PowerHouse FX - Week 9

This week we had our last critique before the final turn in. Our clean cut received good critiques, but our mentors left a couple suggestions for us to change, which mostly include our hero shots. My job was to extend the hair roto for shot #5 and refine scar placement of shot #6 (In our final cut these are shot #2 and #3).

For Shot #5 hair detail, I've got the the script from Payton, who already completed the majority of the keying, I just needed to finish up the top part. I started off by trying to multiply the footage with itself so the contrast would increase and it would be easier to use keying techniques to separate her hair from the background.

Unfortunately, the white values were clamped at 1.0 and Nuke had a hard time differentiating the highlights, which caused an intense flickering in the hair so I started roto painting it out and try to make it look smooth.

After realizing that the roto paint will never create a seamless, continuous edge, I used and Edge Blur node to even out the alpha and then combined everything with Payton's node graph. In the process, I lost a lot of hair detail, but I could maintain the overall head shape

My other job was to finalize the scar for shot #6, for which I already had a pretty good track, so I made some adjustments in Maya, where a I used a Bend deformer to add curvature to the already animated body and adjusted placement so I could render out different versions to see what works best. By adding a switch node, I can quickly swap between renders and see the differences.

After some feedback from my team mates, we decided to go with this version:

On week 10, class 19, we're presenting our final video to our mentors! We're excited to see how everything looks once it's put together, so stay tuned!