Final Video & Breakdown Link:
(a preview of frame 311 in Nuke)
Maya/Arnold Settings
AOVs, Initial Render Settings, and Sampling/Ray Depth/Motion Blur Values:
Render Layers Setup:
The only layers I didn’t end up using were “ground Projection” and “groundRefMask”, which was a duplicate of “justFloorReflect”.
Render Times
Key Light & allObjectReflection Layers: ~30 – 50 minutes per frame
Fill Light Layer: ~60 – 100 minutes per frame
Shadow and Ground Bounce Layers: ~8 – 20 minutes per frame
I rendered all of my “heavier” layers on the Renderfarm, and I opted to locally render many of the mask layers that were super inexpensive. For my final submission of this project, I also added motion blur and depth of field in the render process.
The fill layer was my most expensive by far, largely due to the sampling rates and the refractive material.
Nuke Node Tree
Total Node Tree:
Foreground and Background Elements:
*Foreground includes key, fill, ground bounce, and object occlusion layers.
*Background includes shadow and ground occlusion layers.
Ground Reflection Elements:
Dancer Reflections & Mirror Bar Roto:
Final Elements:
*Includes Lightwrap, Final Merge, Firefly Killer plug-in, and Edge Blur.
*Special thanks to Dhruv for sending our class a link to the Firefly Killer Gizmo script which can be found here: