Factory/Station Progress

This is what I had yesterday from this angle:

Here is an update from today:

I have used the same composited photographed elements (slightly rotated to fit better) with the new textures, as well as testing some depth and grading. These shots also have a lens distortion and grain applied from one of the lenses we shot the live action on.

For extra details in this shot (as well as some textures), I have used this reference material:

Taking from this reference material adds extra details to the modelling and makes me question the previous shapes and how the structure in fact works in reality.

For example, the extrusions added make the shape along the top of the wall a metal gurder - which then holds up the wooden rafters, to which the windows and window frames sit.

This was not the case previously. And, for me, I don't want it to be made of cuboids in the general area that it should be to look okay - it's my job to make sure these are real objects. I want the feeling of a place which doesn't exist, but obviously one which may.

I look forward to the tweaks to the environments to be made and the textures blocked out. This will be succeeded by adding extra details into textures and hopefully getting newly modeled elements introduced to create more realism through detail. After the final lighting, rendering and camera angles, I will be at my homely helm of compositing different elements together and tweaking the final outcome for the shots.

Doorway Lighting Test

I have tested some of the lighting for the doorway of the factory. This needs good spill light.

I wasn't sure how I was going to go about this. I am still not totally 100%, however after speaking to Julian Laing it was suggested to use an ambient light in the doorframe and a spotlight shining in. The spotlight didn't work. But, I opted for using the bounce light with a directional light off of a plane (for now.)

Here is how it looks at the moment:

CG-LiveAction Comp Test

I have tested the idea of compositing live action elements into the CG environment.

Here is the sketch:

This example has partially been textured with the wall on the right being composited from a photograph as well as the roughly roto'd circuit box on the far wall.

I think this is the best option if the tracking process goes well. I see the plan of action being exporting the camera from Maya and bringing that into Nuke for the slight pan to work nicely.

Sourcing Textures

Curved Edges

In the environment I was given, the edges of the room are very hard-edged and in perfect right-angles. In reality, this is obviously very rare, only ever really seen in maths textbooks.

In my previous projects, this was one problem I hope to move on from.

I have thus far thought up three options of how to go about this:

• Merging objects and adding geometry to curve the edges of the room. However, this in theory would then create a perfect curve. Also unrealistic.

• So, the next option would be to use Mudbox to create rubble, bumps and imperfections. This would either entail sculpting and exporting a displacement map (and dealing with that in Maya), or re-importing the object with high subdivision levels - brave on the processing front.

• The third, and most convincing, option is to use photographs from the environment to inform the camera angles and composite the edges of the room into the render. This of course is up for testing to see if it can be roto'd and sync'd into the environment. But, I believe at this stage it will consist of making sure the textures and the compositing edge elements are similar and therefore easier to composite together. This of course fits much better into my Programme of Study which is based around high-end compositing.

3D Tracking Test

Up until now I have tracked shots with 2D (x and y) movements. Today, I have conducted a 3D tracking test (x, y and z) on the main handheld dolly shot.

This is because I see 3D tracking as a step up from 2D tracking and so I wanted to test my compositing workflow tracked to the Tracker node before the CameraTracker node.

In 2D tracking, you can manually pick one point that you think will track well. Then you copy the translate values to a Transform node on the trackable elements. In 3D tracking, the system picks the points. For this track I chose initially 300 tracking points. This is because the camera moves a real lot. After this, basically, you can export the camera information for rendering 3D elements to composite in 2D pipeline; composite 3D elements within Nuke; or composite 2D elements onto 'Cards' which are connected to the 'camera' in your 3D 'scene'... This give you an idea why I see 3D tracking as a progression up from 2D.

I have placed this 3D sphere into the plate:

(Bottom right)

The majority of work on this shot will consist of 2D roto cleanup and possible additions of subtle atmosphere and fog which are of 2D stock footage. So, I will see what this entails in regard to things looking correct or flat and odd.

Here is the track so far:

I am very pleased with the solve. I have achieved a low Solve Error and it looks good to the (my) eye. It follows the many movements of the camera convincingly. I am quite impressed by the Nuke workflow and output here.

More on this later.

Factory/Station Progress

I have added more details to the factory/station interior and played with basic camera setups and the scale.

One of the main additions I wanted to make were thinner details - such as pipes. I have played with the pipes which were there, however wires and circuitry would also add to the large wall areas. Such details were present in the old mills I visited. I will use some photographed elements from the mills by compositing them, but for those which don't work this way, I may discuss with the team in regard to helping modelling them.

Well before

Latest (comp test with fog as suggested at the last peer review)

POV - look to the left

 POV - look to the right

I have now received the textures from Michal Zagorski, so that's the next job whilst tweaking the UVs. I really want to make this look as good as possible in the time I have. I am also toying with the thought of dirtying things up more and adding rubble features using Mudbox or ZBrush, especially if the help is available. But, we will have to see how the texturing goes first, and with the comp it may look fine, but it is definitely a process which will bring more detail and, hopefully, realism. I have scheduled an intense week on this particular process, with miscellaneous jobs intermittently fending for attention. However, this factory interior with the extreme long shot and Tyler's POVs have overriding priority in the project at this moment.

The stage after that is to discuss and develop the lighting to a higher standard. For me,

Factory Preparation

I have received a version of the factory from Lina Ivanova of what she has achieved to model.

Since, I have been tweaking the scene by grouping and renaming within the Outliner for organisation and easier changes; UV mapping; converting everything to polygons; re-routing textures; fixing scaling issues; adding details such as rubble; setting up render settings; tweaking the layout; smoothing objects; setting up image based lighting and more...

The factory from a test extreme long shot. Many tweaks have been made.

Myself and Michal Zagorski have also been out photographing the Old Mills in Dundee for textures and source images to composite into the scene. This should add much more realism to the environment.

The issues so far with the environment, I feel. are there is are the scale isn't real enough, things aren't deteriorated enough, there needs to be more little details and things such as weeds composited. The texturing and lighting stages may take a bit of time, but I have experience and this shot is my focus from now.

Vertigo-esque shot of ladders

For the lighting, I have used a HDRI sourced from the internet with similar colours and time of day of which we shot the other shots and live action on green screen in. And I have added some spotlights in upon this.

A Smart IBL: http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html

I have other options as well

For this type of shot I take a lot of inspiration from the visual effects industry, creating some very ultra-real work. For example, the work on The Great Gatsby (2013):

The Great Gatsby (2013)

So, if I take inspiration from this, I can use the modelling and the live action I have, and then texture, light and composite this in an interesting way and I can make something hopefully very beautiful.

So, it is my job to use the final stages of this development to make this look as real and interesting as possible. Lina has done a good job with the modelling, and now it is a foundation for me to really build on.

Much more on this soon...

Alleyway Segment For Feedback

Feedback on the composites so far would be very welcome as the are going through the last stages.

You can ignore the colour correction as these are just tests for the 'look' and everything will be graded together in the end.

Sh040C Update

Here is an update on Sh040C.

I have cleaned it yesterday (by removing the rope and preparing the plate) but today I begun to add in smoke. I used my slower edited footage of atmosphere.

This is how it looks once the atmosphere is positioned, roto'd, layered and tracked:

However, this is not the look I am after because it looks very flat, slapped on top of the image, right in front of us - in our faces. POW.

So, I want to create the effect in which the atmosphere is wrapped around and intertwined with the ladder on the bottom third of the frame.

Therefore, I have to roto the ladder and composite it back on top:

I found the most effect way, instead of tracking the roto, was to simply animate the roto seen as it moves along a 2D track anyway (it is a very flat movement.) This meant that no unnecessary areas of the character were appearing on top of the ladder or other areas - creepy!

Even though this seems like a cool idea, it doesn't quite yet create the look as it doesn't make the smoke surround the ladder, it puts it behind the ladder. Therefore we need to see some smoke on top of the ladder. The best thing to do here is to take the merge of the smoke which is flat on top of the ladder and roto whispy shapes and areas of the smoke and then composite this again on top of the ladder roto.

This is the effect you are left with:

And this is the shot so far with some more colour correction testing:

What I wanted to create here was to darken it and bring out that contrast, but also not to lose the detail of the face within the darkness. In order to do this I lowered the gain of the whole piece but upped the gain of the shadows. Another notable tweak was that I also upped the gain of the highlights for more contrast and gave it a white cold and dreamy softness with a glow node. This adds to the feeling of the scene. And, this is just still in test mode and not final. I have not yet had a look at it next to the rest of the shots to see if there are any consistency issues, for example...

Initial Scene Preparations

First thing's first. Well, actually, it is calculating lens distortion, removing grain and motion tracking and such.

Here are a few examples of my initial preparations for a shot and how this applies to the final touches of Sh040C:

When using lens distortion, there are a few techniques. I prefer using either of two options: Nuke can automatically calculate - in a similar fashion to tracking - the lens distortion. The other is drawing points along straight elements in the scene and that will calculate if these elements bend due to lens distortion. I first of all use the former and use the latter to test if the lines are straight. If this does not work, I opt for the latter and draw the points manually along the lines.

This is an example for the lens distortion process:

This is the footage with lens distortion from the camera.

I have now applied the 'image analysis' and drawn a line with 'line analysis' in order to check it is has worked and the straight lines are indeed straight. They are.

Looking at this line on top of the original lens distorted footage, you can see that there is now a gradual distance from the line in the corners of the frame. This clarifies that the lens distortion has worked.

It is also important to clean out any noise from your footage if you are going to composite anything into it which may have no or different types and levels of grain.

Here is an example of removing grain in this shot:

Looking again at the original footage there is obvious noise/grain.

For comparison, here is the image once the Denoise node has been applied to the footage.

After the compositing of undistorted and de-grained footage/elements, it is important to re-apply the lens distortion:

Before. Notice the distance between the image and the end of the frame at either side.

After. Notice that gap filled and the rest of distortion now visible.

After. Now all of the smoke (subtle) have the same lens distortion to the originally shot footage.

The lens distortion makes everything like it should again and fills the frame correctly, as well as draw attention to any elements in the framing which the director designed or the DoP chose to bring out in the shoot, along with the elements that have been composited (I believe that it is good to place things in the composite considering the later lens distortion to make sure it looks right.)

And, re-graining:

By sourcing a flat area of the original plate (such as the concrete), using the F_Regrain node, it gives me an idea of grain. But, it always seems to require changing the grain size and amount by looking at the original footage again to use the eye to match it as best as possible.

After.

This is my process so far, regarding the first few cases of using the very effective method.

Sh041 Update

Regarding the previous post on this shot, said issues have been altered.

Some other particular details have been created, for example, the shadow under the additional 'conjoined' extractor fan, the repainting of the wall artefact behind the chosen re-location and a shadow on the fan as this particular fan would indeed be falling gradually out of the highly lit area.

These effects are achieved by rotoscoping, either by drawing bezier shapes, colour correcting this and compositing it on top; or cloning and painting artefacts out. Luckily this shot is very, very still and so requires no tracking whatsoever.

This is the original shot plate for comparison:

Cleanup in progress

Using Nuke's rotoPaint node, one can remove elements such as unwanted rope from their shots by using fairly simple digital painting techniques. For example, the clone tool, smear, blur and painting colour.

It is what is called 'invisible work' as it is not meant to be known to ever exist in the first place. After all, filmmaking is trickery and often staged and faked. Such techniques are to make things either more appealing or more realistic. Another good example is the light I removed in Sh041 (visible in this post.)

Here is an example of a 'Conjure' shot in progress:

I have also toyed with some colour correction, which needs some work, but for me it looks more like what I want from the shot rather than the warm image above it.

Of course it isn't as simple as painting one frame if the camera and other elements are moving. One has to track the painting into the footage, and any other painting done for areas which are out of frame in the beginning, as well as roto anything which is in front of the painted-out element. The character in this case moves on top of the rope. So he needs to be rotoscoped:

If I had left this shot without roto'ing the character and compositing this back on top of the repainting:

The area of painted wall would be on top of the arm as if a part of his arm was invisible or missing:

This is then the rotoscoped arm over the repainting:

So, this is what I have by this stage:

Hopefully this stands to demonstrate some of my compositing and cleanup processes I am using shot to shot.

Latest Pre-vis | 11.06.13

This is the latest for the Masters Show 2013 teaser:

There are certain rhythmic issues in the edit and obviously no finished CG elements as of yet. But, this gives one an update on how the edit looks and how some fully tested and colour corrected shots may look in the final teaser piece.

It is the peer review tomorrow.

More on this later..

First Pipe Composite

An update on the pipe from one location composited into the other location.

Sh041 Original

Sh041 Latest Update

As well as a second (or "twin") pipe being composited, there are a lot of other things to be added into these shots such as little shadows and scratches.

Latest Node Tree

Notes

Twinning

During the shoot we did use the composition in a lot of cases to create the idea of conjunction and twinning.

Seen as the content is of a man who has been conjoined to his twin brother for his entire life who imagines himself alone and independent, this is compositionally and in terms of storytelling rather significant.

However, some things we could not conjoin or twin up on set/location.

Therefore... COMPOSITING will be at hand to help..

Here is a quick example:

Sh040

In order to integrate these more I would however add a shadow on the original fan, add scratches and such to distinguish a difference between the two and add smoke from the additional composited fan - different to the original, for example.

Shot Consistency

Colour correction is a very good tool in the latter stages of film production to give the scene a consistent feel from shot to shot - especially when shots are taken from several different locations and made to look one of the same.

Of course, well before this, lighting is very important to be executed in exact ways location to location.

What the character wears is important as well as the location obviously appearing to be similar. If you design the set, then you can put similar or exactly the same props into the scenes.

If you design the shots for cutting in the storyboard, this subtracts any odd jump cuts that may occur in the edit.

Also, if the movements of the characters or elements join shot to shot.

Many things allow the cuts and story to flow better within a scene, and many more than these examples.

But, there is one other situation I'd like to point out: You shoot on several locations which are pretty similar, for example an alleyway, but they aren't totally similar.

Now, we did this, and we did frame steps in both alleyways to aid the cut. And, to be honest it isn't a big problem, but there is a very good way to synchronise them up using compositing.

Example of Alleyway #1

I have chosen to test cutting out one particular element from one close up shot, or mid shot, and compositing that into the wide from the other alleyway location.

Example of Alleyway #2

More on this later...