VFX of Poldark Mines

Poldark Breakdowns: The Mines

Here is a breakdown of the work I did for Lexhag creating the mines in Poldark. Shot on location in Cornwall my job was to digitally extend the existing ruins,to rebuild the Grambler and Poldark Mines

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BlackMagic Fusion setup tips: Pathmaps

Setting Global PathMaps in Fusion.

Setting pathmaps is my top tip if you work with Fusion on different computers. Often drive letters or working folder names will change so when you open a Fusion .comp on a different machine all the loaders fail and you have to reconnect then. Using Fusion pathmaps stops this happening and saves a lot of time.

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Compositing shadows and mattes from V-Ray

Shadows help place the CG elements in the world. Literally grounding it in reality. Rendering them is easy, but for more control we need to separate the shadow layer for compositing. Creating them in 3dsMax isn’t hard and here’s how to setup V-Ray to separate the necessary passes.

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Outline of our linear workflow

This is the outline of our linear workflow. It works for both Fusion and Nuke.Viewing Linear workflows

The Composite

Setting up our linear workflow is relatively straight forward.

The key points are:-

  1. Inputs and outputs are 10 bit dpx files.
  2. the log to linear operation should match the camera profile ( Cineon, s-Log, Arri log c, etc )
  3. the log to linear operation on the input is inverted for the linear to log operation on the output.
  4. Composite with a floating point colour depth.

The Display

There are two methods for viewing the composite.

  1. No LUT file.  Without a grading LUT the only option is to apply a simple gamma to view the composite.
  2. LUT files. If a Colourist is involved then the linear image MUST be converted to a log plate before the LUT file is applied.

Further reading

  1. Simple Log to Lin workflow in Fusion
  2. Using Stacked LUTs in Fusion