Group Project: Outer Space

Last week we finished a bunch of shots for our Group Project.
We have a lot of material, very cool shots with the Red Epic and lots of energy to create cool visual effects!!
I worked on a couple underwater shots with a submarine and all the underwater environment and also I worked on an outer Space shot where a Spaceship is going towards the Earth.
I liked the experience of working in team structure in short period of time. It makes you work in an efficient way. You have to make a lot of decisions to get the shot finished on time and with a decent quality.
Our instructor Mark Benard explained to us that in big companies that work for big feature films can be working on a single shot for months, but smaller studios that work for smaller productions have to work faster and more efficient, since they work usually for TV series and the deadlines are insane!!
That's why is nice to start working in that sort of productions when you are starting, because you will have the chance to learn more things and faster.
In our group project it happened a similar thing. I had to work on full CG shots for 2 weeks, and it would have been impossible for me to started them from scratch.
When we were planning our Group Project we basically took a look of what we had and what could we do with that.
So the CG Submarine, for instance, is the one that my classmate Andre Rios, used for his UFO project, and the spaceship is the one I used for mine.
So we were working with elements form our own library, and everything worked just fine! :)


In the space shot I had the chance to recreate the Planet Earth. I had never worked on a Space environment so it took me a while to build the Shaders for the Planet, and figure out how could I divide the layers to comp it. But by watching other people doing it and researching a lot of references I learned how to do it and I think the result is pretty nice.
I just created 2 Spheres in Maya, one for the Earth itself and the other one for it's Ozone layer.
Rendered the layers separately and comped them in Nuke. Here I had the chance to control the amount of blur and glow of the Ozone layer until I got the result I wanted.

The coolest thing is that I never thought about doing a shot like this and at the end I like it. The problem is that the spaceship has the same animation in my original UFO shot (Which I still have to post, sorry)
So it's gonna be hard to choose which of them will be in my demo reel... but anyway, both of them will live in this blog :)

 

And here is the animation...

So to recap, we just finished many of our Group Project shots and I have learned many things. The more I learn about visual effects and CG the more ideas come to my mind. I love to do this and I wanna learn more!!!
We have 6 more weeks to finish our VFX Program at Lost Boys Studios, that makes me sad actually... Pretty soon we will start working on our Personal Projects and cutting our final demo reel, so we still got a lot of work to do!




I hope you liked this post, keep an eye out for the next ones :D


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