War Scene WIP

[gkocov]

Hi!

This is my first post here and also my first real compositing project (I have several years previous experience in the VFX industry working mostly as a rendering TD).

The shot is a WIP done for a workshop held by Steve Wright. Some of the mattes for the soldiers, all the rotos (excluding some roto correction), all the matte paintings and the 3D tank were done by other participants, everything else was done by me. The shot still lacks grain for the composited elements and there's no color grading, but 95% of the work is finished.

The background plate and the soldiers were shot on 35mm full aperture and then scanned as 2K 10-bit log DPX files. The soldiers were shot on bluescreen directly on location, so the lighting was not difficult to match. All the compositing work is done in Shake 4. The camera movement was tracked in MatchMover Pro, exported as a Maya ASCII file and imported in Shake for the multiplane node. The smoke and explosions are taken from a freely available stock footage web library (http://detonationfilms.com/free_stuff.htm). They were all shot as NTSC DV, some on bluescreen, some on greenscreen and some on a black background. The mattes for both the soldiers and the stock footage were procedurally generated using a color difference keyer and a luma keyer built from basic Shake nodes. After the despill and lighting/color matching, shadows and muzzle flashes were generated in Shake and added to some of the elements. The 3D tank was rendered in several passes (diffuse, specular and ambient) with a matched camera movement in the 3D software, so there was no need to composite it in 3D space. The only work done on the tank was color correction and defocus matching. The important elements from the matte paintings were extracted using an inverse corner pin and then all the elements were defocused accordingly and composited in 3D space using several multiplane nodes (only one multiplane node didn't work because on different depth segments different BG plate elements needed to be masked). Although technicly incorrect some of the explosions were composited in log space because the color/luminance shifts from the log space composite looked better compared to the linear composite.

The shot can be downloaded from http://rapidshare.de/files/22459703/war03.zip.html

Original clip: war03_raw_mjpeg.avi
Composited clip: war03_comp_mjpeg.avi

Both the original clip and the composite clip are linearized using a custom built print curve, resized to quarter res. and encoded as MJPEG AVIs. The AVIs were tested both with the ffmpeg codecs and with VLC, so if you have any problems playing the clips try using one or the other.

I hope you like the shot and please post any C&C that you have.

Regards,
Goran

[Aruna]

Sorry, this GeoCities site is currently unavailable.

The GeoCities web site you were trying to view has temporarily exceeded its data transfer limit. Please try again later.

Are you the site owner? Avoid service interruptions in the future by increasing your data transfer limit! Find out how.

[gkocov]

It seems Geocities has only 4MB per hour data transfer limit. I appologize for not checking this sooner. I uploaded a zip archive with both clips to RapidShare and modified the original message with the new link.

Sorry again for the trouble,
Goran

[Mental_Raymond]

Nice shot. Overall it works really well. I just has some issues with the following.

The white smoke in the far distance, is pretty dense and seems a little odd with hardly any transparency. Seems a little too white too, maybe a small grade might sell it better. Maybe some seconday smaller smoke and ploom comps added might help blend it more too. The opposing soldier closest to the cam seems to have some transparency issues with the smoke, the smoke matte seems to be almost opaque on him. I think generaly this seems to be an issue with the other comped smoked too, a little too dense.

Another really tiny thing is the gun fire from the opposing force. The flashes i assume are comped in? Would be cool to add some seconday lighting from the firing onto the soldiers, this shoulnt be too hard in post.

I dont know how much comp work was done on the guy in the foreground getting hit, but the impact and blood look excellent and work really work.

Dan.

[gkocov]

The white smoke in the far distance, is pretty dense and seems a little odd with hardly any transparency. Seems a little too white too, maybe a small grade might sell it better. Maybe some seconday smaller smoke and ploom comps added might help blend it more too. The opposing soldier closest to the cam seems to have some transparency issues with the smoke, the smoke matte seems to be almost opaque on him. I think generaly this seems to be an issue with the other comped smoked too, a little too dense.

I tried making the smoke less opaque in general, but it didn't look quite right. Maybe I should try multiplying the matte for the smoke with a ramp that's white in the middle part of the smoke and a little darker towards the edges. That might do the trick.

I agree that the roto for the closest opposing soldier is pretty sloppy. Since the camera is pretty hectic I hoped that it might not be that noticable, but the more I watch the shot, the more it bothers me. I'll definitely work on it a little more.

Another problem I have with the shot is that the comped elements don't have motion blur on them. It seems that the multiplane node is pretty buggy and I couldn't decrease the shutter timing (but strangely I could increase it). The good thing is that the real camera we used was also set for relatively narrow shutter angle, so the shot footage doesn't have a lot of motion blur in it.

Another really tiny thing is the gun fire from the opposing force. The flashes i assume are comped in? Would be cool to add some seconday lighting from the firing onto the soldiers, this shoulnt be too hard in post.

Good idea. Some of the soldiers were fireing blank rounds and we captured some real muzzle-flashes which didn't really affect the soldiers, since it was a bright sunny day. I tried to match to that, but make the flashes a little more noticable (the comped flashes are a little brighter and more opaque then the real ones). Putting subtle secondary lighting on the soldiers should work great with the comped flashes.

I dont know how much comp work was done on the guy in the foreground getting hit, but the impact and blood look excellent and work really work.

The ricochets on the bales were comped in, but the hit itself and the blood are from a squib.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions and the comments. I'll try them soon and hopefully some time next week I can post the final comp.

Goran