A lot of hard work on this movie, all in all 432 shots! But the AH-1 COBRA helicopter and the MQ1 PREDATOR drone sequence where that hardest.

We’ve faced several problems we have to deal with. Not enough live plates shoot by drone for the aerials shot’s backgrounds so we had to create some matte paint type of backgrounds which limited the resulting CG camera work.
Hopefully all VFX shots that had a real plate where pretty easy layout, light and comp. But the next real problem was that all the real plates where shot in different time of the day and a lot of different lighting and colors where introduced and when watching the whole sequence it could be seen that in one shot the helicopters are darker in next are brighter and so on.
Usually we are working and delivering untouched plates mainly to match exactly with the surrounding practical non VFX shots. But that’s a real problem when the plates are shot in different daytime or even different location.
We had to balance all the finals shots with custom individual color correction so to convince the director Don Michael Paul, that after the Color Grading session of the film the shots will look at least good enough like they look in this custom color corrected presentation.

The AH-1 and MQ1 where modeled in Maya and textured in Mudbox and Photoshop. I personally was involved in the modeling of the half of the helicopter and doing it’s textures, shading and lighting. The other part of the model was made by one of our talented modelers – Luba Atanasova. The MQ1 was modeled, textured, animated, lighted and rendered by one of our talented 3D Generalists – Kamen Yordanov.

The Master lighting and compositing shot of the AH-1 was done by me using Fusion and all other shots where composed by our team of talented compositors.

The release date is 2nd of August so until then I can’t post any images from the work we’ve done. I’m preparing to add Sniper 6 as a PROJECT as soon it’s released, showing some details on the VFX making.

Sniper:GhostShooter