Major ProjectVFX REEL/BREAKDOWN

LAILA W. RAHIM

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Technical Concept

To create a realistic production-quality composition using elements from a range of live action footage and plates, 3D renders, matte paintings, and possibly other materials.

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Idea/Concept

Initial Idea

Post-apocalyptic scene

Concrete jungle

Nature has taken over the modern city

A person who lives in the city but hates it decides to “re-paint” it with nature

VFX breakdown

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Final Concept

A person who is bored to be stuck in the same routine, fell asleep at work

Dreamt he had a magic brush that made the ink/painting come to life

Visual Style and Concept

References

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World Builder

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Kenya Hara’s

Exformation

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Production Technique

Summary

Pre-production (scriptwriting, storyboarding/pre-vis)

Production (on-location shooting, gathering stock

footage)

Post-production (editing, mattepainting,

rotoscoping/compositing, sound design)

Research on lighting techniques for VFX, camera

tricks to minimalize post-production work

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Creating the Vines

I first experimented with C4D’s Ivy Grower plugin

with give me the following results

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The result looks really nice but when I tried to do the

animation it doesn’t look as good (video below).

I also wasn’t able to customize the paths that I

would want the ivy to grow along.

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I then discovered about the Paint Effects tool in

Maya.

I watched some tutorials on it and it seems like the

perfect tool to create my vines.

I was able to control almost everything on the vines.

I used the curve tool to create the paths that I

wanted the vines to grow on and attached the brush

to it.

I was also able to control the way the growth

animates and added some turbulence for the wind

blowing effect.

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Here are some of the test renders I did with Maya

Paint Effects

Grass

I used the same method I did with the vines to

create the grass but I didn’t use the curve tool.

I just used the Paint Effect brush to paint on the

plane that I have brought in from Nuke.

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Sky Tower Tree Effect

This shot was the hardest.

I couldn’t really figure out how to achieve the

effect with it looking realistic.

I experimented with Nuke and After Effects by just

masking a tree bark texture over the Sky Tower

footage with a blending effect and have the

mask slowly revealing the tree bark over it.

I got the look I wanted but the tree bark mask

animation didn’t look convincing.

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I then asked for the help of my friend to model the

Sky Tower in Maya.

I textured it and used the Paint Effects to created

an animated growing tree at the top.

I then added some vines growing along the tree

trunk as well.

My friend then taught me about the use of

displacement maps to displace the geometry of

the model using the texture so that it would give a

physical bark like texture. Instead of a flat look.

Examples shown in the following pictures .

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Without displacement map

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With displacement map

Lighting/Rendering

I first used the Mental Ray rendering engine and

just added the Physical and Sky.

It didn’t quite give me the desired effect.

My friend then told me about Vray.

With Vray Sun, I was able to use the longitude and

latitude of the location of the footage I shot and it

would give me the sun’s position on that time and

date.

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The problem comes in when I rendered it.

The Paint Effects didn’t render properly.

It took me a whole to troubleshoot it.

I had to convert all the Paint Effects into Polygons and

apply Vray Material shaders to them.

I then used a default leaf texture for the leaves.

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Footage 23

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Compositing

I took some classes with the 2nd Year Visual Effects

students.

I was able to understand more about compositing

techniques, pipeline, and workflow.

I used the Camera Tracker node to track the

camera of all the footage needed.

I then created 3D cards to represent the ground

plane, walls, Sky Tower, etc.

The geos were then exported in alembic format

(.abc) and were brought into Maya.

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After all the 3D assets have been rendered according to the correct camera angle and animation from the camera information from the .abc file, I brought rendered images into Nuke.

Everything was then composited together and colorcorrected.

For one of the vines scene, I added a slight debris effect for when the vines pop out using a stock footage.

The ink/paint stroke effect was done in After effects by using the alpha layer of the vines I retrieved from the renders.

I just applied a Brush Stroke effect on it and masked it accordingly.

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Brush Stroke Effect 30

31Final Comp