STEP INTO RIFT - OCULUS
Edge of Nowhere
Role: Lead Compositor
Software: Nuke
Compositors: Renzo Reyes, Kevin Kim, Thomas Smith III, Scott Crawford
Created at We Are Royale
Armed with a stellar team of Nuke compositors, we delivered these three amazing spots for Oculus: Edge of Nowhere, Climb and Lucky’s Tale. These were some of the first games that shipped with the Oculus Rift system. As Lead compositor, I was in control of establishing the look for all three in game cinematics inside Nuke. Once approved by client and ADs/CDs, all other compositors jumped in to help with the project.
Other tasks as Lead Compositor included making sure that there were no bottlenecks in the compositing pipeline. These duties ranged from supervising other artists, troubleshooting nuke scripts, paint and clean up, setting up template comps to rebuild beauty using render passes, tracking and lens distortion workflows, building particles effects in Nuke (snow, debris, dirt) and helping other compositors push things forward to meet the deadline.
Other tasks as Lead Compositor included making sure that there were no bottlenecks in the compositing pipeline. These duties ranged from supervising other artists, troubleshooting nuke scripts, paint and clean up, setting up template comps to rebuild beauty using render passes, tracking and lens distortion workflows, building particles effects in Nuke (snow, debris, dirt) and helping other compositors push things forward to meet the deadline.
The Climb
Lucky's Tale
EDGE OF NOWHERE - COMP FX BREAKDOWNS
Most of my time was spent working on the “Edge of Nowhere” spot, both the live action and cg sections. All the particle and atmospheric effects were created in compositing. I used a combination of Nuke’s particle system along with stock elements and simple noises placed on cards across the entire scene. Alembic files and depth/ world passes were used to create holdout mattes.
It was my duty as a Lead Compositor to use all the techniques and elements at my disposal to make sure we hit the mark and achieve the look/feel we were going for. The clips below show how all the fx were achieved in comp using Nuke,
COMPOSITING CG OVER LIVE ACTION
For the live action portions on Edge of Nowhere, we relied heavily on matte paintings. Those matte paintings wereprojected onto geometry in Nuke to create the frozen environments. We had amazing matte painters crafting beautiful images for almost all the shots in the spot.
Other shots included frozen elements/ fx created either in Maya or Cinema 4d. In comp, it was our job to make sure it all looked well integrated, regardless of where it came from. See if you can catch those snowflakes hitting and sticking to the lens on one of the shots. Subtle but yet effective.
STILLS
