Max de Groot | Compositor / Pipeline TD

Hi! I'm Max de Groot, a 4th year VFX student at the Netherlands Film Academy. Over the past year, I've got to work on many great projects; a few graduation films, some personal projects, and some work on our school's pipeline. I'm excited to share a few of those projects with you.

Goudvink

Goudvink is a graduation film that I supervised with Youri den Boef. We ended up splitting the compositing of the two shots between us. We started pretty early in the process of the film with the bullfinches, as we were sure they would appear in the film. They represent love and the main characters' relationship. One of the technical challenges we encountered was the inability to properly render motion blur in CG. I ended up rendering a custom motion vector pass using the animation geometry without the actual feathers and used that to composite with, ensuring a realistic motion blur effect in the final product.

You can read the ins and outs of the entire project here.

NOMAD

After coming across these CG plates on LinkedIn, I knew I wanted to flip the plate around. It is still in progress, as I would like to make it more of a stormy evening with low-hanging clouds.

Most of the lighting changes in the scene are driven by the backdrop image. The laser was created using PointRender and a custom-written BlinkScript to create the laser edge on the environment. The entire effect is driven by a 2D image of the laser's shape, which allows for easily animating the shape. The reflection was done using the RayRenderer and was displaced where needed to match the scene. After occluding the reflection and adding some slight blurs, it could be added to the scene.

A Taste of Friendship

The Bathtub

For this shot, I was tasked with filling the bathtub with water and adding our main fish character. I split this shot up into multiple CG layers to be able to integrate all the elements correctly. I started with a render of an empty bathtub through the refraction of the water. To account for the water's refraction on the leg, I rendered a custom ST pass describing how it displaced underwater and applied it to a leg cut-out. Next up are the fish and the water surface. Lastly, I merged the leg that stuck out in between the water.

Finale

Another shot I got to work on was the last shot of the film, over which the credits rolled. The shot was 2305 frames long or 1 minute and 32 seconds. The length posed quite a challenge as, at the same time, all the other shots were worked on as well, and our render farm was pretty busy. This made it difficult to get the CG rendered in its entirety. Most of the compositing was done on a small portion of the sequence, and the entire sequence was rendered only once the shot got more in its final stages.

The DOP had a clear idea of what he wanted the shot to look like, which helped immensely during compositing. I searched for many references and tried to match different aspects to get this full CG shot to look as real as possible.

You can read the ins and outs of the entire project here.

De Anatomie van een Meermin

After cleaning up some tracking markers, I had to make the axe hit and stick in the actor. I started by removing the original axe using manually tracked patches and plain old RotoPaint. Then, I made a cleaned cut-out of the axe and animated it to stick to the actor's back. When sticking the axe "in" the actor's back, the arm holding the axe had to be adjusted slightly to align the hand to the axe again.

Pipeline

During the year, I maintained and updated our school's ShotGrid pipeline with one other student. I developed multiple new apps, rewrote some old ones and added new functionality to others.

tk-houdini-renderman

My class' primary render engine is RenderMan, so when we wanted to upgrade from 24 to 25, I had to ensure it would be ready to use in the pipeline and as artist-friendly as possible. The old ShotGrid app was pretty simple and missed some functionalities. The node for ROPs and LOPs had quite a few differences that I wanted to unify so there wasn't any confusion for the artists. I decided to almost completely rewrite the app to add some missing features and make it more adaptable for future RenderMan updates. Here are some of its current features:

- Automatic file outputs: the app automatically splits and groups all selected AOVs into multiple EXRs to keep memory usage low for compositors who can selectively use which
- Easy light group creation: instead of letting artists write confusing light path expressions, artists can enter a light group name and select the lights they want in the light group, and everything gets linked automatically.
- Easy shading AOVs: it is pretty easy to render an AOV from a certain point in the shading, but you have to know it is even a functionality. XXX
- Automatic farm submission: you can submit your render to our Deadline farm directly from the node without dealing with other nodes or manually submitting it from Deadline itself.
- Copy path to clipboard: as paths in Houdini use forward slashes and our Windows machines use backward slashes, simply copying and pasting it won't work. You can select the pass you want to copy the path from, and it changes the slashes into the system's.

GitHub

tk-readme-generator

If you have worked as a developer with ShotGrid's apps, engines or frameworks, you may have noticed that the repositories' readme files often leave a lot to be desired. They are frequently quite barebones and only contain a link to the general documentation. With tk-readme-generator, I utilized the power of GitHub Actions with the already existing info.yml file, which includes all requirements and configuration possibilities of the app/engine/framework. The GitHub Action parses the info.yml file and compiles it into a user-friendly readme file.

GitHub

tk-multi-reviewsubmission2

This app is a rewrite of tk-multi-reviewsubmission, which enables artists to easily create and publish QuickTime preview renders (flipbooks/playblasts) from the ShotGrid menu. It supports Maya and Houdini and has their respective render settings available when creating a review. Setting up a simple flipbook can be a bit of a hassle, especially if you want to get it as a video. This app handles the conversion and adds multiple burn-ins, such as date, frame range and filename.

GitHub

tk-houdini-splashscreen

Lastly, tk-houdini-splashscreen is purely a cosmetic app that changes the Houdini splash screen background to the project's banner image. It renders the image once to the project directory, and with an environment variable, it changes the splash screen at launch.

GitHub