Project Roomba

"Project Roomba" is, first of all, a very creative name for a project about a roomba, I know, thank you, you may hold your applause.

It is also my Examination Project at Visual Magic, marking the end of two years of learning VFX for me.

I wanted to make a nice looking CGi integration project to round out my portfolio, and decided to experiment with camera sensor analysis, color linearization workflows and OCIO. But I also found a more experimental method to do CGi integrations along the way...

This might not seem all too important, but it allowed me to do something very cool.

The rest of the project consisted of actually adding things to the scene. One of those things being a brand new sunlight, since I can now add and remove light freely!

I also made the roomba itself, controlled using Blender's Geometry Nodes to allow for smooth and very automated animation of the body, brushes and displays.

I added dust to the shot by simulating some particles, also using Geometry Nodes, to make the brushes push the dust in accordance to its spin direction and then suck them away once they got under the main body.

I did have to somehow separate the roomba from its environment to add depth of field to it without further blurring of the footage. This could have been avoided had I shot with a deep focus, but now I know that for next time. I did manage to separate it quite well, and blurred it using a custom defocusing kernel based on my camera's lens

Closing Thoughts

In the end, I'm pretty happy with the project. The integration, which was my goal, is the best I've done. And I learned a lot about workflow organization and light while doing it! There are of course things I could do to make it better, but that is for another time.

Thank you for your time!