2024 VFX Entry

1. PORTAL ENVIRONMENT

This was a group project I did with a classmate and I was involved with creating the heightfield in Houdini, vegetation assets in Speedtree and finally compositing. Looking closely at references of how trees are placed on terrain  I created different masks of the environment to control the  distribution and groupings of the different vegetations across the environment.

This was my terrain setup

Since one of the shots had a lot of camera movement,  I had to try my best to match the same colours for the beauty construction with the  help of AOVS as the previous shots while still maintaining the look I was going for at the last part of the third shot.

2 - CITY ENVIRONMENT

For this project I wanted to create everything from scratch without using megascans or assets online. I knew this scene was going to be big so I deiced to to render everything inside Unreal Engine to save time. 

I initally started the project in maya blocking out the rough layout of the scene and from thereafter I used that as a reference for how my whole scene would look.

I created more than 40 building models in Maya, and for smaller detailed buildings that were far away I used JSplacement to create displacement maps which I then displaced onto planes.  For the procedural terrain I used Gaea and for vegetation I used Speedtree. All of this was later converted to nanites in Unreal to fully optimise the scene.

For some hero assets close to the camera I textured inside of Substance painter and the rest of the models I did a simple shading setup in Unreal engine with concrete like textures using 'world aligned textures' to create different variation of textures . The same technique was applied to the terrain except I tried differently blending materials to create different types of material on the surface of the terrain.

Finally once everything was set dressed and the scene was rendered out, I added some more details in compositing such as projecting birds on cards, replacing the sky, adding atmosphere using Zdepth.

For some hero assets of the scene I used a greeble plugin in Houdini to create extra level of detail onto the surfaces of some models I made in Maya, this also helped give a sense of scale to my objects.

In the end there wasn't that much to do in Comp since it was easy to visualise everything in Unreal without the cost of long render times.

3 - K2SO Battlefield

This was another group project, and I was involved in modeling/texturing the robot based on K2SO from Rogue one. I was also involved in creating the environment in compositing, and to practise the skills I've acquired so far I decided to create a matte painting in photoshop then create a 3D rough representation in maya which I could then export out and project inside of Nuke. The movement of camera in this scene was quite limited due to the parallax issues but with a simple zoom the illusion didn't break. 

To create realistic lighting for the rendering of the robot, we projected the mattepainting onto the 3D geometry so that it would reflect the ground onto the robot's body while making sure the ground wasn't visible in the final rendering for more efficient compositing.

In Nuke I tried to integrate the rendered robot and the mattepainting plate as best as possible with the help of  AOVS, and furthermore I comped in atmosphere, mist and rain created with noise node to help make the scene more integrated. 

This was also the first time I tried using the particle system inside of nuke to create small embers floating around the scene to create sense of war.

4 - CAR DESERT

This was my last group project. For this project I created the environment with heightfields in Houdini and vegetation in Speedtree. I also modeled and textured the car from a while ago. Finally I did the compositing  after the rendering was complete. 

To convey a sense of speed, motion vector pass came in quite useful in making the car feel like it was moving really fast  alongside with camera shake.

Setting up the environment for this scene was relatively straight forward compared to previous environment  projects because I made 3 different Canyon type heighfields which were scattered according to where the camera was placed and since the ground was almost flat, this didn't require a lot of masking for instancing the vegetation. 

The compositing stage handled the rest of the look such as adding in the sky,  and overall making the environment fit according to the look of the car.

CONCLUSION

Thank you  for taking the time to read my project and hope you liked it!