Responsible for:
Scene Setup, VFX, Lookdev & Rendering, Compositing & Postproduction
Non-commercial project, case study for VFX.
Original reference: vimeo.com/165276022behance.net/gallery/36903779/Raymond-Technosmart
by the concept of Alexey Kashpersky art.kashpersky.com/
Original reference: vimeo.com/165276022behance.net/gallery/36903779/Raymond-Technosmart
by the concept of Alexey Kashpersky art.kashpersky.com/
Software:
Houdini/Redshift/Fusion
XENO BRAIN is a client-pitch based visual and technical exercise. There was no specific art direction in the brief other than it should be a SciFi-medical exploration crossover so I chose to rely on the visual style from the work of Alexey Kashpersky, a CG artist whom I admire.
GENERAL APPROACH
The continuous one-shot nature of this animation meant there were no cuts, so lighting and scene setup had to be considered in such a way that it would work all along the path of the camera animation.
Traditional 3 point lighting (key/fill/rim) was used as a base with the main key light pushed into a more back-lighting scenario evocative of sci-fi shots. After the camera moves away from the initial scene, there is only ambient lighting left, the final look of the animation from this part being achieved only with the raw render layers and postproduction techniques.
Initially, native depth of field was used straight from the renderer, Redshift in this case, but finally I chose to rely on DOF added in post-production because of the one-shot nature of the animation which needed a lot of animated and custom adjustments, such as focus pulling, for the different scenarios that were in front of the camera at any point in time.
Houdini was used for the general scene setup: using Houdini's instancing system for redshift proxy objects as much as possible and with the use of a custom tool to calculate the curvature and crevices of the neuron's surface - this enabled the scattering of objects and shader treatment in specific ways according to the topology.
Houdini was also used for the various effects I wanted to add in this animation: the subsurface light traveling through the neurons from the electric impulses, the electric arcs, the micro-particles floating in the environment and to simulate the swaying movement of the blue cilia.
Lighting effects
The various secondary lighting effects present in the shot(electric arcs, electric arcs illumination on the neuron body, cilia tips, neuron interior light) were done strictly in post using various custom AOVs together with several glow types, blend layers and color correction.
The raw AOV behaves as a black and white mask, which gets multiplied by the diffuse filter to add hue variation and context, this blend gets merged with the beauty pass with an ADD operation. Optionally a glow can be used before the final ADD operation enhance the atmospheric effect.
