This post documents the effects compositing portion, and includes some other content at the end, such as the post update storyboards, I’ll also put our progress for the week at the beginning, and most of the footage from the naval battle should be all done by the end of the week (except for the effects) The tank firing footage should have a general look as well.
In September, I first started trying to create a composite of the shot below, many of the steps of which were very similar to those used to create the London project from a previous Nuke course, where I shot a video at home and tracked him down in NUKE.Next, I found an SU-57 model in Sketchfab and created an animation in Maya, using a similar HDRI as Dom Light
I also used these nodes to create an area of high temperature caused by the flames on the tail of the airplane, which will make close up shots look more realistic, an effect often seen when waiting in line for cars in the heat
Next is one of the most challenging shots, this shot is almost complete based on a 3D scene where I composited smoke (using Houdini), a lot of soldiers, tents, several tanks, and Su-57s. This shot has only one camera, but I put a lot of effort into making it, and my process is similar to the one above, with the exception of the steps required toI made a similar process to the one above, but the difference is that I needed to make a higher quality scene and model in Maya, first of all, let’s see how the scene is made.
On the rendering, since I only wanted to get the objects, and the projections that the objects produce on the ground, I created two different rendering levels, one level to control the shadows alone, that is to say, to let the renderer handle only the shadows of the objects as well as the ground (both of which are invisible in themselves, of course) This step is very important, and doing it this way lets you control the color transformations in Nuke much easier, and I’ve done 2+2 renderings of these objects hereI did 2+2 renders on these objects here, it should be 1+1, but the result is that some of the objects move incorrectly in Nuke (I think the problem is with Nuke’s 3D tracking)
In the compositing stage, the process can be divided into three main stages, the first is the shadows, the second is the objects, and the third is the clouds.Of course, the specific steps are still a little different, for example, this scene will have three airplanes through the camera, so this part is basically placed in the last step, the following is the node diagram of the whole process
Here’s a picture of the composite cloud, the object and the overall effect
Next is the creation of smoke in the scene, because the angle of this smoke is more special, I then decided to create their own special effects, so it’s also a chance to learn how to create smoke particles. The process is easy compared to a fluid system, the overall difficulty lies in the adjustment of the volumetric node parameters, as the smoke needs to be allowed to emit naturally
Next up are two simpler shots, I created them using C4D’s fabric simulation system as well as NUKE, in the National Theatre scene, this scene is just a jpg, but I wanted to get some camera effects, so I added a node that simulates the natural camera shake and added a little bit of motion blur.The second composite shot was a special trip I made to the other side of the river from Big Ben to shoot on location, for this shot I stabilized it, I used Tracker to grab 6 points of the buildings in the frame and auto-generated a Transform (Stabilizing) then I animated several Soviet flags and fighter jets flying over them in C4D.
In the Big Ben scene, the steps were pretty much the same as above, the difference being that I added a dynamic background in C4D as I was making it (easy to see if the positions were wrong, which was crucial, otherwise I would have needed to try them one at a time, which I didn’t know was possible until last week and wasted a lot of time) Then in compositing I masked the Big Ben clock, as well as the utility poles on the right side to allow the planes to fly over them from theback to fly over them.I ended up compositing multiple smoke as well as cloud effects in Nuke to give the result a more battlefield atmosphere
Then I used the Keyer method to change the weather, because the original video didn’t look very distinctive, so I used a Noise map to make a slightly shifting dark cloudy weather
Then I realized that the center of the scene was too empty, so I made a smoke effect in the road next to Big Ben after the explosion, the smoke effect is ActionFX in the copyright-free material
Next, I felt that the scene was still missing some elements of war, so I used Runway’s AI image generation tool to make some effects of bullets and artillery shells on Big Ben (reasonable control of AI tools is a skill that designers must master, and technology always needs to be in the service of human beings)
Next, I found that the smoke effect I had just created was a bit monotonous, and in many movies the center flame part would be more comedic, so I added a Glow effect to it, and the way I did it was to use the Keyer to individually select the Alpha of the high temperature area of the flame and Premult this Alpha away, so that I could have the Glow control the center part individually
This pic shows all the steps in the synthesis of this part
In Part2 I did effects compositing work on three scenes, so let’s start by looking at the first one.Here I first did detailed 3D tracking of the scene, which is very important in this shot, and I also used Runway’s Ai Masking tool to mask the characters.(Highly recommended, its automated effects are fast and effective.) I then added three Cubes to the 3D environment in Nuke to check that the three positions in the camera were correct.Then I exported it to FBX mode.
Then I imported the particles, Cubes and camera in the 3D software, then I placed the tank and the soldiers according to the position of the Cube, and then I animated the turret of the tank to make it look realistic.
For the character animation, I found a model of a soldier on Skechfab and imported it into Mixamo and created several animations such as raising the gun and aiming.I then articulated these animations in C4D using the motion editing system as well as the binding of the bones (I needed to bind the gun in my hand)
When rendering, I did one render of each of the three, because there was a big difference in their positions, and I didn’t want to cause a redo in compositing due to them being in the wrong position, and at the same time, I did a manual Roto of the tree next to the tanks in Nuke, because the tanks were supposed to appear behind this tree, not in front of it, and then I did a Grade and color correction on them, and of course in theIn the final composite, the BMNP tank doesn’t appear behind the figure, because after many attempts, the occlusion of it by the figure was actually a very big pain in the ass, and it was very difficult for me to make a very accurate Roto of the motion-blurred parts of the figure (actually it was possible, but it would have taken me at least a week to deal with it, and the BMP tank behind it was relatively small, so it wasn’t really necessary)
But the final result so far is still unsatisfactory because the colors of the tanks as well as the soldiers are a bit strange, they are too far from the color of the soldiers in the foreground.Another problem is the position of the T-90, it’s a bit too big, causing its position in the frame to now stretch when the camera is on (where the edges of the screen are) My conclusion so far is that it’s due to the camera’s focal length in C4D being different from what it actually is, and I’m doing my best to optimize both parts right now
Here’s another shot of the process, I’ll skip the instructions here because the steps here are almost exactly the same as above, and even simpler because there’s only one object. The only difference is the keying of the characters I made by hand.
The yellow area shows the flow of the above two shots in Nuke
Moving on to the next FX shot of the forest, in this shot the soldier hears the sound of a fighter jet then walks out to look at it.Here I did the same steps as before, but this time I was already very experienced so the production cycle was much shorter and I finished this shot in only 3 hours.I used Runway for the tracking, and then because the Ai results can sometimes be a little problematic, I expanded the Ai mask a little bit before tracking so that I could completely cover myself, this step is actually the most important, I feel that VFX compositing is like building a special high-rise apartment building, and this step is like building the foundation of the building, and if the foundation is destroyed, you can’t fix it how much you can fix it.If the foundation is ruined, you can’t fix the house on top of it.
Then I animated and rendered fighter jets, then I replaned the start time of the video in Nuke because I wanted it to start at the end of the video, then I wanted to create an effect of a plane flying out of the bushes, so I used Keylight to pick up the color of the sky, and then I used a Roto to control the range of the Keylight.Then I blurred the edges of the mask a little bit to match the motion blur effect of the airplane moving fast.