[Blaise Douros]

Oh, it occurs to me that the venerable old Shatter effect might be able to handle something like this, too–and it would have the added bonus of faking depth on the particles. You’d have to create two instances, one for each asset, and then pre-comp and time-reverse the second one so the particles re-form into your figure.

[Blaise Douros]

Hi Dario,
You can make this as simple or as complicated as you want. If it were me, I would try to go to a location that had as much of the look and feel as I could, and then comp in some background pieces to complete the look. Or you could build a small practical set with ten feet of goop, with a greenscreen backdrop, and build the rest of the world around that. Or, you could just shoot on greenscreen, and composite your character into a static scene–a matte painting, for all intents and purposes.

The key is that one of your team members needs to be able to generate photorealistic assets to use to create this environment. Whether that’s by digital painting, Photoshop, or 3D modeling, you need to have the ability to create this environment in order to composite the character into it. Once you figure out how you’re going to generate the assets, you can make some decisions how you’ll solve the shooting problem.

For normal VFX work, they’ll shoot it the way the director wants, and the VFX team figures out the best way after the fact. But since you’re a novice, you need to build your VFX shots around your skills.

[Blaise Douros]

I’m not sure how you’d control the colors, but CC Scatterize would allow you to do something pretty close to this, with smaller particles. Your reference image appears to be animated in a 3D app, but if you’re not committed to the idea of 3D particles, experiment with Scatterize.

[Blaise Douros]

You could use CC Particle World, create a 3D camera, and play with your physics until they do what you want (or use Particular, for that matter). Then pre-compose it, and overlay a copy or two with varying levels of Fast Box Blur to create a softer glow. There’s no reason, if you want it to look that soft, that you couldn’t just box blur the comp, right?

[Blaise Douros]

You might just post a list here. We’re all sort of the target audience 🙂

[Blaise Douros]

The Panasonic is a good choice–looks like it fulfills your criteria.

I would also consider investing in something like a DJI Osmo, the nicest one you can afford in addition to your main camera, for stabilized camera movement. You have the opportunity to shoot a lot of dynamic stuff, and it would be good to have the capability to throw in your pack and get shots on the slopes without worrying about torching your main camera.

[Blaise Douros]

I’ve done a few projects like this, though with flat-plane lines rather than CAD geometry rendered in C4D. Here are the key things to check:

Make sure the camera focal length and “film size” matches up, as Steve has specified. You need to specify that (by calculating the camera’s horizontal Angle Of View and entering it in the 3D Camera Tracker) BEFORE you create the AE camera, so the 3D Camera Tracker generates the correct solve. You can’t just change it by opening the camera’s preferences after you create it.

Make sure that the track points that you grab in order to create the plane on which your 3D geometry will be tagged are correlating to the correct reference on your CAD model. So if you want the CAD model to be tagged to the ground, make sure you use track points from the ground plane, rather than the top of that factory building.

Finally, you may need to move that ground plane around in 3D space to finesse its position. I like to throw a Grid effect on it to help make sure everything is lining up correctly.

Once you’ve done all that, and can verify that your “ground plane” is tagged to the ground, then you can bring that into C4D and use it as a reference to set up the position of your CAD elements.

[Blaise Douros]

Why not get the RAW back for the FS7? I believe you can then still record internal mpeg 2 proxy files to a second card. Best of both worlds.

[Blaise Douros]

Gradient Wipe was what I was thinking of–thanks Steve.

[Blaise Douros]

If you want to grow it outward from a central point, you could overlay your brain graphic on a circular gradient, and use a gradient-mapped fade.