Gumballs for the indie film - Curse of the Phantom Shadow

For the indie film Curse of the Phantom shadow I created a gumball vfx. A seamless type effect that you wouldn't know it was a cgi effect unless someone told you.
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This is more or less the bread and butter for some effects artists and is much more common than you would think. Need a helicopter fly by in your city shot, Why rent and go through the hassle of doing a live shot when you can just create one virtually for a couple of hundred bucks.
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So even though its just gumballs, there is still a bunch of work to do. The skill of the artisan is on display if its completely seamless even with something seemingly as simply as gumballs.
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First is the ROTOscoping of the heroine. SHe passes infront of the gumball dispensor so she needs to be cut out. I used the new MAGIC MASK in resolve to do the job. While my computer wasn't really up to the task, i did manage to get useful footage out of it and my alpha mask was made and imported into fusion. Worked 100% well. MAGIC MASK is every effects artists dream tool!! AUTOMATIC roto.
After that, create a gumball. Well, its just a sphere so easy - well.. as easy as that is, i did make a mistake and create a sphere with too many polys and that really choked the gumball drop sim. THe answer was simple, drop the balls from 300 polys to 28. Now the sim was reasonable and i could guess the settings much better - you can't see what your doing if the sim takes 1/2 hour.
with a couple of false starts in lw bullet, i figured out that their is a setting to dial in how close the balls touch - once i figured that out it was pretty straight forward. near 100% friction and some bounce got them to settle realistically.
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Next - layout - guessing the camera height, and lighting so that it matches the frame is an art form when you have no on set data which i did not. That's why a on set supervisor is so important and his main job is to record how high the camera was, the focal distance of the lens, and light and actor positions for each shot. That's like the bare minimum for vfx on set supervisor. So without that though your spending some time trying to match everything - i found out that the lens was between 15mm and 120mm so i had at least a max and min. Also since i know he liked to shoot kinda of wide i went with something like 30 for the lens.
Even though i made the gumballs the standard 1" positioning the made them larger or smaller, so i used reference footage from google to basically get the right size.
My first pass was with big fat gumballs though - and although i liked it - they were far too big.
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During the Sim pass i had to also randomize the colors for a mixed look - director didn't want solid color of all of them even though i did an all orange pass.
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finally compositing -
This is where all the magic happens. The CG elements are rendered and since it's a locked down shot i don't have to do any match moving or stabilization which is another typical thing that happens in these type of invisible effects work.
Adding the element, creating roto masks for the heroine, color grading the raw cg output to match the shot, and adding some elements over the gumballs to help them look like they are inside the enclosures was the majority of the compositing work.
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The most work was dialing in the bullet sim for the gumballs, I've never been a fan of lightwaves bullet, its too finicky for my tastes, but there are a lot of dials to fidget with that are actually helpful. Blenders bullet is far more simpleminded in comparison.
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