The House of Curves

MOXI helps tHoC create dreamlike painterly effects for James Killough’s - Losing Her

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Daffy attended the shoot as vfx supervisor, consulting with director of photography Rain Li to ensure the digital requirements were as unobtrusive as possible. To that extent Daffy opted to not shoot bluescreen, realising that it would play havoc with colour correction and compositing later. Instead small tracking markers were placed on the blank wall, and Daffy carefully measured the room dimensions and camera information to assist with tracking.

Meanwhile Matt Estela was investigating options for simulating paint strokes. While there are many plugins in both 2d and 3d, none achieve a convincing natural behavior. Matt then remembered a siggraph paper from a few years prior, real-time chinese calligraphy simulation. He contacted the creator, who graciously offered tHoC a copy of his software called ‘Moxi’.

The footage from the shoot was tracked using Syntheyes, and a camera was exported to Maya. Daffy then designed a childlike painting that was sympathetic to the movements of the child actor. While the design and animation was refined, Matt wrote an exporter so that the animation in Maya could be exported to Moxi, this way identical runs of the paint strokes could be created with different ink densities, paper saturation, paper grain, all so that the final result could be carefully controlled when compositing.

The painstaking task of isolating the girl from the backdrop was handled by Simon Bronson. Using a combination of colour keying and rotoscoping, he was able to drop the paint strokes between the girl and the wall, subtly adding light and shadow so that the artwork looked like it truly existed.

Extra elements were created but not used, including passes of the live-action becoming affected by the paint strokes, swirling and distorting over time. While amazing to look at, it was deemed distracting to the final shot, so was removed. tHoC look forward to using this effect on another project however!

Credits:
Director/Writer: James Killough
Director of Photography: Rain Li
Vfx Supervisor: Andrew Daffy
Cgi Supervisor: Matt Estela
Compositor: Simon Bronson
Moxi software by: Nelson Chu
http://visgraph.cse.ust.hk/MoXi/

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 1:34 pm and is filed under studio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.