Month 16: Compositing and Scene Finishing/Visual Effects 2

JOY! This was my last month of being on an accelerated schedule. From here on out, its only 1 class a month. I only have 1 more class before I start my 5 months of finals and portfolio creation.  The specialty I have decided on is going to be shading and lighting. While I also considered modeling and visual effects, I feel like with shading and lighting I can model my own scenes and spice them up with some effects.

Alright so this month we had our second composting class, and our second visual effects class. Ill talk about COMPOSITING and SCENE FINISHING first.

(still frame from project 4...ITS ME)

So just to recap what compositing is ... this is the trade of combing film/cg elements. When you see in movies all the cool stuff they do with green screens and adding backdrops that blend seamlessly into the shot... that all falls under composting. I am no master at it yet.... but learned heaps about it this month. 

We had 4 projects in CSF

Project 1 (welcome back to nuke)

Nuke is an extremely expensive piece of software that is very powerful, and very widely used in film. Our first project was already half done for us... our job was to recreate it an expand on it. This project was designed to re-familiarize us with the software.

We had to take an already rendered out sequence (with passes) and build it into an interesting sci-fi scene.

So we got this.................(PROJECT 1)

The person in the suit is actually an intern currently at Full Sail.

From this rendered out sequence, we extracted out several passes I will show below

 Occlusion

 Reflection

 Refraction

Diffuse

UVs

Alright so Using these passes and the magic of Nuke we were given some creative control to customize our shot.... After a lot of tweaking and playing this was mine.

I did all the textures/ the flame pattern and such. Here is what the final product looked like

Our next project was a tracking project in new software called syntheyes. (PROJECT 2)

For this we took a video clip and tracked it

this is just 1 frame. The small green markers you see will track their spots as the camera moves and from these trackers we can rebuild our scene in 3d

you can see the blue geometry that I built that is matched to the scene. This is used all the time in movies when they have to add cg elements to footage. We just did the tracking for this project.... here is the video to maybe aid what I am talking about.

For PROJECT 3 we did the same project we did for project 1 but this time in class we filmed each of our faces moving around, we then tracked our face footage, we then attached the already build armor suit model to our face, and then composted it into a scene.

this is face footage after tracking.... notice how cool I look with the CG bane mask.

Here is a still shot after I had finished attaching the movie tracking data to the armor

This was the Final Composite after everything....

For our final project (Matte Painting) we paired up with the film students. We were to take an establishing shot from their project and create a matte painting for it based on their instruction. This was what my shot looked like when its spread out into one image.

here is the actual video shot

The film students wanted
-all the stuff to the right of the building gone, they wanted it replaced with a French quarters style street.
-they wanted kind of an industrial city in the background
-they wanted a 3rd story added to the building
-They wanted it to look kind dirty with trash and have grafitti on the building
-They wanted the time of day to be the morning.

This is how my matte painting looked when I was done with it

here is the final shot

You cant really tell from the uploaded video quality but the tree leaves are moving as well as the clouds. The buildings in the background are also separated a bit from the foreground to give it some depth.

There is definitely a few issues with it, but I am pretty pleased for my first matte painting.
So that was it for CSF.

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The other class I took this month was Visual Effects 2.

(still frame from project 3)

Visual Effects 2 had us working on three projects.

The first project was to find a video of a fire and to try and simulate that fire using maya fluids.

Here was a work in progress picture

Here is a still shot from the final

 and here is the final simulation after rendering.

 After project 1 we started working with Houdini. Here are some clouds I believe we created in Houdini.

For our second project we had to simulate a pyro effect in Houdini. I found a vool video of a volcano erupting and I tried to recreate the smoke plume

The render

 

For our final project we were gave complete freedom to research anything we wanted and to create a simulation. I took this as an oppertunity to install a trial version of Realflow and play around with it. Realflow is mostly for fluid simulation.  

I found realflow to be really cool, here is a few of the tings I did in a short period of time.

full simulations

 

 

That is all for this month!... I am going to use my free time off this coming month to prepare for finals.