Saturday, March 06, 2010
Peasant Village - Shot 1 Compositing
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionPhew….it’s been a lot of work these couple of weeks with many late nights. Now I’m finally get to do what I really enjoy doing, which is compositing. Yay! I have been bad at putting progress report on the blog these weeks and I will have some more in depth pictures and explanation in a couple of days, but I’ll try to do a sum up here.
Well since my last entry I have been working full time with the mountain shot. I’ve modeled some simple objects that I placed in the village where I thought it needed some more detail. There have also been some tweaking on the houses to make them look more unique. I could have gone on forever tweaking and adding detail to the village but I have other shots to do. So when I felt pretty happy with how the village and the mountain looked I went on building the surrounding mountains. For those mountains I had to tweak the rock shader and the snow shader because I couldn’t displace them as much as the one with the village. Mental ray wasn’t my friend at this time because I really wanted to displace the mountains with finer detail but then I ran into memory issues.
When I was finished with the background mountains I did some quick test comps to see if they would fit together. Thats when I realized that my camera projection I did earlier didn’t fit in. So I redid that part of the mountain in 3d. Then I got more memory problems and had to do more tweaking on the displacement.
Luckily we have put up our own little render farm so I could afford some back and forth.
These last days I have been working on different types of snow. They are all done with Maya particles or nParticles and they are rendered with the hardware render buffer. I have done falling snow and some layers of snow blowing from the ground and the rooftops. I haven’t worked with particles that much but Christoffer was there when I needed some questions answered. Thanks Christoffer!
Now to the compositing. Firstly I have to say I really enjoy working in Nuke. I have worked mostly with Fusion before and this is my first big project with Nuke, but I must say that it was quite easy to pick up. I like they way it handles the exr format. I also like the 3d capabilities of Nuke because I do want to work with both 2d and 3d and with Nuke you get them both =)
In nuke I quickly put up a script with all the layers that was done at the moment. You can watch the result of that in the video below.
I have continued to build upon that script with more layers and right now the scene looks like these stills. I took the camera animation and some basic geometry from the village to nuke and with that I could easily place the character in the right place. The character is live action footage which I have luma keyed and then placed on a card in 3d. The sky is a panorama sky mapped on to a sphere in nuke.
These are not finals and I would be glad to get some critique. I have been working a lot with this shot and sometimes you get blind and can’t tell if it looks good or bad, so feedback is really appreciated.
Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action • Add comments (2)