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...

Watching Water Vapour in The World

Seen as most of my visual effects shots consists of compositing smoke, I have been keeping my eye out for smoke and steam in every day life, eg. clouds, piping hot soup and my weekly shenanigans as an arsonist.

The clouds give you an idea of how light reacts, creating hot spots. The shots so far have no strong light source directly behind it which would give a high level of over exposure, but there are subtle effects needed. At the moment, I am using pre-shot archive footage of smoke, dust and atmospheres. This is pre-lit and therefore in order to give it the effect of being situated in the same environment as the footage, other techniques are required.

It may be obvious to point out, but in order to composite them best there are a few important measures: set the blend mode to 'screen', use a light wrap (generate light wrap only and merge, and premult for the roto to work properly) and colour correct it so it looks part of the scene more but still retains its grey opaque tone.

In order to get a more accurate consistency, along with the above examples, I have used a glow and luminance keyers to pull out values to be brighter. In more obvious areas I have roto'd areas I want to make brighter or darker and applied them on top of the full plane of smoke, adding to them.