CG|VFX reel 2015

CG|VFX reel 2015 from Denis Kozlov on Vimeo.


My reels tend to become shorter and shorter. Here goes the new one – a generalist's reel again, so I have to take the blame for most of non live action pixels – both CG and compositing. With only a couple of exceptions, the work has been done in Houdini and Fusion predominantly. Below follows a breakdown describing my role and approach for each shot.

 

Direction and most visual elements for this version of the shot. The main supercell plate created and rendered in Houdini with a mixture of volumetric modeling techniques and render-time displacements. The rest of the environment elements including atmospherics, debris and compositing were created in Fusion. My nod for a little twister spinning under the cloud goes to Marek Duda.

For this animated matte-paint I brought the output of ocean simulation (Houdini Ocean Toolkit) from Blender into Fusion for rendering and further processing. The fun part were the shore waves of course, I almost literally (though quite procedurally) painted the RGB displacements animation for this area. Compositing included creating interactive sand ripples and some volumetric work for the fog. Resulting base setup allows for camera animation.

For this piece from a Skoda commercial I've created a water splash and droplets in Houdini, as well as integrated them into the plate. (All moving water is CG here.) A lot of additional work has been done on this shot by my colleagues from DPOST, including Victor Tretyakov and Jiri Sindelar.

Keying and compositing live action plates and elements.

A bit reworked sequence from a spot for Czech Technical University that I've directed in 2014. Most visual elements are own work, Houdini and Fusion. More details on the original spot are at http://www.the-working-man.org/2014/03/ctus-faculty-of-mechanical-engineering.html

A TV commercial demo: particles and compositing in Fusion. Production and a magic coal ball by Denis Kosar.

A little piece utilizing the same particles technique as in the previous shot. This time all visual elements are own work.

Direction and all visual elements (well, except for a kiwi texture probably) in my usual Houdini/Fusion combination. Strawberry model is completely procedural; more examples of procedural assets generation are present in the previous posts of this blog.

For this commercial, aside from VFX supervision I created the flamenco sequence graphics, two pieces of which are presented here. Assembling procedural setup in Fusion allowed for interactive prototyping with the director on site. Setup involved mockup 3D geometry rendered from the top view into a depth map on the fly, which in order (after direct 2d adjustments) was feeding a displacement map for the ground grid with individual boxes instanced over it. After laying out the background designs for the whole sequence, setup was quite seamlessly transferred into 3DSMax (using displacement maps as an intermediate). Rendered in Mental Ray and composited with a live action dancer plate in Fusion again. Matte pulling was mostly done by Jiri Sindelar, the rest of the digital work on the sequence is pretty much mine.

Set extension for a scene from Giuseppe Tornatore's Baaria. I used Syntheyes for 3D-tracking and XSI for lighting/rendering of the street model (provided by the client). Composited in Fusion.

Keying/compositing for another shot from the same film.

And yet another compositing shot from few years back.

 

Last, but not least is the music:

"Black Vortex" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/


And if you've made it till here, you might also find interesting my previous post on procedural modeling. And of course for those interested in cooperation, the email link is at the top of the page.