Role: Lead Compositor + 3D Artist
Software: Nuke + Cinema 4D
Created at We Are Royale

Amazon’s Electric Dreams series was one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever had to pleasure to participate on. This sci-fi promo was filled with amazing animation and compositing work from all the fine folks at We Are Royale. Great example of how we worked together as a team.  My main focus on this project was Compositing.

Before going full compositing mode, I helped out with some C4D work. We used Cinema 4D along with Octane Render to create all the beautiful CG animation. I jumped on Cinema 4d to help out with some lighting and setting up renders. For rendering, I created presets that included beauty passes, lighting passes and layer masks. All utilizing Octane’s multipass system.

Being the only compositor for this spot kept my hands pretty full but also gave me a lot of creative freedom. I came up with a system where we only used lighting passes (aka light selects) to adjust the final renders in compositing. Light selects show the contribution of each light in the final render and already include all of the good stuff like reflections, speculars, etc.

By adding these light render passes and with some tweaking, we were able to have control over light intensity and color in Nuke (even animate them!). Depth of Field was mostly done in Nuke by using custom aperture maps and animating focus distances. Atmosphere and particle fx were also done in Nuke by using its robust 3D system. Finally, we did some projection mapping to add the model’s face back into our CG animation to help give it some more human-like characteristics.