In this tutorial we´re about to cover a technique that is quite commonly used in 3d compositing packages such as Nuke. We´ll learn how to clean up Shots with simple geometries by setting up a small “projector-rig” right in AfterEffects. With this technique cleaning up your shots becomes pretty straight forward and keeps you from frame to frame painting.

You can checkout the tutorial here.

Enjoy!

During the course we finished up several shots from start to finish including 3D Tracking (Syntheyes and AfterEffects CameraTracker by theFoundry), Animation/texturehandling/Modelling/Shading/whats´o´ever in Cinema4D and the final Compositing of our shots with AfterEffects and Nuke.

Special thanks to Markus Bürster & Thorsten Hary for helping me out shooting the stuff and beeing the main actor.

Enjoy!

I ll keep you updated, so stay tuned, i think its going to be a nice one!

The Team. On this production we were a bunch of fxphd friends that cooperated as a connected remote-studio called FreakwaveVFX. We proofed this kind of collaboration on “Yalla Asia” with success, so we knew it would work. We were contributed in several countries reaching from the UK, Ireland, to the Netherlands and Germany. With that in mind, we had a big advantage: We all were working in the same timezone, so online meetings for revision, questions and suggestions were quite easy to handle. So before we really started the production, we got our head around the sequence we would work on, that included around 26 shots in total.

the compositing: final nuke script of shot 80-150.

The Sequence. We worked on the rescue sequence that was appearing twice in the movie – with a bad and in the second run a happy ending. We were faced with creating a complete 3d matte painting for the sequence, including several angles , as we needed a frozen river surface on an non-frozen one. The Actors were partly shot on-set, the other were shot in a green screen studio so that we had to match those seamlessly.

Raw greenscreen plate for the shot.

final compositing of that shot

My Role in the Game. My main part in this production was to comp 15 shots. We did all the comp work in nuke and worked in full 2k resolution for that tv production. Beside that i helped creating a rig for our cg ropes we had to integrate where a 2d warped version wasn’t quite sufficient. This part was realized in Cinema4D using a SplineIK-system with several control-points.

Cinema4D: early proof of concept of the rope-rig

Keep continuity. This was quite a heavy task for us, as we were contributed in different countries. For a better communication we set up a shared calendar, set-up a shotgun account for the show, and created a protected Skype-chatroom, so that we could have revision-calls in the evenings, and could paste snapshots of our current work to everyone involved. As we had the communication channels set up, our lead compositor started to create the matte painting, that we all could use. Once he saved a new version, we just changed our read-nodes and were ready to move on. Another big task that we had to tackle, was the cracking of the ice, that needed to have a consistent look though all of the shots, no matter if it was comped in germany, uk, or the netherlands. So we ended up creating a solution that looked great and included that into our template file so that everyone had the same base to start with.

The Cracking: Template nodes-setup for keeping continuity

i m not yet done with a breakdown video for my shots , but i´ll let you know as soon as i got that online!

We need to fix up a few minor issues, but feel free to start exploring our TV/VFX/Motion Graphics Department of Haus&Gross communications.

C4D212 - Bazooka Lookdev and Modell

So what are we´re going to tackle ?

We´ll start – once again – with that shot in syntheyes and learn how to use the new lens distortion technique that syntheyes is now offering for an easy and accurate distortion result. Right after that we´ll have a look at how to get an object track solved properly. We´ll also discuss a few issues i ran into during the shoot of that plate, as we´re doing all this shots in an guerillia like production.

So for those of you taking my C4D212 course … get excited about it, we once again got a lot to tackle during this first class of the shot.

C4D212 - Bazooka - Tracked scene in Syntheyes

Breakweek is now over and we´re going to start again with class06 of the courses this week. Therefore i jus wanted to give you a sneak peak at the shot we worked on in class04,05 and 06 and a little behind the scenes info on that:

Shooting.We started with a little shoot in our office, prepped our kessler crane and got our Canon 5D attached to it. As a result we ended up with a slight camera movement and a plate that looked like this:

c4d212 Holodesk Raw Footage

Tracking. For this shot i prepared some tracking markers, as we´d be shooting big simple surfaces with hardly any details in it. For that we went trough the shot and placed a few markers where we´d need them and where we´d be able to paint them out again pretty easy. Due to the lack of details, i went with a fully manual tracking approach using only the markers, that we put into the scene.We also tackled Lensdistortion as we shot on a quite wide 24mm lens on a full frame 5D markII.

c4d212 Holodesk Tracking with Syntheyes

Modelling. We created all our 3D Assets in Maxon´s Cinema4D. We started with creating the Geometry and modelled the whole Desk using standard modeling techniques. With the help of Cinema4D´s Mograph module we created nice looking animations for our holographic Assets in minutes and with ease. Beside that Mograph was a huge time saver when we added elements and details to our Desk.

c4d212 Holodesk 3D geometry for the shot

Lighting. To light up this scene correctly, we took a batch of HDR photos with the Canon MarkII and our 8mm Sigma fisheye lens. We stitched those together and created an 360° Panorama with multiple Exposure Steps. This panorama was mapped onto a skydome lateron.

c4d212 Holodesk HDRI to light the scene properly

Rendering. Once we got our 3D scene set up properly, we rendered the shot out in 3 passes including one for the desk and floor portion, the 2nd one for the lighting of the Holodesk and the last one for all the holographic elements in the scene. Beside the beauty passes we set up a ton of object buffers to make sure we could adjust every asset in compositing without the need of rerendering.

c4d212 Holodesk Spreadsheet of the Renderpasses

Compositing. After we got all our Assets back from rendering, we started off with the compositing to apply the final touches to our scene. We added up some more volumetric lighting look&feel to our holographic assets, and did some technical adjustments to blend the CG elements in smoothly. With some Roto and Color Correction we placed everything where we wanted it to be, and finally came up with the finished shot.

c4d212 Holodesk Final Shot

Feel free to enjoy the video!
Part 01 here.
Part 02 here.

In my C4D212 course we´ll cover some complete shot production from beginning to end, from tracking to compositing using Syntheyes, AfterEffects and Cinema4D.