This was part of my sequence from the Qualcomm Snapdragon spot delivered by Framestore NY for CES 2013. I did background cleanup / as well as cg comping and integration on all of these shots in Nuke. Breakdown to follow
The tight deadline of this project necessitated that we relight the plate after lighting had already commenced. I was tasked with relighting the background as if there were sunlight streaming in from the left. I also re-comped the dragon in order to make it seem light from this new light source purely by manipulating the cg passes. The Dust Mote pass show in the breakdown was contributed by CloudBox, a tool I wrote for simple volumetrics in nuke -- no need to go out to cg!
After this aerial shot was sped up for the film, the cars looked a bit ridiculous. By patching the ground with slowed down pieces of the original footage, meticulous extended in 2d and re-projected in 3d, I was able to give the illusion that only the ground plane (and the many cars moving along it) had been slowed. Some work was also taken to slow down the car reflections in the surrounding buildings. I was not responsible for the comp of the pool on the roof.
I cleaned up the plate, and performed final integration and comp on the Geico Gecko. The lighters took care of a lot of the integration but there were several tweaks at the very end of the shot that I took care of it in terms of matching overall lighting direction and color. Look out for the CG sand grains falling under his feet.
This was shot on a greenscreen set and I keyed out the exterior around the car and replaced it with a highway environment. ALso of note was our my modification to PxF_Distort, a free nuke gizmo for simulating reflections and refractions. We used PxF_Distort for the chrome on the car interiors, but it was incredibly slow and a bit inefficient. By mucking around with the gizmo internals I created JS_OperationMindchrome which was several times faster and workable for our needs.
I personally built the environment (except for the clouds), totally relit the plane, and comped the shot in nuke. The clients had us dramatically alter the look of the plane in the last round of revision, so a lot of comp work helped mold the plane into the desired "graphic" look. Keep an eye out for a breakdown of this shot in future reels. Also note the subtle heat ripples coming from the engine.
I finished this CG comp, which was started by another artist. The plane is entirely CG. Enjoy the red light flash on the undercarriage / engines.
This is a breakdown of another tricky shot, the turret. The background was rebuilt extensively as is documented, changing looks a few times. In particular, the fence was removed entirely, and then added back at the end (note the shake on the wires when the missiles launch!) We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the smoke elements coming out of Houdini could be made to look like they were traveling through layers of grass, so I actually imported a geometry cache of the smoke cloud into nuke, positioned cards of grass in it's path, and then exported those for the effects team so they could include them in their renders...that way, if only for a split second, we cam see the smoke moving through the grass.
This was shot on a green screen set, so the windows and car exteriors were replace with a cg environment. The driver was holding a real bottle, which was painted out and replaced with a slow motion cg one to help the gimmick that the car in the spot can defy gravity. Since we had a cg car tracked to our real car traveling through our cg environment, we were able to add the reflections on the windscreen right onto our plate and get accurate environment reflections for free.
The CG car was tracked to our live action one allowing us to dial up and down parts of each. In the end, we settled on a hybrid car that benefited from some of the organic motion of the original, along with the cg reflections and interactions. The hybrid car was place on a cg track, and animated to move along it, dipping off the "bank" at the end. The sky is coming from a skydome filmed via the animation camera in Nuke.
This full cg environment was started by another artist, but improved and finaled by me. I did a lot of work balancing the reflections and refractions of the characters in the foreground and animating the pulses and beams traveling in the background.
I created a 'day for night' effect, which turned footage of a hotel shot during the day into a night exterior.
I added faked binocular reflections to this shot by creating a simple 3d environment featuring the desired reflection and filming it through 2 cameras tracked to two openings on the binoculars. These were carefully combined to preserve the highlights present in the original plate.
For this Allstate "Mayhem" superbowl spot, the clients desired a flythrough of an on-fire Chicago, circa 1871. A complex nuke 3d environment was created featuring multiple layers of buildings, as well as fire elements and columns of smoke. A huge "CloudBox" (my tool for volumetrics in nuke) was used to put a gloomy darkness over the whole city. Expect a breakdown of this on a future real as the virtual environment was quite complex.
One of the regular locations on this TV show was a diner set with a greenscreen outside the door. Due to all the reflective surfaces, there were terrible spill problems. Tracked and composited in Shake. I'm particularly proud of the hair detail.
I combined a maya live 3d track with nuke's built in 3d system and some reference images to build a photo-real sawblade, and personally integrated it into the dynamically lit environment using Nuke. The blade wasn't allowed on set due to safety concerns, so we added it in post!
I removed the police car following Nicole Kidman's car using Nuke.
Like the troy shot from the same job, this was a complex 3d nuke build handled entirely by myself. About 20 layers contributed to the full environment behind the parapet. In particular, I was proud of a technique I used to re-photograph the solider-marching plates to remove perspective baked into them when they were shot, and the gizmo I wrote to attach 'ropes' -- all in nuke! -- to connect the soldiers and the horse. I also use an animated cloudbox over the soldiers and near the horse itself to simulate the sand clouds disturbed by all the troops and their 'present'.
Undesirable crew reflections led me to 3d track the scene, build a 3d "tree filled" environment in nuke, and then film that scene through a camera positioned at the car's windshield. That output was then displayed on cards where the windows were, giving the illusion of new reflections in the windows. All tasks, except roto, accomplished by me in Nuke.
I wrote custom code in Processing to manipulate this concert footage. Properties of each pixel's rgb value modified it's depth and skew. This 'shot' in my reel represents 3 of about 5 or 10 shots manipulated this way.