I’ve been working with compositing in shot 1. I exported our 3D scene from Houdini and brought it in to Nuke. I layered in some cards with smoke assets to add some atmosphere to the scene. To get the smoke to react more realistically with the changing lighting, I made some CurveTool nodes to get the average pixel values of the lightning and headlight passes and linked that to the mix on some grade nodes for more interactive lighting.

I also tried adding some distortion to the lighting to break up the edges and add detail.

I’m using a tool from Chris Fryer called GodRaysProjector to get 3D volumetric lighting from the headlights. This allows the parallax on the volumetrics to look correct as the camera moves through 3D space. This pass cuts a little early because I’m still working on getting the headlights to move with the car as it drives off.

We are also still working on some render issues with the lighting pass. We have been unsuccessful at finding sampling settings that get us a clean render with little noise. It seems to be an issue with mesh lights in Redshift. As a result, we’re considering using Arnold for the lighting pass.