Another body in a New York alley

This NYC city scene has been one of my favourite to work because there was more to model and it was great fun getting that horrible grimy look to it!

Most of it was modelled in 3DS Max, but I took the bin bags into Mudbox to sculpt in those creases, I love using Mudbox and it was the first time in a while I’d gotten to do so. They then had a bump map added on top to get all of the fine crinkles in there. The puddles were achieved through the use of various maps and masks in the shader. All of the other various bits of rubbish were simple poly models.

The comp for the most part was pretty straight forward, with just an edge and core matte pulled using the IBK and Primatte nodes, and a garbage matte. Due to the bad colour of the green screen floor, it was quite hard getting a clean shadow, so I had to use a work around based on the original shadow matte and a few tricks to clean it up.

As there was no reflection recorded with the original plate, I had to make one by mirroring, breaking apart, and then reconstructing the actors. This final process involved 7 sections to ensure that the reflection’s contact points were correct and that it looked accurate. The reflections were the blurred and graded to match the CG, with a soft blend added to the bottom edges.

The CG was graded to match the plate, with a gentle edge blur & small overall blur to soften the image, and some grain added to break up the smoothness. The plate had substantial spill suppression to remove the green screen reflections on the actors, and then graded to improve its look. Finally I added an edge blend to bind them into the image further, then a subtle green hue was added to the whole image to give it a grimy look and tie it all together.

I thought I’d show some more behind the scenes images, so have included some clay and wire renders as well as the original green screen image.

The Sports Studio

Here’s the latest comps for the sports studio scene for Ocean Storm Films. 

As it’s a studio scene it is fairly simple on the modelling front; a wall, some glass, a background plane and a few blocks to give something to reflect. The football pitch is just an image, as I didn’t see the point in spending hours modelling a stadium!

The scene was modelled on 3DS Max, rendered with V-ray and comp’d with Nuke. The comp consisted of four combined mattes for the actors, and some rotoscoping for the reflections on the table as it was impossible to get a good result from pulling a matte. The CG bits were rendered out as EXRs and reconstructed in Nuke so I could grade and adjust each element individually. For the actual comp, I used the process’s I’ve described before, but this time I added an extra trick of using an edge blend to soften the outline of the plate and blend it to the CG.

I have been requested to show some ‘behind the scenes’ shots of how I achieve some of these images, so here is a simple wire viewport shot. As you can see there isn’t much to this scene. The white curved plane to the left is for the background image of the stadium. The three figures and couches were my stand ins, my low-tech solution to help align the different camera shots. The blocks on the ceiling and background are there to give some interest in anything reflective.

Here's the original green screen image.