Course Work

Project 2 Image Compositing

Use Shake to create three separate composited images. One image should be two or more live action images setup for compositing with blue screen. Another image should be using a computer generated foreground element with a live action background. The final image should be a computer generated background with a live action foreground.

For my project I decided to create a short story using my different required photos.

Click any image to see a high quality version

A nefarious plot begins to unfold!

The villian makes his escape.

But will he get very far?

Justice is Served!

Here are the source images for the gallery shot.

The first step was to create a matte for the thief. Since I took the original in front of a blue screen, I thought a simple chroma key would be all that was neccessary. As it turned out, I had to do a rough rotoshape to get rid of all the junk not in front of the blue screen. Then I did a chroma key. That was not entirely successful, so I used a series of quickpaint nodes and reorder nodes to touch up the alpha channel of my matte. I then took both the simplified thief and his matte and did a fileout.

I then pulled my thief and matte in using a filein node. I used a spill supress node to eliminate some of the blue that still lingered around the edge of my thief. My next move was to add a shadow and reflection. The shadow was a simple drop shadow with 3d transform. For the reflection I copied my original thief and did a 3d transform with a rotoshape so only the proper part of him would reflect, then I darkened the image a lot. Finally a simple over node with a reverse of my thief matte allowed me to add the background.

Here are the source images for the escape shot.

This image contains absolutely no compositing on my part, I just thought it made the story clearer.

Here are the source images for the spiderman shot.

This shot was much harder because spiderman is clearly a cartoon. I tried to match his texture colors to the colors in the source image from the thief's shirt and the car under the lamp post. Once I had spiderman posed and lit in maya I exported it. I tried using brightness and color match nodes to make spiderman appear as if he actually were in the scene. To make it more realistic, I added shadows on the lamp post so if you look close you can see spiderman is actually on the lamp post. Next I had to add pull a matte for the garbage bag. I shot it in front of blue screen, but since it was a dark shiny bag, there was too much spillover to make a chroma key worthwhile. I used a rotoshape to pull the full bag, then I used another rotoshape to remove the handle so it looks like the thief is carrying the bag. After having the matte, I did a few brightness and color corrections and a move 3d to place the loot in the thief's hand.

Here are the source images for the villian hanging shot.

The first step was to create a matte for the thief. Like in the gallery shot I had to do a rough rotoshape to get rid of all the junk not in front of the blue screen. Then I did a chroma key. That was not entirely successful, so I used a quickpaint, multiply and reorder nodes to touch up the alpha channel of my matte. After getting a successful matte, I needed to do a lot of color correction on the thief. I photographed the thief indoors, but the scene is outdoors. The thief was tinted all the wrong color. I used two original pictures from outside to color replace the pants, shirt and skin of the thief. That still did not completely fix the yellow tint, so I had to color match and do more brightening. I also had to use some brightness nodes with gradients to fix the shadows which were not correct. After getting the thief's color close to where i wanted it, I moved, resized and added some blur.

I created the webbing in maya and did some subtle lighting. Once I exported it, all I had to do was attach it to the scene with an over node and do some resizing and movement. For the loot bag, I basically copied the matte from the spiderman scene and made some subtle lighting and brightness changes.