We wanted to open part 2 of The Freeman Chronicles with the villain arriving at the scene with a fleet of humvees. However, there were no humvees on the day. So the scene was filmed knowing they would be added in post.
To start, the shot required a high quality humvee asset.
The humvee was purchased from turbosquid without textures or rigging, so before work started it needed to be prepared by completely retexturing it in blender, then rigging it.
For realistic animation, suspension had to be simulated using softbody physics. To make the most out of this setup, a ground plane was created with small bumps representing gravel. This caused tiny vibrations as the model moved, which added another layer of realism.
Shadow casters were also placed to match scene shadows from the wires and pole.
The animation was then rendered from blender with four main render passes: shadow, vector, depth and beauty.
Next, a matte painting was made from a panorama created in syntheyes, which combines the frames of the footage to create a clean and noise-free background.
Finally, the data was comped in After Effects.