Enchanted Tree

Synopsis: A group of exploratory probes have been dispatched to investigate a tree showing supernatural qualities.

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Breakdown

Nuke Script

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Precomp

First thing's first, I degrained the footage and wrote it out. Then I did a camera track to send off to Maya with some temp geo in place. While doing the 'Glowing Tree Effect' I realized the 2D track worked better than the camera track so I switched to that afterwards.

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Probes

The next step (after modeling, rigging, texturing, lighting and rendering) was to integrate the CG probes. I broke them up into 2 separate render layers, one to go behind the tree and one in front. It was going to be the easiest way to isolate them for the eventual tree roto that would separate them.

The AOVs were shuffled out and recombined for an easy time grading them. Additionally, I used the utility passes and Cryptomatte to create masks when needed. These passes came in handy once I realized I would need to add some interactive lighting from the scanners onto the probes.

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Tree Effect

The tree effect wasn't too challenging to create. I used a series of cracked texture images unified by one I hand painted to get the shape. I had an erode node keyframed so that they would slowly open as time went on. I also added some noise to break up the intensities which helped create different saturation and values of color. Next, I started stylizing with some exponential glow, chromatic aberration(per my own Gizmo), and god rays.

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Scanner

I did some R&D beforehand to figure out what the best approach was to the scanning effect.

I tried doing layers in Arnold with the wireframe shader but that never quite fit so instead I did the whole effect in Nuke.

The advantage to using Nuke's wireframe shader is that you can set up the whole scene and stylize it without going through the process of rendering since it's all in comp. It wasn't particularly heavy either so you could update and tweak the effect in real time.

After reading in the geo and the camera I put the wireframe shader on it, stacked some glows to get the right falloff, and added some chromatic AB to finish it off.

The scanners on the probes were created via animated rotoshape with several noise patterns to give more randomness to them.

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Relighting

Since the scanners were supposed to be very bright I needed to do some interactive lighting on the environment to make the effect feel more grounded.