Scarlet Witch VFX Recreation: This isn’t the End?

I’m sure the of this blog post isn’t quite what you were expecting considering the general theme and timeline of all my previous posts. Some adjustments have indeed been made, but it’s all for the betterment of my VFX skills and the quality of this project! So, what exactly happened?

Originally when I was outlining this independent study with my professor, we agreed that I would work on 2 magic VFX projects for this semester— one that was a recreation of an existing effect that I would work on for the first half of the semester, and one that was a more original shot of magic VFX designed by myself. Surprisingly enough, the journey has been relatively smooth overall so far, and I’ve learned a ton in just this first half of the semester already. But even so, during my meeting with my supervising professor last week, we both seemed to share the same sentiment about the scope of this study. We essentially established that at this point I had two options: either stick to the original timeline and emerge from this semester with 2 decent VFX pieces that aren’t super refined, or adjust the scope a little bit and purely focus on continuing work on the Scarlet Witch VFX to truly expand on it and make it into a production quality effect.

After a good amount of discussion about the two options, I ended up settling on the latter, since I really wanted to come out of this study with something I’m truly proud of. If I would’ve just worked on this project for one more week and moved on after today, I definitely wouldn’t be able to say that I’m fully satisfied with the end effect, and since I have the flexibility to adjust the goals of this study, I’ve decided to take advantage of that to make sure I’m able to achieve the goals I’ve had in my mind since the beginning.

Long story short, this is not in fact the end of my work on the Scarlet Witch VFX— I will be continuing work on this shot further into the semester until I’m able to finish properly expanding on it and creating a very high quality piece for my portfolio. So I hope you’re not tired of seeing me work on this effect yet, because there’s a whole lot more coming with many incredibly entertaining details to be adjusted!

So, having decided to adjust my schedule and continuing business as usual when it came to working on this effect, this week was all about reworking the base of my effect to create something much more comprehensive in comp. It all started back in Houdini where my mission was to add even more energy and velocity to the particles of my outer orb, as well as to adjust the material used to shade those particles in order to add more variation in opacity and color. After many minute adjustments, the effect was ready to be shipped back into Nuke with minimal issues! If you’re returning from last week and remember the wedging issues I had, those are thankfully fixed now. Turns out trying to render 5 wedges at once of 320,000 particles isn’t the best idea for my poor CPU who was certainly trying its best to chug along through the very long process. I switched over my wedges to generate one wedge at a time, and the process was much smoother, very happy it was a relatively simple fix!

Before I could dive into my Nuke comp to start fixing up the particles I adjusted, I had a looming issue I unfortunately finally had to tackle. Completely unintentionally, I somehow started work on this comp in the Nuke Non-Commercial version, despite having an actual Nuke education license registered to my Foundry account. I seemed to have mixed up the two licenses and assumed they were the same thing, but was given a rude awakening when I got a scary looking pop up message saying that the build of Nuke I was working on was going to expire in the next month. Of course I know now that just means I would have had to redownload the newest non-commercial version of the program, but honestly it was silly to continue to work in that version when I had the full version right there at my fingertips.

Sounds like an easy fix, right? All I’ve got to do is copy and paste all my nodes from my Non-Commercial comp over to my new comp in the real version of Nuke. Surely nothing could make this process needlessly complicated and tedious, right? WRONG.

If you didn’t know already, Nuke does this funky little thing where it encrypts the data of any nodes and comps created in the Non-Commercial version of the program, meaning it is not possible to open Non-Commercial files nor can you copy and paste nodes between Non-Commercial and official Nuke. Do I understand why this is done by Foundry? Yes. Was I still a bit peeved about the process? Also yes. BUT, I did realize that this provided me with an opportunity to essentially start from scratch to recreate my comp in a much cleaner way, and get rid of some of the extra effects I was using that just ended up washing out my FX in the end.

A couple hours of work later, we were back in business in a new and improved official version of Nuke! Truthfully it was nice in the end to be able to recreate everything to be able to sift through what I did and didn’t need, and I definitely ended up with a much cleaner setup after everything was said and done. My main new task within Nuke for this week though was to work with the new and improved outer orb particles to create something that felt much less like a flat circle of particles on the screen. Utilizing the changes I already made in Houdini, I worked with the Shuffle node in Nuke to shuffle out the alpha channels of my particles, isolating only the brightest and most intense ones. After some grading and color correction, I then merged those isolated particles back onto my original outer orb, which resulted in a pretty satisfactory increase in the contrast of my orb.

You can see a very condensed version of the process below:

Orb with minimal contrast :(

Orb with a LOT of contrast

New combined orb with satisfactory amount of contrast! :)

I spent more time than I’d like to admit on making very tiny adjustments to the color, brightness, and contrast levels of the outer orb this week— and honestly I’m still not entirely satisfied. But, as always, it’s a step in the right direction at least! This week’s WIP video feels much less washed out and flat than my previous versions.

Other than my work on the outer orb, I also did a bit of adjusting to the branching tendrils emitting around the outside of the orb. Those tendrils are the part of this magic that still needs the most work, but I took a stab at trying to at least mess around with the shape of my tendrils to get rid of the uniform and blocky shapes I had before. They still didn’t come out perfect, but they definitely look less rigid this week and are even more sparse, which I believe is a pretty good benchmark of progress for this week.

Without further ado, here’s my WIP for this week!:

I’m always looking for more detail and refinement to my particles, but once again can’t say I’m unhappy with this week’s progress! Stripping down my effect in Nuke definitely helped me see another perspective to the method I should be comping these VFX, and as you might have noticed, I took away a lot of the extra glows and lens flares that were distracting from the heart of the magic effect. Of course I will still add the extra effects back eventually, but for now while I’m still in the heavy editing phase, I think it’s important to be able to focus on my FX specifically before trying to cover my mistakes with pretty lights.

Hope to see at least some people sticking around with me for the continuation of this project, I promise it’ll be worth it at the end to ideally see a truly polished and film-quality VFX shot!