MA_VFX 23/24 BeacherSo I asked my friend for his critique of our group project and this is what he had to say:
Responsible for everything except the car model and the real-life footage.
The production of the final video was very rushed, about 80% of the video was done in the last week. As I only did the easy shots of the front early on, most of the difficult and complex camera animations were done very last minute. Thankfully, a lot of the planning work was done early on and it helped make the journey a little bit more grounded as I just had to follow the storyboard and direction of the mood reel.
If I have more time, I hope to improve my composition shot and experiment more with the lighting and rendering aspects. Also, I would like to go back to my comfort zone and hopefully add more VFX simulations to my video.
Furthermore, after reviewing the video I realise there is some mistakes with some of the shots which I will be fixing and updating in the future.
Also thanks to Gonzalo’s reminder, I think the exr workflow is becoming more and more familiar to me. I usually render PNG as I try to make my renders as good as possible to avoid doing much compositing. But rendering exr really gives me the flexibility to make changes in post-production (even though I think I am still bad at it). However those exr files are really huge and since I had a lot of shots, my SSD exploded. Sadly, I discovered the DWAA compression too late as it really saved a lot of space.
Please turn off the sound for this.
So for the BTS video, I want to show my journey of making this but due to the short amount of time, I only can put the important parts. I want to share that actually there is a lot more planned for this video at first. But due to the limited time I have to work on this (because there are two papers to write and one more group project that is very VFX heavy), I cut the whole plan in half. Originally, there was supposed to be an abstract making of the video which is part 1 of this video. The final video shown is the second part.
So for the BTS video, I want to show the different stages of the production. Firstly, it is the pre-production stage where I look for a lot of references on cars. Also, I look at a lot of reference video of how other people do their production on cars. I studied a lot of real live shooting of cars where I broke down which camera angles and motion work make sense and which are not realistic. I also looked at abstract car videos where the producers used a lot of abstract CGI elements as symbols related to their cars.
Also, I showed some of the animation VFX and compositing process screen recording. Nothing new here, just normal and the usual workflow.
Some of the VFX playblasts showing the very little VFX elements in my video.
Although it is only a car, animation is really hard for me to get so this stage is really a new challenge for me. Had to spend a lot of time animating the car and camera. I think I might just not be finished if it’s a character in my video and not a car.
The car rigging process is made easier with a plugin called launch control, it is really easy to use and delivers great results. I hope to try more of it in the future.
Dig through the whole internet and finally filter the useful footage that is fitting for my storyboard.
Originally planned my video to have a Mustang or a vintage car, but I realise it is quite unrealistic for those cars to perform such “racy” animations. Perhaps next time my beautiful Mustang will be used in some more classy video I guess.
Can’t draw at all so I shall just take screenshots as storyboard directions.
Found a piece of suitable music on epidemic sound. But it is too long so I had to remix it to fit it to my animatic. The screenshot shows the old animatic which is why the final music is longer than the video. It is a back-and-forth process where I match the clips to the music and vice versa.
Role: Director, Producer, VFX, Look Dev, Animation (except robot), Lighting & Rendering
Special Thanks to my Colleague, Chen Xuan for the camera animation guidance
For the idea of this project, we did it together as a group as we thought of what all of us wanted to do. TianHang wants to do modelling for robots. Yanghao (Chris) wanted abstraction with the involvement of animals/creatures. I was eager to explore the complex setup of simulating abstract plants and interesting VFX CGI. Choplat (Chay) wants to do post-production and sound design.
So knowing what we all wanted, we looked for references and came up with this story (script below). Hence, it contains what everyone wants to do.
For this project, I think the bulk of the work is on VFX as almost every shot contains some elements of CGI. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to create the setup so that the geometry that is exported from Houdini would look more natural and at the same time with a hint of abstraction.
Also did the animatics (see earlier post).
Lighting and Rendering are also quite straightforward, as it was a desert scene and we did not have too many objects to obstruct the illumination of our main subjects, we just used an HDRI to light the scene.
References
Link to our board, welcome to explore.
Ai Generated
To help the group understand the whole plan of the story, Chay and I put up this animation with early VFX tests and simple geometry.
So Chris had the scene built in UE5 ready to be rendered, so I blended two deer animation data together with Houdini’s KineFX and used that deer geometry to layer FX simulations on the deer.
For this video there is two layers of animations on two parts of the deer.
Firstly, I want the focus to be on the horns of the deer so I split out the body and the horns of the deer.
Secondly, I started with the vines simulation, starting from the legs as it travel upwards towards the horns.
Since the horns are already separated from the body, I can manually time when I want the vine simulation to start on the horns. This setup gives me more control to art direct the vines’ animation.
Once the vines are done, the leaves are just copied to a fraction of the points on the vines. They are also animated to move along the curves of the vines to give them a more complex look to the deer.
Originally, the idea was to have animated plants spreading across the landscape.
However, due to the lack of time and resources (we were running late for our deadline as we had other assignments to submit), we just had static plants already covering the landscape and just animated their hue with a custom AOV in post-production.
The initial design and simulation above for the plant, but we think it was too flimsy and looked too fruity (similar to grapes). So we decided to go with another design whereby the plant is more flowery and vine-like.
False colour showing the bloom time offset.
At the initial start of the s04b, the paints will be added from the previous shot, and the hairs will be replaced with grass and plants
Final Product
Fracture simulation as a start
There is a lot of work to make the plants. See BTS video
Also, I added some debris which is a particle simulation.
The VFX here consists of particle simulation for the initial magical pollination seeds.
Then I added a vine simulation for the grown of the plants.