Holographic Fashion - VFX Short Film (VFX & compositing)

I just wanted to talk a little bit about the VFX/ Visual Effects as well as the composition that went into creating the Holographic Fashion short film. The process that we went through to achieve the final film.

Shot 01_Green screen footage

The three images that I have included on the left, is to illustrated the process that we went through to create shot 01 of the short film Holographic Fashion.

To the left is the first image, Shot 01_Green screen footage; this illustrates the footage that was taken with the green screen as the background and lighting set up. All the footage for Holographic Fashion was taken by Tom Magill at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE); at the Canberra campus. The green screen were used so that we could later composite the footage on top of the 3D background and then add effects to create the results we wanted to achieve.

Shot 01_Background

The image on the left, Shot 01_Background, is the clean render of the 3D scene for shot 01 that has been taken straight out of Maya. This render was used within the Nuke script as the Background layer where everything gets composited on top of. The image appears to be quite dark as it have not been gamma corrected yet and it does not contain any effects. This render has been done through a linear workflow in order to create realistic lighting within the scene, which also explains it's dark appearance. You can barely see the furniture in the background but as you can see the image below on the left, Shot 01_Composited, that it is more visible but still needs to be quite dark for the effect that I was going for.

Shot 01_Composited

To the left is the image, Shot 01_Composited; this image illustrates a final composited render that is used within the completed film. In this render you can see the result of the footage once it has been composited over the background together with the visual effects that are all added  together.

The Background layer which is the image shown above, Shot 01_Background; has been saved as an .exr file extension and was then automatically been gamma corrected once it was opened within Nuke. A ZDefocus node was then added in order to create the blurriness within the background to create the effect that the camera is focussed on the foreground.

The desk in the foreground has been rendered on a separate layer to the background so that the background can have different effects to what the desk in the foreground would be receiving; so using nodes like the ZDefocus node was easier and would not effect the desk in the foreground.

The slider on the table that I used to switch the holograms on; was created through the use of a two separate flare nodes together with an animated grade node to control the visibility as well as changing the colours and creating that slight flickering.

I then added the footage of myself to the tree of nodes by using a merge node. Using Primatte node; I was able to remove the green screen that  was in the background and instead I now had the render of the 3D scene as the background. Further more I used nodes such as Sharpen, Grade and LightWrap node to help the footage blend into the environment and to create the effect that the light of the holograms in front of me was illuminating me. This meant animating these effects at the start as the film does not start with the holograms on.

The holograms seen in this shot was created using all the Photoshop concept sketches that was created by myself and Natasha Downs. These include the dress designs as well as the hologram controls such as the intensity slider used to brighten the holograms; the wheel that is used to select the dress designs as well as the other holograms such as the folder or the keyboard. I used a Glow node in Nuke in order to create the hologram effects on all the 2D images used. I then mostly used Grade nodes for the most of the colour corrections that I wanted to do as well as animating the visibility of the holograms.

Nuke workspace, shot 01 

The scree shot above illustrates the Nuke workspace for the animation of the wheel in Shot 01 that switches between different dress designs, to be rotated. The animation curves is shown through the Curve Editor workspace when editing the transform node that is used for animation. The Curve Editor was very usefull in getting the animation timing right according to the movements of my hand. Transform nodes were also used in order to place the footage as well as all the images in the right spot that I wanted them to be in. Transform nodes was also used in the animation of the folder being minimised; the rotations, scaling and translation; as well as the scaling of the dress design files; so pretty much all the animation.

Shot 02_Green screen footage

To the right, Shot 02_Green screen footage; is used to illustrates the footage that was taken with the green screen as the background and lighting set up for Shot 02 of Holographic Fashion. As you can see in the image; my hand is slightly leaving the green screen on the bottom of the screen. It's not the worst thing ever, and can easily be fixed with a Roto Node within the compositing stage. Instead we decided to use a transform node to place the footage in a way that that small part of my hand is cut off; as seen in the image below, Shot 02_Composited.

Shot 02_Background

The image on the right, Shot 02_Background, is the clean render of the 3D scene for shot 01 that has been taken straight out of Maya. This render was used within the Nuke script as the Background layer where everything gets composited on top of. The image appears to be quite dark as it have not been gamma corrected yet and it does not contain any effects. This render has been done through a linear workflow in order to create realistic lighting within the scene, which also explains it's dark appearance. You can barely see the furniture in the background but as you can see the image below on the left, Shot 02_Composited, that it is more visible but still needs to be quite dark for the effect that I was going for.

Shot 02_Composited

To the right is the image, Shot 02_Composited; this image illustrates a final composited render that is used within the completed film.The 3D model appearing in the 3D hologram in the image on the right, Shot 02_Composited, was sculpted by Natasha Downs using Pixologic's 3D sculpting program ZBrush. The background was however created by myself. The compositing was also done by Natasha Downs and with the help of Tom Magill. They merged the footage of the different render passes of her 3D model and was then able to create the hologram effect through using a godrays node as well as the gizmo's that was used in shot 01 on the other holograms.

Shot 03_Green screen footage

To the left is the image; Shot 03_Green screen footage, which illustrates the footage that was taken with the green screen as the background and lighting set up for Shot 03 of Holographic Fashion. This was done the same as the above two images Shot 01_Green screen footage, and Shot 02_Green screen footage. Where the camera as well as the lighting was set up relatively the same for each shot. For each shot we had about 3-4 takes so that later on we were able to decide which one turned out the best. Each shot also had to be acted out the whole sequence over again so when it came to the compositing stage, we were able to cut the shot where we wanted it to.

Shot 03_Background

The image on the left, Shot 03_Background, is the clean render of the 3D scene for shot 01 that has been taken straight out of Maya. This render was used within the Nuke script as the Background layer where everything gets composited on top of. The image appears to be quite dark as it have not been gamma corrected yet and it does not contain any effects. This render has been done through a linear workflow in order to create realistic lighting within the scene, which also explains it's dark appearance. You can barely see the furniture in the background but as you can see the image below on the left, Shot 03_Composited, that it is more visible but still needs to be quite dark for the effect that I was going for.

Shot 03_Composited

To the left is the image, Shot 03_Composited; this image illustrates a final composited render that is used within the completed film for shot 03. The background used for this shot is a render from a third camera within the same 3D scene that is used in Shot 01_Composited and Shot 02_Composited. I composited this shot using the footage shown in the image above in, Shot 03_Green screen footage, together with the same set-up that was created for the 3D hologram in Shot 02_Composited; by Natasha Downs and with the help of Tom Magill.

Credits_Composited

The image above, Credits_Composited, is illustrating the effects that has been created for the credits using Nuke. I ended up using the same gizmo that we used on all the holograms within all the shots, to create the same hologram effect where it almost gives the idea of a glitch in the hologram, on the text and the extra images on the sides. I then used a transform node to animate the text as well as the hologram dress design images sliding upwards.

I absolutely loved creating the effects for this short film and I learned so much while doing them. Working with the Foundry's compositing program, Nuke was an amazing experience and I cannot wait to start another VFX project.