VFX Project

Chapters

1. The Idea

2. Creating the Storyboards

3. Shooting and Tracking the Footage

4. Modeling and Texturing the Assets

5. Creating the Simulations

6. Shaders, Lighting and Rendering

7. Compositing and Final Result

The final result of my Semester 3 VFX Project. I worked on it over a period of 2 months.
I was responsible for all the CGI you see in the shot.

The Idea

I wanted to recreate this sequence (2:38) from the "Feel Good, Inc." music video by Gorillaz, where the camera orbits around the edge of the cliff the main character 2-D is sitting on.

STEP 1

Creating the Storyboards

I had many camera angles in mind before shooting the footage. What I ended up filming with my classmates was a combination of these, and I was happy to get something that wasn't too far off from the original idea, given the equipment constraints we had.

STEP 2

Shooting and Tracking the Footage

I wanted the footage to be shot outside for a multitude of reasons.
First, in the music video, 2-D is sitting in the skies fully exposed by the sun, which meant I needed to find a location with great outdoor lighting. Since shooting the footage wasn't a one-man job and I needed my classmates' help, and because we had a ton of heavy, fragile equipment to carry around, we decided to settle on a location where the majority of us could film our individual project footages together.

We picked the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant for this very reason.

A beautiful, cinematic location that receives great lighting.

Secondly, I consider lighting to be the most important visual effect. No amount of CGI can fix a shot with bad lighting. For my shot specifically, I wanted a place that had no skyscrapers blocking the Sun's beautiful light, and as close to an open field that I could get in Toronto.

Thirdly, more light information in the camera = less noise. Since this was an outdoor shot, I wanted there to be as little noise as possible.

I used NukeX to track the footage and export the virtual camera to Houdini

Equipment used:
Sony A7S III

DJI Ronin RS2

NukeX

Can you guess where we were filming?

STEP 3

Modeling and Texturing the Assets

The CG Cliff in my shot was procedurally modeled in Houdini, sculpted in Blender, UV unwrapped in Rizom UV and textured in Substance Painter and Substance Designer, with some textures used from Quixel Megascans to blend in with the other textures in the Cliff Shader

The Windmill model was procedurally modeled in Houdini, UV unwrapped in Houdini, textured in Substance Painter. It isn't as high poly as the Cliff since it was going to be in the far background

I created a Houdini HDA to procedurally generate roots and ivy networks for my models based on controllable parameters

I used "The Grove" plugin for Blender to create the trees, on the recommendation of my professor, since they use the same plugin in their professional VFX studio

STEP 4

Creating the Simulations

The Clouds and Grass Simulations were created using Houdini's FX tools

The Grass was created in two parts. First, I created a Vellum Simulation to create some low poly Grass with a good amount of simulation and wind detail. Then, I took some high-resolution Grass and applied a positional noise to give it the illusion of waving in the wind when viewed from a distance.

STEP 5

Shaders, Lighting and Rendering

Here's where the fun (and most stressful) part of the project began.

The shaders, lighting and rendering would decide how the project would end up looking in the end.

It wasn't very reassuring when my renders started out looking this way.

Everything about this render looked bad. The grass and ivy leaf shaders looked like plastic; the rock looked like fake chocolate. I knew I had a long way to go and a lot to learn about creating photorealistic shaders and cinematic lighting.

I started to make some progress with the lighting, but the shaders still looked bad

When I first added the trees, they looked horrible. There was no subsurface scattering and no depth to them.

I read up on how subsurface scattering works for foliage, and what settings I could change in the Karma CPU renderer from the Documentation and started making some progress with the trees

After some hair pulling, a lot more trips to the documentation and feedback from my professors, I managed to get this result!

A huge improvement!

STEP 6

Compositing

The final step was compositing the renders and integrating them with my original footage. I keyed and rotoscoped myself out of the original footage, added the sky matte painting and projected it onto a sphere and used a gizmo from Nukepedia to add the birds. I also added the motion blur in Nuke.

And that's how I achieved the final result!

Thank you to these wonderful people

My teachers

My classmates

Laurence Cymet

Simon Han

Jorge Razon

Ben Warburton

Pankaj Brijlani

Eric Covello

Mihaela Orzea

Ila Soleimani

Filip Kicev

Julien Nema

Harsh Jain

Rick Turton

Gurkeet Singh

Jinujith Ajithkumar

Umang Shah