League of Legends Ruination Europe

Concept

We helped JK Groupe to create 8 teasing films for the League of Legends Ruination Europe campaign. We had to match the visual style of the LoL magical mist, and recreate it on top on stock footage of various european cities.

A challenging project

When JK Groupe approached us for this project, we knew it would be a challenging one. From the initial brief to the delivery, we had 3 weeks to deliver 8 films made of 40 shots.
All the shots contained 3D smoke simulations, a process that involve a lot of simulation time. And before we could do the 3D simulations, we had to find, validate, track and model all these shots. 

With a very efficient team and a reactive client, we were able to deliver all the films in time for the marketing campaign that was happening live as we delivered a film a day.

Process

For each shots of the project, we went through the same process :

• 3D tracking : we recreated the camera movements in order to have a virtual camera in our 3D scene matching with the real camera used to film the shot.
• 3D Matchmoving : we modeled the main buildings and elements, that we used as masks and volume colliders for our 3D smoke simulations in Houdini.
• Simulations and renders : we used a render farm to simulate and render with Arnold all the smoke simulations in parallel to meet the short deadline.
• Compositing : we used Nuke to integrate the 3D render on top of the video footage, and add various post-effects to get a good integration.

3D Tracking and Matchmoving

Below are some example of our 3D matchmoving work on the shots. We use 3D proxies of different quality for the main buildings in almost all shots.