Immersive Cocoon "2011"

[oliverz3d]

Thought I'd share a short I directed and handled all the 3D & rendering on - with the exception of Y-Depth passes that involved work by my vfx collaborator Quan Tran.

The digital set was rendered entirely in V-Ray at 1080HD to multi-channel EXR's, and takes place within a setting inspired by the penultimate scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The teaser also stars the lead actor from that film, Keir Dullea.

Live action was filmed multi-camera, against greenscreen atop a backlit plexi floor on a shoestring budget and the entire production took place over a 27 month period.

You can view in 720 HD at: http://vimeo.com/21465475
Or in 1080HD at: http://vimeo.com/21463365

A Making Of video is also available at: http://vimeo.com/22793735
Extra info at: http://www.i-cocoon.com

Here are a couple of stills, v-ray main pass render and final composite:

[lukx]

Nice job! What method did you use for rendering? Universal or IR+LC ?

[oliverz3d]

Brute forced it. This was a unique scene where general principles I found were not effective.

The amount of light sources in the scene & the high level or ornament, made it very challenging & time consuming to attain a clean IR+LC output, and that's not even covering the flickering issues that would arise and frankly I did not want to deal with. Granted, several shots were primed for caching, as only the camera moved, but found it best to stick with brute force.

Given the number of light sources, area lights were problematic and relying on a minimal number produced a flatter render than using light material. This is also why BF was so effective (not to mention LC doesn't work properly with light material) - because I relied on light material, it was an optimal match. Double sided light material was applied to planes (the top of the plexi geometry) that were hidden to camera, but not GI & reflections and brute forced with 2 bounces. No more bounces were necessary given the amount of sources in the scene. That was overall very effective and viable, I found it to be the best solution and I was able to get clean shots at 1080HD, in 20-40 minutes a frame on average, on a dual 6 core workstation.

The downsides were a couple of shots that required supplementary area lights to match those on set, where light material wasn't as effective, obviously the addition of such lights in a bf situation has a big impact on render times (the two lights in addition to light material doubled render times). The other issue, was the Cocoon shadow was for example on the ceiling, too noisy. Pushing brute force higher was inefficient, so instead I rendered a separate ceiling pass, lit by an area light.

[super gnu]

cgi is very nice.. good clean look to it, and very nice camera work..

i would say.. the greensceening lets it down a bit.. pretty soft edges on yer man there... he looks a bit stuck on in some shots.. althoiugh thats a real difficult one to comp into.

[oliverz3d]

Thanks super gnu.

Other factors also may have had a bearing there. Shots 3 & 5 looking at Keir in the alcove have pretty soft edges and shot 3 the footage was quite sharp, but shot 5 was probably the softest overall. While the shot was filmed with an excellent lens, the focusing wasn't 100%, so I think some consistency compensation seeps into it, over compensate the edges to better sync with the overall softer tone and edges in the next shot looking at him... Rushed shoot too, I anticipated overtime with Keir alone and then had to shoot a second actor due to rights clearance delays on the same day; both those shots were cropped in off the 4K plate which exasperates the focus issue, studio was a bit too small for the shoot, spill, etc., and the compositing process became quite convoluted. I can say he didn't integrate as well without that edge manipulation, perhaps needed more tweaking in hindsight, but overall other issues stood out more. As you say, certainly a difficult scenario to comp into.

[3DMK]

Great Work!

The main thing I see is that the Room is looking a bit flat. in this lighting situation, I understand This is very hard. IMO the walls should have some reflections to give a bit of contrast & movement in the room.

Also I think the lighting of the Man could have been better matched with the 3D in some areas.

But hey....other than that....great WORK.

[oliverz3d]

Thanks 3DMK.

I found the same thing while I was working on it: while many of the paint shaders started off matte, I ended up adding subtle reflections to them, a very slight gloss, but of course that had a noticeable impact on render times and with the uplighting you just get a hint. Put more gloss into the moulded elements that picked up the light better and covered less surface area. Couldn't push it too far of course, but I may have toned it down too much when tweaking the latter stages. But yes, certainly recognized and felt like it was an uphill battle with the flatness. It's also why I made the statues more reflective and chose polished black laquer furniture with white cushions. At one point I was testing dark leather (furniture, books, etc.), but because of the lighting scheme it just doesn't register well. Also ended up creating 9 to 12 subtle paint variations across the 3 primary colors to add more nuance, gradation to the scene. So much was done to add nuance, but it could've benefitted from more.
Beyond the nature of the scene (the room even looks cg-ish at times in Kubrick's film), I also feel the final grade could be better, was never satisfied with it, and that got unnecessarily complicated for reasons I won't go into. At full res & the larger its seen, the nuance comes through better, but becomes lost the lower res its viewed.