Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action

Peasant Village - Face tracking progress & Meat Snake Comp

I feel that I’m pretty much done with the meat snake shot. I just noticed a couple of problems with the clean plate, it is sometimes visible as a halo around the snake. Didn’t see this on my monitor at school but it was quite obvious on my laptop at home… This is most likely a result of a slightly different exposure in the 25 frame clean plate loop in the background. It will be corrected shortly. Click it to watch in HD on Vimeo.

I’ve been working really hard on the face tracking shot this week. It’s without a doubt the most complicated shot I’ve ever done, also, I am sick and tired of looking at myself every day, hehe… Many things have gone wrong, especially when rendering (a total of 11 render layers, some of which has up to 5 passes) and the shot is 400 frames long. Things are falling into place now though, and I have done comp tests of almost all the “effects” in the shot. Now I just need some tentacles coming out of my nose and mouth…

Removing markers (click to enlarge)

Moving bubbles under skin. Just as difficult as I expected… The hardest part was lighting the bubbles in post and getting the masks to work so that the edges of the bubbles would blend nicely. A lot of fun though. The texture of the rendered face was created from 13 different projections that were baked to 2k textures. Baking them was a mess! Both Maya Software and Mental Ray either gave me messed up results, or correct results with artifacts. Then I tried baking using Renderman, and it worked like a charm! Learning Renderman is now my next big project, and Nuke… Hehe! I had to clean up the baked textures in photoshop, cloning from the other projections to remove bad parts (everywhere where my face was not facing the camera.) The textures were then merged with a simple layered texture node, and I keyframed the alpha so that each texture would be at opacity=1 at the frame they were baked.

Comping bubbles (click to enlarge)

Veins showing up (animated). I used Maya Paint Effects to create roots of a tree. I then animated the PaintFX so that it would look like it grew. After rendering this out, blurring it a bit in Fusion, I could reapply it as a texture in Maya. Right now I’m using a 2D displace in Fusion to get the bump effect, but I’m considering rendering out a normal pass instead.

Bloodshot eyes (animated veins) Pretty much the same as above. Couldn’t rely on my tracked mesh here so I had to rotoscope the eyes… I tracked the corners of both eyes and connected the roto masks to these trackers. This helped alot, getting the general movement of the eyes. Still, I had to key the roto every single frame of the shot. The rotation of the eyes were manually tracked in Maya. This was not too hard as the eyes tend to stay pretty still and then move very rapidly over just a couple of frames.

Eyes passes. RGB pass to mask the irises/eyeballs. HDRI reflections for extra specular. Animated veins using PaintFX.