Final Project! Super Time Lapse!

All right! Final project time! Rather than leaving my audience with cliff-hanger after cliff-hanger every blog post...I've decided to condense everything into a super time lapse for you! ....right. Anyway, I've been working on this final project for the better part of the semester, as I am doing the VFX for Karinne Berstis' short film, "Kinks" in our 343 class. So it's been an ongoing project, as you can see from one of my first blog entries when I performed a motion test.

Pre Production:

Too much side space?

The  pre-production took place actually even before I got any footage. I was also the Director of Photography on this film and so I had to plan each shot carefully to allow room for where the bubbles would take place. This meant sometimes cutting off peoples' faces (something you obviously never want to do in a regular film) to make room for the bubbles, or leaving tons of head-room or side space.

Not so weird when bubble's are in!

The pre-production work for the actual compositing went a little like this:
- gather animations for bubbles (or clip-art for the rough tests)
- organize each shot into a composition

- listen to pump up music!




Progress:
The main workflow I used for the compositing of the project was as follows:
Motion Tracking:

First I'd add a null object to the comp. and then find something on the actor to track to - usually I did something on the face (so the motion of the bubble bouncing around would match when the actor turned their head). I chose not to have the bubble 100% attached to the actor - as in when the character turns their head, the orientation of the bubble does not necessarily move. Both the director and I felt it was more important to have the bubble readable than to follow every nuance the head made - as we found out in some earlier tests I did. 

Bubble Composition:
Next I'd make the bubble itself. I used the same template for most of the bubble outlines and just squeezed and stretched as needed. Within each shot I had a new composition for every bubble that was made - and I did this for 2 reasons.
1. When you turn the layer into 3d everything inside the bubble is on the same plane since it's just a nexted composition. That way I wouldn't have to worry about one part of the bubble (the outline, the shadow or the animations itself) popping out in Z-depth just because I didn't line it up properly.
2. If each bubble was its own composition, it would be much easier to later go and swap out or replace animations. I knew I'd be doing a rough cut version (2 at least) as well as the final, and I wanted to make sure I had things organized so say, 4 weeks in the future, I could just as easily navigate through and replace the animations with newer ones, or tweak the way something looked.

Once the bubble was made I'd drag it into the shot composition, turn it into a 3D layer, adjust the orientation based on the character's head position, re-adjust scale and position so they never went over the actors face, and link it to the null.


Next step would be to add the lights to help it integrate into the world better. I generally used point lights, which allowed a small "vignette" with the shadows coming across it. During this stage I'd also adjust for reflections. I had considered doing shadows for the bubbles, but in the end it wouldve required too much masking and it wouldn't be that noticable anyways.

Can you spot the differences?

It's all about the details! Check the wall.

Lots of masks for 1 simple move.

That leads me to: MASKING! Unfortunately there are a number of shots where a character walks in front of the camera, or a hand comes up or we pass behind an object. All of these instances require a ton of masking work...which isn't fun at all. Keeping up with good habits, I break up the objects I'm going to mask into a lot of smaller layers to give me greater accuracy and flexibility in keeping things clean. Being a roto-artist is definitely not something I'd like to do but I suppose if I do get a job at a VFX house somewhere everyone has to go through the ropes...ugh.

The final steps for me are Color Correction and rendering. For some reason that I don't know (maybe Ben can give me some insight?) when AE renders a file out, the colors become a lot darker. Even with the same codec (ProRes422) and all the settings, the image comes out a bit darker. So I just make 1 adjustment layer with the color correction I need and apply it to all the shots within a scene - regardless of having VFX or not. Otherwise it would take a super long time to match the shots with no VFX to the slightly darker shots that do. After that it's off to the render queue and me off to bed! ...HA.

Anyways, that's the process I went through for VFX on "Kinks". Come to CMB on Dec. 12 at 12PM to see it screened!

As for what I'm turning in, 1) the sound people need to go through the final mix and all, 2) Not sure I can screen the director's movie in another class! But here's more or less what it'll look like.

Kinks Excerpt from kabraz on Vimeo.

3d Match Moving Assignment

Awright! Finally down to the match moving/CG integration! So during the summer my friend Scott and I filmed a really quick 1 minute short about me running like a lunatic with a Nerf gun trying to get to the last helicopter leaving to safety whilst the neighborhood around me was under siege by giant alien space-ships...and...Drones! I drew up a concept piece for Scott who then modeled it in Maya and sent it over.

Tracked it in Maya's Match Moving software (first time for me using that software and it went surprisingly painlessly!) and brought it straight into Maya where I tried to keep things to their bare essentials. I really still suck at lighting and texturing so I tried to hide it with the fact that obviously there would be a ton of crap going on to hopefully distract you, but I dropped in the model, textured it with this red, rusty texture I found (the drone was initially going to be very shiny...but then I realized how much harder that would be if it had to reflect everything around it...) and then threw in some lights. The first shot has only one ambient light sorta behind it, while the 2nd shot actually has some directional light hitting it from the backend to kinda give it a light wrap from the "sun". It took quite a lot of messing around and I'm still not convinced I did anything correctly, but I managed to use a still-frame of the shot as the Color File for the lights and just messed with Eye-dropping different samples of the footage to sort of match the colors.

Then exported and brought into AE where I did the compositing and Color Correction. For next time I really need to just export the model by itself so I can properly layer it on top of the elements...for example in the first shot I wanted the car-bomb explosion to be behind the drone but since it was all 1 piece (and I didn't feel like doing some roto) I had to slide it over to the left to avoid having the flames "on top" of the drone as it turned around.

Secondly, after a few test renders I realized in the initial renders of the 2nd shot I had too much movement going on for a mere 31 frame animation. I simplified it and tried working with the curves editor (but my damn mouse middle click sucks so I couldn't adjust anything...) and ended up trying to do pseudo curves with the keyframes to mimic the "distance" it had to travel - i.e. making it come from the background more slowly and appear faster as it flew towards camera.

The one thing I wish I could do (and I'll probably ask you Ben) was to move the locaters from Matchmove into After Effects. I'd already got a pretty solid track from Matchmove and it'd be nice if I didn't have to track again, in AE or a 3rd party program, for the other VFX components.

 Final Composite!

Light wrap around the back, but pretty unimpressive texturing and lighting...=/

Dunno what all that artifacting is but as you can see it's nothing amazing...just all hidden!

Drone Shot VFX from kabraz on Vimeo.

Ball Drop

I thought this video was up but apparently not...there was some formatting issues while uploading to Vimeo. Anyways, simple physics test with a ball dropping and colliding with little blocks!

Ball Drop from kabraz on Vimeo.

Surveyor Ben!

So I had created this cityscape for a test and decided to test if I could do a believable camera move around a live action clip. Obviously it didn't turn out perfectly well but with a little tweaking I think it could be a bit more believable.

Surveyor Ben from kabraz on Vimeo.

Lighting

3D layers in AE

At the risk of sounding totally douche-y this is the logo I created for the production company consisting of myself, Harrison Reynolds, and Shane Gibson. It was a pretty basic task of getting the sides to unfold onto each other (although I had to watch for seams since the slightest bit could stick out) and the hardest part was lining the pivot points up with the edges of the squares. I had it a bit easy since the sides didn't contain any depth, too. I then just animated a camera flying around (also to hide the fact that there are more swinging panels than there are sides - to make it more complex looking I folded a few sides over twice and just deleted the layer once it was in position - and then added Trapcode Shine to it for that super blue look. Overall I think it worked out quite well! Added some sounds and here's the production logo...although after the fact I noticed it did look a bit like the game cube logo - but if you won't tell I won't either.

A Box of Thirty Logo from kabraz on Vimeo.

3D Texturing

So while modifications of R2 continue I decided to just go ahead and try to texture in a very basic way some of the shapes on R2's dome (since the main body doesn't really have any detail yet. I added blinns to both the dome and the body to give it that shiny look and messed with the specular a bit on the dome to bring it up. Then I just made 1 blue blinn and used the same one for the rectangles around his dome, then made a red one for the circular "eyes". Nothing amazing, and quite honestly I thought it looked cooler when it was just the model. But oh well...til it gets more details I'm going with that.