Major Project
Initial Ideas
Brief: Create a short action narrative sequence, focusing on an event causing destruction in a city environment.
Response to Brief:
Idea 1
Retired police mech reactivated to eliminate a target. Based in a cyberpunk city.
Idea 2
Large creature causing destruction (Godzilla-ish). Based in a present-day City.
Idea 3
Alien invasion. Based in a far future city.
Reference Images
Pre-Vis
Shot 1 - Full CG environment establishing shot; news report audio clip for exposition.
Shot 2 - CG environment with green screen character composited, aftermath of 'terrorist' attack.
Shot 3 - Full CG shot, revealing retired police mech.
Shot 4 - CG environment & destruction, green screen character composited.
Pre-Production
Backstory:
The piece is set an alternative reality near future, where governments have control of what citizens think and do by the use of propaganda and other nefarious means. 20 years before the piece is set a peaceful protest against said government was held, this was violently dispersed by government police. However the events of the protest have been flipped by the government who now celebrate the anniversary of the event as a triumph of peacefully dealing with a violent riot. The main character of the piece is portrayed as a terrorist, as on this anniversary has incited a small protest that is attempting to reveal the truth. The antagonist of the piece is a retired police mech that was used in the initial protest 20 years prior. The mech is reactivated to deal with this new riot and hunt down the main perpetrator.
Expositional News Broadcast:
Main features to be covered - Anniversary of protest, reports of 'terrorist' attack, exaggerated focus on peaceful government resolution.
Updated Pre-Vis
Proposal Presentation
Project Timetable
Modelling Progress
Mech Texturing
Cloth Scene Render Test
Shot 05 - Look Dev
Pre Vis - Mech Animation v1
Pre Vis - Mech Animation v2
Shot 05 - Look Dev
Pre Vis - Mech Animation v3
Pre Vis - Mech Animation v4
Pre Vis - Mech Animation v5
Shot 05 - First Keying & Compositing Test
Compositing Progress
Initial Trailer Edit
Additional Trailer Editing
Breakdowns
Final Trailer Edit
Showreel
Compositing Breakdown
Establishing Shot
I then utilise the data that has just been copied into the beauty render, first by using a ZDefocus node, this replicates DoF blurring produced by real cameras. A vector blur node is then used to add motion using the motion vectors rendered out of Maya.
The screenshot also shows an exponential glow node, this node adds a glow effect to the brightest parts of the image, this mainly affects the neon signs in this shot.
The final part of the comp was a final grade, this grade was used on all of the shots to bring a sense of continunity to the trailer.
The final two nodes add some cinematic details. The God rays node is used to add a slight colour shift to the image, emulating chromatic abberation. The grain node adds noise to the image, like that produced by cinema cameras.
The first step on all of the shots was to import the CG renders and all the necessary render passes.
In the case of this shot the beauty pass had to first be deniosed. The Z Depth and motion vector passes were then copied in. The Z Depth pass has its red channel copied into the empty depth.z channel of the beauty render. The motion vector pass has its red and green channels copied into the forward.u and forward.v channels of the beauty render.
The next step was to add some smoke elements, this helps to add depth and life to the shot.
These smoke elements were created using a noise node with a graded version of the z depth pass as an alpha. This was then merged with the CG using a plus operation, the strength of the smoke elements is controlled using a multiply node placed just before the merge node.
'Over the shoulder' Shot
As mentioned previously the first steps were used on all of the shots. In this screenshot you can see the importing of the render and render passes, the utilisation of the render passes and the smoke elements.
In this shot one of the main elements is a plate filmed on greenscreen. The screenshot on the right shows the keying process and the addition of some depth smoke to help fit the plate with the CG.
For this shot the CG was a single rendered frame, because of the shot felt very flat, to overcome this I decided to project the CG and greenscreen onto planes and animate a 3D camera. This gave the effect of a camera moving slightly through the shot, giving some more life to the shot.
'Walkpast' Shot
The screenshot on the right shows the first steps used on all of the shots.
This shot also used a greenscreen plate. For this shot I decided to add extra motion blur to the greenscreen plate, this helped the plate fit in with the CG, which in this shot was also a still frame with added smoke elements. The added motion blur helped to add some interest and motion to the shot.
This part of the comp is the addition of depth fog over the combination of the greenscreen plate and CG. The constant colour used as an alpha was taken from the Z depth pass, this was to match the smoke elements added to the CG previously.
'Warehouse' Shot 01
This shot used all of the techniques previously outlined.
One different technique was used in this shot. The addition of dust motes to the CG.
The motes were added using a 3D particle system in Nuke. The particles were emmited from a 3D card, the particles were affected by gravity, a turbulent force and also had a speed limit applied to them, this made the particles behave more like dust.
The particles were added to the CG using a plus merge operation, the strength of the particles were controlled by a multiply node. The position of the particles was confined using a roto node as a mask.
'Warehouse' Shot 02 & 03
The second and third warehouse shots utilise the same techniques in the previous shot.
'Final' Shot
The final shot of the trailer was the most complicated comp, with largest amount of elements. The shot also had the longest time spent on the CG.
As with the other shots the first steps were the same, importing the CG render passes and making some basic changes to the CG like adding DoF, motion blur and glow.
The second part of the comp was keying the greenscreen footage. On the righthand side of the screenshot you can see an alternate keying technique, IBK stacking. However the outcome of this technique didn't yield as good of a result as using keylight.
The other parts of the screenshot show the keylight technique. The main key is taken from the central pipeline, you can see that two keylight nodes have been used and mixed using a key mix node. This was done to get the best key possible by utilising different source colours to get a good range of the colours of the greenscreen. The keylight in the far left pipeline shows a keylight node used to despill the footage.
This part of the comp was connected to the keying section, this is where the greenscreen was lined up with the CG, graded to match the CG plate and had some smoke elements added to blend the footage with the CG plate.
This part of the comp is where the smoke elements for the CG were created, using a technique mentioned in previous shots that utilises the Z Depth pass of the render.
You can also see a small section that is used to rotoscope a section of the CG so that it appears infront of the greenscreen footage.
This part of the comp is where the smoke elements that appear in front of both the CG and greenscreen plates. For these elements a constant was used to generate an alpha, the constant was taken from a graded version of the Z depth pass of the CG. The strength of the smoke elements are controlled using a multiply node placed just before the merge node.
This part of the comp is where the lens flares produced by the lights on the mech were produced. I created the lens flares using a gizmo downloaded from Nukepedia called, Flare Factory. This gizmo allows you to create lens flares from a variety of editable presets, you can also add lens artefacts and animation.
The flares are composited together using a plus operation, the same operation is also used to composite the flares onto the shot itself.
As with previous shots the final part of the comp was adding a final grade along with a slight colour shift and a cinematic style grain.
