Hasta La Motion!

I was watching this tutorial about compositing CG passes to a plate and in the video showed a way to add the shadows that got thinking about what is technically correct.

When I add my shadows to a plate I use an alpha mask to drive a color corrector and I color correct the BG plate to create a shadow of my CG.

In this tutorial, it showed that a constant guizmo colored with the shadow values was masked by an alpha and then put over the BG plate.

So I’m wondering as to which way is technically correct?

Thanks for the help!

How do you guys do it? i mean, if i wanted to track points on someones belly but the belly moves and stretches, how would i do this? do i need to use multiple cameras or what?

I am finished up a long contract at my current studio and I’ve been looking around for new work and I noticed that a lot of studios aren’t using Fusion anymore. Most places are using Nuke or Shake. I just started learning Nuke last month but am still having trouble getting a job with the lack of Nuke experience. I have close to 5 years experience with Fusion and over a year with After Effects but that seems to not have much of an effect on my skill set.

Does anyone know of any studios in Vancouver B.C that are still using Fusion?
Thanks!

Hi all,

I am very much interested to build a career in VFX. So, please help me out from where should I start for VFX. My background is , I am a character animator.
Please.

Thanks

John3d2w

Hi. Im putting together a pitch for a job and wanted to see if I was proposing the right sort of techniques.
The director wants to have 1 shot where an actor exits a car, but is made to look about 2 decades younger than he is. The actor in question is in his late 40s, and we have reference of him from 20 years ago.
The director has seen Tron and thinks doing a CG face replacement would be the way to go (as opposed to make-up or a younger double).
Im terrified as I know this is one of the hardest VFX things to achieve. Its for a TV production so wont have movie budgets, and as I said is for 1 shot so cant be a too complex.

I considered doing just 2D beauty work in comp, but its going to involve not only smoothing out his skin, but lifting jowls and a slight double shin using warping techniques, so this could get very complex.

My next instinct would be to do a 3D matchmove of the actors face on the plate, use a UV unwrap technique (similar to work I saw on Where The Wild Things Are) so that the texture of the face is all coming from the actual shot footage. Then do paint / beauty work on the unwrapped texture and reproject it onto a slightly facelifted version of the same 3D mesh.

The next option would be to create the face model / texture from scratch using reference photos, and try to matchmove / light it to match the scene. The actor is not going to be talking or anything – but he will climbing out of a car so there will be a decent amount of motion / lighting to get right.

The final option is getting a head scan of the actor and doing the same thing, but I think this is just going to get too expensive.

If anyone has experience of trying to achieve this then I would love some advice. I think doing beauty work on a female actor would be easier, but this guy certainly has the telltale signs of his age in the overall changing shape of his face and its texture.

Thanks in advance.