OTOY Forums

Here is an experiment that I have been working on. A former colleague, Joseph J Lawson recently changed his Facebook profile pic to a still from Close Encounters. I was inspired to capture the feel of the image in Octane. I use Cinema 4D as my 3D app, and aoktar has done a truly inspiring job on his Octane plug in.

I encountered some technical challenges, of course. The biggest one was duplicating an anamorphic lens used in the original photography. It took quite a bit of research and development to get the look in the ballpark. It's still not exact, but as good as it needs to be for this, I think.

The next challenge were the spotlights, both in appearance, and noise. I took me a couple of days to dial in the look, and the biggest improvement came from using IES files to allow the lights to behave properly in the fog volume. Without them, the lights didn't have the proper decay. The one light on the right is still off, but at that this point, it's good enough. I prefer to render with PT as much as I can, but the lights were too noisy with PT so I switched to PMC, and they really cleaned up nicely. I think I am still over sampling too much, and I might try to re-render with lower samples to cut the render time down (roughly 50 minutes at this resolution on my rig, which is noted in my signature). Also, color balancing everything was a challenge, too, as the appearance of the lights changed whether or not the fog was present (of course.)

It was fun researching this scene, and trying to get everything correct. I found a model of the proper truck on Hum3D, but it needed extensive modifications to match the truck in the shot. I had to step through the shot on YouTube to get the details, and ended up buying the film on iTunes for better resolution. I had to add the steel rack, the ladders, a bubble light, two spotlights, a proper license plate from the era, and so on. I was lucky enough to find some really good references via Google, thankfully, especially the spotlights. You can't see them, but I also modeled the mailbox rack which features prominently in this sequence, and I might give animating them a try.

The plants were from Forester Pro. I as one the fence about getting this (no budget), but I'm glad I pulled the trigger on it. Easy to use, works within the Cinema mindset, and has a very natural feel. I could animate a breeze if I needed to, which is nice.

I also used Real Displacement Textures for the road surface and track gravel. It might be a little difficult to see, but what a difference these made for me! Highly recommended and fast, too!

I did a minimal amount of post work in AE, mostly just some color correction and film grain. This film was shot in the 1970's using Eastman 5247 color stock, which I am familiar with from my visual effects days (yes, I know how to load film into a magazine). In the end, I had to degrade the image as it came from Octane in order to better match the original.

Enjoy!

1st great subject and mad skills ..

2nd in keeping up "supportive nature" of the forum and remembering the Scene even seeing it once as very young child .... Dreyfus is missing from the truck, then I realized the stills had a depth of space that your rendering may need to reference more of

...Great work I cant approach this level yet

Thanks, and you're correct! Adding the Dreyfus character would have added more time, so I chose to omit him (for now). Also, I did not trick out the truck interior at all. It's missing the maps, radios, interior spotlight handle, mic cables and the like. I may decide to go back and add them in later (I like doing that work, but it can be a rabbit hole...)

As far as the photometrics are concerned, that was the biggest challenge for me, and my solution is far from perfect; the original footage was shot 4 perf 35mm panavision anamorphic. The still I was working from was cropped to a degree. When I used Cinema's tools to undistort the image (really nice tools, BTW) and then solved for the camera location, etc. nothing seemed to look correct. Added to this was that the tool seemed to lock out any changes to focal length, format, etc. I mucked about this for some time until I abandoned this and went with my plan B solution, which was to simulate the anamorphic lens with actual elements in front of the Octane camera. At this point, it became an eyeball solution. It was quite tedious to go much beyond where I ended up (the slightest change yielded drastic differences in appearance). My original intent was to get it "in the ballpark" and to the point to where "it would cut in," meaning that this could be conceivably cut into the show, had the shot been done at that time, in that era. Looking at the overall sequence in its entirety, I think I achieved that as well. So many of the shots had subtle differences (continuity failed in several instances, in particular, the side-mounted ladder).

Lastly, my original intent was to try and capture the magic that Vilmos Zigmund brought to the screen, and received his Academy Award in Cinematography for that year. In fact, it was the only Oscar the film received. I'm hopeful that, had he still been alive, he would have appreciated my meager attempt

looks very nice

Great work Jay!

I saw this and commented on FB. Great to see the detailed breakdown here.

Classic movie/cinematography.

Beautiful depiction.

Very thankful for this breakdown into your process and inspiration.

Please keep posting! I'm learning a lot through your process.

best,
O