Since I have tried plenty of style in VFX, I wanted to try something different for this project. I was intrigued to try to create a disaster sequence which heavily influenced by
the movie 2012 (2009). My initial idea was creating a sequence of a person running away from a disaster.
I was really dried out of ideas for almost a week on which I searched many and many of movie scenes. This scene from Marvel Eternals (2021) also inspired me to create a sequence that reveals the disaster as the hero shot. I have never done a hologram properly before; hence I figure this assessment would be a good way to try it out. With these new research, I finalize the sequence as a character in the future, looks upon the horizon of an alien invasion.
Zhao, C. (Director)(2021).Eternals[Film].Marvel Studios
Compositing Process
My Overall Node Tree
I found some footages from footagecrate and created some myself that were used on the 3D environment. First on the pipeline is the footage on scene 1 with cleanups of tracking markers on the watch. It followed by glow effects first and the 3D hologram as to not block the view of the 3D objects. Minor glow also added after ScanlineRender. It finishes with overall grade and color correct.
Scene 2 is pretty much the same. It starts with the footage with glow effects followed by the 3D hologram. As can be seen also on scene 1, all the glows for the hologram is masked with roto & radial, minus the MatchMove on scene 1.
Scene 3 is a bit more extravagant as it is the hero shot. The pipeline starts with the footage fixed with lens distortion & remove jitter, which the data is used for camera tracker. The camera tracker pipeline ends there as I just need the solver points and camera movement which can be seen used on the 3D environment on the blue backdrop.
It continues with all of the rotos to create a realistic layers between the footage and the assets. I used dots to not make the node tree even more crowded. All of the rotos were first stabilized then match moved to make the process heaps easier. The scene again ends with glow effects and grading followed by color correct
Findings
Final camera tracker with less error
This time I have a really hard time with the hero shot as I thought that the footage will have no significant problem, but I encountered the most time consuming and aggravating error, the camera tracker.
I was struggling for 2 weeks to get it to work and even created 10 different Nuke files on which each of them I tried at least 5 different camera tracker.
Luckily with the guide of my tutor, her suggestion to use LensDistortion significantly helps it as I knew I used a 12mm lens. It will indubitably cause lens distortion and thus needed to be undistorted first. I wrongfully assumed nuke camera tracker would work without it at the beginning of this project.
Although this might not be the perfect cameratracker, this is the least error that I am able to create.