Bash Comp

The roto animation pass was used as the guinea pig to setup the comp workflow. Render time was minimal so I had time to play in Nuke.

These were the first versions out of Unreal and proof that the engine can almost certainly replace the Maya viewport.

The idea is to have the broad stroke elements to essentially bash together. I setup a shadow pass to sit the car on the road by creating a level and custom sequence.

Unreal’s powerful gBuffer generates a series of passes by default, I figured the Ambient Occlusion pass would be super beneficial to help gunge up the front grill and add some depth to the interior.

The early version of the Bash comp script. The new High Quality Media export feature enables Alpha channel embedding on export. However, as the feature is still experimental, I was unable to export the gBuffer passes using the manager. To combat this I made an Alpha Channel from the main beauty to mask the other passes.

An early comparison between the original plate photography and the CG charger. The idea isn’t to create final pixel comp but to soften the CG to a point where the post visualisation doesn’t stand out. In the context of the cut it will be a lot less noticeable.

Using a smoke particle system I was able to fake some tyre smoke. Creating a non destructive workflow really helped me to slowly build the setups and get into a flow when bouncing between Maya, Unreal, Nuke and HitFilm.

Here is my concept animation for the Charger run through the Unreal render pass setup and bash comped in Nuke. The renders from Unreal collectively take less than 15 seconds, so all that was needed in Nuke was to update the paths and render.

The time saved during rendering allowed extra time tweaking the materials and positioning the lights for the main beauty render. I began to gently sit the Charger to the plate and to try and break the cleanliness of the passes.

This was more of a directors cut version, I went back into Unreal and tweaked the smoke, and antiqued up the car paint. In the bash comp I always tired to always add imperfections to the Charger. The renders are so fast I could have played around with the comps for days.