Week - 6 Camera Tracking Data in Maya and Lighting in Maya

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This week we focus on bringing the camera tracking data from Nuke to Maya, adding CG assets in Maya Scenes and use lighting to render the CG assets in Maya.

After adding in the geometries and setting the ground points in nuke we export them to nuke by using WriteGeo node - Writes out geometry to a specified file. You can export it in, OBJ files, FBX files containing meshes, point clouds, cameras, lights, and axes.
We create a new project in Maya by setting the project in your desired location and then import the scene.

We then group the cloud points and hihglight them and group these with other elements affter which in the channel box editor we added a new layer of which we added the cloud points onto.

We then created an image plane and imported the footage image, if there is an image sequence make sure that you tick use image sequence and then we split the workspace into 2 viewports one contains Camera prespective which we make sure that the camera is locked and the other contains prespecctive where changes can be done.

Now we try to bring in the assets where we scale them and move them into your desired space.Once we bring in the CG asset shared to us we try to scale the given asset to real world measurements using the distance tool to create your locators which will tell you the distance from locator 1 to locator 2 in centimetres (CM).

Now we add shaders to the CG asset as Maya shaders are not PBR by default, we then can assign our own material that is Standard Surface or AI Standard Surface.

We then assign the textures by selecting appropriate settings with the textures files that were shared to us. If the material is black and has white/grey scale mask, always check that alpha is luminance is selected else it should be set to Raw

In the afternoon session we focused on Lights, downloaded the HDRI shared to us, selecting all the images we open them in Photoshop

We Created a mask, added an adjustment layer and adjusted the exposure in the adjustment layer, added mid-tones and saved the file in .exr format.
Now open arnold settings and click light option and select Skydome light and import the HDRI we just created, rotate the skydome so it matches with the scene.
Now if we render the image, the image will show.

In order for the CG asset to blend in with the environment we add shadows, inorder to do that we select the object which was named as GroundPlane and set it AiShadowMatte. Now if we render the image we get the result as shown below,

This week was very hard to follow as this was the first time I had used Maya, and was struguling in the textures part. I had to rewatch the the lecture online and followed a Maya Tutorial from Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPHRLf6UN4k0_AfrTzLmK4iDV9J97-qR in order to familiarise myself with the Maya interface and its functionalites.

Location: Kingston upon Thames, UK

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