Fighter Jet

For my Compositing 4 exam, we had to complete four VFX shots, and this was the first one I worked on. I chose this shot because I enjoy integrating CG elements into live-action footage, making it a great opportunity to combine both disciplines.

The fighter jet and sky environment were created in Blender. The cloud VDB's were scattered across multiple planes positioned at varying distances from the camera to create a stronger sense of depth, speed, and scale.

The camera shake was created entirely from scratch. I used the same camera that was used to render the sky environment, parented it to a null object, and drove the null's movement using noise modifiers. To capture the resulting motion, I placed a plane with a tracking pattern in front of the camera and rendered the sequence.

In Nuke, I tracked this rendered sequence to extract the camera motion. The tracking data was then used to stabilize the original plate. Based on the camera movement, MotionBlur2D was used to generate motion vector channels, which were subsequently fed into VectorBlur to create physically consistent motion blur that matched the camera shake.