Flash Film Works uses Fusion Studio’s node-based 3D environment,
including the Catcher node, with rotoscoping and projections to complete
VFX shots for adventure series ‘The Librarians’.
Flash Film Works Completes VFX for ‘The Librarians’ with Fusion Studio |
Flash Film Worksis using Fusion Studio to complete Turner Network Television’s supernatural adventure series‘The Librarians’, which requires numerous VFX shots for each weekly episode. Founded in 1993 by VFX supervisor William Mesa, a winner of Emmy, VES and Academy Technical Achievement Awards, Flash Film Works itself has won a number of Emmy Awards and has supplied VFX work to the major film and TV studios 20th Century Fox, Disney, HBO, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros. |
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Working to a broadcast time frame, they need software that will help quickly and efficiently build and finalize a large number of complicated shots, which is what they can do with Fusion. As examples, Jeremy talked about building out shots that needed damage applied to a car, a convincing teleporting membrane and an evil, photoreal minotaur who chases the Librarians and punches through a heavy metal door. |
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“For the membrane transporting scene, the characters walk through a door and pass through the membrane, which pops as they go through into another dimension. In Fusion, I set up the shot so that I could rotoscope the characters. Then I rendered out the rotoscoped images as a frame or two, and projected the image onto the geometry, making the task simple and fairly quick. Another interesting shot completed in Fusion was a crash scene with damage to the front of a car. “I did this completely in Fusion, again working on a 3D track. Fusion’sTrackercan detect and follow one or more pixel patterns across frames in the shot. The tracking data can then be used to control the position or values of other tools used in the composition,” Jeremy said. |
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“We took a frame of the car as the reference, displaced it with a Displace 3D node and lit it to get the shadows. We then projected it onto geometry - that is, the image of the car onto that displaced geometry 3D-tracked on the car. Before Fusion developed itsCatcher node, I would have had to render it out and import it back into Fusion.” TheCatcher materialis used to ‘catch’ texture-mode projections cast from the Projector 3D and Camera 3D tools in Fusion. The intercepted projections are converted into a texture map and applied by the Catcher material to the geometry it is connected to. By connecting the Catcher to the diffuse texture map of the material applied to the image plane, and then switching the projection from light mode to texture mode, Fusion knows to apply the projected image as atexture map. |
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One advantage of this approach over light projection is that the Catcher can be used to project alpha values onto an object, without lighting enabled. Another advantage is that the Catcher is not restricted to the diffuse input of a material, so that you can project specular intensity maps, or reflection and refraction maps if necessary. “Without an extra render-and-re-import step, being able to rotoscope what you are projecting or do a quick paint on something is useful and very efficient,” said Jeremy. “We needed to complete a few versions to get our car shot right, but it was almost complete at the first go. That is, we had the technical result quite quickly, and the further iterations were artistic changes, not technical corrections.” www.blackmagicdesign.com |