- Posts: 31
- Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2022 11:42 am
- Real Name: Femi Rex
Very detailed and careful model of the actor with an animation rig. Track camera with Syntheyes or similar (Fusion's CameraTracker probably won't get it done, but you might get lucky. Match-animate the model to the actor's movements. Depending on what you want the replacement bits to look like, you might be able to build them out of the same model as was made for the actor. In this case, it was probably a procedural modeling approach using Houdini or Blender Geometry nodes. Could be done in any DCC, of course, but procedural would be the most efficient.
Loose roto of the portions of the actor to be removed and detailed roto around the interface areas. Cleanplating to remove the limbs that are to be replaced. The camera track can help with this if you model the environment and project the plate onto it.
Shoot HDRi in the environment the same day as the rest of the shoot to make lighting easier. Light and render the CG version of the actor and composite it into the cleanplate. Meticulously paint in the bits that are behind the CG. This is probably the hardest part since those bits weren't visible to the camera and thus have to be stolen from other portions of the reel or synthesized entirely. Maybe some of the recent AI applications like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion could help there. I'm not entirely sure if they could be leveraged for that kind of thing or not, but I'd rather spend a couple of days experimenting with them than a couple of weeks doing paint. Even if failure meant that I'd have to do the paint anyway. Risk/reward.
This is the kind of thing that takes a team of experienced artists several weeks.