Watch this emotive scene from the University of Hertfordshire's Tom Balev, created with NUKE.

Tom was asked to incorporate CG elements into existing real-life footage, in his own words: "My initial idea was to create a crash scene although I didn't want to create just an ordinary set-extensions projects without any emotion to it whatsoever. I realised I could incorporate the driver walking away from the crash scene by using various sound effects (breathing, heart beat etc). Using V-Ray I created separate render layers which meant I didn't need to re-render the entire scene when corrections were needed. I used an entire range of render elements including ambient occlusion, velocity passes, z-depth, shadow passes and more. Everything was exported as a multichannel 32-bit EXR to preserve floating point information. In NUKE individual render layers were separated, colour corrected and merged together. I added additional z-depth blur along with vector blur using my previously exported velocity pass. Final steps included some imperfections like grain, lens correction, lens reflections, chromatic aberration and vignetting. I can't think of any other software than NUKE which would be more suitable for this projects workflow. NUKE is extremely powerful and robust compositing software packed with the variety of features I needed to successfully accomplish this task.

Modelling, texturing and lighting completed in Maya.