A few weeks ago, I have finished the flower bloom animation effect, now I need to synthesise the environment in which the flower grows, as I didn’t shoot this shot on location but found an image to use as a background so I need to change the environment of it, I chose to use ps to help me do this.

The ground in this scene was too smooth and didn’t look like a soil environment for flowers to grow in, so I added brown soil with stones to this image

When I finished the background for the first shot, I had a discussion with manos. One of the ideas he offered me was to add an additional top-to-bottom shot in front of my shot, which would better illustrate the story.

So I’m still using ps and have filled this image so as to give the camera plenty of room to move!

In order to make the plants grow more realistically into the real environment, I will use the roto tool in nuke to add shadows to the soil and ground.

Additional Narrative Footage

I’ve been thinking about how to represent the fact that the world has been invaded by zombies, and in addition to a lot of ruins, I think I need to add some dated blood and handprints or patterns or something. Therefore, I downloaded the material from the internet for learning and imported it into nuke for compositing, and added the element of grass, which also symbolises the blossoming of life in no man’s land.

First, I categorized my flower models into flowers, roots, and also leaves. I started with the root part of the flower, I needed to simulate the growth process and curve of the root, so I first used “add” to add its line, and then I added “for each” in order to create the effect for each root.

The node “pathdeform” is very useful for me, the principle is that I first create the point of the rhizome, and then combine the “tube” with the path of the point, so that I can simulate the rhizome of the flower.

The final “foreach” combines to the root of each plant, including when I make leaves, the process is the same.

This was the most challenging step in making the leaves, I wanted them to look more realistic. So I tried to add vellum to make the leaves wiggle randomly, but vellum takes a long time to calculate and it can’t make leaves growing on one side wiggle, so it was a failed method. But this reminds me that I can use the “noise” node.

On top of that, I need to make a fertile soil that incorporates the growth of the flowers and creates some collisions. At the most basic level, the first thing that needs to be done is to create a sphere and change its shape in order to fill this irregular sphere with particles. And set up the colliders (flowers and leaves) so that the leaves get a more realistic feedback when they grow and touch the soil.

Successfully, I did it. It was very not an easy challenge for me, I never learned to code so it was very hard for me and I had to refer to other people’s videos for the codes. But, I would go and try to figure out what the codes meant and which ones the controls were, which was very helpful. Next, I’ll be going for live action videos and 3D tracking in nuke.

At the very beginning, I looked for a background reference image, which is a panoramic view of London

I tried importing the models into maya to adjust their perspective as well as to adjust the camera angle.

This step is easier for me because I downloaded these models from the internet as I wanted to portray a surrealistic future world, so this saves me a lot of time.

Some of the models had problems with the mapping, so I had to import the models into Substance Painter to recreate the UVs and maps, and I was able to deeply feel that I was more proficient with these software compared to the first semester, which was a memorable process for me.

For this step I’m going to use the Arnold sky lights from maya, which will be more realistic as opposed to area lights and spot lights.

I rendered using the tiff format because I found that if I exported to the png format I would have some color formatting issues that were wrong, giving me a serious image.

I then use ps to adjust the tones to make them look more coordinated.

In this step I want to add a hazy mask (roto) behind the entire environment, this will make my scene look more spatial and make the front and back model’s look primary and secondary.

Add clouds – this is a very critical step. It will make the whole scene look more atmospheric!

I used project3d and the card node in conjunction with camera movement to help create a nudge effect in the scene.

Overall, I don’t think matte painting is very difficult, although this is my first go at this method. Probably because I would have used ps to adjust the image before, as well as adding nodes inside of nuke all from what I learned in the first semester. This experience was very useful for me, matte painting allows me to create wide shots that are realistic and difficult to photograph.

The first shot: abandoned urban buildings, tall buildings, wide-angle shooting, big scenes

The second shot: The street scene, the building pasted a huge poster, the big title reads “People and zombies coexist peacefully”

The third shot: The city bridge, traffic to traffic (symmetrical shot) the background is the huge night scene of the London Eye

The fourth shot: In a ruins, a plant is growing (simulated time-lapse photography)