To practice more with after effects and with Tracking, I followed a tutorial from VideoCoPilot on how to make a destroyed effect on a building, this may also come in handy for the synoptic projects later on.
To start with I did a 3D Camera Track, which can be seen below
Once the tracking is complete, I selected 3 points on the top of the building to create an ‘Origin Point’ then chose to create a Solid on that plane.
From those origin points you can also chose to add text, null and other objects to the area.
I then created a solid on front of building, however this needed to be rotated slightly so that it was aligned with the beams on the building, and then transfer building damage onto the solid shape.
I Changed the size of the damage so that it was larger and aligned it once again.
Added Colour Correction to base plate and to the damage with CC Curves
Pen tool to cut out certain area, this could then be changed in 3D space
Subtract the drawn shape
Duplicate layer, add mode, tint to red to be able to see it and feather both layers.
Duplicate another layer, change track matte to Alpha matte mask, move it back in 3D space and scale it up to create a 3D effect.
Duplicate layer, draw ellipse and feather out the shape to create extra gouge
Add smoke effect from action essentials 2
Duplicate background plate
add alpha track matte to “Beams” Layer
Create beams with pen tool
Beams
Breakdown So far
Add rough edges effect to beams so that they look bashed up
The Martian is a movie produced (VFX) by Framestore, THe Senate, Industrial Light and Magic, Territory Studio and MPC, leading companies within the VFX Industry.
By looking into NASA’s mar mission archives, the teams were able to collect the best references for the movie, and this helped them to get the best results when shooting for the film in Wadi Rum in Jordan.
The VFX Companies then changed the landscapes of Jordan, into the red planet and made it look more alien than just our home planet. The main component of this is the grading and colour correction seen in the majority of the breakdown clips.
Original Plate
Progress Plate
Final Shot
The next component that was used a lot was adding the visor onto the front of the astronauts helmets.
The reason why they didnt include the visor on the actors helmets, is that it would reflect all the cameras and the area that they were filming in, and this would have been difficult and tedious to remove during the editing of the film.
During the VFX, these visors were extremely believable and integrated them into the environment , using highly realistic reflections, using tracking and rendering reflections within the CG Environment.
The filming on site in Jordan used high resolution photography, however extra rocks, craters, mountain ranges and a view of a distant Olympus Mons to create a greater landscape were all added within the CG landscape.
Although there isnt any wind on mars, Ridley Scott wanted to add more to the environment by adding fast ice and dust clouds, to create more of an atmosphere.
These effects were created using houdini and maya CG Fluid simulation, combined with pouring salt and dry ice.
‘We added light clouds to the surface, to echo the dust clouds; above that, we worked to create something that would add the depth we wanted, without importing the fluffy white variety we’re accustomed to on Earth’.
Greenscreen Plate
Render 1
Final Shot
“Many of the plates we shot in Jordan were replaced in some way, except the very middle strip that were the amazing mountains,” adds Stammers. “In the background we’d add additional mountains that were even further scaled. Most notable is in the area of the Hab site where the main mission is taking place, there’s one really distant volcano which is a nod to Olympus Mons, Mars’ largest volcano at 59,000 feet. Ridley wanted something epic in the background to dwarf even the big mountains that are there at Wadi Rum. Then we added other ones that were half that size but much bigger than the ones present in our plate photography.”
“Raccoons don’t often walk on two legs, and they don’t regularly start bar fights, fire huge guns or pilot spaceships either, but then Rocket, the star of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, is no ordinary raccoon.” via Framestore.com
Framestore is the company that worked on Marvels Rocket Raccoon in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy.
“If you exaggerate his performance and make him too cartoony you’ve lost the audience but if you go too real you’ll end up with something that isn’t entertaining or doesn’t do Bradley’s voice justice,” explains Animation Supervisor Kevin Spruce. “James Gunn instinctively had a gut feeling of what was right for Rocket. He often wanted to keep him casual and low-key, rather than over-acted. He was very big on the fact that when you shoot live action the actors don’t always look at each other when they’re talking, whereas there’s a tendency for animators to always make characters face who they’re talking to. The animation team worked hard to get all that observational detail into Rocket and became really intuitive to what he would do in any situation.” via Comicbook.com
Rocket is one of the most central characters that framestore has animated, and so Rocket needed to look both realistic, but natural. But seeing as though Rocket is similar to a humanoid, in the way he walks and acts, he needed to be able to do things that Raccoons dont do.
During the making of Rocket, there was a constant need for reference to the concept art, stand-in performance and voice characterization.
“Everything came down from what we shot on set,” says Ceretti. “We had the actors there and the interaction was so natural there. There were, though, lots of little things the animators brought in. When Rocket talks about something, he’s always playing with something on the table. That’s something we found out from racoons – they are very tactile so when they grab something they really play around with it and work around – so these things made him very natural.” via fxguide.com
Framestore were given a brief to make a “grizzled and cynical” character.
“That mood is not strictly true because there are moments in the film where you catch a glimpse of what’s really going on underneath this outward appearance of stand-offish grumpy character. It’s this injured and tortured soul. There’s a moment, for example, where he isn’t wearing any costume and you see his implants and biotech implants into his body.” via fxguide.com
Framestore received several pieces of concept art as part of his designing process.
“We went right back to a raccoon – we’d been given raccoon reference, we’d been to see a raccoon,” says Fawkner. “We did two versions of Rocket and in the end he got more bipedal and was more human sized in his proportions. We really dealt with him as a creature that could emote and talk, and that somehow seemed slightly easier once we had got his facial features sorted out. We had big shadows under his eyes which let his brows emote. All these things were gradually done to allow a face that would read more human.” via fxguide
One of the major challenges in the making of rocket raccoon was his hair. Framestore relied on their inhouse hair system calle “fcHairFilters” and its sim tool “fDynamo” This gave them a series of filters that build up to network different functions to give each hair its own shape.
A raccoons fur is made of from lots of layers of short fine hair, and then one layer of long, thick hair, so Framestore needed to separate these into layers in order to simulate them during the movie and tests. By doing this they were able to get a more accurate simulation.
The fur was separated into sections as the different costumes created natural split points. This meant that parts of the fur which were not visible, were able to be removed, and therefore didnt need to be simulated and saves time. Overall, they had three variants and a total of 22 hair sets.
Rocket was rendered in Arnold and the shader that was used was based on the disneyISHair model, a physics inspired hair shading system that is friendly towards its artist.
On each of the markings, they used multiple colour maps. This meant that they could mix them in different ways on the hairs in order to create different effects.
“For the short fine hair we were able to achieve the speckled look along each hair which is present in real raccoon fur by swapping between the different maps in certain areas controlled by mix masks. The longer hairs had less colour changes along the length which gave the recognisable raccoon mask.” via framestore.com
Framestore then made the bounty hunter gear for rocket, but since that job needed to be shared with another VFX Company, they tried to make it as easy as possible to set up his different outfits, including his prison uniform.
“It’s quite a rigid space suit, so we decided that the top part could be mainly rigged and the trousers would be cloth simmed,” explains CFX Supervisor Sylvain Degrotte. The prison outfit was more difficult. “It was less rigid so it needed to collide with Rocket’s fur underneath and be able to slide and wrinkle in a more fluid, less mechanical way.”via framestore.com
““We built that costume in quite a novel way,” continues Sylvain, “at the beginning we took the approach of ‘OK let’s do it like Gravity take a physically accurate, pattern-based tailoring approach,’ but the costume already existed in real life so instead we decided to do a photogrammetry scan by taking 360° photos. It was much quicker and we still got all the details we wanted. We just had to fit it from our human model to a raccoon. It was an area we really pushed forward in and did something differently that worked for this particular show.” With the systems set up we developed our in-house software Jet to automate the simulation process. Artists could click a submit button and all it would run all the required simulations – the bounty hunter trouser simulation or the prison costume plus the three different groom simulations combined together – and publish a package that was used by lighting to render later on.” Via Framestore.com
Rocket is usually seen carrying his four-barreled gun, which was 3D printed to be used on set, and then was matched by framestore using CG.
“I think they had a view that the 3D printed gun looked a bit perfect,” notes Fawkner, “so when they gave us the 3D asset we replicated that but they hadn’t loved the gun in the first place. So we beat up the gun a bit and MPC did a lot of shots where it extends and unfolds.” via fxguide.
Below is the showreel of how Framestore has made rocket raccoon.
Bethany Cassap 