Andres Hueso - VFX & Compositing Showreel 2024

Shot 01 - King Kong

With most of the components of this shot provided by my school, I put a big emphasis on making this shot my own. With the assets being fully CG, I really pushed the lens FX in order to give the illusion that it was filmed through a real camera with an anamorphic lens. I achieved this by using lightwrap, lens dirt, diffusion, chromatic abberation, vignette, lens distortion, grain, depth of field, stretched bokeh, and foveated lens blur. While these are more or less commonplace in most of my shots in different ways, I've put a big emphasis on them for this shot. I also had the opportunity of using camera shake on this shot due to the sheer size of King Kong and what a character of that size would look and feel like to be around. On that first shake, the goal is to fully immerse the viewer into the shot.

For the environment itself, I found the fog, created using various keyframed noise inputs did quite a lot for the overall atmosphere of the shot and added a significant amount of depth to the shot. I used the depth passes from the renders for depth of field and layering in the fog as well as some of the other assets such as the breathe, dust, and fire. Overall I was really looking to make an immersive, vibrant shot.

All assets were provided by CG Spectrum.

Shot 02 - Apocalypse

A large part of this shot was telling a story through the color. The area around the car has the highest amount of contrast and warm color which draws ones eye to the subject, while the path ahead is covered in dust and leans towards a more blue tone. Putting together all the assets themselves was mostly a matter of color matching. The plate was also cleaned up in order to integrate the buildings in a realistic way that fit in well with the environment.

All assets and original plate footage were provided by CG Spectrum.

Shot 03 - Burning Building

Given such an intense shot, it was very important to me to be able to feel the intensity of the fire while watching the final composite. The overall look needed to be punchy and have lots of contrast while remaining fairly subtle. Rather than an overcast day time vibe, I went more for golden hour to complement the fire. 

Compositing the fire and smoke itself was about treating them individually but allowing them to come together in a natural way. I did my best to integrate the thickness of the smoke with the intensity of the fire without one taking away from the other. Procedural noise was used in the windows on the inside of the building as smoke/fire as well as for the burns across the building. An exponential glow on the overall shot was enough to give an idea of some subtle haze from the fire.

The heat distortion effect received the most revisions out of any other aspect of this shot. Using the Heat Wave gizmo by Damian Binder, I played around with different amounts of distortion, blur, turbulence, and speed. Real life footage was very important for reference in order to achieve a grounded look, however all of these factors are affected by how far away the camera is as well as it's lens, so some artistic liberties were taken.

Original plate footage as well as all of the assets were provided by CG Spectrum.

Shot 04 - Astronaut Walk

One of the first decisions I made on this shot was to put the astronaut in space, primarily inspired by Star Wars' and Starfield's gritty futuristic aesthetic, I wanted to lean away from a perfectly chrome spotless look for the future, in favor of something more grounded in reality yet somewhat dreamy.

The spaceship corridor model was sourced from Sketchfab and was modeled by user The_Table. I textured and shaded the model using various smart materials as bases in Substance Painter and the brought it into Blender, along with the 3D tracked camera from Nuke, for lighting and further shading edits.

One of the more notable aspects of this shot that helped ground the character into the scene was the relighting of the subject. I achieved this by creating various masks for the subject from a normal map generated in SwitchLight Studio, an AI virtual production tool. This tool allowed me to generate PBR texture maps for the subject which I could then use in Nuke to aid the composite. The generated normal map became invaluable for grounding my character into the CG scene.

However, in order to make the subject feel as if it were really there in the scene, I match moved and roto-mated a model into the 3D scene in Blender to follow the character's movement, then projected an exr sequence of the subject onto the mesh from the camera's perspective. This effectively put my subject physically into the 3D scene and allowed for accurate reflections on the floor.

The original plate footage is from Action VFX and the planet is from Footage Crate.

Shot 05 - The Flash

This shot is special to me, as I created it nearly entirely from scratch. From parts of the model and lightning, to the shading and texturing, the animation, and of course the compositing.

While the animation was a simple run cycle, it presented challenges in how someone running as fast as The Flash would actually run. I looked heavily into comic book art for posing in order to translate the original artistic intent of the authors of this character into 3D. While the shot is intended to be realistic in style, it dips slightly into the absurd in heroism.

The various effects overlaid on this shot are the result of months of experimentation. The lightning trail was the first and most important and most difficult to balance, inspired by appearances of The Flash in TV and movies. Along with the lightning trail, I created an afterimage trail using a pass I rendered out of Blender of the animation sped up over 10x and a chroma trail which shows up stronger after every leap. The same goes for the chroma split, which is simply the red, green, and blue channels split up, shaken up, and added back together. The sped up pass I mentioned earlier was also used for the double image, to give the illusion of very rapid movement even if the main pass itself is moving at a normal speed.

For the longest time it looked as though the character was running in place until I added a moving background as well as randomized lights. The background is a combination of multiple techniques, starting in Blender with a 3D camera moving horizontally at a very high speed facing a series of various stock images put together side by side to give the illusion of moving through different environments all motion blurred together. The background was then taken into Nuke and blurred horizontally to smooth out any harsh edges left and solidify the streaks. A corner pin was then used to animate and distort the background into the proper perspective, using horizontal planes from the original render as reference for the perspective. This very same background was also used as a 360° HDRI in the original render, this way, the color of the light on the subject matched the background.

The lighting setup used the same philosophy as the background in that it was used to convey movement. Three separate lights with different strengths were set up on a control ring, which then had it's rotation almost entirely randomized. This truly gave the feeling of the character running at speeds faster than light, never being in the same lighting for more than one frame.

The design of the suit itself was heavily inspired by concept art for The Flash movie as well as art by other artists. The entire suit was designed in substance painter, using a variety of different custom shaders on different parts of the suit made up of small textures combined together to give the illusion of detailed cloths and fabrics.  While a simple classic design looked very nice, it would get lost in the composite. I ended up going with the more tactical, regal look that a hero in the Justice League would wear. The lightning on the suit was made by using warp filters over painted lines and exporting the warped lines using different seeds and using them as emission in Blender.

Shot 06 - Sunset Pier

The vision for this shot truly started coming together only after looking online for assets. The railing gave me an idea for some sort of oceanic view but initially the plan was for a night time shot. However, the golden hour look really appealed to me for the opportunity to use a more varied color palette, as well as allowing for a more active view with seagulls and a boat. The biggest challenge was to balance the different assets in the shot, as to not distract too much from each other or the main subject itself.

The chroma key was comprised of separate keyed sections combined together, the feet were rotoscoped. The railing was relit in Blender as a 3D asset. After lining up the camera position using fSpy, I exported the camera into Blender, modeled the railing and floor from the camera's position, and then projected the cleaned up footage of the railing onto the geometry. I then lit the geometry with some basic sun lamps lined up to where my sun would be. The reflection in the water is a simple vertical flip of the sky merged over using soft light, with the bright highlights keyed and added on top after.

Nearly all of the assets are from Footage Crate and the original plate footage was provided by CG Spectrum.

Shot 07 - Alien Invasion

The real challenge with this shot was balancing the destruction of the building with the explosions. The explosions needed to be intense, and violent in order to truly sell the destruction of the tower. I used the laser of the ship combined with various masks in order to get a sort of internal glow from the building, as if it were being destroyed from the inside out, the way a lasered building might.

In order to add a true sense of scale and depth, I used the depth pass to composite in some atmosphere as well as depth of field. It was important to give both the building and the mothership very distinct looks so they wouldnt fade in together, but ultimately marry them together with the laser.

All assets were provided by CG Spectrum

Shot 08 - The Lakehouse

This shot involved quite a bit of work in Nuke's 3D workspace. The camera was fully 3D tracked and the environment rebuilt into a 3D mesh using a generated point cloud from the 3D tracked points. I then projected the dmp provided by the school onto the reconstructed and now edited mesh in order to partially match up with the dmp. The background was created using a stock video also provided by the school. I painted out any people and painted in more trees to fill in the empty areas more. This was then projected onto 2 planes set up in the background of the 3D space. The assets were integrated by rotoscoping certain parts in and out, adding shadows, and color correcting.

Shot 09 - Other World

Originally this was a day time shot, with a very different sky and not as much contrast. However, being dissatisfied with the result I began to research and study how day to night shots were created, not just in terms of color and value, but the purpose of them. I found that this shot worked significantly better as a night time shot, both in telling a more compelling story and making for a more interesting looking shot. The sky went through a number of different iterations before landing on this sort of blue to red color palette that made the night environment a soft purple. I fell in love with the look and made sure the shot was servicing this color palette.

Once again I employed the help of SwitchLight Studio AI in order to generate a normal map for both the subject and the environment, which allowed me to accurately relight both and ground them in this new environment.

Most of the assets in the sky are sourced from Footage Crate, plate footage and rock spires were provided by CG Spectrum.

Shot 10 - Car Ride

After cleaning up and smoothing out the green screen in comp, I was able to pull a clean key. Only minor adjustments and some manual roto were necessary to fully replace the background. The background image sequence was stabilized and match moved to the overall movement of the plate. I horizontally flipped the background and masked it to the mirror in order to fake a reflection. A small amount of glow was added over top to further help blend the background and plate together.

Plate footage and assets were provided by CG Spectrum.

Shot 11 - Blindfolded

This shot presented a unique challenge with the flowing hair. For the fine hair I used the IBK Color method and to keep a solid core for the alpha matte I did a basic key and combined the mattes. The plate was then despilled, color corrected, and premultiplied by the alpha matte. A small amount of glow and grain was added in order to blend the elements better.

Plate footage and assets were provided by CG Spectrum.