Studio I - The Swimmer

I dedicated my Studio I project for my swimming career that helped me become the person that I am today and gave me many opportunities along the way. I wanted to capture the atmosphere and tension that swimmers have to go through when we compete at the highest level. This project was challenging in many aspects, but having the topic stand so close to me helped me achieve what I wanted.

There were a total of 11 CG shots and 8 live action green screen plates I composited in the swimming pool arena. Here' s a breakdown of how each Nuke script looks for the corresponding shots:

In a few cases, I had issues with rendering in 3D so I had to improvise in Nuke to resolve them...

The first issue came from the textures maps I wanted to have on the scoreboard. Using the SCAD renderfarm often resulted on flickering and was simply inconsistent with rendering the "Omega" sign, so I came up with a solution in Nuke. Using the "PositionToPoints" Node allowed me to get a point cloud of the 3D scene and place 2D elements exactly where I want them. Exporting the camera as an .abc file gave me the same persepctive as well.

The second issue I was facing was the ripple effect on the water. I didn't want to just have a flat surface for it so at first I thought I'd use a bump map in Maya to get a more natural look. However, the render time made it very slow to make adjustments and the end result looked very CG. So again, I went into Nuke to create the ripple effect using the previous method combined with an "idistort" node, which only effected the transmission and specular chanels in a very specific area to create a natural looking ripple effect that I can easily modify.

This trick worked so well that I ended up using it in every shot where the water was visible.

Here I also include a gallery of screengrabs of each green screen shot to give you a better understanding of the starting point and the end result.