This post is about the creation of the mobile plant and the NUKE compositing, with a video of this stage (at the moment this clip is 100% my personal production)
Our team uses GITHUB to record every time a team member makes a change to the project and uses it for important questions (within the project). Here is the link: Issues · Sturmt1ger/The-Bag-Choice (github.com)
First, I converted the video to EXR format because I wanted to export it as a background and Redshift doesn’t support PNG sequences.
Then I 3D tracked the camera and subtracted the character mask I created at the beginning to get an unmasked scene data. (I also masked it to expand it, since NUKE still reads the extra data. Finally I tested the 3D scene in NUKE
Then in Houdini I made a simple material because I needed to test the Redshift renderer (this was the first time I used it, the renderer is extra software in Houdini so I spent a lot of time installing and learning it)
Then I found some models of flowers and grasses in Bridge, and I tested the materials in C4D first (because the models contain multiple subdivision levels)
Then I integrated multiple models into Houdini.
Here you’ll see that this haystack contains multiple models because I wrote a function expression when converting particles to something else, and in the expression the particles are converted to three integers, and the three integers point to three different OBJs, so we get a random haystack!
Then I tried to render a frame and I can see that the first image has strange colours, this is because the Redshift render window uses OCIO colour grading.
However, I didn’t find where I could adjust it, and I’ll need to keep working on it later, as I have no way of seeing what the colours actually look like on the monitor.
The second image is the result after exporting to EXR compressed format, the colours are now correct
Then I added an expression on the liquid emitter about the time, $FF> to indicate that it works when the number of frames is greater than X, because the environmental scene is in the second half of the shoot
Then I added steps to the scene and adjusted the position (this step requires patience because you don’t know what the adjusted things look like in the render window, because these items in the picture are not rendered, they only exist as volumes (hidden) in the scene)
Looks better now!
Then I started to create the lawn under the character’s feet, I still used the same technique but switched an emission source and modified the viscosity values
Then I adjusted the position of the various parts for a long time to get the right trajectory in the video
I then put the two videos into NUKE and composited them and adjusted their colours with some depth of field and motion blur effects.
I then spent a lot of time on the rendering and eventually I imported the result into NUKE
Then I noticed that there was no shadow on the ground when the character was walking, so I shifted the original character mask and recoloured it
This video is the current progress of this clip, all the following visual effects were done independently by me (There’s currently a bug where part of the Flood Plants fluid is supposed to flow behind the tree, not in front of it, which I’ll tweak at a later stage)