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..