Month: March 2023

Topic：Utopia And Dystopia

Project Name：Double World

My work：
FX
Compositing
Editing

Critical Reflection

I have done a lot of post-production work in this collaborative project. I am happy with the group work, but at the same time, I realised a lot of problems with the group work. What I was more satisfied with this project was the FX part, I really liked the FX elements I did. I found the work very interesting for me. I think I will learn more systematically about the particle system in Maya and the various effects in Houdini in my future studies. Another thing that I am happy with is the editing in this project. The editing made up for some of the shortcomings in the pre-production and helped with the final presentation. However, the one thing that I think needs to be improved on this project is the compositing. I didn’t think about the camera movements associated with the 3d scene compositing in advance during the pre-production shoot, which caused the camera movements to collide with the camera movements set up in the 3d scene halfway through the compositing, adding some extra work for myself. It also affected the final result a little. There is still a big lack of experience in terms of workflow. More practice is needed to make up for this shortcoming. In my next studies, I should pay more attention to practice and communication with other people in the workflow to ensure that I have enough time and allow myself some revision time. I also need to practice more in the 3D section of nuke.

I should confirm with everyone on the next collaborative project the job responsibilities and deadlines for the work to avoid running out of time due to rendering and other issues. This was a problem for our group this time. It caught me very off guard. Other than these issues it was great and everyone did a great job.

Topic：Utopia And Dystopia

Project Name：Double World

Editing：

I was in charge of the editing for our project. I feel that editing is very important in a film project. In this edit I worked on the music with a lot of sound effects related to the images. On the bottom track the sound effects were matched to the environment. In the footage edit I added some effects to the sequences to add atmosphere to the film while still fitting the story.

Topic：Utopia And Dystopia

Project Name：Double World

Research-008

Compositing：

The compositing work for this project was not very difficult, but it was very trivial because we had a lot of shots split up. I had to deal with a lot of work in a relatively short space of time. This time I used 3D tracking in nuke. But because I imported the maya camera, I no longer had to backtrack the camera, which reduced the workload a lot. And this semester Gonzalo has taught me exactly how to use the 3D module in nuke and how nuke interacts with 3D software. So it’s not too unfamiliar when it comes to practical application.

This time the compositing was done in 2D and 3D for different scenes.

Topic：Utopia And Dystopia

Project Name：Double World

Research-007

Brain Melt Effect：

This effect was added midway through the production. My team member told me that our sequence was looking a bit monotonous during the production process and we were worried that the final rendering would be too plain, so we were wondering if we needed to add something. So I thought I could add a melt effect at the end of the scene to make the brain melt, based on the subject of our project: the brain. Because our brain is made of metal. If we could make the metal brain bleed red blood. Not only would it be visually striking, but it would also fit in with the idea of adding some cyberpunk elements.

For this effect I chose to use Houdini to create it. Houdini is a very good choice for this type of effect because it doesn’t have to be composited in maya, it can be rendered and composited in nuke. The effect is mainly created using Houdini’s popnet. I didn’t do very high precision particle calculations on the model as we had limited time and our style of cel shading was too realistic and the elements didn’t really match the image.

To make the effect of a metal brain oozing blood. I tried to apply the material directly in Houdini, but it was not very successful. So I chose to export two different colours and then composite the two sequences.

Topic：Utopia And Dystopia

Project Name：Double World

Research-006

particle work

Some of the particles and neurons that surround the brain are needed in our project. But it doesn’t need to be done as if it were a biology textbook, it doesn’t need to be very realistic.

So combining research and my own ideas, I came up with the idea of using the Maya mesh taught by Nick the Term to make neurons and the Maya particle system to make the particles that surround them. I originally tried using Houdini for the particle simulation, but after testing it I found it a little difficult to import into Maya and blend it with the scene, so I finally chose to use Maya.