This post began by documenting the making of the team project in the Exploration Practice course, and this post documents the first phase and some of the second phase of the production process and insights.
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)
Below is a summary of the core elements of our team project
Project thrust:
A short visual effects film about people’s choice of bags to show the importance of environmental protection and to stimulate people to rethink environmental protection.
Project Tools:
NUKE, HOUDINI, MAYA, UE5, PR, BRIDGE
Synopsis:
Two people meet in a café, A asks B why they don’t use eco-bags, B thinks it’s okay. A then tells B that it’s wrong through a series of initiatives and visual effects if the environment is destroyed.
Then I drew this storyboard
Next, after getting the original video, the first thing I was responsible for was the ROTO work on the VFX part of the video, as our VFX needed to be masked against the VFX with a person
I first used Mocha Pro to auto-key the character, it’s as easy as Photoshop, then I found some problems with this tool, it’s hard to track when the character turns around (for example, when the character turns his head, the whole tracking plane is displaced) I think the reason is caused by the software’s problems.
So I did an accurate tracing of the character in NUKE, then converted the NUKE data to MOV format and imported it into Pr, which has a plugin that allows you to take full advantage of the performance of the computer’s GPU to auto-trace the character, but you still need to manually process some colour similarities.
After completing the tracking, I realised that the system wasn’t recognising the part where Mahadev walked in from outside the camera, I then manually tracked this part in NUKE, I divided him into 6 sections for accurate tracking
Then I tried a simple masking in NUKE to test ROTO usability
I then created a node tree for smoke synthesis in the NUKE file so that my squad members could easily make smoke through this series of nodes