SDGM 560 - Virtual Collaboration with The Mill - Process Blog Week 6
This week I wanted to project the foreground mountains onto geometry rather than cards. In Maya, I projected the mountain matte painting for shot 2. I made 3 mountain variations by extruding cubes. After they were well positioned and mesh smoothed, I exported them individually as .fbx files. After all 3 were imported into Nuke and the animated camera played through, the left side of the matte painting clearly needed an extension.
Projecting on Maya geometry
Matte Painting Extension Needed
Geo Projections in Nuke
A quick render test was done to see how well the geometry held up before the matte painting extension began. I noticed a problem as the .mp4 played where there was a strange bubbling/ camera shake occurring over all of the projection. In attempt to problem solve, I exported many iterations of geometry with both less and more faces, but the problem continued to show. Due to limited time and because this method didn't seem to give a better result than the previous one, I made the decision to project the mountains on cards with displacement.
Projection Problem - Bubbling
Projected on Cards
For Shot 1, the mountain matte paintings were adjusted. Then a Heat Distortion Gizmo created by Petar Tsonev was downloaded from Nukepedia. At first, the heat distortion effect will affect the entire viewport. This was a problem, as I only intended the effect to be inside the balloon when the pyro is shown. The solution was to use a roto node and mask it to the heat distortion gizmo. This ensures that the distortion effect will only take place within the roto shape. The amount of distortion was also keyframed as the pyro increases and decreases, The size of the noise for the distortion was adjusted as well using the gizmo's parameters.
Heat Distortion Problem
Heat Distortion Solved
Noise
Distortion Parameters
Heat Distortion Node
I also included particles within the scene by using a particle emitter node. I adjusted the emission rate, size, and life span. I also added turbulence, gravity and drag to their animation. These particle nodes were then connected to a scanline render node which is attached to a duplicate of the shot 1 animated cam. A blur node is then added to blur the square particles to make them appear more round. The original background is also blurred and the alpha of the particles is applied on top of the blurred background with a copy node. This allows the particles to show a similar color to what the background shows as they float through the scene. After this is all premulted, it is merged over the background.
Nuke Particles - White
Particle Nodes
Nuke Particles - Colored
Blurred Background
Particles in Scene
Lastly, smoke assets were merged both in front and behind the hot air balloon as it begins to take off. The smoke footage was received as an .mov, so it was written out in as an .exr sequence and read back into Nuke. The timing off the sequence was adjusted with an OFlow node to slow it down. The smoke was then transformed and color graded to be more warm and dusty.
Smoke Asset
Node Graph
For shot 4, a new background was created and high res renders of the clouds were composited in and color corrected. The clouds and balloons both had changes in their compositions. Each individual render is placed on a card and positioned in 3D space. z-defocus and color corrections were then applied.
Updated BG - Shot 4
Updated Clouds
Shot 4 Node Graph
Shot 4
Updated Visualization