Look Development and FX
Metamorphosis Project Blog
Winter Week 4
1/25/26
Winter Week 3
1/22/26
Today I put lighting into our scene using an HDRI, a disk light and an area light. The HDRI helped get the mood I think I want to go for but I want the scene to be cool and isolating for scenes one and two. So I am opting for cooler lighting and trying to get that to work. I have also started some volumetric lighting tests, so far it has been kind of successful.
The way I am currently trying to get volumetrics is by using the karma light filter and the gobo filter. The gobo filter uses an image and through that creates more dynamic volumetrics, I have not tried many images but if I can instead use a noise map I would prefer that.
These are the settings I am using for the fog box inside of karma
This is one of my results, the volumetrics are barely visible and I want them to be more striking, another issue is that the light one the ground is very bright.
This is another one of my results, I like the volumetrics in this a lot better. I think it is underexposed due to the increased fog volume. I also am afraid of the fog taking away a lot of background detail when that is added.
The next task I am going to do is try to find a better way to get dynamic volumetrics, I don't like using a image that is then projected by the light I would rather use a noise map. The issue I have ran into with the noise maps however is they seem finicky with the light gobo. I might have to switch to the light gel instead and see if noise maps will work with the fog.
Winter Week 3
1/20/26
Update on exporting the cameras. For the past couple days I have been struggling with exporting the camera with the information from the XR stage. We got one shot out by doing what I said in the previous post but for some reason this same method did not work for other shots. One thing that made this difficult was that the sequencers are read only. Meaning I cannot manually bake the cameras before they are exported or manipulate them in any way. in addition to that when imported to other programs none of the information was there. But since then we have discovered another way, my teammate found that you can copy the file of the sequencer into a new unreal file which makes it so it is not read only. So she exported and it worked going directly into Houdini. I found that if you open the "tracking cam" in the subset files then export just the tracking cam into Houdini it will work.
Winter Week 2
1/17/26
Since shooting on the stage we have now gotten all of our camera information which will now need to be exported from Unreal Engine 5 into Houdini. Main issues we will have to fix is camera location and frame range. In unreal the frame range is about 917,000 - 919,000 and the camera was hundreds of units away from 0,0,0. In Unreal Engine I was not able to figure out how to change these things as it was not allowing me to manipulate the sequencer. So my next thought was to just export and fix these things in Houdini. However while trying to figure this out we ran into some issues. Exporting the camera information from Unreal Engine was successful. We had all the information we needed but it was not importing into Houdini. It would be brought into the scene with no keyframes or just one keyframe. But the camera would import into Nuke and Maya with all of its information. So the solution I found was to bring the camera into Maya and copy and paste its keyframes starting at frame 1 instead of 917,000. Then importing that camera into Houdini to then set its origin to 0,0,0. This did work, so this was the strategy used to fix our cameras in order to import them into Houdini.
Winter Week 2
1/12-13/26
These were our shoot days on the XR stage, we had gotten all of the shots that we needed to get done with our actress. The blue screen idea for the stage worked wonderfully. I was the main gaffer on set making the lighting was correct matching what we wanted from our story boards, my diagrams and the path that my teammate made. Some minor adjustments had to be made just for some logistical reasons or to make post production more smooth, such as moving a light off camera and adjusting its angle.
But here are some pictures taken from on set.
Winter Week 1
1/5/26
Over our winter break I created a blooming flower procedural animation, for more information on that go to the blooming flower blog.
But going into Winter week 1 we will be filming on the XR stage next week and I will be gaffing. I need to create our lighting diagrams for the shoot mainly our more stylized shots since there is some intense lighting shots. But generally the light will be very even on our actress with the main goal being to have no blue spill on her from the stage.
​
Here are the lighting diagrams I made in photoshop, they are mainly for helping me think through some of the setups. For these shots specifically they have the most unique lighting as compared to the other shots we have where the lighting is generally evenly lit.
This is a map for where the fairy is running, it was made by my teammate/director to help me get a good idea as to where the light should be hitting the fairy throughout the film.
Fall Week 9
It is coming to the end of the fall quarter and my team have come to the decision to make a pivot with our project. Originally we were going to use the XR stage with a environment created in unreal engine 5. However with the stage there is a lot of parallax when filming and it does not give us the result that we want. So we are going to use the XR stage as a giant blue screen instead. It does defeat the purpose of the stage however this fixes the parallax issue and makes for a much easier time when comping in our live actress. Additionally we do not have a normal bluescreen stage so this is also a way to have a bluescreen. So moving forward with this project we will be transitioning to Houdini. This way we will have photorealistic renders and a better style for our film.
Fall Week 8
Fall Week 7
Version 3 for the environment is developed. It resized the environment and the geometry so the file is not as large and easier to transfer. The scale is a little upscaled so that when the actress is comped in from the green screen stage she will look small in the environment.
​
​
These are screenshots from some lighting tests. It is too dark right now and I am struggling to balance the brightness of the scene with lighting up the trees. The texture on the trees is very dark so while other parts of the scene read as nighttime the trees are under exposed.
Fall Week 6
I have gone back to lighting our environments since I have received version 2 of the environment and started to set that scene up for camera movements and lighting. I have a lighting setup using a directional light, sky light, height fog, an atmosphere, and a sphere was set up to replicate the night sky. The biggest problem I have is lighting everything to look like nighttime and not have anything be under exposed. Some areas are being lit too much and others are mud.
This lighting is closer to what I want, it is soft with the volumetric rays and nothing is too muddy
But transitioning to this scene it is way too bright to be a night scene and needs to be darker
Fall Week 5
I have started on creating a growth sim in Houdini. For the last shot in our short film the forest our character is in will be brought back to life and I am coming up with ways to create a growth sim that will look realistic and be quick. I started in unreal with a quick test. Using the motion design tab in unreal I created a cloner that will clone geometry into a shape of other geometry. I used grass that will take the shape of a statue. I then used an "effector" to spawn the grass onto the statue and finally another actor to animate the grass growing onto the statue. This would be great for background effects, it does not look very detailed and would not be a good choice for any close up shots or anything close to the camera.
Fall Week 4
I continued to explore the lighting in the concept scene. Using the same exterior lighting setup as the last post. I have changed the color of the scene and taken inspiration from the lighting in Nosferatu. In the carriage scene I like how they light the focus of the scene and leave a lot of the background as silhouettes. I think applying this to our project would be very beneficial to us because it will cut down on render times and load.
In this rendition I wanted to really push the god rays. The way to do this is unreal engine is to put an object in front of the key light and turn up the exponential height fog. I also made the scene more green because it brightens the scene up and I think is a better color than a deep blue. I have also added cards with a mask of an image of fog. I think this works well to break up the scene and set a better focal point. I am not set on the camera angle but that is due to change since the scene will change and the camera will be following our actress.
The critiques I have are the camera angle is not the best I think putting it at eye level of a normal person will net better results. I also think along with moving the camera the angle of the light could be changed to reflect the moon more accurately. I also do not like the harsh shadow coming from the main tree.
Along with that I have noticed strange shadows coming from the rock geometry I have not found a fix but these shadows do not react to changing the light.
Fall Week 3
During Week 3 I gathered more reference for lighting, instead of looking at Pinterest for just images I was looking into films with huge snow or desert scenes. Mainly looking at how they were lighting those environments. The two films I looked into further was The Thing and The Revenant, both of these films use horror elements with monsters and use lighting and the camera work creatively to convey that. In The Thing you cannot see past their camp, the only lights are coming from the buildings or lights and it adds to the feeling of the unknown. In slight contrast The Revenant is a lot brighter and the audience can see much more of the forest but the camera work with the narrow angles is how they got their horror elements.
This scene utilizes a basic set up with a directional light, a spot light, a sky atmosphere, skylight, volumetric cloud, and exponential height fog. Critiques I have are that the blue one is too dark, I am loosing lots of detail and it is too dark of a blue. It looks as though it is underwater. The lighter colored scene is also too dark it does not look like it is lit up by the moon but instead like its a street lamp.
Fall Week 2
During week two I continued testing the snow in unreal engine 5. What I was mainly looking for was how detailed I could get the snow to be and how heavy the simulation will be when I use geometry instead of particles.
I found that the simulation is light and I don't need that many particles to get the simulation to work. Adding materials and transparency does make the sim heavier but not by a huge margin.
To wrap up the week the simulation is getting better and looking like a good option. The next big test will be putting it into the actual scene we will be using and how it will effect that render time.
Fall Week 1
I am trying to decide if we are trying to do our snow effect in unreal engine 5 or in Houdini. I am testing unreal 5 first and this is a very early test of what snow could look like.
​
Next I am going to see if I can change the sprites of the snow to get better detail and see how taxing that will be on the system.