LAST LBS PROJECTS

We are finishing our visual effects course at Lost Boys. This week the Class 009 will graduate!

It's sad to finish here but at the same time we will start our professional career in the VFX studios around the beautiful city of Vancouver, BC.

This last month we basically have been working on our own portfolio, websites, demo reels, etc.

But I had the chance to work on a couple of exciting vfx projects for my demo.

One of them is the integration of my Still Life object into a live action plate.

I tried to focus more in Compositing, since my previous projects are more Full CG, so I wanted to show some comp skills in my demo reel. So I shot the plate with Rajavel and put real objects in the foreground in order to practice some Rotoscoping and integration.

For the last project at Lost Boys I just took the ship I modeled for the project "Vancouver 2023" and throw it into a plate I shot at Metrotown.

In a previous post I commented that I wanted to work on that project so bad, but, because of the limited time, I had to drop it because I would have to do so many things.

But I already had the ship modeled and I wanted to show it in my demo, not in a simple turntable or still image.

The basic Idea was to take a simple shot and integrate the ship there.

One Sunday I went out seeking for interesting places to do a comp for the ship. My girlfriend Yuumi came with me and she helped me a lot shooting the small mirror ball for the HDR lighting in 3D (thanks for your patience and help, Yuumi)

Yuumi holding the Micro Light Probe :P

We went to many places around the area were we live. I couldn't find a great plate for my ship, and the light wasn't so good, little bit cloudy and flat but that was ok. After I my girlfriend and I were finished shooting the plates we went to Metrotown for lunch and after that, around 6 pm there was a beautiful sunset and golden light, so I decided to take some shots there, and finally those are the one I used for the project.

Again, the idea was just to show the ship I modeled integrated into a live action plate so I could show a bit of my compositing skills. A bit of rotoscoping, color matching and that's it.

I didn't even shoot with Mark's camera, a Canon 5D Mark II. They had to use it so I couldn't take it for the weekend. Instead, I used mine, a Canon 500D with has not great video features, it doesn't even shoot at 24 fps.

This factor actually caused me a little bit of pain when solving the Camera in Boujou. The track is not perfect and the camera is also very shaky. I did my best to fix all of that, the result could be better but was good enough for me.
The shot was actually very rough, shaky, and with many dust on the lens, lens flares coming from the sun. I thought that would be a big problem but was easy to hide in comp. And I really like the texture caused by the dust in the lens.

What it really worked very well right away was the lighting. The first test renders convinced me very soon. It's amazing how this small chrome ball worked!

When I finished the last stage of this project, I realized that I still had a couple of extra weeks to keep playing with it and make it look cooler. So I started to add set extensions, which gave the chance to practice a bit more

my Matte Panting skills and integration in  Comp. I also played with some practical elements to add some dust, when the ship is taking-off, and I even created a particle system to simulate papers and garbage that might be on the ground a

So what it started as a simple project at the beginning, turned into a nice way to experiment a lot in Comp at the end, and I learned a lot of new stuff with this projects. Plus, it's looking nice for my taste. There is not so much going on, is just a spaceship taking-off at Metrotown. But at least is looking cool I think :) 

I hope you found my last 2 projects interesting, I definitely learned a lot working on them.
Thanks for visiting my Blog!