Studio II

For my Studio II project at SCAD we decided to make a criticism about gun possession. The concept of this project is to make it look like it's ordinary to carry guns anywhere you go. We wanted to record footage all around the city and composite CG weapons onto people. I've been contributing to this project as both a compositor and a look development artist. In the early stages I started modeling a Glock-19 handgun, then moved onto UVing and texturing, as well as lighting and compositing it into the footage we recorded. We were also provided a Kel-Tec handgun model by Stephen Mok, who's a very talented artist in our group. Check out his content here: https://themokintosh.com/ . He sent over the model to me so that I can make it suitable for our postproduction process. Here's a LookDev rig of it rendered in Maya, Arnold:

So we had one great CG gun for our edit, but to have variety I worked on modeling the Glock-19, and this is how it turned out with the wireframe:

After that I moved on to UVing, and in the meantime we also recorded our live-action footage. I was responsible for directing and supervising some of the shoots and record the HDRI photography for most of them.

Note: These are .jpg files for the website, they don't show the dynamic range of the HDRIs.

The texturing is still a work in progress but this is how it looks so far:

And this is how it looks integrated into the second shot of the edit:

I will come back to this shot to make further adjustments in the tracking, but I wanted to get started on another shot which will be more challenging. In this shot, I'm adding the tips of empty bullet cases so that they look like they haven't been used before. Using the GeoTracker by KeenTools I managed to track all the cases and did some roto work that will be helpful further down the road.

After a quick render of each bullet from Maya, this is how the comp looks:

Seeing this render helped figuring out which tracks need more adjustments...

I figured that only integrating the tips of the bullets would cause less complications as far as lighting goes, but I still needed the mask from the case body since I don't want the inside of the tip to be visible so I just set it to "matte" in the Arnold visibility settings. I also started working on removing the tracking markers.

I'm also responsible for removing the tracking markers in two other shots. They still need some adjustments but this is how it's going so far:

For class 15 I put together my shots to have a feel how they look together. I noticed that there's a color miss match between them even though they're in the same color space so I'll need to make adjustments to that... I also need to finalize the tracking on the bullet shot, the ones that touch at their top and bottom are more challenging than I thought...

After some color correction and refinement on tracking and roto, here is a breakdown of the bullet case shot:

Here you can view the whole project: