Criticle thinking
This project was a big one that lasted almost half a year, and I’m very happy with the final result, even if there are still a lot of mistakes and points that I could have optimized that I could have found even now, but it’s a good result for this stage. When I was working on Gonzalo’s last big project in August, I was already planning to make it, I also planned to practice scenes every week before the summer vacation started, there were about 8 of them, but in the end I only finished about 5 of them until September, all these small practices were me imitating the shots of those movies and the special effects, and a lot of time was spent on learning the basics of the software. The software I used for this project was MAYA, C4D, HOUDINI, NUKE, SUBSTANCE PAINTER, PR, AE, and PS. It was a great opportunity to train in these software, especially NUKE and C4D, I learned quite a lot of new things and I can now composite things quickly and accurately. VFX is a lot about bits and pieces of trivia, you have to look for multiple solutions to a problem, and I’m having a lot of fun with that.
The shortage of this project is that the sea battle scene is not completely produced using Houdini, because of the time problem. The effect of the magic shield is directly synthesized, and there is no fog on the sea, adding some solid fog will be much higher quality. Then there is the forest shot, I didn’t find a very high quality soldier model at first, and the key point is actually not taking a panoramic image along with the shot for HDRI, I am using other HDRI maps to mimic the real scene in the compositing now. Next is the magic bullet scene, where the problem is very similar to earlier, I learned to do the animation of firing the bullet but didn’t use it because the speed of the bullet is too slow and it looks unrealistic, I could actually continue to speed up the particles to simulate the real bullet flight, but time is limited. And there is also some problem on Part 4 scene, the airplane effect looks fake, I need to recreate it.
But all in all, I’m confident in this project, and overall the finish result and the flow of the plot I feel I can give myself a score of 85/100.