Sky Replacement

Update on my hydrant render - bad! Very bad! Desktop too slow to handle, and laptop keeps crashing. Have to find a way to fix this soon.

So meanwhile, I decided to do something else. I was walking home from school and I came across this big patch of grass with buildings in the background. It looked pretty interesting to me, so I took out my handphone and took a video of the place. Just a simple plan. I had no idea what I would do with it. This is what it looks like:

When I reached home, I transfered the footage to my laptop and analysed it - the quality was horrible, it looked totally flat and the sky was siply blow out with zero cloud detail. That gave me an idea - why not colour correct the shot, key out the sky and replace it with a better one? I proceeded, and I gave it a very dramatic mood, as if it was about to rain. I also found a sky photograph which I had taken earlier, and colour corrected it to match the footage.

Clouds Image


Color Corrected Clouds

Then, I realised that the camera was constantly moving throughout the shot and thus the sky image had to follow it. I wasn't familiar with Fusion's tracking tool thus I imported the original footage into boujou and tracked it there. This way, I would get accurate 3D camera information. I imported the tracked camera as a Maya camera file and imported that into Fusion. I then placed the clouds in 3D space, duplicated them and positioned and rotated them to form a kind of a panorama.

That was the final step in terms of 3D compositing. I cropped the shot to a widescreen one and rendered it out with motion blur enabled.

A very interesting practice with Fusion's color correction and 3D compositing tools. On that excuse, I got to use boujou as well =)