PowerHouse FX - Week 7

I spent the majority of the week fixing the scar tracking for shot #4, as well as figuring out a way to comp it in on our live action plate. Here's an updated version of shot #4:

I've been having issues with getting a great track out of this shot, but I'll keep refining it. On the other hand, the over exposed and dynamic lighting helps hiding some slipping of the scar. Since some areas are way too bright the scar would barely be visible, but I had to adjust the visibility as she moves through the scene. To achieve that I first used a merge(overlay) so that the scar would be blown out when the values go over 1.0, and then I used a merge(over), for which I added an inverted mask from the background so that this merge node is only as visible as bright the background is. On top of that, the invert node gives me flexibility of the opacity of this mask.

The 'motionvector' and 'Z' AOVs help me adding motion blur (VectorBlur) and depth of field (ZDefocus) to the scar to help comp it better.

We decided that the scar should be much bigger and go up higher on the actress's back than it was the previous week. So I created new texture maps for the scar, which will also be used for shot #6 to maintain continuity. Here are the new texture maps, since I'm only using a Maya Surface Shader, which doesn't have many attributes, I haven't created specular and normal maps, but that might change in the future: (Base Color, Displacement)

This is a test comp for shot #6 which had a surprisingly better track. I used the same method as in the previous shot:

Next week, I want to finish up the tracking of shot #4 and help out with other comp works!