You really do start to realise how big a vfx project is once you get to the compositing.[...] Take shadows for example. This became (and continues to be) perhaps the biggest part of the post processing. I already knew I would have to build any object in 3D if it needed to receive a shadow, but there were several things, having never done a project like this from start to finish, that I didn't realise until I came to the compositing:
In the last post I said I would talk about the Futuristic Car 2 project, but, well, enough time passes between these posts that I'm not always working on the thing I said I would be. I certainly was working on the other project, and I will definitely write about it at some point, but not today. It's always nice to have a little break from longer projects, it's easy to start to get sick of a project if you work on it solidly for too long so I reverted back to something I haven't worked on for over a year: The Rollercoaster project.
The problem of writing a blog post is that while I'm writing it I feel I should be working on the thing I'm writing about. That's probably why it's been roughly a month since the last blog post even though I said it would be every Wednesday. The trouble is it doesn't always feel that there's a blog post worthy amount of work done. Maybe I should do smaller more regular updates.
So it's been a couple of weeks since the last update but things have advanced quite a bit. I'm still working on 'Shot 2' but the tracks have been laid out, rendering tests have been done and shading has started.[...] One of the first things I did was set up the track which was simple enough and just meant scaling the imported (from the other scene) track so everything was roughly the correct size and then match it to the geometry I had already built that represents the buildings. You can also see the support struts that I've made which 'hold up' the building, because it's not like it would end up pulling down the building or anything...
It was a long week last week. Long enough that I didn't do a blog post and barely did any work on the rollercoaster project. A week filled with waiting around for various renders to finish. Unfortunately, the renders weren't for this project but for a personal project that I finally finished yesterday. But that's not to say that there's not been an update to this project, after last weeks blog post I had a few days of working on it and managed to get some important steps completed.
In our last post we outlined how we got on getting our footage for this rollercoaster project. I wanted to get started pretty quickly with this project and I'd actually already started modelling the rollercoaster before we had the footage, but seeing as it was the tracking that I thought would give the most problems I changed focus to trying to get Shot 2 in our sequence tracked. This would effectively work as our test shot; if we could get this shot done we could continue with the rest of the project, and if I decided it couldn't be done then we would move on to something else. I think I was right about this being the most difficult part (at least so far).
Unlike the other posts this was written by Matthew Griffin and not by me.][...] I'm delighted to be on your screen telling you what our new project is all about. Put simply, we're going to put a rollercoaster in a town centre. London was lucky enough to be graced with its one whole day of Spring on Tuesday, so we took our opportunity to go filming in the small town of Kingston in South West London to get our source footage.