Joe Azar - Compositing-Lighting-Lookdev works

Eye of Judgement

"Mahkoum" which means "judged" in Arabic, tells the story of a young girl about to face her final judgment.
This is the pitch of a very short first movie that I created during my academic years at ESMA Lyon.
This project is special to me, this is why I reworked on two shots lately. You can find below some breakdowns from concept, to lookdev, lighting and compositing.

Some concept researches, last sketches and some advanced concept :

The final shape has the silhouette of a divine entity, resting in this infinite place. The eye of judgment is at its center, created not only by the negative space but also by the two central jewels.

Look Development

All aspects - modeling, lookdev and lighting - are achieved using respectively Autodesk Maya, The Foudry Mari and Pixar Renderman.

Close up shot

The three different doors represent the different possible outcomes of the final judgment. I enjoyed adding detailed displacement inspired by church tympanum and ornaments.

Final output composited using The Foundry Nuke vs Raw render :

Some AOVs :

Some compositing passes :

Wide shot

I wanted to light the scene to have a nice game going on between the lights and the shadows, to translate the duality of the 'good' and the 'evil'. This intention defines also my choice of having a compositing that splits the image in half, just as if you can fold it in half - besides to my peculiar taste for symmetry.

Final output vs Raw render

Some AOVs :

Some compositing passes :

Digging in the temple in order to create this buried effect :

Some other compositing passes :

GlassMaker

While working on a 3D animated short production with a main character having magnifying glasses, an interesting question raised : How can we avoid rendering glasses in every shot and have an optimized workflow that gives us flexibility in choosing what we see through them and what we don't see ?
The answer is simple : J_GlassMaker !

This gizmo is created for ongoing production, but with some settings tweaked, it can be used widely.

To make it work, you will need: the camera of the shot, the animated 3D object, both character and environment renders and an ST map, created on nuke, based on the glasses' UVs, and defines their deformation.

I added a switch, in order to define whether we see the character in the refractions or no.

For example, if a character revolves around themselves, at some point we would be looking at the environment through their glasses, and in this case, we just want to see the environment and not the character anymore. This is when this switch becomes really useful :

And here is a 360° turn with the switch animated :

And finally the glasses frame, with and without the J_GlassMaker effect :

Besides the different 3D elements imported as inputs, the gizmo, the setup and the STmap are fully done on The Foundry Nuke.

MAGICAL RAILS

During the same short film production, I had the chance to develop the look of magical rails, and spoiler : I loved it !
I wanted to create something looking fancy, yet that is completely time-saver and fully done on Nuke.
I guess I was up to the challenge ! take a look :

The goal was having the rails appear in a magical spark out of nowhere before the vehicle arrives and disappear after it, leaving some particles behind.

Here is a close look on some of the big steps I went through to create them :

First, I created a roto, growing over the UVs of my model, and using an STmap, making the rails appear and disappear with the right speed and timing :

From left to right :

1) the white base filling (shown in the video above)

2) Noises, applied using the Position Aov (_Pworld), with different scales, intensity and values, to bring variation to the different strings of the rails and creating the sparkly aspect thay got.

3) Color grading the different strings.

4) Isolating the edges of the rails, and then using their position information (thanks to a PositionToPoints node) as a particle emittter.

Talking about particles, here are the three particles I shaped using nuke flare node. They are the 3 variants I am emitting from the isolated points, in different sizes, shapes, colors and intensity :

On the right, the first layer of particles sparks out as a magic flicker triggering the apparition of the rails.

On the left, the second layer of particles, acting like fairy dust left after their arrival :

Last but not least ; assembling all the different layers, grading dome parts and making some other glow in give the whole as much magic as possible !

DARK AMULET TRANSFORMATION

What if someone activates the magic of a dark amulet?
Here is my take on transforming a dark amulet made from magical stone into a shining jewel filled with malefic power!

I worked on all aspects from the concept to the final output.

All aspects of the golde version - modeling, lookdev and lighting - are achieved using respectively Autodesk Maya, The Foudry Mari and Pixar Renderman.

The "magical stone" look, the transformation and the final projection are acheived using The Foundry Nuke

Did you know that you can make magic with rust?

Thanks to a free stockshot of rust metal, some occlusions, some grading and light information, I managed to create my second look without having to go through a full lookdev process again.

It was a time-saver, but above all a very interesting approach to this type of process on Nuke.

Transformation time 

The process was as much fun as fruitfuI!

I managed the transition by painting in rotation and timing each part of the transition. Then I isolated three different parts by keying the mask and shuffling them into three different channels: red, green and blue.

Red is used to transition from one material to another.

Green and blue are used to add multiple overlapping effects at the edges of the transformation.

Final output, next to the different masks used :

Thank you for scrolling through it all! If you leave a comment, I would be happy to read it !

A very special thanks to everyone who has inspired me, and helped me for the last couple of years.

For your passion, encouragement and support, Thank you Baptiste. Thank you Perceval.