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htrujillo13

SANM560 Powerhouse VFX Collaboration

Updated: Nov 15, 2022

This blog will span over the course of Fall 2022 to document my progress in the SANM560 Powerhouse VFX Collaboration course.



INSPIRATION






Above are a series of videos my group sent in for inspiration pertaining to visual effects body augmentation.


We drew inspiration from glowing images of flowers and sparkles/glowing pollen (depicted below) for our project pitch.



Our idea centered around a young woman locating a flower near her house that stands out among the rest. When she approaches it and reaches for it, it blooms at her touch and causes a crazy chain reaction all the way up her arm to her face. Vines burst out of her forearm with flowers budding from the growth, particles flying about and glowing like the flower she touched. Her eyes glow as well (were thinking of replacing her irises), and suddenly, as if it were all a dream, the reaction is over.



I had some plastic vines laying around in my room for decoration and decided to take some reference shots of what the effect of the vines growing might look like.


We also found a willing actress pretty early on, which helped with setting up previsualization.







PREVISUALIZATION AND CONCEPT


Once left to our own devices to come up with a story, my team and I decided on a couple of ideas centering around the Body/Appendage Extension. Our idea went as follows:




We'd also drawn up a couple concepts for previs and ultimately were left with a couple pieces of concept art done by Emma and a 3D previs shot-by-shot video that Xander created.








ORGANIZATION


We'd also come up with a schedule by which to plan tasks by. It's made things a lot easier for us to split up each task by a weekly basis so we have a general idea of when to have things done. Like filming, for example.


Using Autodesk's Shotgrid, we were able to come up with a schedule full of tasks. Emma also created a flowchart to help with workflow.






FILMING - WEEK 2 & 3



The location we filmed at was only a 2 minute drive from my house, and we ended up storing all the camera and lighting equipment at my place. I'd taken some pictures to scout out the location for our pitch with our mentors at Powerhouse.

I took these pictures around mid-day to check the lighting for our filming days.




The day of filming, the shoot didn't take as long as we thought. We used the URSA Black Magic Mini camera to shoot the footage. We decided to shoot during the early evening, just before sundown, to that we could get shade over the filming location. After a few practice takes and a general rundown, we got what we needed for Day 1 and said our goodbyes. The following day we shot at noon for a different lighting setup and collectively agree that the Day 2 footage will be what we use.

Following is our second pitch video with a bit of our footage alongside some R&D from Thalia, Emma and James.



Here's a couple BTS shots for fun:






I took the liberty of assigning each shot with a naming convention on ShotGrid so that we could sift through an organized list. Not only that, but since we filmed on two separate days, I divided the shots based off of day, shot, and take.







R&D - WEEK 4



The exposure on a couple of our plates needs to be re-adjusted and was mentioned to be potentially too bright. Specifically, the OVGN_0020 plates on Day 2. I went and checked the numbers and histograms, and it's not so bad on the actress' knee (we can use the faint glow of the sun off the fabric of her skirt as reference for the glowing particle effects).

The problematic area lies in the sidewalk which is all washed out to the actress' right.



I'm going to mess around with some grading to see what I can come up with and do some more R&D to figure out whether there's enough information on these areas. I'm meeting with a colorist next Monday, and then we';; really know.

For now, I have a couple of ideas on how to fix that portion of the plate, whether it be a mix of grading and levels, or matting it in from another plate and comping that in.





KEENTOOLS R&D PLUS COLOR ISSUES - WEEK 5



I've been messing around with KeenTools the past week to scan our actress' face with FaceBuilder and FaceTracker. I aim to move onto tracking her forearm with GeoTracker so we can get something to line a digital prosthetic up with in Maya for the vine effects. So far, I've gotten a taste of KeelTools' temperament and had to take my time playing around with its facial alignment options. I'm learning what pins to prioritize as to not mess up the facial geo too much.




I'm going to mess a bit more and see if I can come up with a track and potentially an exportable Geo.



PROBLEMS:


Something to note is that we hit a snag with our exposure in the shots for day 2, which we were originally starting to work with. I'd met with a DaVinci colorist to have him show me how to read the numbers to see if the clipping in the exposure could be salvaged but unfortunately there was not enough information. The histogram was pretty squished, so I went on and ran the news by the team. Since then, we've switched to using the plates from Day 1, which are definitely more in the shade.


Now, per the image below, I wanted to show how much more information I found that the Day 1 plates had compared to Day 2 (the sunny ones). The histogram was definitely stretched, and I had a lot more room to work with. Since the Day 1 plates were shot in the shade, the exposure was definitely darker than Day 2, but I was able to find a very happy middle after messing with the levels and other DaVinci controls. I then applied each color change to every shot and exported the EXR's out to the rest of the team to get started on.



The kicker was figuring out the accurate colorspaces to use for both the plate EXR's as well as any CG that the rest of the team would import. I had a bit of trouble making sure everything matched and was set up correctly in Nuke, but I managed to make it through with flying colors- literally! Something to note also is that I needed to make sure the rest of the team knew about the colorspace changes and issues so that we're all on the same page and both their EXR's and my Nuke scripts were all set up.





MORE KEENTOOLS R&D PLUS

LOTS OF ROTO - WEEK 6



So.. back to Keen, I ended up having to start all over with FaceBuilder since we switched from Day 2 to Day 1 plates, but this time around I was much more successful working with Keen. I was worried that since we didn't have that extra 5th shot that we did on Day 2 that had the actress' face in full, clear view, I was worried about the accuracy of the build and the track in Keen. As it turned out, I both built the face, tracked it and exported the FBX for my team and had little to no issues this time around. Now we can move forward with building facial effects!

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to screen record to show the track, but here's a screenshot of Keen from this weekend.





Continuing along with updates, I also started some rigorous roto oh both shots 2 and 4. I've mostly finished the roto work for shot 2, but it needs some extra fixes and a little more love. Mainly I wanted to make sure that when we put the flower rig unfurling in shot 2 that the stem and petals are able to go through the actress' fingers and look natural when she reaches for it. I put in a checkerboard as a placeholder for the flower for now.

Below are some screenshots of what the roto work looks like, as well as a screengrab of my node graph for bringing the fingers forward. I find it way more helpful to split up finger and hand sections so that I have better control over the roto.




Here is the test comp for shot 2 that I'd worked on over the weekend.




PROBLEMS:


When the actress is reaching for the flower (checkerboard for now), I'm having trouble finding a smooth transition from her fingers being behind it to reaching forward in space and grasping it naturally.



As you can see, it's a bit rough when she reaches for it. I will say that when the flower EXR's are in the shot, there will be a very thin stem to grab, I don't think I'll have half as much trouble since it can slip between her fingers and the roto's easily enough. I'll have to mess around with it once the CG is completed.





PAINT PATCHES & KEYER R&D - WEEK 7


Week 6 ended with me attempting to find a way to bring the actress' hair over a placeholder CG-integrated element (like he checkerboard, only this time I just used a constant). I started with a roto but decided to take the Comp-Smart route and key her hair. A handful of inverts later and voila! I also painted out the q-tips in both shots 2 and 3.



Here's what my node graph is looking like for shot 3 above (OVGN_01_03).



PROBLEMS:


Need to find a way to paint out the leftover key of the ground that's getting pulled into my garbage roto.... I only want to see her hair getting picked up but there's so much in the way on the ground behind her.






Shot 2 I had gotten started on a few weeks back. If you scroll further up, you'll notice the comp with the checkerboard placeholder- I finally got some rough EXR's of the flower blooming in her hand, although there aren't textures on it yet. Hoping to get those by next Tuesday, potentially sooner so I can work on blending and grading. For the time being I was able to fix and adjust the rotos in the shot to fit the flower better.





As for shot 3, I got the EXR's for the vine and while including the cut we made to shot 3, the vine doesn't even travel up high enough for her hair to be an issue! R&D aside, I'm glad I explored the option.






INTEGRATING ASSETS - WEEK 8 & 9



Final stretch! For some updates:


Shot 2:


Shot 3:



For both shots, I've been grading the assets to match the background and the scene better. Since we're also rendering in Redshift in Houdini, one of the issues we were facing as a team was how to get me a cryptomatte pass of the flower's materials. I wasn't able to proceed very accurately without being able to split up the materials and edit each by themselves. Luckily, our CG Generalist Xander was able to make a makeshift pass and with the help of a couple grades nodes, I made sure each material were true RGB colors to split them up.



We're also planning on replacing the flower model in shot 3 with one that's more flimsy and less stiff so it adds a bit of realism. I've set up the comp so that all I'll need are the new EXR's of the flower model, the particles to fit on top and the cryptomatte hack passes. Same with the shadow passes, though the shadows for shot 2 are a bit more of a complex issue.

Here's the node graph for shot 3 where I'm at right now:






The shadow issue for shot 2 is that we do not have the time to line up the metahuman arm we used for the shadow pass in shot 3. So that means I'm going to find a way to 2D hack it with rotos, grade/color correct nodes & masks. I made one in the video above for shot 2, but it definitely needs to be more prominent.








CLEAN UP - WEEK 10


AAAAND we're there, folks. Here are the final breakdowns for week 10.


Shot 2:



Shot 3:



If you ignore the big cobweb in the lower right-hand corner (it's just the breakdown), that about sums it all up. The last couple of fixes were a few more added shadows that I'd made myself in both shots with a grade node and a couple of rotos. I re-added the noise with the DasGrain node as well to tie everything together.

If I had a few more weeks to work on this project, I think I'd be going back into this comp with my Mocha Pro student license and re-track everything, especially the hand. I can't help but notice how much it slips in shot 2 when she picks up the flower. I'd also like to have used the metahuman arm in both shots to get accurate shadows and not ones I'd fashioned myself.


Special thanks to Ed, Nick and Monica from PowerhouseVFX for supervising this project and helping it turn into what it is today. We only had 10 weeks (8-9 if you count time lost due to hurricanes this quarter) to come up with the entire project and I feel very good about it. There's a couple of small but important fixes I would like to make before this project debuts in my demo reel.. But regardless, thank you for tuning in! Expect to see the final project on here soon.

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