Patricia Posada | VFX & Compositing reel 2023

This is my up-to-date Demoreel presentation. It represents the culmination of this year's hard work during my FX school days showing some of the best works I have created throughout the year. Despite minor imperfections, this Demoreel demonstrates my progress and dedication to perfecting my skills in this area, in order to create projects that fascinate people just like the work of others fascinated me.

My aim in this project was to create a National Geographic inspired environment as realistic as possible, emphasizing the hair simulation as well as the whole integration process, a clean worked matte painting, color corrections, LUT's, fleurs, blur and glow...

As per the stag's grooming, it was carried out by 5 different groups of guides depending on the length and density: neck, head, ears, eyelashes, and body, leaving the hooves gradually hairless. One of the biggest challenges of the project, which was done in 3 weeks, was to create it the hair somewhat wet and damp, meaning that the stag has cooled down in the lake that can be seen in the second shot.

The second project was carried out within a one-month timeframe, during which I had to create the full CGI environment as well as a credible simulation of crowds walking around a Christmas market on Westminster bridge.

This work was inspired by the opening scene from the movie "The Nutcracker" (2018) made by Rodeo FX. The biggest challenge was to recreate as much as possible the reference source, both in terms of scenery, camera movement, and people walking. Presented as a technical project, it slightly varies from the original reference. The work tries to focus on a contemporary ambience, with crowds in sweatshirts and coats, trying to represent what the scene in London would look like today.

A total of 20 different characters (9 women and 11 men) and more than 25 Mixamo animations have been used for it in order to create a realistic simulation even though it has no texture for furter people variation.

The matte painting project was inspired by a project I found last year on Artstation. It tells the story of an astronaut who, after years of living in space, comes down to Earth in search of her crew. She ends up discovering that her companions' spacecraft crashed years ago and that time passes differently on planet Earth. This background story was inspired by the movie "Interstellar" (2014).

The goal of this project was to create a hyper-realistic scene and its storytelling. It tries to make the audience think about the background story and what could have happened to our main character, rather than focusing on the special effects. It was mostly done with Nuke by overlaying cards with images from different Photobash packs and interposing them with fog. However, in addition to this, it did have some retouching previously done in Photoshop, such as the dirt on the ship.

This project was the result of the first test with Houdini at the beginning of October last year. The goal was to demonstrate my understanding of the use of textures, lighting, fog, renders and other early procedural tools.

Despite being the first project using this software and not having any kind of simulation, I consider it one of the best ones due to the great visual impact and image quality I achieved.

To create this project, I exported a Vi model and made the textures and uv's, along with the fog and the procedural rocks, to later render it with Mantra.

In this project I wanted to experiment with everything I had learned so far. This project, a "Road to Hogwarts", was done at the end of the autumn semester. 

To make the first scene I exported a 4K video of the Glenfinnan viaduct and selected the shot that I thought could stand out the most. Then, I took it to Nuke and made a point cloud tracking that would end up taking the 3D camera out of the scene and a geometry based on the points. The geometry would later have to be redone inside the scene in Houdini to perfectly match the train and to use it as a collider with the smoke. From here this scene would go back to Nuke but already rendered and by passes to finish integrating the CGI part with the lighting of the shot.

The second shot is composed of both CGI and matte painting. The matte painting is added in Nuke already composed this time from photoshop. The hardest challenge of this project was to get this and the foreground to match in light, colour and hyper-realism.

The simulation is composed of 3 emitters: 1 in the chimney and 2 at the bottom of the train. These have, as in real life, their initial speed, and then it is the movement of the train that gives them their shape.

This last project, and also one of the most recent ones, aims to be one of the most impressive. For it, I used a variety of assets from Megascans to later render everything using the Redshift engine.

On a technical level, the peeling reacts by means of an activator that I have created thanks to the colour given with the attribute paint, so we get a much more controlled simulation. The greatest challenge of this project was the tight schedule I had to create it, for it was achieved in just two weeks of work.