Lighting

Me and Ash have been put in charge of the lighting. My first scene to do is the spider walking next to the arm.

All I was given was Lily's animated spider. To begin I added the shot into the background. I created a plane and applied an animated texture to it to give me the shot within the scene. The next thing I did Was create a camera and lined everything up so when you looked through the camera, the spider walks along the table.

I had to animate the spider a bit more so it moved along the table because it only walked on the spot. This was where I used the tracking to match up the points so the movement of the spider matched the camera and movement within the shot.

I then had to light the scene which was what my main priority was in the first place. This was quite easy as for my other project I have been studying lighting. I needed one main spotlight to light the animated texture and another spotlight on the spider to create a shadow. This spotlight had to be from above looking down so that the shadows would match the shadows in the footage. This is how the overall scene looked:

I had to bend the plane with the animated texture on otherwise there was not a surface for the spider to create a shadow on.

There was also no texture on the spider. Sarah created an amazing digital hand painted texture using the UV mapping she had been working on. However, it was all created on the wrong Maya file so when I went to apply the texture, nothing had been UV mapped. Deon then assured me that he would create another much more basic texture and send it to me so I could apply it to my scene.

In the meantime, I worked on the camera a bit more. At the moment the spider looked far sharper in the rendered scene than the footage. From the image below you can see how the spider looks odd against the background because of the focus in the footage:

I did a bit of searching and realised I could change the depth of field on the camera. I started fiddling around with the settings and tried to get it so the spider was only slightly out of focus.

The only thing left to do was apply the texture and it could be rendered. Unfortunately I had to wait all day. I was in contact with Deon and he had promised me to send it in the morning. I had to nag slightly and push him to do it but by the evening he had sent me his basic texture which I applied. Then it was ready for render. A day after it was planned but at least it could get rendered.

Here is a final image from our scene.