Author: Roos Stolk

For the last few weeks, we worked on the hot air balloon festival. This is a project where we used the balloons we made in Maya (I recreated the hot air balloon from scratch) in a template given to us (the background everybody uses) We were told to add our own composition to this, for example, we were told to add a spaceship or some rockets.

For my composition, I went with the sea life above ground. this idea I got this from Coldplay’s Up & Up video. I found these green screen images of different sea animals and added these to my project. The last time I showed a composition of my idea for the hot air balloon festival it was still a very basic overview of my idea. throughout the weeks I added my recreated hot air balloon that in my opinion is more to my liking for a hot air balloon. I think it also fits better in the scene than the hot air balloon I made before. Also when you look in the background you still see the building that will fall to the ground due to the particle force created by the orca. But now I also added the different buildings around it so it won’t be looking like a weird lonely building. After adding everything I needed to color correct everything so it all fitted a bit better into the image.

In the nodes, you can see how I added the different files that I found and a part where the particles have been put into the nuke file. I had to work with keylight to remove the green screen background and Rotoscope out different parts of the buildings so it would fit the mountain. As for the particles that move together with the orca swimming through the sky. In the end, I did these particles in Maya since it is still too difficult to create this in Nuke. I created a particle trail in the exact shape I wanted it to go in the video. I added the hot air balloon video in Maya to see the right path the orca would go in.

In this week’s class, we got extra material to work with. Gonzalo gave us a nuke file where we got an example of the different techniques we did over the last few weeks. He gave us this video where he removed and added different parts. On the left, you see a word added on the heater, in the top middle the emergency exit gets removed and on the lockers you see the yellow poster getting removed. and lastly, a paper on the board gets removed. I removed the only paper that is still on the wall and added a different poster on the lockers. In the video, you will see these changes happening. Even though we got given these different tools to erase or add different things, I still had a littlest of a difficult time. I feel that over these weeks we learned a lot of different things and I feel myself growing in the understanding of this new program I learn to work with called nuke. Even though I learned a lot I still feel that I am not nearly as good as I want to be. I have to practice more of these kinds of things so I can create whatever I like.

For this week we had to work with 2.5D tracking so we could follow the area the poster was going while the camera was also panning around. This was quite the same technique as the tracking we did to the phone in an earlier class. There was a difference in this one by the pole going in front of the poster. So this class we kind of relearned the correct way of planar tracking and adding an image to this track. For the pole, we did a simple rotoscope and connected this to the planar tracking so the pole will follow the camera movement and still overlay the extra image we inserted in this video. I struggled a little with the planar tracker here, you can see this if you look closely at the bottom right corner of the added poster. You can see it moving differently from how it is supposed to look.

I have started to create my own composition for the hot air balloon festival assignment. I added different elements to see what would happen to the composition and to make it a bit more interesting. for now, I decided to go with the extra element of having sea animals in the sky. The idea of sea animals moving around in a different place than the sea is something I enjoy seeing very much. This idea started from the music video of Coldplay, in this video they have multiple sea animals going through the sky. It starts off with a sea turtle going through a subway station, and after that you see big whales going through the sky. I love the video for all its abnormalities and differences in sizes, see below images of these animals shown in the Coldplay Up & Up music video.

There is still a lot that I have to change, like the color is not matching with all the elements and I also want to add particles to the sea animals as they swim through the sky. The hot air balloons I use are the once I made during the Maya classes, everybody had to make one of these hot air balloons. I still plan on remaking this hot air balloon so I can look up better references and sketch my own hot air balloon. so looking at this image now I still have a lot to do to make is more like the way I want it to look.

This is the first sketch (layout) of how I want my hot air balloon festival to look. So the template is made out of 3 different sea animals swimming with the 3 hot air balloons in the sky. I also added an extra element in the back, this is a building that is supposed to get destroyed by the orca in the background. this is where I want to use the particles for to create a connection between the orca and the building. It is a video that I found that already had the building breaking now I only need to make it so the timing is right and recoiler it to fit the rest. also, the building looks a bit lonely by itself so I feel the need to add extra buildings so it will look more like a city.