BUILDING IN THE WATER

[Randy Johnson]

What kind of footage do you have? is it a clip of a river and a another of the building or is it the building in the shot with the river and just no reflection? How much movment does the river have?

randy

[Richard Martz]

Well that is probably a job better done in an animation program. FCP wil probably be of little help. You can invert your artwork (shot or sequence) of the building and use some BORIS water ripples as a filter on the image but it really won’t be truly believable (if that is what you are looking for). There are a million parameters in those controls and it will take some time to get it right. You may also find that the ripples need to be executed in a different source plane than the reflected image. That is the reflected water must have a vanishing point but the image actually wouldn’t have that except as a function of the water itself. Ripples closer to the camera will need to appear closer than the ripples farther away. Additionally you may have to create a mask where the reflected image meets the shoreline. I know that AE can do some amazing things but for a photorealistic look you’ll probably want to use Maya, Lightwave or 3DS Max. However be prepared for a price tag of at least several hundred or even several thousand dollars per second of animation. I suspect that is why you came to the forum for help – because budget might be a problem. You might want to post this on the AFTER EFFECTS forum for some additional help there.

Richard Martz
MagicMartz Media

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[Rafael Amador]

The shoot I’ve got is the water without the riverbanks. In the top is quite dark and in the botton lighter, reflecting the clouds. But the water (is the Mekong) it got a lot of movement. And trying to superimpose a still from Angkor Wat that was shot against the sky, so is easy to cut the shape.
At the moment I’m trying with AE applying a Wave Warp and little Displacement Map feed with the luma information of the river image.
The problem is that there are too many parameters to tweak in those effects . Anyway now start to look OK.
i wish i could manage application like MAYA. If I don’t try so, is not just a matter of money but of capability. I arrived to late to the digital world. Thanks for the help.
rafael

[Chris Poisson]

Rafalos,

For the past 6 moths I occasionally have been working on this exact effect. I have had pretty good results of late, it is not all that complicated, but it takes a subtle touch. I do it in AE with a still photo of water, invert the sky and/or background and precomp it with the water. Blending modes are critical for a good reflection. The movement comes with fractal noise placed on a 3D layer tilted to mimic the depth of the photo. Playing with the blend modes of the fractal noise itself is the subtle part, that and the right type of noise for your water shot, and the right speed of evolution in your noise. If you’re interested in seeing what it looks like, that can be arranged.

If your water is footage, I’d look at making a depth map from it, and using that to distort your building/reflection, but you’d still probably want to do that in AE, perhaps with Forge Freeform or somesuch.

Fun, isn’t it?

[Ed Dooley]

Remember that the sky would normally appear in a reflection in the water too, so you might not have to/want to
cut the shape at all.
Ed

[rafalaos] “And trying to superimpose a still from Angkor Wat that was shot against the sky, so is easy to cut the shape.”

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Chris,
Thanks God this job is for my self, so I’ve got all the tine necesary to get it, or get crazy.
“I’ve got not much experience with AE but this is a good chance to discover things, I been playing a bit with the Fractal Noise but about the Depth Map I’ got no Idea. If I got any question I will post it to you. Thanks a lot.
Ed, thanks for the sugestion about the sky. in fact I will pick it from somwhere else because the one of the picture is too flat.
Cheers,
rafael