Making of Monster Mascot

chaseit (53)in #story • 6 years ago

Hello fellow users!

In my last post I presented you my latest youtube video called Monster Mascot Attacks Warsaw. You can see it here:

and here is original post:

https://steemit.com/art/@chaseit/monster-mascot-attacks-warsaw

Today, I'd like to share a little bit of making of story.

This was kind of a simple project. I wanted to use some popular Polish mascot as a reference to Godzilla, Ghost Busters and King Kong movies. The story was also simple. Giant Mascot walks through the center of Warsaw, looking all happy. Suddently 2 jet fighters appeare and knock him with some rockets.

We shooted the footage with Black Magic Ursa Mini 4,6k. The best result was achived with 30mm lens. (We also made some takes with 50 and 18mm, but those were either to wide, or to narrow for us). We took about 20 different takes and choose the most epic one :)

Camera track was one of easier ones. I could basicly make it 2d track, even though there was a little bit of paralax. The result was good, so we could start with CG work.

We started with model made in ZBrush by one of my friends. The model was later used to make a rig and - what's most important - fur. Fur was created using Yeti and Maya, by a friend of mine, as was the rig and animation by 2 more collegues. Take a look at a first fur preview:

This couldn't have work if not for the most epic animation made by one of my co-workers, check it out:

Our hero was animated using Maya, and only then exported for fur and explosions simulation (which also were made in this same software).

After this, there was rendering time. We used Arnold and Maya to render all passes needed for compositing. Explosions light on monster itself were rendered seperatly and comped later on. Compositing itself was the most difficult challenge. Alot of motion blur made it nearly impossible to roto out, so we prepared mattepaint of all first plan buildings and trees and made some 3D projections inside Nuke. So all of which you can see in front of our Monster is in fact CG (and photo projections).

Compositing was the most complexe work I have ever had making my viral videos. It was hard to fight with motion blurs, rotos, flares (which I recorded on purpouse, because "they were cool" (I will probably never do it again)). Color of the frame was changing every 15 frames so there was alot of keyframe grade animation. Everything needed occlusion and shadows, so I made shadows using roto masks. All of it led to really heavy nuke script - which with 4k footage took almost 120 gb of RAM.

We also wanted to achive the sence of scale, so we simulated the flock of birds inside Houdini, and used its viewport alpha for compositing masks. (There was no need to render them, you wouldnt even notice).

We also needed some jets. Andrew Kramer was the best choice, as we already had Jet Strike Pack. We needed to fix some shaders so it was ready to render in Arnold, and it was good to go :)

Final rendering took about 5 minutes per frame. Feel free to count it. The video was 800 frames :)

All in all it was worth it. After 3 weeks the video has almost 770k views on youtube, and probably almost 100k+ on facebook and other medias. All of major media in Poland (including Playboy which is funny) wrote about it. Ad income stopped at 120 USD at the moment, but whats most important is massive subscribers increase. The channel had about 3,5k before, now it has almost 4k more :)

I just hope I wont let my new viewers down with my next video.