Car Fire
- Max Austin
- Aug 1, 2020
- 2 min read
This project would not have been possible without the help of two of my constant collaborators and friends, Kush Das (FX) and Kiersten Yahn (lookdev/shading/lighting). We had talked about doing it for a while before we finally checked out some equipment and went to the race track in Savannah to film our plate. We visited the site multiple times to get different lighting scenarios at different points throughout the day and block out the shot. Luckily, this was just a few weeks prior to COVID so we had plenty to work on while we quarantined.
I started the process by taking our plates (shot on the URSA Mini) into Resolve to get them into the correct color space for Nuke.
Once inside Nuke, I did some precomp by degraining and undistorting the plate. That was then written out and read back in as they are computationally heavy nodes.
After that I tracked the footage using the camera tracker inside of NukeX as well as some hand tracks and placed temp geo for the car and the environment that could help CG placement.
Some minor cleanup was needed. First, I removed a porta potty in the background just to improve the overall quality of the image. Second, I realized once I started getting some preliminary FX renders that the direction of the smoke did not match the direction of our flag. As opposed to reworking the sim I decided to replace the flag using stock footage from pexels.
The flag used a combination of keying and rotoscoping to isolate. Then I did some color adjustments and tracked it into place.
The car shadow and ambient occlusion were added using standard methods.
The AOVs for the car were shuffled out and then recombined for added control over the look of the car. These passes were individually tweaked to improve the integration.
After some feedback, we decided the car looked too clean. So I grabbed some burn textures from online and blended them into the car to make it look like the paint was melting and flaking off.
I also set up an iDistort node with some noise channels to make it look as though the paint was bubbling up.
The FX were integrated into the shot and all that remained were some final important touches.
These included heat distortion from the fire, a hint of lens dirt, the re-distortion of the image with the CG elements, some light bloom, a final color grade, and the regrain.
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