6-7 : Scav shenanigans

Scene 6

The original scene shows a titan walking around, with a blood overlay. Using in-game footage was the most simple way to create this, although it does not allow to recreate the strong parallax effect.

Scene setup

To record the footage, I used the Freecam mod. I loaded the Interchange map with an increased scav number, so that they would be swarming the place. This caused a significant performance drop, but it is not too noticable on the final result. The recording location was the South-East corner of the Interchange, near the Emercom extract.

The scene setup in only a camera looking at an emissive mesh plane which displays the video. The field of view is slightly smaller than the video, in order to accomodate for the horizon being tilted and the Camera shakify effect.

Compositing

In compositing, a color balance node is used to add a red tint to the highlights, to replicate the aspect of the original scene. The blood overlay is added with a add node. Bloom and sensor noise nodes were also used to give the image a more natural look.

Scene 7

Scene setup

This scene is a static image with a moving camera. The setup is the same as previously, except the camera is animated to move around and zoom on the scene.

The static image was made in a separate Blender scene. The background is a screenshot taken near the Climber’s Trail extract in Shoreline. It is added as a background to the camera through the Data/Background Images menu.

Positioning the objects in the scene was more difficult than with the Motion tracking process, as there is only one frame to work with. This makes positioning the ground and setting the scale of the objects difficult. Thankfully, I could use one of the objects in the screenshot as a reference : the drum used by scavs as a fireplace has standardized dimensions.

First, a mesh plane was placed as a floor, then, I modeled a 809x544x544mm cylinder, and finally, I positioned the camera so that the Blender drum was positioned exactly like on the background image. After adding characters, the scene looked coherent in termes of angle and scale.

I originally added 3 pairs of characters, but I ended up adding a last character sitting on a concrete barrier so that the scene would feel a little less empty.

Shadow catchers and light setup

For the scene to look convincing, the characters have to be lit in the same way as the rest of the scene, and they have to cast shadows on the ground. Every object that will have a shadow casted upon must be modeled in the scene. The ground and the drum were already added, but since a character is sitting on the concrete barrier, it was necessary to model it and position it in the scene.

These three objects were defined as shadow catchers in Object properties/Visibility/Shadow catcher. This works only in Cycles. It is also possible to create shadow catchers in EEVEE but it requires a particular material setup. Fore more information about shadow catchers, refer to Ryan King’s tutorial.

A single Sun light source was placed and was adjusted so that the characters would blend in. I purposefully chose a sunny weather when taking the screenshot, so that it would be easier to position the sun source later. A uniform white world background color was used to make the shadows brighter.

Compositing

The compositing setup is the same as in the previous scene, except that the shadows were tinted in green with the color balance node, and the blood overlay used was multiplied instead of added, as it was on a white background.

Result

The result feels convincing as a screenshot, but EFT being a very detailed game, the characters fail to stand out in front of the background, which makes them difficult to see with the camera movement. In the original scene, the titans stand out better, thanks to their simpler level of detail compared to the background.

The two scavs on the left are a reference to the Grant Gustin Next To Oliver Queen’s Grave meme. The two scavs in the back have found a tank battery, though I don’t know if this is actually possible on Shoreline. One of them is posed to look like a pointing soyjack.