edit: back up !
write up to follow.
Central - https://vimeo.com/151819852
North - https://vimeo.com/151819851
Beautiful work!
Very nice work!
Was this comped with Fusion?
Thanks!
Yeah, entirely vray → fusion → premiere, but using premiere just made us look into using davinci in the future instead.
We started off trying to do the final grade in premiere but it’s color tools are unbelievably shit, so we went back to doing them in fusion but a lot of minor changes at the end isnt a great workflow. lots of adding a value of 2 to the red in the midtones and reexporting to make the tiny consistency changes, then windows would tell us that file is already in use because the network takes an hour to catch up and we cant overwrite them yet… not ideal. and any minor change in premiere is garbage, it’s too difficult to control what happens.
we’re going to start outputting from fusion a neutral comp in 16bit and doing the final grade in davinci which I think is the only editing tool i’ve seen with decent color controls. Doing it the way we did didn’t compromise the job at all, but it wasn’t a smooth experience in the final few days.
Looks great.
We use davinci for our aerial shots and the grading is awesome, export speed is lightning fast and feedback response while working in amazing.
One word, go davinci if you can 
Stan
Premiere is more for video editing, is it not? Have you tried Adobe SpeedGrade? Magic Bullet Looks?
Also, great work. Very impressive. Care to share any wireframes? Raw renders? I always love seeing how far something is taken in 3D/post.
Grate JOB!!!
Beautiful work Neil!
It is, but at the end we needed to quickly add near microscopic values of colors in the highlights or shadows to get the consistency between shots that much better and it was just a massive ordeal - premiere didnt have the tools and adobe/magic bullet were too heavy handed with how far gone we were. So we did it in fusion, which when you have to re-export the entire comp every time was slow.
Here’s a before/after
mostly just adding drama/grading, but there’s a mask for every object to balance them individually. after that red grade was put over the pillows didnt look blue (and so on) so we had masks to correct and tweak everything. I’m only saying this because looking at it now it seems like we hardly did anything but it didn’t feel like that at the time…
Really truly some excellent work. Not to take anything away from the raw render (which looks great) but the post work really is excellent. I see you have the background/outside in the 3D and not comped in after, is this common for you? So that it is picked up in reflections I assume?
Fantastic stuff Neil.
Because I am a total ar*ehole, there was a reflection in the glass in a couple of shots that looked slightly off. Maybe a flat shot of the surrounding area? Anyway, everything else was absolutely top drawer and thanks for posting the before and after processing images, it’s always lovely to see stuff like that
And then the client wants something changed! I have spend hours in post just to have that happen. Also, once that change is made they expect the update to look exactly like the first one (minus the change).
Every shot in the final film is the first time it was ever rendered as a sequence - we got the client to sign off on still images and a grey movement in the edit to music before we would render a single frame. It was in the contract from day one that once they ‘sign off’ and we press render on a sequence, that’s it.
We’ve only got a 7 (slow) machine render farm here so it had to be kept tight. Before we’d rendered any sequences we knew how long it would take from our single frames so we could calculate and work around our limit.
there were 2100 frames total - base render with flat gi, just sun moving done with brute force, and up to 8 layers of glass. each ‘frame’ (10 layers in some) had a max of 1 hour that it could take. Our limit was exactly 14 days of non stop rendering - and we came in exactly 2 hours under at 8am on a monday.
Aj - I know exactly what you’re talking about Yeah the surrounding was difficult, the angled glass looking down on it gave us trouble when all we had was google maps. one of my regrets that we didn’t shoot it properly.
Macker - We used to comp in, but now we tend to do our test renders, figure the sky out alongside getting the lighting approved by the client, then drop it into the scene on a plane to make sure every reflection that would catch it is correct. hard to say if it makes a difference but I like getting it out of the way early
We started off with a storyboard of still images which got us the concept approved.
once that was approved i did an internal test of how the timing would work using the sheets from the pdf.
pass: jadesig
After that we started animating cameras and did a few revisions of the grey storyboard
north - https://vimeo.com/138797130
central - https://vimeo.com/137072761
pass: jadesig
One they approved and signed off on that, we went back to still images - one frame from each camera. No camera was rendered until that single frame (and any others relating to areas we can see in it) was signed off in writing. Kept the whole process very smooth.
By and large i’m very happy with how close we stuck to the original idea. some cameras got moved but our timing and pace was the first thing to get locked down which made everything else super easy. Not one frame over the exact number we needed was rendered.
Sounds fantastic. How as a team do you tackle these shots then? How many people work on something like this, and what’s the overall timescale?
In my office there’s one other 3D chap, but we never work on projects together. We each see through projects from conception to completion; but it’s an architects office not a vis-house so we never ever get sign off on anything. Everything can change at the drop of a hat.
It was 2 people to start with and a third joined on once we were getting the scenes detailed up. 4 weeks getting the storyboard/concept locked down (not really full time, some waiting in between meetings), 4 weeks of 3d production, then another 2 weeks of rendering and postwork/fine tuning the scenes we still hadn’t started rendering.
Thanks for posting, interesting to see the process followed.
Mistake that we’ve made in the past is rendering “low res” versions of the animation with full mats and lighting (due to client demand) Such a waste of time.
Do you always render the glass separately? I tried it on the last animation but must admit I couldn’t decide whether the saving in render time was worth the extra comping time.
beautiful work, and it’s really fascinating to have some insight on the process. I’d love to see more of this, especially on quality work such as this one.
Really stunning work. Congratulations.
So you say that each frame with all its glass layers were processed in 1 hour… in slow renderfarm machines?
Could you please share your render settings? are you using the current BF+LC method proposed with Vray3.3? At which resolution did you render the frames? Besides setting Reflection Maxdepth to a lower value for most materials… how do you get that great quality at that rendertime?
Congratulations again… beautiful videos.