Compositing

Past two days filled with compositing work, since I have nothing more to do after my simulation is out of Houdini. The shot of the golem running towards the camera is pretty much done (shot 17), and I also finished up on 3 other minor shots, the one of the rock shaking, the rock hitting the actor and the shot of the golem landing.

For shot 17, I used the basic passes like beauty, diffuse, shadow, ambient occlusion, etc, for compositing. There were some problems with the shadows, namely, the shadows falling on the ground were of a slightly different "intensity" than those falling on the stairs. Colour correction was done to the stairs to have them look similar to the actual ones. In order to create a depth of field look without a depth pass, I faked it by keyframing the defocus node.

Some problems faced were that the ambient occlusion was not affected by the detail in the bump channel of the shaders. Hence, the ambient occlusion pass was not able to bring out the detail in the models, so it had to be compensate for with colour correction and motion blur. The motion blur was also used to cover up some discrepancies in the rotoscope.

We also decided to go for a more desaturated and darker look so the environment would not distract the audience from the main subject.

Golem Forming (Houdini)

 Ground fracturing

 Stairs fracturing

And lastly, my awesome Node graph!