Meiying Li

Bigger fish

Storyboard

This story is a mini world about insects. Mosquitoes watch TV at home, but a spider attacked the mosquito and occupied the mosquito’s home. Finally, when the spider thought it was safe, a bird found the spider. The story is over.

The room of the insects is CG as well as characters. The wall is live footage with markers so that I can use 3D tracking in Nuke and comp them together.

Character

The character sketch baise on story.

And after that I modeled the character in Maya. Then I made blend shape for the mosquito. Textured them in SP.

Footage

Showreel&VFX Breakdown

Final output

In the session I learned now to use green screen with control.

I operated the camera and lighting and learned some importent tips from it.

In terms of lighting the background should not have bright and dark patches to make the green even.

Avoied shadows on the screen and try to add backlight if we have subject with shiny surface.

In terms of camera, we should choose the right aperture to avoid super shallow depth of field for us to keyer the green more easily.

Use 4K resolution if possible to capture more details of edges.

For this workshop we learned how to use mocap camera and put markers on actors. Then we export our animation to Maya and unreal to learn how to use them.

In Maya we learned how to retargeting bones for rigging, to match the mocap animation to the rigged character use Maya motionbuilder system.

For Houdini workshops we explored destruction simulation and grass simulation.

With rose we experienced a vase destraction by bullet.

With Dom we were introduced how to make a broken wall simulation.

For more advence exploration we made a grass simulation.

Moodboard

Storyboard

Modeling&Texture

Animation

Roto in nuke

Compositing

Final render

Moodboard&Reference

Modeling&Texture

Render passes

Roto in nuke

Final render

We were introduced to 3D tracking workflow in nuke. This workflow allow us to place 3D elements to footage and clean up the footage like remove tracking marks, items we do not want in the footage.

To do this we explored how to place ground plane in the footage and how to make sure it is stable in the footage.

Colour Grade render passes

The aim of this practice was made us understand 3D render passes and what can composter do with those passes.

I choose this street image as background, the light of this image is blue and green. I color graded the beauty passes to make the color of this car match with background image and balenced the black and white point. To make the lighting of the 3D render same with background, I colour graded the defuse of the passes, and in order to made the car looks fit in this street I color graded the reflaction to make it same with the ground color.

Green Screen

This practice is aiming to understand green screen work flow in nuke. We had two session with Gonzalo the first one we look through different green screen remove node in nuke and green screen footage treatment before start remove the background. And we had the first exercise.

In the second session we understanded the green screen work flow structure and had a new exercise.

The idea of my final project is aim to create a sunken city under the sea; character grow with fish’s fin to able to swimming under the water. The fish will be half transparent. Animation duration will be above 1 minute.

Reference board

Story board

Character

https://www.canva.com/design/DAG1BVr7Gz8/5z9tpBOpTA-RgNlf3O4TJw/edit?utm_content=DAG1BVr7Gz8&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

You can find the breakdown and final render video from this canva link.

Organic modelling

1. zb organic modeling (Make basic shape – zremash – add details

2. maya zb organic modeling ( add reference images – use quad draw tool )

Organic modelling skull

Introduce SP workflow

Import low poly model (obj/fbx) – bake mash maps (combine high ploy with low poly if you have one) – add texture

Introduction of alpha brush, mask and material.

Cabin texture

After modeling in Maya and fixed the UV map, I separate the material in different parts use maya standerd surface.

Then I import the cabin fbx file to SP, use smart material as wood texture, then add dirt mask and mod mask.