First steps on the Thieves' well

This isn't the most elegant cg move, but I post this for the interest of whoever wants to see how these matchmoves start and get refined. I've added the first couple of boxes to the bottom edge of the well to see how well they match the perspective of the live action shot. Turned out surprisingly well considering it was done by eye looking back and forth between a reference photo and the 3d enivronment. Now it's a question of matching the lighting closer, removing the gaps between some of the fake boxes that appear to slightly float and also rework the right side to be more of a dark confusion of boxes and packing materials. Once a whole lot of extra power cords get layered over the entire scene, it should mask the edge of the seam much better..

Pulling up the box

This is a hybrid live-action and temp cg shot of the thieves starting to pull up the treasury chest. The virtual camera gave me plenty of trouble getting a smooth tilt down off of the thieves - right now it jerks rather abruptly. It didn't seem like much could be done and this was the best result I could get out of the camera curves. Strange, usually the camera is very easy to finesse. I like the abrupt camera tilt - seems to add a good amount of energy to what is a slow developing scene. If I want to slow it later, after effects allows me to warp time with time remapping (essentially retiming a shot a la Matrix where footage slows down or speeds up).

Thieves ending - rough cut

The last major section of the initial set of BoxWorld shorts was to plan the ending of the Thieves adventure. To move forward with that is this first rough edit of the trap sequence. The next stage here will be to block out the cg elements in rough form and start to incorporate them in with the footage to get it to flow smoothly..

Main chasm matchmove

The single biggest issue with this Chasm sequence is matching the live action to the cg flythrough. Below is the first pass that turned out rather successful. We never get so close in this shot that it became too difficult to match the edges.

Thieves chasm sequence

And here's how the segment is starting to look in a cleaned up edit with temp CG. The large chasm won't be too tough to build with copying and pasting architectural pieces over and over - the tricky part is just the few boxes close to the live action footage and how well they merge. Sound design will also be a huge factor in selling the scene. With reverb and echo added later, that'll give the voices the depth they need to put the guys there..

Thieves chasm

Here's the next stage of the massive chasm that starts the third act of Thieves. From the last post, the construction has been fleshed out a bit more and the live footage has been motion tracked in with a rough mask. The end of the shot still needs to breathe a bit more...

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Pre-viz started for Thieves

As Mailman starts to wind down, the Thieves closing segment is heavily dependent on cg environments that it's time to start developing the initial layouts. Here is the first pass at the opening flythrough of the chasm that establishes them walking out to the ledge. This isn't the easiest to see how it'll work, but tomorrow the timing gets fixed and the live action will get dropped in to see how it plays.. and it should become clearer.

Mailman with temp music

Now it's starting to come together.. here is the first three-quarters of the Mailman story with some temp music courtesy of RJD2 to check overall timing and how the effects shots are merging with the live action. The edit has trimmed about five seconds to what is here - still eliminating any dead time. There's still some touchup needed in different spots and potentially a slight recut at the beginning of the hallway to liven it up a bit..

Full mail sequence

Here is the first cut of the mail mountains effects cut together. Pretty rough, but the pieces are there. In the next iteration, the mail will be retimed, the edit slimmed down a bit and sfx flowed in.. I posted this version to show how disjointed a sequence like this will look in the early stages.

Let the mail drop..

Happy new year, everybody! Now down to the pixel pushing business..

Here's one of the tricky jobs for the end of Mailman, the stream of mail that rains down on the mailman's daughter. Too difficult to rig practically and too difficult to get Lena's voice on the set, this was left for cg post-production. It's not photoreal, but quite a bit more dynamic than real mail would have been. In order to keep moving forward, a few corners were cut, as in the mail stays rock solid and doesn't bend or crumple on impact, but these are pretty minor concessions. (final shot is at the bottom of the post)

First off is the still of the real footage.


Then a still that shows the filter work to darken the sides and draw attention to the girl.


Here's a still of the cg work environment where the umbrella and pile of mail is approximately recreated by eye and guesswork in 3d space. Up above the shot is a long trough where mail is piled up and ready to slide down using the cg physics engine. The mail is corralled in the last tube where it gets directed straight down at the umbrella. In that last tube is a "turbulence" field to blow the mail around a bit so it doesn't all land in the same place. Also a "dampening" field to slow the mail down since it picks up too much speed going down the ramp.


Then everything except the mail is turned invisible and the shot is rendered:


As a small extra touch and as an experiment in multi-stage renders. The visibility of the umbrella and pile is turned back on and a blindingly bright light is cast down from above to create this high contrast pass:


This is to create the shadows that the mail casts. Anywhere that is black will be layered in as a soft gray while the white is set to transparent. No need to go into this too deeply. It's just a way to get shadows and nothing else.

And the final shot with everything composited including fake boxes in right foreground, slightly out of focus for depth.. The shot doesn't run this long, in fact, it's only seen for a few seconds, but this is an extended sequence to pull the best movement from.


And then the sound effects should solidify it..