What the Hell is on My Coffee Table?

So we are now caught up to the current week.  This week I wanted to do a lot more than I had been, now that I feel more comfortable working in Cinema and After Effects again.  I started with shooting a quick plate and creating a panoramic of my living room using PTGui. My panoramics usually come out a little janky at the top and bottom because I don't have a full frame camera, so I can only get about 150 degrees vertically, and I poorly fake the rest, but they work out pretty well.




Coffee Table Plate from conor scully on Vimeo.

I found this awesome HDRI plugin a while back called Smart IBL by HDR Labs, which I have just begun using because I have been shooting panoramics and adding them to my own IBL library within SIBL.  It's pretty cool.  They have their own HDRI library that you can download, and if you shoot your own panoramics as well, you can use the SIBL Edit to keep them all organized and ready to go. I strongly suggest checking them out.

Anyway, I got a nice track in Boujou, had a rough time getting it into C4D, but finally figured it out, then I started playing with what to put on the table.  I had been wanting to learn how the metaball worked, so I played with that a little and came up with this guy.


Coffee Table from conor scully on Vimeo.

I ended up cutting the final a little short because correcting the reflection in the table in After Effects was taking up too much time and a little beyond my skill level.  Next time I use the metaball, I think I'll try to get it to conform to different shapes, or into text.