PowerHouse FX - Week 3

At the end of the 2nd week we were able to shoot at our selected location, and based on the feedback we received from our mentors we focused on refining the story and create a more accurate 3d previz. Here's the edit of it where Samuel worked on shots 1-3, and I (Kristof) worked on shots 4-6.

We put some of our recorded background footage on our presentation with the 3d previz overlay, just to give a better understanding of our idea. Also, Rebecca made major improvement on our wing model and will start rigging next week. Here's the presentation in video format:

We haven't reached picture lock yet but this is a rough edit of our project with uncut shots.

My task for this week was to create and alpha channel for our actress so that we can place the wings behind her. As I said, we haven't picked out final shots yet because we want to have options, so I was working on 0050_V4 and 005_V10 and created the alpha channel with a mixture of Keyer, Keylight and Roto nodes in Nuke. I also looked into ways on how to easily remove tracker markers and found this video that suggest a cool trick to do so.

Marker clean up demo starts at 12:35

Shot 0050_V04 would be an option for our final shot and creating an alpha for our actress hasn't been easy. Keying out the hear is a challenge and will need more refinement, but for now it works well for the body part, less for the hair.

This is my Nuke node graph.

Shot 0050_V10 would be another option, for which we used a green screen and a different background. The green screen helps a lot with the alpha channel, the difficulty will come form matching it with our clean plate which has a slightly different motion. On the top right corner of the video you can see the marker removal in action.

For the color difference, I used a primate for the core and the daisy chain method for edge matte.

This is the tracker removal part where they are being rotoed out and with the help of the edge blur node, the edges of the cutouts get sucked in to fill in the holes.

In the meantime, Payton has made a rough comp for our 3rd shot, where we will show the sky at night time with birds flying around, here's how it looks:

Elise started texturing the wings in Substance Painter, that Rebecca has modeled in Maya.

The upcoming week, we will refine our current progress and finalize the edit, so it's going to be a busy one but we are excited to keep working.