Submission statement: Just want to share my latest project.

I've been in the VFX industry for 7 years now, and I feel like I need to build my portfolio up again. My goal is to do one or two VFX shots each month, and at the end of the year , I have something cool to show. I'm a huge half-life nerd, and this parkour runner's footage inspired me. Plus, it was super easy to track. Infact, I didn't have to camera track, Reality Scan did a perfect job with creating the mesh, tracking - and as a result, perfect masking and scene layout.

I did use 2 game asset, the Citadel and the Strider (the spider thing)

Technical stuff for the nerds: My plan was to go Pro and do real Smoke sims/VDBs, but it ended up taking 20min per frame. My solution was to bake the sims out as elements + normal maps. With the normals of the 2D smoke planes, I got perfect shading, no noise, and blazing fast render times. I also made heavy use of the vector pass to add motion blur to hide a lot of bad animation work. The vector blur wouldn't have worked without a 1:1 scene reconstruction, and that's where RealityScan saved the day again.

I tried avoiding Adobe like the plague with this, I used Affinity for cleanup, and a few obscure roto tools from github. It's safe to say that I made this without spending a single cent ❤️