New BoxWorld Preview

Finally, this is updated to include all the effects work that has happened over the last few months. As the project nears completion, it's time to get refined material out for people to see..

Elevator platform

Shifting gears, I decided to go back and finally try to cleanly remove the green screen from the elevator platform shot once and for all. This shot has eluded me on several prior attempts and the screenshot below shows why:

It was our first greenscreen setup and as you can see, the screen isn't so well illuminated. It runs from very dark green to white at the highlight. And then the green gets heavily reflected in the boxes and the packing tape, and also tints the white clothes of the actors. A fine chain that hangs across the opening doesn't help either. Below is the current state of the removal. There were about thirty different color keys applied to it over seven different layers. In general, on difficult removal shots like this, the troublesome areas get separated onto unique layers to then solve the problems of each area rather than try to apply an effect to the entire shot. There was also a bit of rotoscoping to handle some fine detail near the clothes, but it still needs a bit more work. The surveyor's shirt breaks up once he steps aboard and that will need a bit of rotoscoping to clean up. As much green tinting was removed as possible, but too much color correction changes all the other colors. This is one shot that is just going to pass scrutiny.. barely.. luckily, the shots that follow on the elevator are fantastic.

Thieves Well - current edit

And then here's the first minute and a half strung together. There's still a bit of graphic touchup to make the shots fit together nicer, but it's getting there:

Thieves Well - shot fixed

Well, once again, it's not perfect especially over repeated viewings, but it should do the job just fine. There are four layers behind the live action and then three in front to create different planes. Of course, by adding in more planes, the perspective would be more correct, though it would introduce more shifting into the shot..

Thieves Well - failed attempt

In case anyone's curious, here's the first pass at the motion fly through of the shot in the previous posting. I knew that there was going to be trouble merging the flat shot with full 3d, but the question was how jarring would it be. As you can see below, rather jarring. But solvable.. this version below uses a background, the live footage, the a foreground. A new version is rendering right now that separates the foreground into two independent layers. That should (hopefully) solve that strange midground shifting. It'll never be perfect, but once it gets reasonably close, I can add in the foreground wires and lights which should take the emphasis off.

Thieves Well - shot in progress

No video on this one just yet, but soon. If you click on the image below, it'll come up larger and show the original footage set into the center and then a fake 3d environment of boxes laid in around it. Since this shot will track forward and then sink down to the box they're hauling up, it gets really tricky to match the geometry. The easiest way was to create haphazard piles of boxes that purposefully don't match the perspective of the live action boxes since there's no way to keep them perfectly aligned. As it is now, it's possible to look closely and see what's fake and what's not. That difference should be minimalized with the addition of foreground wires and lights that layer smoothly across both and take the emphasis off any seams. Later today, the shot gets rendered into motion to see how well it moves..

Thieves Well - Continued..

Here's the edit now at one minute with several more effects shots (below). In the next post, I need to get the sound mixed better so that the distance shots feel more correct with the varying levels of echo. Also, I need to add in footage of a glove pointing in the looking down shot. Other than that, the next shot is the one that brings it into focus, a medium long shot that clearly shows all of the geography together (and breaks out of the current ping ponging between close and long shots).

Final Thieves' Well

Of all the four Boxworld shorts, the ending of the Thieves segment is the most complicated since a majority of the set is cg and it requires a complicated interplay between real and fake objects. I've decided to make a concentrated push on this section and get it to a fully working first stage in the next week. For the next several posts, you'll be seeing the same scene get progressively longer as more shots get added in. Right now, here are the opening three:

The glowing red light was added in to create continuity between the second shot where the voltimeter is clearly seen and the third shot where it's in the shadow, but I wanted to establish it's relative position. And the red light does it easily. And below is a rough version of the view down the well to the treasury chest that they're going to start hauling up: