This week I rendered out the version I thought was the final one. I then comped in Nuke, and did a roto in the front wall so it would cover parts of the engine.
I had placed two parts of the engine in the front room, so it would look like it was left behind, but because I placed the roto back in front of the render layer, I lost those parts. So now, I have comed with an idea of rendering just the front parts and will comp back in on top of everything.
Also, I realised there are several bugs in my scene. The first one is in the camera movement. Because I had the auto-key button turned on, at some point, when I was in the camera view, I moved my scene and keyframed the camera, so for one frame my engine was further away then in the rest of the footage, as shown in the picture below.
Other things I realised during class: the parts that are rusted copper looks too flat, the shadows are not harsh enough, wich makes the whole engine look like it doesn’t belong there, and the metal pipes aren’t as dirty as the other parts.
In regards to the rusted copper parts, when looking through the hypershade, I’ve seen that I had a roughness tiff file linked to the specular roughness, that wasn’t giving me control on the intesity I wanted it to have. So i traded that file, for a aiNoise file, and it worked much better.
Related to the shadows not harsh enough, many changes had to made to achieve the expected look. I covered up the whole room with aiShadowMatte planes, so the engine lighting wasn’t affected by the hdri. Before I had placed two aiAreaLights in that room each one in one corner. For the new look, For the light in the right corner, I used a cold colour, increased the intensity, and decreased the spread of the shadows. For the light in the left corner, I used a warmer tone, and descreased the intensity almost to zero.
To make the metal parts more dirty I had to take the diffuse into Photoshop and painted dirt by hand. There’s the before and after: