This week I proceeded to update and finalize the compositing of shots 3 and 4. As suggested I added distortion to space just before the portal appears mid-air. I used the Noise nodes, one of the red channel, the other of the green channel, and adjusted the size of the noise to be combined into the original footage and be used to distort the image. With the use of a roto, I merged it with the Original Plate for which the operation was Difference, to get as close as possible to resemble visual tearing in space.
After feedback from my teammates and Aldo, I also added grade to the space and extra Volume Rays to give the feel like the portal is emitting the blue light and hence affecting the colours of the surroundings. I’ve also added a reflection on the floor of the portal to help it settle in the space better.
For shot 4 I’ve mainly adjusted the roto of the character, tried to make a cleaner integration with the portal, added colder grade and volume rays to space. I also rotoed out the shadow coming from the character and added it back after merging portal shadow with the original plate. Now that I look back at this, it isn’t necessary, but in an earlier version, I was placing a roto of the clean floor back onto the footage of where the character left the portal. However, it was messing up with the script and wasn’t even necessary as it couldn’t be seen behind the portal itself.
I also used 3D camera tracking in order to create a card for the location inside the portal and place it in the scene more correctly.
For the portal in shot 7, through which the second character was jumping, I got the feedback asking to make it more detailed and realistic on which I worked in Houdini set-up. For more realism, it was essential to lower the size of the voxel for the fire, the division of the bounding box in which the smoke for the fire was generated, and apply a better shader. If for the other portals I used the shaders built-in and Mantra renderer, for this portal I decided to set up the Arnold Renderer in Houdini. It required an extra node in the obj menu for the volume to be visualized in the renderer, as well as a specific Arnold Shader for the fire.
For shots 8 and 9 to save time it was decided to implement an earlier version of the portal in scene 2. To make it look different, I applied a green colour in the shader.
It was my job to composite the shot 9, for which Xuran created the CG background, that we see inside the arches. To divide the work among us, Madeleine rotoscoped out one of the characters in that shot, and it was my job to rotoscope the second character. To save time, I didn’t rotoscope all the parts, but the ones that would appear in front of the arch.
One of the hardest parts was to fix the tracking of the CG assets, as they were manually tracked along with the picture background. With the use of transform node, I key-tracked the movement separately for the background, as the image on it is supposed to be miles away from the temple position; separately keyed the temple door and levitating parts on the right-hand side as when I was adjusting the door, the rendered picture of the right objects was cut off and looked incorrect (see below).
Node graph – part 1 Node graph – part 2 Node graph – part 3 Node graph – part 4
The final step left is to edit the shots, add a grade, soundtracks, sound effects, and some text.