manta ray vfx shot and breakdown

this is the culmination of several terms of learning, relearning, and persistence. looking back, there are a ton of things i'd do differently both for simplicity's sake as well as efficiency and quality. still, i'me pretty happy with this as a learning experience as i got to sink my teeth into a very generous portion of the vfx pipeline.

some of the steps that went into this project:

-shot on RED Scarlet
-tracked with PF Track X
-modeled in Maya14
-textured in Mudbox 14
-shaded in Maya 14
-rigged in Maya 14
-animated in Maya 14
-rendered with Maya 14's Mental Ray
-composited with Nuke 7
-effects in After Effects CS6

compositing a manta ray

the lighting didn't end up looking right in my last render, so i adjusted the image based lighting set up and brightened the shadows so they aren't more intense than the shadows in the plate. i used a pretty neat plug in called reel smart motion blur in adobe after effects to get the motion blur on the ray. it generates a motion blur based on the translation of the pixels in the image, not by actual 3d translation. this saved a lot of rendering time out of maya. the next step will be rotoscoping the tree trunk in the beginning of the shot and a few more color corrections.