LAVA

Responsible for compositing and steam particles (Nuke Particles)

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Tracking

Surprisingly, there were a lot of issues in the beginning with getting a solid track.  I didn't foresee that as a problem so there was a little slowdown off the bat.

Luckily, I was also ready with a solution: Camera Projections!

I successfully re-projected the plate and replicated the camera movement.

As we moved on with the shot; however, we discovered that because they were projected it warped the plate in ways that made it hard to position and integrate the CG.

I gave the camera track another try and sure enough, it turned out great!

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Matte Painting

The matte painting was composed of two pictures: the sky and the mountains.

The mountains were manipulated a bit in Photoshop before being brought into Nuke for its superior selection tools.

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Integrating FX

After a couple of iterations, we were able to match the sidewalk texture to the real sidewalk very closely.  

As a result of this early precaution, very minimal color correction was needed to blend it into the plate.

An issue we ran into was getting an alpha to export from Houdini.

As a solution, I was able to grade the Z pass to isolate what we needed.

The lava was rendered without a backing to the sim so it required extensive color correction.

Before:

After:

I created an IDistort with custom channels coming from a noise pattern to generate heat distortion which helped blend the lava.

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Nuke Particles

Next, I created a very thin layer of smoke coming from the lava as it's exposed to the air using Nuke particles.