Advanced Set Extension

[benger]

Hi,

I'm facing a problem. In the short we're shooting right now there's a scene when a boy sits in the corner of a room and he has to dig a hole into the wall with his bare hands. This is obviously not possible with a real wall, so we decided to build a fake corner that he can dig into, and extend it in post production.

I know one thing or two about creating basic set extensions, I successfully replaced skies and put extra towers on rooftops before. However, in this case the wall surface is supposed to be homogeneous with no features breaking it, so I'd have to seamlessly connect the real wall to the CG one all around the boy, and match the lighting, the texture, the color etc. I've done some experimenting in Photoshop and so far it seem impossible to do it realistically.

Do you have any idea how to solve this problem? Thanks!

 

[Bernadett-B]

You have many possibilities depending on how long the scene is and how important it is (and how much money you have for it). The most radical solution is to build a whole fake room where you have complete control over everything from lighting to material. The other option is that you use more advanced post production features and somehow reach a point where the real and the fake wall is indistinguishable. Or use green screen If all else fails.

 

[knightly]

Light the corner set the same as an actual location. Control that aspect of the production and the headache should disappear

If you have to do it in CG, take reference photos of the set walls and use those as the UV textures for the model. http://www.Blenderguru.com just had a tutorial on making more realistic textures... good stuff there.

 

[benger]

You have many possibilities depending on how long the scene is and how important it is (and how much money you have for it). The most radical solution is to build a whole fake room where you have complete control over everything from lighting to material. The other option is that you use more advanced post production features and somehow reach a point where the real and the fake wall is indistinguishable. Or use green screen If all else fails.

The budget is very small, of course, so we cannot build a whole room, and green screen is not possible since the boy has to interact with the wall pretty much.

 

[benger]

Light the corner set the same as an actual location. Control that aspect of the production and the headache should disappear

If you have to do it in CG, take reference photos of the set walls and use those as the UV textures for the model. http://www.Blenderguru.com just had a tutorial on making more realistic textures... good stuff there.

I don't think that lighting and painting the set the same as some actual walls would be easier than doing it in post prod.

Your second suggestion seems slightly more doable. I've been thinking about trying to model and light a room in 3d, and composite the footage into it, but it's still borderline impossible to make it look totally semaless.

Do you know a scene from a movie or TV show where they did something like this?

 

[leetv]

Could ya post a screengrab, please?

 

[benger]

Could ya post a screengrab, please?

No, sorry, we're still planning this shot, we'll shoot it next Thursday or Friday.

 

[knightly]

It would be much easier to get them to match doing it practically... that's a budget thing though.

The CG extension shouldn't be too hard, there's another how to on blenderguru.com that deals with architectural modeling and rendering...