The power of imagination
During week 06 my biggest challenge was to create the heat distortion at the moment the boosters turn on. Additionally, with the help of Eaza we created the reflections in the glass of the library adding a further level of detail to our project.
After having an explanation from the Mentors in the last class. They detailed the creative process for developing a realistic heat distortion. Together with Professor Gaynor, we developed a script that allows us to deform the plate, creating the simulation of the distortion.
For this week’s previz we decided to feature all animation updates for all shots, and for shot 050 we decided to leave the previous iteration of boosters in context and update the naming and end portal. For this reason, the boosters look misaligned, but as soon as the fx department has the new iteration of them, everything will be updated.
With this script what I generate is the noise information that will be used to distort the plate. This noise has to be animated very smoothly to make a difference in the distortion and it must also be generated in the red and green channels. Later, this information is copied to the channel Idist.u and Idist.v respectively so that the distortion node can take this information.
To mask the distortion, I took as a mask the alpha information of the smoke pass that the Fx department had previously passed on to me.
After some contrast modifications I created two levels of masks that allow me to give more detail to the distortion. A first level creates a more pronounced blur in the hottest parts of the boosters and a second level expands the influence of the mask so that around the boosters you can also feel the heat generated by the hot smoke.
Glass Reflections
To create the reflections of the glasses in the library, I took the information of the 3D tracking that I had done for the layout of the scene. This information helped me to place cards completely aligned with each of the glasses with which the reflection interacts to mask the reflection pass that the lighting department gave me.
