PowerHouse FX - Week 2: The Pitch

On Tuesday, 9/20, we presented our idea of the birdwoman. This project will focus on body augmentation, digital make-up and minor seasonal change. I was responsible for creating the 3d previsualization, as well as gathering refrence images for the the wings for look developement.

Here's a video recording of our pitch:

After presentation we recieved very useful tips and feedback from our mentors so the storyboard and 3d previsualization would change soon.

For the upcoming 8 weeks I'll be responsible for lighting, look developement, some fx and compositing. I will also make sure that during shooting our live footage everything goes as planned and we get all the shots, hdri, and sound we need.

We're ready to record our shots this upcoming Sunday, 9/25 and start our postproduction on week 3.

How to shoot HDRIs on set:

Before the shoot I did some research on how to shoot HDRIs on set. Even though I'm quite comfortable creating one with a chromeball, after watching a couple tutorials I want to experiment Hugo's desk's method. For this set up I will need a DSLR camera, a tripod, a fish eye lens and a 360 HDRI head. The following videos show how to take the pictures and edit hem in Photoshop:

After taking my fish eye images, the photomerge method didn't work out due to the extreme amount of lesn distortion. So I went to nuke to aplly the lens correction, in hope for a better result. These are just some images of the nodegraph, lensdistort node and before/after photos.

Even though, the these images didn't have lens distortion at all, Photoshop still couldn't process them. I think this could be solved using one or both of two methods. The first option would be a better alignment for the different images so Phtotshop would have an easier job figuring out where to stitch them. The other solution could be a wider range of photos with multiple camera angles. I did some extra research and found this tutorial by pwnisher, who creates hdris, using a similiar process. The only difference is he takes extra photos at 45 degree angle facing the floor and the ceiling and then do the stitching in a software called Insta 360 Studio. Here's the video of the full tutorial: