Lighting!

ok so i have been playing around with lighting. I practiced with hdri's, but due to the nature and position of our object, we would need to create a set of images from very high up, and even then this would only get us just alot of washed out sky colours. so instead i was creative and created my own environment light rig, which acts as an ambient occlusion render, just for light emmision instead of subtle shading. I am a little secretive of this custom light rig, so im not gonna post up the hows and whys, just the end result. na na na na na.

Cloud Development.

I have been learning to use fluids so i can give our group the ability to have dynamic foreground clouds in our piece. I wont upload 1000s of screenshots, just a couple i was happy with. this is all just look development, when the matt paintings are finished I will be able to custom make clouds for it. Here are a couple images of the clouds i was working on.

Crash CG Shot Animatic

I have been putting together an animatic of how the plane can crash. no attention has been paid to the details of the piece, more just how the shot could work. Here are a couple of versions, pretty similar though.

Third Tracked Shot

Ok so after the success we've had with the other two shots, we filmed and I tracked the last of our live action shots. I used the same process as before, and it worked well for us, and now we have all 3 shots ready for the model, rig and animation. Here is a quick test render to see if the track worked....it did!

Another shot done!

So after a successful test, and some good feedback (information can be found on the group blog) we went back to film our next shot. For this filming, I was confident that measurements were not necessary as i could get more accurate measurements from google maps. So after filming, I tracked the footage no problem, then scaled it afterwards using images taken from google maps, the scale of the plane based on real life reference (see Ollie's blog) and the scale of the first tracked shot compared to the plane in that one. It may sound a little confusing, but it was pretty easy! So here is a quick render to test that the shot worked, then just for fun i added a couple of particle emmiters:

Track Test:


particle fun:

Shooting!

We have filmed one of our shots as a test, and I have tracked it so that it can be passed onto the animators. I used matchmover pro to track the footage. This was made easier by measuring the field on the day, and placing markers at strategic points so as to scale the scene properly. Here is a test render to show that the track works properly.

Industry Exercises 3

Hey there, this is my blog for industry exercises 3. For this project we were given the choice to source out own client based project. Luckily, we had been talking to a director at Framestore just before the start of this term and we managed to get the opportunity to produce work for his film. As it is a real client based project, I am not sure how much is OK to put online so sorry if at any point this blog seems lacking of detail.

So a brief synopsis of the project to start with. The film is about a spitfire pilot, who flys during world war 2. The director cant afford to hire a spitfire, and film it in the air, or use creative green screening (at the moment), so he would like a CG plane created and implemented into both live footage, and full CG environments.

Our group consists of:

Ollie Kane: our on-staff director and modelor
Stephanie Joy: our matt painter and compositor
Sanjay Sen: our rigger
Joe Henson and Nick Georgio: our animation geniuses
and me, Greg Martin, and im the TD in charge of tracking, lighting and effects.

My roles for this project:
-DOP: It will be my responsibility to be on site when filming, to record information to help us later in post, and advise about how the camera should move, and which settings to use
-Tracking for 3D: It will be my responsibility to take all of the footage, and translate and solve the camera moves for 3D, to pass on to the animators ect.
-Lighting: It will be my responsibility to provide the CG lighting to match that of the environment. this may involve HDRI images, or some other creative solutions.
-Effects: It will be my responsibility to provide the fluid effects for adding foreground clouds to our CG shots, plus any interactions that occur with the environment and the plane.

Our first step is to storyboard and come up with ideas for shots however I will only update you when dealing with my responsibility for this project. to see storyboards or other things not listed in my roles section please view our group blog:

http://spitfiretuck.blogspot.com/