Previs Development:
While working on my previs this week, I was considering what sort of things I could fill the empty space with in the opening shots of the main character (Shot 0010/0030/0050/0070), and I remembered the striking visuals in the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners opening. I wanted to attempt recreating this in 3D to see if I could potentially develop my own version of it later for my FMP.
I started by roughly copying the pose of the main character, David, from the Edgerunners opening using the Minerva rig by Ramon Arango. I then used toon shaders and toon outlines to essentially create masks I could later use for the photography montages. If I do develop this technique for my FMP, it would be much simpler to use Nuke, but for this experiment I wanted to use the tools I already had access to for a quick test.
Next, I took a playblast PNG and brought that into DaVinci Resolve, where I used the separate colours as masks combined with various photo montages (with each image at 2 frames, again to match the Edgerunners opening as closely as possible for now).
For the photos themselves, I used stock images that I then took into Photoshop and edited to have the same posterised, comic look to them, along with the same colour scheme. I chose nature photos to go within the character, signifying her home and her culture, and then city photos for the background to represent the city she is in during the show and how much this contrasts against her core values.
I wanted to add in some of the bold yellow seen in the original opening, so I used a Paper Effect keyed to expand outwards as a replacement for this.
I really like the results, and I’m looking forward to developing the technique to be more personalised for my FMP. I also made sure throughout the process that everything I was doing would be the same if the character was animated, so if I have time in the coming weeks I would like to try the same technique on an animated character. While the character isn’t animated, I still used an image sequence playblast to ensure I was testing that it would work the same.
As for the main previs itself, the updates were mostly to Shot 0020, 0060, and 0180. I added backgrounds to Shot 0020 and 0060, and also adjusted the pose for Shot 0060. I really like the idea of the wolf slowly pacing through a city, with the city being miniature compared to the wolf. I would want to make sure there are enough visual elements to avoid the city looking like a miniature set with a normal sized wolf verses a to scale city with a giant wolf. I also adjusted the poses on shot 0180 and added in the viewport FX slash to the weapon. I think the arm should be lagging behind even more than it already is, so I want to push that more next time.