Charlotte's Web

[grassynoel]

Here is an animated matte I completed for Charlotte's Web. The shot was a nodal pan and took about 10 discreet paintings camera mapped onto a 3d tracked cyclorama. The trees and grasses were replaced with 3d elements so they could blow in the wind.

http://www.glennmelenhorst.com/Mattes%20and%20environmental/CW/endframe_comped.jpg

There is more info and an animated version of the shot on my website...

http://www.glennmelenhorst.com

Cheers.

Glenn Melenhorst

[B. Kachel]

Very nice. Looks very real.

[grassynoel]

Thanks,
By comparison, here is the original...

http://www.glennmelenhorst.com/Mattes%20and%20environmental/CW/endframe_baseplate.jpg

Glenn

[Gonzalo Golpe]

Hey, I like so much this work. Now I´m watching to your website. Very interesting and instructive :wink:

[tide78]

wow man, sweet, I saw the movie the other day, never guessed the shot was a matte. Very practical, and convincing. :D

-Z

[thenextside]

Nice work. I checked out your stite as well. Very cool.
Cheers,
Tim

[Speculart]

Very impressive Glenn. That is one LONG camera move.
Love your site, fantastic characters.

[grassynoel]

(That is one LONG camera move. )

yeah, it was almost nodal but there was just enough parallax to require the ground/hills etc to be modelled in 3D. Still, the barn and house were kept as 2d which was a saving as I was prepared to build them in 3D too. All the trees were replaced with digital doubles as the director wanted them to blow in the wind otherwise I would have kept more of them from the original plate too.

Glenn

[nickmarshallvfx]

Wow that is incredible! Awesome work, it looks completely real!!

[grassynoel]

http://www.iloura.com/content.asp?page_id=11&section=making_of

Here is a link to our new 'making of' for Charlotte's Web.

Glenn Melenhorst.

[tarta]

Wooow. it's looks so real!




www.serfx.com (http://www.serfx.com)

[tarta]

Do you know this guy?

http://www.demainclundi.com/claudeschitter/







www.serfx.com (http://www.serfx.com)

[caulfield]

Hey Glenn,

that Charlotte making of is great. Do you know what sort of tools the 3D guys used for the water and snow elements? It's beautiful stuff.

The only thing I didn't like about that piece though was the character animation/direction. It was neither cartoony or real, but either way I didn't really catch the performances.

Luckily your matte work saved the day :)

[grassynoel]

Heh, I was also director of animation for the Wilbur shots (mind you it was just the full cg Wilbur, not the face replacement shots.) It was tricky as our pig was only used to help Wilbur act in ways a real pig couldn't, like bust through a fence or slide in the mud. We have a new making of on our website... www.iloura.com (http://www.iloura.com)

For the water we used a real mixture of techniques. We used both realflow and hand painted mattes/masks. The shot where Wilbur slides on his back through frame was generated using real wave to make the wakes, then displaced in Vray and combined with a bunch of noises and procedurals. The tiny splashes of water were rotoscoped splashes from real droplets which were distributed with a particle system which also generated a tiny ripple in the displacement map. It got pretty complex. We also tried to shoot as many real water effects as possible so many times a splash starts as realflow but ends as a real element.

The snow was all p-flow in Max. I made most of the snow and basically built it up in layers. Paul Buckley here at work is a snow/particle genius and I poached a bunch of setups fro him. In the matte i had layers blowing off the ground separate to layers drifting off the car roof, building roof and barn. Then there were depths of mist and 5 or 6 layers of snow including one layer of practical snow shot against black.


Glenn

[photoshopped]

Fantastic work, well done.

Jay