BD-78

BD-78

This is a short story about BD before he begins a new journey he has to leave some memories stored so he can create new ones.

In this project, I wanted to showcase and test the abilities that I have learned during the past few years. Skills like Environment work using Houdini and GAEA. 3D Layout and cinematography. A little bit of 3D modeling for props. Shading and texturing for props and environment. Lighting in different scenarios and compositing techniques to generate a cohesive relationship between the different elements as well as faking some elements like smoke, clouds, heat distortion, and lens distortion. 

For the environment, I was able to take some assets of trees from unreal and add them to Houdini. for the ground and mountain, I took height data from my hometown in Ecuador and then exported it to GAEA where I was able to modify it and bring it back to Houdini. 

The assets from Quixel where awesome to use but in the end, I had to re-shade some of them modifying bump and displacement, as well as some coloring to match the environment, that was the same for the trees. 

Lighting was essential for my project, i wanted to create a cinematic feeling for it in the different scenarios that I had, I went through a lot of iterations of it.

For lighting, framing and cinematography references helped me a lot to figure out the look of the film

For compositing, I did research on how to fake heat distortion as well as some other tricks like faking anamorphic lenses and creating lens artifacts like chromatic aberration, vignette and bloom.

After some back and forth with peers and professors, I was able to create the first animatic for the project where I used a combination of sketches and CGI previz using Unreal Engine (due to the ease of creative iterations). The previz was useful to me so I can see and note how much work I have to do before render, and also how much I can get away in comp. 

The concept came to be last November when I was curious to research more about how to comp CGI objects in the grass, how to do printouts with moving cameras and moving elements, and how to comp different elements to generate a realistic fire comp, and also test and showcase lighting techniques and environment generation. 

Here is a compositing breakdown for the projects where I showcase all the compositing tricks that I used