Yep I work for Ralph Richter. I do most of the cg stuff for him.
Render Pass Compositing, Useful passes for compositing/ retouch, how do you use different passes in post, which are the most valuable other than mattes,
We usually use the beauty pass as basis for our post work. And add passes like reflection/refraction on top with heavy uses of masks. Sometimes reflections are even painted from scratch because you wouldn’t get them any other way or at least not without a lot of headaches. We had to do a job with a mini once and the client wanted a certain reflection on the hood to outline some kind of form that isn’t even there on the original car. In the end the client was happy but to us it just looked off and unpleasing
Micro Noise / Surface Imperfections, is much of this going on in commercial ad work?
I sometimes try to slip it in but most of the times clients don’t want any imperfections on their car.
Tires, Modelled or displaced tread? Whats preferred? What works best?
Modeled tire but the side details displaced/or bump depending on the perspective. But you don’t always have a modeled as an option so we had 1 or two cases where we used photos of real tires and “cloned stamped” the details in. All in all you use what you can.
Camera backplate matching? techniques, matching settings of something complex, like an Alpa stitch on a phase-one back, guesswork? or are there real values we can use for sensor size and lens,
At least for us most of the time its guess work because sadly nowadays clients rely on stock footage and they send a link with the background they’d like and not always camera values are known. Or we get a premade background where someone already distorted the perspective. But I’m sure this is different for all of us.
The Max perspective match tool seems hit or miss, I could be using it wrong, Or are shots just matched creatively by eye, or backplates worked in retouch to match the car?
I don’t like the max perspective tool. I used it once or twice and I never get a good conversion to a vray cam. The perspective is always off.
Horizontal and vertical shift, are these used creatively on shots to skew perspective?
We never had to use it.
Who picks the heights angles and lens’s, I know car company’s do this sort of thing for photography but is it the same in cgi? does the cg artist get a say?
Sadly the brief usually has pretty strict guidelines on perspective etc. So we have little room to be creative. But if we see something that might work better we do a quick mock up and send it to the agency. And we had a few jobs where the client was using teamviewer to finalize the perspective with us.
Vray Sun or direct light, for boosting Sun power? Plus creating crisp shadows, what opinions are there on this?
No real answer for that it depends on what is needed. Sometimes we just check how the shadow would fall in CG but paint it in photoshop.
What cool location rigs are available for cgi work? Real life rigs not talking about cgi rigging,
I have to get some feedback on this I know my boss likes to work with 1 special company, but I forgot the name.
Is anyone cgi rigging their cars for easy positioning? Ie suspension, ride height, wheel angle, speed, lights on / off, doors open/closed I can imagine this to be handy in a little menu, but is the work involved just overkill?
For stills that would be overkill. I only did 1 rig for an animation and that is 2 years ago.
Modo with vray is anybody going to switch? Modo seems the perfect tool for automotive work to me, modelling, retopology, etc, will it be as well integrated as in max? Also an osx version would be nice!
Not really we do alot more than automotive and modo doesn’t seem ready yet to make the switch. Additionally from the few times I used it I didn’t like it one bit. Their materialsystem really annoys me
