BAVFX - Tranvía de Caballito
About the project
Ever since I started my journey as a digital artist I found out about Ian Hubert, an indie filmmaker who uses Blender for mindblowing renders. He's motivated me enough to learn about the software and after some years of following tutorials and creating animations both in After Effects and in Blender, I felt it was time to put me to the test and start with VFx once more, since the last time was in 2021 with the test-video "LLuvia de Donas".
How it started
Due to several reasons I started working on delivery services on the last third of 2022 and as I was going to different places, I couldn't stop thinking about how beautiful the city of Buenos Aires really is. So I decided to record different places with my phone whenever I could and kept them on my google drive knowing that I'll have the time to be behind my desk and make a collection of edited videos from the city.
The video
After delivering a meal, I looked upon a painted wall that was in front of me and took off my phone and started recording. The idea was crystal clear from the beggining: a tram must break that wall.
I tought the video was good enough, that I could just delete the cars and call it a day...
After failing deleting the cars with the Runway App, I tried to clean up the first frame with Photoshop, and then I learned that I should've taken more information from the street on the right side of the frame so the computer could work out with the content aware fill tool properly. The bright side was that I got to erase the car on the left, and after thinking about what to do, I figured out that mirroring the image and then tweaking it a bit could work:
I was satisfied with the result, so I ran it inside After Effects with the content aware fill and... failed. I wasn't ready to give up since I knew I could use camera projection inside of Blender.
So I opened up After Effects and tracked the main footage (yes, the one with cars) and imported the tracked data to Blender. After that, I built the scene and added the modified alley by projecting from view a piece of geometry. This is how it looked if the camera wasn't where it was supposed to be:
After that I downloaded a tram model from the internet and modified it to my liking. When that was done, I started making the simulations.
For the simulation I added a wall of bricks, the painted wall, a proxy mesh for my tram and lastly the floor with collision where the pieces will fall to. I spent a lot of time tweaking to get a result I was satisfied with.
After seeing that everything was coming up together, I showed a friend of mine how the video was going, and he advised that the tram on the painting could be animated, so he told me to do it by messing with two layers of the tram and their scale. I loved the idea but I didn't like the railway track not being in the center of the street. So I opened up Photoshop and used the new Generative Fill feature to create the new railway:
Right after, I animated the tram and exported the video so I could use it as a texture on the wall inside of Blender. When I was finished, the painted "cartoonish" world had to be created. And for that, I added some cubes, modeled a lamp, made a tree with the sapling tree gen and added the floor. I had to make a holdout shader for the front faces of the mesh so they don't cover the footage:
The only thing remaining before compositing was creating and animating the engineer, a task done on Illustrator and After Effects. The animation is subtle and simple: the engineer had to express confusion and disorientation. So I decided to give him a pokerface with him watching his surroundings trying to understand how did he travel from one world to another.
To finish the job, I opened up After Effets and blended everything together adding multiple stock footage of the smoke and sounds in Adobe Premiere.
This is the end result:
Thanks for reading!
