OVERGROWN - Production Log #6

As OVERGROWN teaser completion progresses, we're nearing the 'it's a wrap!' point. Highlights of the past week were definitely the first pass of the score by composer Mariana Calegari, and the compositing work done by Andy. Let's take a look!

Crafting the Score

 Hjalti Hjálmarsson:

As I put together an early version of the teaser, I experimented with various temp music until I got the overall vibe and rhythm working. This became the rough reference point for our composer Mariana Calegari. The teaser is short, but it requires a sweet and endearing melody along with some scarier, more foreboding music. Mariana's been doing a great job tackling this, and we're currently doing the final feedback rounds.

Painterly Layers of Compositing

 Andy Goralczyk:

My job as a lighting artist usually starts while animation is at least in the blocking phase. As soon as Rik and Hjalti have the first poses, I assemble the separate lighting file using our Shot Builder and link in the animation. This is usually enough to add a general first pass of environment lighting. As the animation gets refined, I add more character-specific lighting and tweak the set and shot composition to support the action and make the characters pop more. Our OVERGROWN teaser has 12 shots, so a lot of work had to be done in parallel.

Since last week, animation has basically wrapped (there is only one shot left to polish!), so the whole teaser can be turned over to final rendering. Luckily the frames are quick enough - render-times are about 8 to 15 minutes on a powerful GPU - that we can render the whole teaser in-house in 4K. Since much of the look of OVERGROWN depends on compositing, we render everything as MultiLayer EXR, with a full set of passes, cryptomatte and custom AOVs and do the compositing afterwards in a separate process. This is very flexible in terms of workflow, but the final output frames are HUGE: A single frame can be around 1 GB!

In compositing we merge all the passes together, but each pass gets a slight bit of Kuwahara filtering before everything is combined together. This makes the final image slightly painterly, but it is more subtle than applying a paint filter on the whole image at once. The filtering is applied only on the lighting, not the color passes, which creates subtle color bleeding and simplifies the details in a very pleasing way.

This treatment is done on the environment and the characters separately; our two protagonists are getting a special fur simplification treatment, which uses a bilateral blur to create stylized shading faceting based on a special character ID pass.

That’s all for now. Thank you for supporting OVERGROWN. Make sure you didn’t miss Rik’s courageous take on method animation on our socials, and stay tuned for the Painterly Shadows masterclass by Simon, which will be published later this week.