Second Year: VFX Studio Project
Breakdown
This breakdown shows everything that I worked on in the project
Developing the Shots
For this project we worked in groups I worked with two other students and assumed the role of the project manager, the project brief outlined that we had to create an environment and composite a live plate into the shot, though this was loosely enforced.
Initially I drew up lots of storyboards for different shots and styles, I wanted to do a shot set in space with a super close up of someone's face featuring, after two weeks of discussion we decided to loosely base the project off this storyboard called "The Draw"
We took the themes from storyboard, the over the top explosion out the side of the gun and the western style to it and applied it to Simon, one of the group members, setting of Victorian England then evolved it into a DnD Steampunk fantasy setting
The gun was modelled in maya, each of the UVs separated by material allowing me to easily texture and apply textures in substance painter and maya
The model was textured in substance painter I used techniques like drawing colours onto the barrel and blurring them to create heat burn effects and using a coat then chipping it with roughness maps to create good textures for my model
Lastly I feel like the lighting of the shot let my model down, The lighting is based off what we filmed on the shoot a hard pink/purple light on the left, soft blue light on the right and a soft orange top light. I also included an extra light behind to represent the portal. The fire VDB also arcuately lights the gun giving some really nice reflections. Lastly I included a HDRI to give accurate reflections of the environment.​
For the fire effect I used Embergen to create the explosion, reducing the level of oxygen in the sim to make it appear as if it was being filmed in slow motion, I didn't have time to render out 4x the frames and slow it down in Nuke. I also rendered out an Image sequence to use in Nuke.
Originally creating the portal VDB wasn't my job however due to technical difficulted I had to re create it last minute to do this I used Embergen, tracked and exported the portal out of maya using AIVolume
Pulling a key was very difficult due to the poor greenscreen quality I ended up using a mix of Keylights and Luma keys to get a nice key. I then created a teleport effect using rotoscopes and the Idistort node making the effect glow. I also tracked a hand and gun into the shot to match the third shot and sell the fact that he was holding a gun. at the end of the node tree I graded the background plates and portal plates to match the black and white points of the footage
In nuke I composited an embergen sequence over the top of the maya render to make the quality of the flames better. And used zdepth to make the shot more realistic. Cutting the third shot into two helped me hide the lack of body in the 3D scene making the shot feel more grounded
To get the hand model I first cut the hand off of a MetaHuman re rigged it and positioned it around the gun.
I then modelled a sleeve to cover the hand and used Mayas build in modelling tools to add folds
As group leader I organised the project development and meetings however the final product couldn't have been made without the exceptional effort made by the rest of the group, the perseverance in the face or major problems and the creative problem solving we each came up with.
Evan Goddard