Visual Effects and Motion Graphics

Location ideas for the advanced compositing project we were assigned today. Not really sure what I’m going to do but I’ve been wanting to do something with this location for awhile; it always reminds me of Lord of the Rings for some reason.

Using expressions to sync motion graphics with audio in After Effects

It’s been awhile

More cleanup and compositing done

Almost done with cleanup (for the main shot at least). For most of the tracking markers I created cards although there was a lot of colour grading/other transformations that had to be done. However, one of the markers is obscured by a card which is in place to mask BB8 before it exits the bin, so I had to use another method. Using a rotopaint, roto, premult and merge node I painted out the marker with the ellipse-transform clone which filled in the area with another bit of carpet. Then I tracked the marker with a tracker node and copied and pasted the transformation keyframes. I had to manually rotopaint the last few frames (when the bin falls and obscures the marker) out with fresh nodes and then the original rotopainted card works for the rest of the scene. Basically, none of this is as straightforward as you’d expect! I’ve placed lots of cards and rotos around the wall/bin; there’s a lot of little problems with shadows etc. as mentioned before. It’s a lot cleaner now but but a long way from perfect. Still, learning a huge amount.

I’ve done a bit of compositing with the beauty pass including denoising the plate then adding grain back in--got it to a point where it matches the background footage alright but might tweak it a bit more.

Animation test, no compositing done within Nuke yet. Rendered out the three channels; will fix animation in middle section as it’s still spinning out somewhat.

Creating an Earth/space scene in Cinema 4D with 3D shaders.

Still from animation/positioning test.

Filmed and started animating. Created a plane and cube in the Nuke camera export to get an idea of where the bin and ground will be. Doing some really low quality renders to make sure object placement is okay which I’m having trouble with. A bit floaty.

Tracking test with shadow. Lighting isn’t properly set up nor is it composited at all...just another test.

The mini Darth model we textured and lit in Houdini 101/2 workshops.

Intro to Maya workshop

Got a good track in Nuke and Blender, now rendering it out again but with a shadowcatcher plane this time. Will have to set up different render layers to render out the various passes when I do it properly. The plane is bouncing light back onto the robot even though it doesn’t render as a solid which is why HDRIs will be extremely useful (to get an accurate cast).

Some 3D blender to Nuke tracking tests, obviously no compositing done, just seeing if I can get a 3D object into the scene. Had a few frame rate/reformating issues but got the cube in the end. The second (robot) track starts out okay but goes really off at the end; not sure whether it’s a formatting issue or just a really bad track. The footage was pretty terrible for tracking anyway so will film sometime soon and try it properly. 

FINALLY managed to render out separate passes in Blender! It’s divided into beauty, shadowcatcher and utility passes. Going to try to do a test with some footage and just a cube because actually using it in a tracked scene will be challenging.

HDRI attempt, big fail