Motion Track Test

So this is a tracking test for a short film I'll be shooting in October. The premise revolves around characters communicating through thought bubbles. So this was a short test with a 2d motion track and then another test with a matchmove revolving around a character. The 2D track was done in AE with 2 track points on the light panel and on teh bookcase, and the 3D track done in Boujou and then imported back into AE for the composite. I added a light to the 1st one which I really liked, but the 2nd one was a bit harder since the scene makes itself a 3D camera.

Kinks Motion Test from kabraz on Vimeo.

Visual Effects Assignment 3

So I somehow manage to always do next week's lesson this week...ugh. I had some of those advanced animation and what not with the Star Destroyers but here's what I did this time. I did a 2d motion track with After Effects' built in tracker (which surprisingly held up!). Applied the data to a null and then started with the composites. Just like the Star Destroyers I cut out some helicopters and made them into two 3d layers for the hull and rotors. Precompsed those and dropped them into my main comp with some motion blur. There was 1 on the ground, 1 beginning to take off, and 1 in transition from takeoff to flying. The last chopper I keyframed to ease so the velocity of the chopper would speed up as it leaned forward to push itself through the air, while the take-off chopper had to first build some resistance and then ease into motion. I composited the different layers of smoke and then a general layer of atmospheric smoke - including the smoke that reacts to the choppers (which was just a lucky coincidence from Action Essentials 2 - thanks Andrew Kramer!) and finally composited in the Mon Calamari star cruiser (although masking the leaves out was a huge pain.

VFX Shot from kabraz on Vimeo.

3d Renders

Right so this next assignment was a lot of messing around - trying one thing and then kinda getting something else. Which isn't entirely bad...I'm pretty happy with the way some of them turned out. But...I'd like to get to the point where I'm doing these things on purpose rather than tweaking some settings and having stuff kinda come out.

For the logo I did Panda Cheese based off the hilarious Egyptian commercials for the product. With the bezier tool I traced over the entire thing and it came out....lumpier than I'd like. I then changed the curves to planes and colored them.

Next I did the revolve - and this actually came out sort of how I wanted. I drew from the Right side view half a profile of a lightsaber handle (I've been playing way too much Force Unleashed...haha) and then revolved that around. Unfortunately, still not too comfortable with working in NURBS I just created a 2nd cylinder and stuck it through the handle "wall" for the button.

Also, while saving these frames as png's I guess I didn't have a background so it rendered as white? For the extrude I had the concept of a wall in mind so I designed the curve of one here

 and then drew a curve to create the wall. But messing with some of the rotation functions I thought it looked like it could serve as more of a roller coaster...so I just went with that.

And lastly I messed with the lofting for a bit and then by accident created something kinda cool (which I didn't render out...probably should have but didn't think it'd get anywhere.) Basically it looked like part of a cape wrapping around somebody. So going off of that and a love for the characters like Batman and Spawn who always have these crazy capes enveloping their bodies, I drew curve layers to loft. The bottom layer was fanned out like the bottom of the cape along the ground while the 2nd was the "shoulders". I had no idea the "cape" would wrap the way it did but I was pretty happy with that. Just for reference I added a head and gave him some Batman ears. Baha.

Elevated view from the back - cape kinda swirling? Maybe?

More of a side view

A straight on view didn't look really right the way some of the layers overlapped so I just tried to hide it...anyways, with some things coming out planned and others that kinda made their own way, here it is!

City Invasion

So finished up animating my scene. At first I had the whole sequence as a still shot with a little camera wiggle, but later I decided add in a more handheld camera feel, full with the rack focuses and stuff.

Little breakdown of what's going on here: I had the cutouts of all the ships but this time I cut out the tall building foreground to put the 2nd ISD behind (I even named them!) I then did some simple animations to get a feel for the movement of all the ships (I really wanted to emphasize the hugeness of the ships so I had them move really slow). It was also really important that I get the engine heat distortion set up so I worked on that first - I added a particle system (2 on top of each other) and then used them to act as a displacement map for the Destroyer. Since only the leftside engine would be visible I only did the engine distortion on that side - I had tried to do make some engine glow but that ended up not working well since I couldn't play the light off the hull. I then parented the particle system to the engines and made them 3d layers so I could push it back.

The next big item was the helicopters. I took the cutout (it was the whole chopper) and split it into 2 layers - one of the body and one of the rotor blades. I made the blades 3d layers and keyframed them to rotate around, then precomposed them and duplicated. I did the same for the 2nd helicopter body - I had them separated as the Military chopper (screen left) and the 4 "news" choppers.

I added in the TIE fighters squadron too and had them drop down from the shadow of the ISD "hull".

Finally the last touches were precomposing the entire scene and putting it into a slightly smaller composition - to give room for the camera wiggle and handheld stuff. I made the composition wiggle on it's own, but after adding a 3d Camera I also put a wiggle expression on the z-orientation. Finally checked all the motion blur on and animated the camera - unfortunately I didn't have a realistic lens focus effect so I just added a gaussian blur and manually keyframed it once the camera moved. After several test renders and tweakings here's the final product!



City Invasion from kabraz on Vimeo.

Perspective Digital painting

So for the Perspective Digital Paint I thought it'd be fun to kind of mess with the color palate a bit. Going for a bit of a cartoony look I have everything shaded in weird colors, but I tried to keep the fundamentals of design and color in mind. For example, I still tried to make darker colors represent closer objects and lighter ones in the distance, including the sides of the house for shading.

The house and overall silhouette were on one layer that had a transfer setting of multiply attached to it so I could paint within the outline. For big expanses, like the foreground and sky, I added to their own layers and just wiped across the entire area. Also, in those big expanses I changed the brush type to a feathered brush with opacity so I could (attempt) to do some fall-off with distance. That was about it!

Star Destroyer City

Not amazingly creative, but I do love me some Star Destroyers. Kinda going for a District 9 feel with the helicopters too, but I think they give the scene a little more life. I had considered TIE fighters as well but in the end held against it. Anyways, here it is! 2 Different Star Destroyer layers + 2 helicopter layers (I think it's obvious which one is duplicated). I bumped the contrast on everything up to create the silhouettes and added a little grain to the nearest Destroyer too.

3D Renders

Created a simple scene mapping textures to spheres. You can't really tell but I mapped a galaxy photo to a large sphere, and inside created the Earth, Moon, and the asteroids. The asteroids are simply spheres that are slightly deformed - I just duplicated it a second time and rotated it for the 2nd asteroid. Then I just went online and downloaded a TIE fighter model and stuck a few of them in there. I wanted a Star Destroyer but the file I downloaded was a .obj? and when I dragged it onto the grid this HUGE thing showed up and each section of the ship was split into different pieces- like the bridge, the engines, etc. and I didn't know how to group them or scale them all down uniformly so I just scrapped that. Anyways, hopefully we'll get into what all that was about.

Wide View

CU of TIE model & Asteroid Texture

POV TIE View