High Noon Compositing Project

Creation Process

Planning

For this project, I chose to replicate a still from the 1952 Film High Noon. I had planned from the start to model the building on the right and the hitching post to the left, leaving the rest to be a plate. I originally set out to use Maya but quickly learned I would fare much better using Houdini. My goal was to spend an average of 15-20 hours of work each week on this project, and I have clocked in a solid 50-60 overall. The learning curve for Houdini was steep and frustrating, but I think in the end the struggle was worth it.

Plate Gathering

I used Fairview as my setting of choice for plate gathering because many of the sorority houses there have similar building styles to the reference photo. On my first try, I took about 50 photos of different houses with varying focal length in an attempt to narrow down which house I would use and what settings I should use. The second day, I took 20 more of one house in particular, but my height off the ground was incorrect, and the shadows were too harsh. After a couple hours, I hit a lucky patch of overcast weather and sat on the ground to get a better angle. This photograph was caught with a 18 mm lens from about 60-70 feet away. I then edited the photo's exposure and levels, and photoshopped some bush noise over cars and trash cans to avoid the eyesores.

Modelng

Modeling not only in a new software with a similar but altered interface was a huge headache, as was having to learn a new modeling style, but putting them together created a beast that took hours to overcome. Houdini's node-based networks did, however, provide us with a very non-destructive environment. For cylindrical posts, I would draw NURBS curves and revolve them, editing from there. For any relatively rectangular items I would simply use a primitive cube and combine a set of copy, mountain, and soft edit nodes to achieve the look I wanted. For the lattices, stairs, roof, and door frame, I would draw curves, duplicate them, and loft the pieces together to create a skin. Some of these methods made my life harder when it came to uv unwrapping, but I am overall very satisfied with my work, especially for my first time using Houdini.

Texturing

For texturing, I have used substance designer to create procedural textures since many of my reference textures are simple and repetitive with only minuscule changes. Many of the differences in shading are also due to lighting so I felt this would be better left alone in the surfacing stage. I was having difficulty using the SideFX Labs Plug-In with my apprentice version of Houdini regarding the substance material node, so I reached out to SideFX. They were able to help to a point, but it seemed my endeavor was going to take more time than I had. Luckily, I had a backup plan. I could export my uv unwrapped .obj files to substance painter and make sure the scaling and sizing was proper there before bringing the maps back in. It took a lot of tedious connecting and tweaking that would have been made much easier through the Substance plug-in, so I will be looking more into the issues I had with this. It also took a while to fully figure out the proper pathways used to accomplish connecting these maps, as the vops node network is not unfamiliar to me but the interface was just different enough to hold me back for a few hours, but I am overall very satisfied with the results.

Lighting

I strategically chose an outdoor scene that was shot at noon to give myself an easy go of the lighting. I love lighting a lot, but I knew that I should probably sit back on the complexity this time around due to having to learn an entirely new software. Thankfully Houdini's lighting and rendering tools are very intuitive and straightforward. To create this render, I created a semblance of a 3-point lighting system. One overhead sunlight, one sunlight that was cocked to the side and angled up for reflected light, and one very soft distance light for fill. I used light linking to control which meshes were affected and I used Mantra for ipr and final renders. Using the output context, I created a mantra node to control my render settings. This was by far my favorite part of the project.

Compositing

Before completing my final renders and moving on to the compositing stage, I adjusted some color maps to add weathering to my textures, added a fourth spotlight to get the straight-on shadow effect that proved impossible with my one sunlight, and adjusted the angle of my sun to achieve sharper shadows. After this, I decided to follow along with the video Andre posted for outputting my shadow matte and object render passes. I decided against doing multiple levels of render passes for the objects as my computer is not very powerful. I continued following along with the video to composite my plate, shadow matte, and object renders into the same image, and this process was made extremely easy with Houdini's node system. It also made it possible so if I needed to re-render one of the layers I could keep my setup and simply replace the image, proving to be a very non-destructive workflow. I had to bounce back and forth between Houdini and Photoshop a few times in order to get the proper sizing, angle, and details, but Houdini's compositing tools are very sophisticated and sped up the process incredibly.