Cherry Cherry

Towards the start of 3rd year Cherry Cherry VFX provided us with the oppertunity to work on an outside brief. I worked as part of a small group of students over the course of Semester 1. My roles were lighting, rendering and compositing. We had to come up with an idea for a popup cinema sting, a student put an idea through and after some deliberation with the client we were given a brief to create a seagull floating on a life buoy in the open ocean, and a clapperboard jumping over, in full un-stylized CG.

Starting the project we knew we were going to have to blend together simulated water in the foreground and an un-simulated background water, which we could stretch out into this distance. Also creating a good bird rig was going to be a challenge, as well as achieving a photoreal or close to final result.

We ran into a few issues with this project, in several different areas that had to be overcome, for me these were mainly to do with the rendering of the water, but several things popped up at the end of the pipeline that had to be fixed right before we began rendering, or popped up in compositing which had to be fixed there.

In render testing everything was working as we expected however when we switched to a HDR render the water lost its transparency (render version 1 in the breakdown video) making it look more like mercury. I made use of a previous render of the water which was transparent trying to blend them and bring the water back to what it was supposed to be but in the end we had to re-create both of the water shaders and re-import the bifost cache to solve the issue. We think this was caused by reloading of Arnold changing some settings in the scene file, or a broken shader.

Render version two has the properly transparent water, which is what we took forward to compositing, however this through up more issues in being able to see the clapperboard still underneath the water surface, which we hadn't accounted for.

As you can see in the bottom right the clapper board is visible which needed to be fixed, the sky is quite dull and the bleiding line between foreground and background water is fairly visible, however the colours blend well. As always I broke the render down into all the necessary AOVs and this is what let me fix the clapperboard under the water.

Refraction pass
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Fixed Refraction
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Having the passes allowed me to isolate the clapperboard more and remove it from the individual pass during the rebuild rather than the beauty. I did this in the refraction and specular pass.
To remove it I rotoed the underwater area the clapperboard was in and translated water from the area to the left on top, hiding the clapperboard. with some tweaking to the feathering and roto shape the result can't be noticed in the rebuild, even with the water moving.

I also did some grading on the very front section of the water to blend it more, and to remove the line from just under the life buoy, here's the comp tree for this whole process.

Here is the rebuilt AOVs with the changes I made, no more hidden clapper under the water.

I used the same HDR we used for base lighting as the background, but rotated and graded it in order to get a nicer composition and blend it better wit the CG.

The next step of the comp was adding lens effects, for this shot I used depth of field, a vignette, some lens distortion, field curvature and glow, which all add their own little detail to the composite. There is too much depth of field for the real world scale but this is acting as a way to further blend the simulated water with the distant water and really draws the focus front and centre onto the bird.

There were some issues with the depth pass, luckily it only affected a small area of the head above the water so I was able to slightly dilate the depth pass to fix it. Although in future I will render background elements separately so that we don't run into this issue.

And finally all was left to add was the logo, which originally was blue text on a white background. The white was easy to key out with a Keyer node and grade the text to black for a nicer more professional look for the composition, and the reveal is a simple animated roto meant to envision waves.

My finished composite then went on for another layer of grading by a different student before finally being sent off to the client. 

I am pleased with the final result and think it looks good. I think the seagull looks good but could have used real feathers to improve the realistic look but we simply did not have the time to add another level of complexity to manage with the render. There were a lot of different issues to work through in compositing but it was good to have something I was not expecting come up so I could work to solve those problems with what I had available.

Overall the project was a fun challenge to work on, we all definitely learnt a lot and it was helpful to highlight issues with a full pipeline that we can now avoid on the 3rd year films. I was able to put some more varied compositing into practice and I learnt a lot about Arnold along the way.