VSFX 406 Blog 4: Observation Analysis Progress Report

My original plan for this project was to buy a glove and shoot insert footage of my own hand in front of a green/blue screen and composite it over the choppier hand shots in the film. As I considered the practicality of it though, I'm not personally interested in compositing, and when I actually think about what I'd be motivated to sit down and create, I decided that I want to make completely new shots in CG.

Hands are difficult to model and rig, but I happen to need a rigged hand for a model I'm making using 3D scans of myself, so I decided to get a rigged hand from turbosquid and put it to use in both projects.

I modeled a seam across all the fingers to match the real glove. I textured the arm using a mixture of a PBR material and distributing very fine hair particles across the surface in order to get that kind of patchy soft velvety look that the gloves have. I also spent some time working on a cloth simulation. The glove is still fully bound to the armature, and it's not doing any collisions, it's just wrinkling and stretching when it strays further from its base pose.

Next I patched together some frames from the film in photoshop and extracted the camera perspective using FSPY. I then used that 3D Camera to project onto new geometry and made a very basic model of the room.

This is just a test scene with some very janky animation, but I still wanted to test out the lighting and compositing to match the film / add some stylistic flair.

I tried to loosely duplicate the lighting of the set, and then introduce some spotlights (the ceiling still reacts to the lighting in the room but it can't cast shadows so I can shine lights through it). These spotlights follow the hand, making it the focal point of the scene and adding an edge light. I also added an ambient red light to the floor to look like intense bounce. Once I was pretty much happy with it, I exported it as a PNG sequence and added some elements of film emulation. I crunched the contrast a bit, added halation, camera blur, and grain.

This is a limited set (no fourth wall) but it should be enough to insert some fun shots into the film.