Studio 1 Project: Declaration
Back when I first started learning Maya and Shake, I agreed to do the effects for a student film. They consisted of only a few shots, the main being the explosion of one of SCAD’s film buildings, Adler Hall. I gave it a noble attempt and the director was happy with it, but I wasn’t.
The Original:
I don’t think it’s bad for about two days worth of effects’ work (and about a week of modeling without the fluids) but it is not good enough for my demo reel. I kept it out of my reel throughout Portfolio class but when my professor saw it, he asked me to redo it and that it’d be a waste not to.
So here I am, deciding that I am going to spend an entire 10 weeks on it, making it as flawless as possible.
The Plan:
Before, the shot was locked off, full CG, and at night. My new shot will be composited onto live footage from the viewpoint of a person walking along the street, with the building to the left. The camera looks over at Adler Hall, overgrown with plants and covered in trash. Suddenly, a man exits, running as fast as he can away from the decrepit building. Just as he gets about 50 feet into the parking lot, the building explodes. The camera reacts strongly, backing up, then looking up at the plume of smoke.
The How:
The plate will be shot with an HVX, the man running being a live element. The entire ground, building and fence in front will be CG with the man rotoscoped out of the plate, then composited back in between the ground and fence. The building simulation will be done with 3ds Max’s volume breaker. Last time, I manually broke apart the building, then used nDynamics for the simulation. Here is the SIGGRAPH video of volume breaker; it is far superior and actually designed for this kind of thing:
nDynamics and nCloth become useful again for the other objects in the scene (trash, etc.). Mental Ray from Maya to render (unfortunately, probably locally instead of on SCAD’s farm, because of the simulation caches – time to buy some more hard drives). I’m still debating whether or not to use Final Gather, and though I’d love to light the whole thing manually, considering the complexity of motion, using FG may be necessary. I’ll be taking advantage of all the usual Maya/Mental Ray tricks: layers, passes, mia_material_x, z-depth, 2d motion blur, OpenEXR, linear workflow, etc.
Compositing will be done in Nuke and I’ll try to add as many details as I can with 3d compositing (ala 2012).
As of right now, Adler is going to be textured using camera projections (for the ambient color layer only). I figured this is the best move because of how quickly I can get photorealistic results, and once the simulation begins, the pieces will be moving so quickly, that the color layer won’t matter much. I’m waiting until the plate is shot and I meet with everyone involved to make the final call on this. Either way, the other objects (shopping cart, plants, trash, dumpster, couch, etc.) will be textured normally.
Tracking will be done with PFTrack, without the addition of tracking markers; there are enough features on Adler and in the surrounding area that I’ll be able to get a solid track without them.
Adam Briggs agreed to help out and do the fluid simulations for the fire (he helped with particles on the original), and Mikey Rogers has agreed to help with texturing.
The Schedule:
Some Thoughts:
I am a lighter and compositor, but this is obviously an effects heavy project. Simulations have always interested me, and I’ve continuously used nDynamics to spice up projects here and there, I hope this project can push me further into that realm. As of now, I’ve been rather limited in my software, mostly to Maya and Houdini; 3ds is very popular in the visual effects world, diving right in with a project like this is exactly what I’ve planned/needed to do for some time.
Click the SCAD Studio 1 tag, or this link to look at all of my posts on this project.
