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Category: VFX Fundamentals

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VFX Fundamentals

Term 1 Final Video Assignment

Ideation

#1 Space Battle

The scene shows beauty shots of large spaceships to introduce scale. Then it shows the deployment of smaller fighter ships going to battle formation. All of these build up to the climax where enemy ships jump in from hyperspace and start to attack and deploy their own ships. This leads up to the high point of tension where we cut because there is no time and budget to do the actual space battle.

#2 Perfume Advertisement

This idea was to try out motion design coupled with VFX. I wanted to try this because I feel like given the time frame of the assignment it would be interesting to explore. Since the intensity will increase as we progress. It is better to do something more ambitious and make mistakes early on.

So the idea was to create an abstract and moody commercial that showcases a uniquely designed perfume bottle.

#3 Chocolate Ice-cream Commercial

#4 Car Commercial

Conclusion

In the end, I went with #2.

Mood board & References

References from Pinterest
AI-generated
AI-generated

FX References

0:10
0:08

Lighting Mood board

Mood Reel

Storyboard

3D Model

Initial Designs
Refine with a better silhouette
Inner geometry, gold frame and cap
Final

Look Dev Materials

Final Concept

Styleframes

s01
s01b_v4
s02
s03 start
s03 end
s04a
s04b
s05

Animations

Animation is not my strong suit, I need more practice. But I tried my best to follow the mood reel’s animation. However, I feel that overall the animation is the biggest problem in this project.

Especially the cut after the bottle’s emergence is very glaring. If there is more time, I would need to rethink how to better transit. Though I could simply merge those two shots into one continuous shot. However, due to the lack of time, I just did a cut as they are simulated separately.

Overall, the pacing is a little fast for my liking, I feel like a lot of the shots can be dragged out. That being said, I do like the last transition from the close-up to the end scene. That one feels smoother and I am happy with it.

FX

For FX, this is the part I love the most and want to improve. It consists of mainly two simulations; (1) Rigid Body Dynamics and (2) Pyro (Smoke).

Having an art-directed fracture is the foundation for both simulations. I employed both procedural and manual boolean slicers to get a fracture that I was satisfied with. In addition, I added interior details in between the fractures.

Fractures
Interior Fracture Details
s02 Node Graph

The smoke simulation is pretty straightforward once the RBD is complete. I just take the pieces where I want smoke to spawn and use them as emitters for my smoke and simply run a smoke sim. viola. The combined FX is shown below.

Compositing

AOV Passes including Light Passes

Compositing is pretty straightforward as well. For me, I like to make my raw render look as good as possible so that I would not have to spend too much time on compositing (a little bit unorthodox I know).

However, sometimes there will still be times when the deadline is very close (like this time) and there isn’t time to rerender. Hence, I always like to output as much information in my render through AOVs so that I have the option to do editing in post-production. (image above).

Also when doing AOV channels, I like to output my light AOVs as well. Having light groups in my render would mean I can adjust my lighting without returning to 3D.

For post-production, I just try to ensure that all my scene colour is consistent. Then I applied an overall colour grade and added some grains.

Sound Design (SFX)

Final Output

Combining everything together after weeks of work, here it is! The final product. Please on sound as there is audio to it as well! Thanks for staying with me until this point. Enjoy

Reflections

Overall this project was a successful one. I learned a lot about the project pipeline. I also realised my weaknesses and strengths. I feel that I would need to improve my animation skills and camera animation. Right now, it is a bit stiff and not dynamic enough. For future projects, I want to try doing another aspect of houdini.

Categories
Manos - Modelling, Texturing, Animation VFX Fundamentals

Formative Assessment Feedback

You have a well-presented and thorough blog. It is easy to navigate and see how you plan your documentation even in the areas that are missing. The information so far is good but mostly focused on the technical part. It will be good to see your thinking and reflection for every part of the process. Also try to finish the missing areas for the summative submission, especially the weekly tasks that were given in the class.

For the final project you have shown a good number of experiments regarding the design, environment and animation (motion graphics) but you haven’t included most of them in your blog.

Do not forget to make a VFX breakdown video for the summative submission.

-Manos

From the feedback, I realise I need to be more proactive at uploading my progress. Also, I need to at more of my personal thoughts and reflection from the things learnt in class to the blog posts.

Categories
Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

UE Assignment – Cabin in Woods

Brief

As part of the term 1 VFX fundamental course, we are instructed to construct an environment scene in UE5. The theme is cabin in the woods. The process for this assignment would be:

  1. Look for references
  2. Block out the scene
  3. Add materials and look dev
  4. Import models
  5. Scatter vegetation(tress and plants)
  6. Setting cinematic cameras
  7. Additional elements
  8. Render image sequences

References

I went online to look for some references to give context what a cabin in the woods would look like. I plan to add an additional element of water in my scene. I imagine my cabin would be positioned beside a body of water such as a lake.

Blocking

I moved on to blocking out my scene. The concept would be to have mountains/hills as the background. The cabin itself would be by a pond and surrounded by trees. The big cubes represent the mountain, the cylinders are trees( the quantity is TBD). The white plane is the pond/lake and the small box will be the cabin.

Look Dev/Materials

I tested the animated water surface material. For the lake surface, it would be darker and slightly green beside on references.

Lake material
Adding all the materials

Importing 3D assets

Next would be importing the 3d models of the cabin together with the textures.

Cabin model

Vegetation

Afterwards, I proceed with the scattering of trees. Both the water plants and trees are hand painted in the scene using foilages in UE5.

Adding Camera

After completing the scene, the next step would be to frame my camera angles. I tested some angles which I find aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Elements

Lastly, I added two additional 2 elements in my scene to make it more interesting.

Final Result

Reflection

Overall, this is a short and fun project to do. Quixel bridge definitely made the whole process a lot faster as very little modelling is needed for this project. UE5’s real time render is really fast and realistic(ish). The most challenging part would working with the shadows and the lighting. I wasn’t pleased with the initial render and had to color correct in the post using Nuke.

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Gonzalo - Nuke VFX Fundamentals

Nuke – Balloon Festival

Idea & References

Assets

FX

Rotoscope

Composite

Final Video Assignment

Reflection

Categories
Gonzalo - Nuke VFX Fundamentals

12/5 Real Scenarios in Production

Need to review one’s work before publishing it. No matter the amount of pressure or little time.

Reduce the reliability of the artist.

Stages in Production for Film in Compositing

Temps/Postviz

Trailers

Finals

QC

Software Project Management

Google Docs and Sheets

Ftrack

Shotgun/Shotgrid

Production Roles

Line Producer

Central to VFX project management. Liaise with all aspects of production and post-production.

VFX producer

Ensure the studio completes projects on time and to a high standard.

VFX Dailies

A daily meeting in the morning when artists working on a project meet to share their work in its current state. Ensure that you are moving in the right direction and getting feedback.

Get your current versioned work uploaded.

Tech Check before publishing

Check if you did all the notes for the shot

Compare this version with the old one

Check editorial

any retime in the shot

your shot has the latest CG and FX

Your shot has the latest camera match move

Write in the comments if you have any personal notes

Do you have different alternatives for the shot

QC

Desk Dailies Review (small)

1 VFX sup, 1 VFX Prod, 1 Line Prod, 1 Lead Comp

+ artist (you)

Slack, Zoom, Teams for remote

Small Cinema Dailies (medium)

1 VFX sup, 1 line Prod, 1 VFX Prod, 1 Lead CG, 1 Lead comp

+ tech team + artist/s(your team)

Big Cinema Dailies (big)

VFX sup, line Prod, VFX Prod, Lead CG, Lead Comp – studio team

VFX sup, Director, Producer, Editorial, Lighting lead – client team

Reflections

On-site offers more learning experience than remote/online.

Trust is important.

Word gets out fast so don’t be “that” guy/girl.

Categories
Gonzalo - Nuke VFX Fundamentals

28/11 3D Matchmoving

3D Tracking in Nuke

There is an additional axis involved for 3D tracking in Nuke.

You can extract cameras, and position information in Nuke.

From Nuke version 15, there is support for USD file format.

Axis in Nuke is a null/locator.

Tab in the viewport to switch from 2d to 3d view.

Basic UI/UX navigation is similar to most DCCs.

Pixel Analyzer.

Workspaces can be customised as well.

grains more in darker areas, lesser in the brighter areas

.dpx is an older image file format

renders from CG should be clean and free of noise, grain workflow will be done in post-production

Scanline Render/Camera/Sphere

multisample tab to adjust the sample size, to adjust the quality of the render

3D Geo, Lights and Materials

All 3d objects exist here in the 3d scene node

Lens Distortion

All camera footage is shot through a lens. A lens is a series of curved pieces of glass that bend light and “focus” the rays on the image plane.

Lenses with different focal lengths produce different lens distortion and even with the same focal length, no two lenses are the same.

24mm lens, more lens distortion at the edges
50mm lens, less distortion

Workflow for compositing, undistort-> doing comp work -> bring back lens distortion afterwards

DP on the production site will take down lens information, and take a picture of the distortion grid to record the distortion.

Other information recorded on set will include, chrome and matte balls, Macbeth chart, and 360-degree image for HDRI.

Lens distortion
Only in NukeX
undistorted image
Difference

For plates without any grid, we need to manually draw those lines. Both vertical and horizontal guidelines need to be drawn. One line needs to have at least 4 points to be considered a guide.

STmap

Works with Nuke. Also lighter with STmap.

STmaps move pixels with a texture map (U,V) with green and red channels.

Also, know as a forward channel for undistortion and backward channel for distortion.

Assignment: Balloon Festival

This is my final product for my Nuke term assignment. I will do an individual post to cover the process.

Reflection

Today is the last day of the workshop style class as Gonzalo is not going to cover any more compositing until the next term, we were given a sneak peek into what we are going to cover for next term which is 3D match moving. Also, we reviewed our Balloon Festival assignment. We covered the 3D aspect of Nuke and learned about len distortion and how we work with footage with distortion.

Categories
Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

27/11 UE5 Movie Render Queue

Offline rendering solution

Supports batch rendering, and multiple jobs

Need to enable the plugins

Render in image sequences due to the many advantages over video format

Less compression, no interlacing, and more information rendered in each frame

Stable, convenient and time efficient.

Aliasing in CGI

Deferred Rendering vs Forward Rendering

Color Spaces – a set of parameters which define the color capabilities of a particular device stored in a digital file.

Currently the newest is ACES

MRW window

Add in sequence to the queue

Each job will encompass its own configuration

Categories
Gonzalo - Nuke VFX Fundamentals

21/11 2D Cleanup

The Rotopaint node has more added features compared to the roto node.

A little similar to Photoshop.

Operations:

Brush – unlike Photoshop, there is no custom brush. We can paint with blend modes as well.

Clone – Hold ctrl to sample and paint, and shift to adjust the brush size.

Use lower opacity for a more refined result. adjust brush edge hardness when needed.

Blur – similar to Photoshop blur

Dodge and burn – for painting in shadows with burn and highlights with dodge.

Can set either single frame operation or entire frame range.

All edits are recorded in the node and can be further edited. parameters that can be edited such as transformation, stroke, lifetime, and shape.

Rotopaint can also generate custom-painted alpha channels, just need to enable in the hidden folder

Difference node helps to isolate the difference between two images.

For clean up, we need to denoise the plate because the cleanup will stand out on the plate with grain. Normal workflow would be to denoise the plate first, do the clean up then re-introduce the grain.

Match grain by channel.

Grains are super important as they occur in almost every shot

F_regrain samples an area (the flatter the area the more stable) then applies a similar grain pattern) only NukeX.

Kodak Grain, sets grains by RGB channels, normally the biggest grain is in the blue channel.

Need to match-move before applying the cleanup.

Homework assignment: do before and after, do more damage.

Tips for hand-painted motion blur and smear

motion blur
smear

Grains/Noise

Grain can be extracted by using the minus operation for the original plate with the denoised plate.

Changing from linear to cineon color spaces will reveal more grains in the darker areas, purely for visualisation purposes.

Cons: will work on flat sections of the plate. but will not work for uneven surfaces because of the way the grain is distributed and arranged.

Newer workflow is done using the DasGrain gizmo by Fabian Holtz

Localised grain application, with common_key and DasGrain node.

Normalise grains, as grains are not even spread throughout the plate.

Grains more in darker areas, lesser in the brighter areas

Gizmos can be copied and pasted and shared, they are just Python codes.

Reflection

Today we learnt about roto paint tool to do some clean up to the plate. For assignment we are suppose to do a messy class corridor scene. I feel like the given examples gives me a haunted vibe. So why not just add a floating “spirit”(its actually Dark Sun Gwyndolin from Dark Souls)?

I create the scene in 3D then place various 3d models i found online. The main character also has a smoke simulation to it on top of the floating animation. I also tried to match the lighting as much as possible. Then I rendered out the scene.

Finally, I composited everything in Nuke and graded it. Of course not forgetting the main point of the class is to do some clean up. I covered up some of the pasted posters and added some graffiti on the walls as well.

Categories
Manos - Modelling, Texturing, Animation VFX Fundamentals

20/11 Animation

12 Principles of Animation

Timing and Spacing

Timing and spacing obey the laws of physics. How fast an object is moving will be reflected on the screen. The faster the object, the more space in between the position in each frame. The slower it moves, the closer the spacing

Squash and Strech

Objects have some sort of elasticity. More exaggerated in animation. For example, to illustrate movement, a bouncing ball will stretch before touching the floor and squash after impact.

Anticipation

Anticipation is the action to prepare the audience for the upcoming movement, hence making more realistic.

Easing (In and Out)

Movement in the real world is not perfectly linear. Things take time to accelerate and decelerate. Hence there needs to be a slow in and slow out animation for the animation to be more realistic.

Follow Through and Overlapping

Follow through and overlapping action help to give the impression that the animated object follows the laws of physics, including the inertia.

Arcs

More natural movements follows an arched trajectory, following implied “arcs”can achieve greater realism. For example, a thrown object moving along a parabolic trajectory. However mechanical movement, often moves in straight lines.

Exaggeration

As realistic animations can sometimes be dull and unappealing, adding an additional layer of exaggeration can help to make the animation more interesting.

Solid Drawing

Solid drawing refers to ensuring that the animated object has space and volume. Giving them weight.

Appeal

The concept of appeal is to make a character more likeable and relatable to the audience, be it the hero or the villain. They will be to be more real and interesting.

Straight Ahead Action (&Pose to Pose)

The two different ways of approaching animation. Straight ahead action means creating the animation frame by frame whereas pose to pose means to generate key poses and filling the intervals later on.

SAC:

Pros – creates a more fluid, dynamic illusion of movement, and is better for producing realistic action sequences.

Cons – On the other hand, it is hard to maintain proportions and to create exact, convincing poses along the way.

P2P:

works better for dramatic or emotional scenes, where composition and relation to the surroundings are of greater importance.

Secondary Action

Adding secondary actions to the main action gives a scene more life, and can help to support the main action.

Staging

Staging’s purpose is to direct the audience’s attention, and make it clear what is of central point of importance of the frame.

Maya

Maya, Press S to set a keyframe.

Time graph

There is different animation interpolation between keyframes.

Reflections

I think animation is super important for any CG artist, whether or not you are an animator. The understanding of movement and timing will definitely help me to become a better artist.

Categories
Gonzalo - Nuke VFX Fundamentals

14/11 Channels & Planar Tracking

Recap: Ctrl mouse click to the viewer will sample pixel details on the frame, Ctrl+shift will sample the average pixel detail on the screen

Filtering

Reformat:

When scaling up an image, do not scale it more than 10%. If not the image will start to lose details and become softer.

https://www.topazlabs.com/ good upscaling software

Concatenation

Concatenation is the ability to perform one single mathematical calculation across several tools in the Transform family. This single calculation (or filter) allows us to retain as much detail as possible.

Do not break the concatenation, it blurs the image. It happens when adding nodes with filtering (transforming).

Filtering (and Motion blur) is recognised only at the end of the node tree.

BBOX ??

Shuffle node

A powerful node that allows the manipulation of different colour channels (as well as other AOVs) to the output result.

AOVs can also be accessed in the shuffle node

TIP: For animation ease, select keyframe and press H.

Planar Tracking exercise

Defocuse with depth pass, Use defocuse instead of blur.

Zdefocus gives more control as it utilises the depth pass. There is an option to control the focal point apart from the size of the blur.

Native to nuke, we can render out 3D objects with depth pass as well to apply defocus.

Bokeh, added to nuke on plugin from v14 onwards. It reads real camera values. The node is really good based on the inputs. But very slow. only in NukeX only.

Assignment: iPhone Planar Tracking

Reflection

Today we did a bit if planar tracking exercise, we are suppose to track and mask out the fingers on the phone. The brief was to stablise the shot and create an interesting animation of the screen reacting to the movement of the fingers. Using tracking and stablising, I was able to create a mask area to replace the screen with a interactive iphone screen. I used a bit of houdini to simulate a cloth drag for the first swipe and particle simulation to show the second swipe.