Negotiated Brief revisited

I'm trying to catch up with some of the old work and fine tune it for my showreel. I started with the heart idea from the negotiated projected last year. Although it doesn't look that exiting, the techniques of 2 1/2D, camera mapping and combining CGI elements with real live footage are the bread and butter of digital compositors nowadays. So I hope that this clip shows some skills on those levels.

I mainly changed the stuff George pointed out at the feedback tutorial. There were some issues with dark edges around the layers of the 2D background, that was fixed by simply adding unpremultiply nodes. There also was an issue with a halo around the CG heart. That was a bit more complicated. The reason for the halo was that the depth pass of the heart was separate from the depth pass of the forest. Although I knew that from the start I originally tried to use the same blur node for both depth layers and animate the refocus effect when the heart comes into the foreground. But since both depth layers have a different range of values, I either got the heart sticking out too much from the background or blurred. When I tried to make up for it I ended up with the front of the heart in focus, the rest completely out of focus- that's were the halo came from. So I could have used a separate blur node and readjust the focus by hand, but I just went back to Maya and rendered out a depth pass that included both, background layers and CG heart. That definitely made things easier, but there is still a problem with edges everytime I use a depth pass with a lens blur, but I did my best to avoid it.

Other than that I just kept the depth of field down, kept the colors more saturated, added a hint of light wrap around the heart and lens distortion.

Here's the original one:


Here's the breakdown of the new one:

Heart VFX Breakdown from Peter Stache on Vimeo.