Emilio Lingg - Compositing

2D Character Integration

From start to finish - The process behind the shot

Join me on the journey to unravel the magic in this shot! We'll deconstruct the steps it took to get to the final product. 

In order to push my compositing skillset to the next level, I decided to do a shot where I replace a person with a greenscreen plate of myself. This helps me to harden all my core-skills and find an excuse to try all the fancy techniques you can do.

The first difficulty was to find a plate that looks visually pleasing - and is not boring. I found this clip from "Cottonbro Studio" on Pexels. 

After analyzing each frame closely and preparing notes on everything that needed to be done, the work could be started.

Preparing the greenscreen

The first step was to shoot and key the greenscreen footage which will replace the person on the left-hand side of the frame.

The shooting was quite a challenge. I decided to align myself as closely as possible to the original person. This way I could ensure to match the perspective and make the process "easier" in a later stage. This turned out really well. Big thanks to Marc Peskoller!

As the greenscreen itself was properly lit it was relatively straightforward to get a good key. This was the easy part of the project. Of course, I had to use different keyers for the hair and the shirt but the process was quite straightforward. I'm also quite happy with the final alpha.

Preparing the plate

In order to replace a person, you first have to get rid of it. 

I started with painting out the original person and creating a clean plate. I then had to track the background and match-move the clean-plate on to the original plate. Luckily, there is not much parallax in the background.

As a last step, I combined the alphas of a rough roto of the person I wanted to replace and my greenscreen. This combined alpha is now the whole area where I need a clean plate. I expanded this area by a couple pixels with an erode node and limited the area of the paintout to this alpha mask. With this I could ensure to keep as much of the original pixels as possible.

Setting up the correct layering

One of the most time-consuming parts of the project was to create roto shapes of various objects and people. This step was crucial to ensure that I can correctly layer, color-correct and even paint out all the different elements.

The main parts were the glasses, the person in the front, the table, and the plant. Following is a brief overview of the roto-script and the finished layering setup.

Color grading the greenscreen plate

By far the most difficult part was to grade the filmed greenscreen plate to fit seamlessly into the plate. 

This took a lot of iterations and a lot of color sampling, trying and exploring the different color correction nodes inside Nuke. I will probably rework some of the grading at a later point but for now I'm quite happy.

Additional fun challenges

The devil is in the detail!

A perfect example of how much work is in this shot is the paintout on the wineglasses in the front. I went ahead and added the refractions of myself into all glasses in the plate. 

This has been achieved by warping the greenscreen footage from the back and keying the highlights and details from the glass. Finally merging those elements together. 

Lastly, a big shoutout to Marcel Pichert my teacher and support, James Belch my Mentor, and Luise Rolle for the insane support and tips when I was struggling. Thanks guys!

Space shot with matte painting

Another fun project is this shot from a larger project I created in collaboration with Annika Reichmann, Carlos Eulen, and Marc Peskoller (Stay tuned, we'll release it later this year).

It's the gauntlet fighter from "The Mandalorian" flying through space. Props to Marc who modelled this gigantic spaceship.

Crafting the space background

The quite unique background of this shot has been created solely in Nuke with a lot of Noises, simple Expression nodes and different merge operations.

It was quite fun to mess around and achieve this stretched effect for the nebula. I also added small details. In this stage I decided to go with a green color scheme as I was tired of the orange-teal looks from  my previous projects.

Adding Depth - Foreground Planet

Another element in the shot is the planet on screen left.

Inside Nuke, I placed a big sphere and projected a planet texture on top of it. After some grading, glow exponentials and tweaking I merged it into the main pipe.

Creating interesting meteors

An important part for me was to add small rocks and meteors to make the shot more interesting.

I modeled about 10 different rocks from simple primitives, shaded them accordingly. I then scattered them using Maya's Mesh tools. I could place them quite precisely and even randomly rotate and translate them. What an awesome tool!

Trails!

I think the element which adds the most value to this shot are the 2 big trails following the spaceship. I used a sweet little workaround I figured out while working on this project.

To create this effect, I created a motion path using this script from over 10 years ago. I then animated the growth of the curve and created a sweep mesh around that animated curve. 

Only now I was able to use the alpha of that growing geometry to mess with it in Nuke.

Merging the elements

After all the elements were merged together, a last step was to add lens flares, lens distortion, grain and a final color grading. Done!

Thanks for reading this far!