The House of Curves

a photoreal CGI city through to a live action office seamlessy

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Superfad NY Director Michael Wiehart had next to no time to create a VFX heavy commercial in which a camera flies through a nighttime cityscape and in through an office window to find a late night office worker, who turns out to be the janitor. Via Stuart Robinson of Superfad London, we picked up the brief and Daffy launched quickly into previz and model building.

Former tHoC students Dan Prince and Andrew Savage got to modelling the surrounding Skyscapers whilst Ulf Lundgren set about building the complex offices we see as that the camera scrapes past the nearby interiors.

We used .exr rendering for high dynamic range compositing, lots of cloud, mist, lighting and extra matt passes helped create a moody looking final city.

The interior part of the move was shot based on the timings of the previz. This footage was then tracked, and based on the fixed aspects of the architecture, such as the columns and the depth of the main corridor, we inverse engineered the rest of the block. The footage moving through the inside of the corridor was useful, but we had nothing for the heli style camera approach, we therefore stitched our previz flythrough to the accurate animated camera inherited from the tracking process. using projection technology, and lots of fiddling, Ulf textured the CGI office to match perfectly on the takeover frame, then rendered the whole move up to the takeover point.

Ulf took the design of the hero office as a cue to building the interiors of all of the other offices and corridors, that we clearly see on the approach. These very hyperrealistic interiors, combined with lots of mattes and lighting gradient passes enabled Daffy in comp to get an accurate looking building with the right amount of rondom varience to hint that only a few light sources were turned on at such an early hour.

Superfad
Director - Michael Wiehart
Producer - Christina Roldan
Liaising Producer - Stuart Robinson

tHoC
VFX/CGI Supervisor - Andrew Daffy
Supervising TD - Matt Estela
Modelling - Dan Prince & Andrew Savage
City Texturing - Cathy Murray

LOST LINER
Interior Modelling, Lighting, Texturing, Photo-projection - Ulf Lundgren

fx3x
Stabilisation, roto - Kristijan Danilovski

Software
Maya 2008, After Effects CS3 & Photoshop CS3

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under news, show and tells, studio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.