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Category: VFX Fundamentals

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Gonzalo - Nuke VFX Fundamentals

07/11 2D Tracking

Transform model

2D track – flat

2.5 track – parallax

3D track – pure 3D

2D tracking workflow:

add tracker node

make a new tracker, and place it at one corner of the TV

the first box searches within, and the second box is the search limit

Play track, and export match move one point. this creates a new transform node that links to the tracker node and has the tracker data.

The order of the track location matters.

stabilising shots

Reflections

I have seen similar tracking methods in After Effects and it was quite popular a few years ago. It is a good start to build a foundation for 3d tracking. I had a lot of fun picking out the posters and placing them in the footage.

Assignment: Planar Tracking Street Poster

Categories
Manos - Modelling, Texturing, Animation VFX Fundamentals

6/11 Texturing with Substance Painter

Today’s class is about how to create custom textures for our 3d models using substance painter. The whole concept of how SP works is pretty straightforward. It is very similar to Photoshop where we paint with masks and layers.

Substance Painter offers a bunch of materials and smart materials that are packaged with the program. Creating custom materials with substance designer or importing existing smart materials is also possible. Most of the existing materials are not exactly usable straight out of the box. But they can be modified or used as a base start point to create the final texture.

I think the most important thing for texturing would be that whatever the artist choose to add to the materials must have their reasons. And that reason is to sell the story and concept.

The image below was a test image that I did for the class. I was trying out the different brushes and materials in SP.

Reflection

Texturing is the next step after UV unwrapping. I feel that it is a important step as it gives the 3d model life. It gives the asset a reason to exist. Without textures, the whole 3d environment will just be plain and dull white clay material. I would definitely be using more SP to create textures for future projects.

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Gonzalo - Nuke VFX Fundamentals

31/10 Merging + Color

Concept of Premultiplication

Softwares like AE already premult layers

Page Up & Page Down to scrub AOVs

Instead of a layer system, the node tree system is a list of instructions

Merge Node and its operations:

  • over
  • mask
  • average
  • overlay
  • stencil
  • minimum
  • maximum
  • under
  • etc…

Reformat node: changing image size/format. Upscaling will result in the degradation of image quality. You can choose the interpolation methods but the result is often jittery. Can look at AI tools if upscaling is really needed.

Premult Workflow: Unpremult to divide by alpha -> do grading and CC -> then premult

When doing grading, we process and treat RGB separately from Alpha channels.

Colorspace and linearisation

32 Bit Color

Colour Matching Methods:
1. Edit the white point of the original colour, then adjust the gain.

2. Divide color, then multiply

Ctrl Shift-drag to get an average colour data

Alt + K for cloning nodes creates a reference copy of the node with linkages for all the parameters.

QC

Control highlights, mid-tones and low

Reflections

Today the main takeaway for me is the concept of per-multipilcation. To do image edits, we need to unpremult before doing any operation to the image. This is because there is extra image data in the channels that we are not aware. This information is new to me and I will definitely keep this in mind the next time when I do compositing.

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Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

30/10 Landscape Material, Water & Foliage

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Manos - Modelling, Texturing, Animation VFX Fundamentals

30/10 UV Texturing

UV mapping is the process of generating a flat representation of a 3d dimensional geometry. This UV map can be represented by UV coordinates which are also known as texture coordinates. Since it’s 2d, the two parameters it are U for the X-axis and V for the Y-axis.

Applying textures – right click assign material (either existing or new material)

Creating materials – edit from hypershade

Maya’s UV editor – interface to edit UVs if needed, auto unwrap works most of the time.

Demo example: Earth and Moon

Earth texture (source: USGS)
Moon texture (source: NASA)
Earth and Moon geometry in Maya viewport

Reflections

As most of the modeling work will be done in Maya, the next step will be to UV wrap them. Having proper UV maps is very important to ensure the textures does not appear in the wrong places of the model. For the class activity, we are tasked to texture two different spheres with the earth and moon’s texture from online sources. The task was pretty straightforward as when unwrapping a UV sphere the projection is already the same as the geographic projection of the images (Mercator Projection being the most popular for maps). All we have to do was to auto unwrap and apply the textures with a standard material in Maya. I look forward to further texture lessons.

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Gonzalo - Nuke VFX Fundamentals

23/10 Rotoscoping

General Roto information

Rotoscoping for VFX is used to create a matte or mask for an element from a plate, so it can be extracted out to place on a different background or edited. Rotoscoping gives artists a chance to produce scenes that would otherwise be difficult to do in real life. It also allows us to edit out unwanted elements in post-production. the possibilities are endless.

Roto Node and Rotopaint are generally similar. Rotopaint allows you to paint on the plate. But the roto node is lighter.

Colour Channels & Alpha

Mattes can be located on each channel

Motion blur in mattes is important, and often roto mattes have motion blur included

Rotoscoping

Divide and conquer, split the subject into parts for the roto mask.

Lesser spline points will result in a smoother animated mask

Roto Assignment: Running Man

The assignment brief was to create a matte for the running man as well as the bridge railings from the plate. The following is my attempt at the assignment.

Reflections

Today we learnt about isolating specific elements within a plate into different layers. It involves creating an animated mask which is black and white so that we can use different pixel operations to extract them out from the background. I find that this is a incredibly tedious task. Although Gonzalo said it can be quite nice and easy to do, I find that my mind when numb when trying to shift those individual keys to create the roto masks. Perhaps my workflow is not that refined, but I did not enjoy the entire process. I also was not pleased with my final result of the running man as I see a lot of problems with my work. I will need more practice to get better.

Categories
Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

23/10 UE 5 Materials II, Landscapes

Material Instancing

Master Material and Material instancing

Pros and Cons of Material instancing Workflow

Material instances are derivatives of the original master materials with exposed parameters for the artist to tweak further.

Right-click convert to parameters.

Need to implement proper naming to define the corresponding parameters.

Texture LODs, Mips

Different LODs of texture map as well.

Known as Mip.

Texture resolution with LODs helps to optimise the scene.

Texture resolution comes in sizes which are powers of 2.

Sometimes image texture can be layered and contain multiple data layers inside the different color channels.

Landscapes

INPUT CONTENT HERE

Reflection

INPUT REFLECTION HERE

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Manos - Modelling, Texturing, Animation VFX Fundamentals Zbrush

23/10 Organic Modeling II – Dynmesh, Remesh

Dynamesh

DynaMesh is a great tool for free-form sculpting because it removes the need for concerns about a geometry’s topology. It’s possible to change the overall shape of any DynaMesh by using the brushes in Zbrush. I think it is very useful for me to create low and middle-resolution sculpts, for blocking or low-resolution models. It is also a great way for me to make the base mesh before adding more details to my models and progressing to high-resolution models.

Zremesher

I find the remesher tool in Zbrush really useful, it automatically produces topology for my dynamesh model. Also in the V3, the new algorithm can produce better results on the sculpts.

Reflection

Today we continue with Zbrush organic sculpting/modelling. I really enjoy sculpting because somehow I find it very therapeutic. I continue to work on my skull. I also try different brushes that is inbuilt within Zbrush. I also found out about stencils where you can sculpt details with texture alphas which is super cool.

Another cool feature about Zbrush would definitely be Dynamesh and Zremesher. Dynamesh quickly allows me to start sculpting from a sphere to a base mesh with low details in a short time. After having the proper proportions I can then increase the amount of polygons to sculpt in even more details. I am amazed by how much polygons Zbrush can handle and not crash. Previously sculpting in blender gives me quite bad experience as the software will crash after the geometry exceeds >1mil polys. Zbrush can handle a few mil polys easily.

Furthermore, ZRemesher is really a cool tool to quickly optimise the topology of my model, from a few million polygons to a few hundred thousand in just one click. The software dev behind this is really a genius.

INSERT SKULL SS HERE

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Gonzalo - Nuke VFX Fundamentals

17/10 Intro to Digital Compositing & Nuke UI

What does a digital compositor do?

Compositors create the final image of a frame, shot or sequence. They take different digital elements; like the animations, background plates, graphics and special effects (SFX) and put them together to make a believable picture.

General Pipeline of a film/movie

Pipeline workflow

Three routes in an established production company

  1. Technical Artist
  2. CG Generalist
  3. Compositor

Digital Compositor progression:

  1. Roto
  2. Prep
  3. Junior comp
  4. Mid comp
  5. Senior comp
  6. Lead comp/department head
  7. 2D sup
  8. VFX sup

Software for Compositing

After Effects

  • Layer based compositing
  • 8/16-bit colour, for broadcasting use
  • Most of the time, not computationally heavy
  • popular with motion graphics
  • Unstable performances with large data files, and other colour spaces other than sRGB
  • Missing features for digital compositing

Davinci Resolve

  • Node-based
  • better colour management
  • works well with heavy files
  • Free
  • Comp and grading in the same software

Nuke

  • Supports USD (universal scene description)
  • Customizable
  • Comes in different types
    • NukeX
    • Nuke Student
    • Nuke Non-Commerical
    • Nuke Indie
Differences across all nuke versions

Nuke

More information is available in the documents in the week 3 folder.

What was went through:

  • UI navigation
    • Toolbar
    • Node graph
    • Properties
    • Viewer
  • Some basic shortcuts
  • Nuke script format, open projects, save projects
  • Workspaces
  • Node groups
  • Commonly used nodes

Feedback

Wk2 Assignment

Comments: Pay more attention to telling the story. Need more direction.

Next week’s homework:

Practice and get comfortable with the software

Next class: Rotoscoping

Reflections

Today’s class is still covering a bit of theory. Gonzalo covered in detail what the job of a compositor entails and where compositing is positioned in the pipeline. He also covered the general progression of a digital compositor. We then moved on to talk about the differences between the different general compositing software in the different industries.

The later part of the class, we finally proceed to open nuke. Gonzalo very patiently introduced us to node based compositing with Nuke. He also covered some common nodes that we will be using often in our journey. He assured us that it is alright to not understand everything that he covered as it might be overwhelming at first, but eventually we will get it. I really like the pacing of his class as it was not too fast nor it was slow. I look forward to more Nuke classes as it seems interesting.

Categories
Emily - Unreal Engine Unreal Engine 5 VFX Fundamentals

16/10 – UE5 Materials I

Introduction to materials

  • PBR workflow
    • Base Colour
    • Roughness
    • Metallic
    • AO
    • Normal
    • Height/Displacement
  • UV Texturing/Unwrapping
  • PBR master material & material instancing

UE5’s material system is like most DDCs which is a node-based system.

Common nodes:

  • math nodes
  • Constants
  • Texture nodes
  • Function/Parm
  • Coordinates

In PBR, roughness is rough for a value of 1 and shiny is 0.

We created 4 basic materials:

  1. Master base
  2. Glass
  3. Chrome
  4. Emissive

IOR is index of refraction which is the angle at which light ray bends when entering surface.

Master and Instanced material. Instance materials build upon master master materials to increase performance.

However, often we need to plan and organise the materials.

MIs can be derived from master materials using parameters.

Mipmaps are like LODs for geometries, its the same texture but adapts resolution according to camera view.

Texture map formats:

In games, mutliple maps are stacked to different color channels.

Progress for Cabin in Woods

  • Found some reference images for cabin in the woods for my UE5 project.
  • Blocking layout for Cabin in the Woods, this is my blocking for my UE level

BLOCKING IMAGE HERE

REFERENCE IMAGES HERE

I will need to apply what I learnt about shaders and use it to apply some materials to my cabin as well as my lake will need some shaders as well.

Reflections

Material and Shading is a very important concept for CG artist to understand. I am glad Emily covered it in detail. She mainly went through the PBR (Physically based rendering) workflow. She also mentioned some tips and tricks to apply material and shaders in UE5. Hopefully I can apply what was taught to my cabin in woods project and make my scene more realistic. The nodes system in UE5 is familiar to other rendering softwares which mostly uses nodes system as well. So I did not struggle much with understanding the core concept of materials in UE5. The concept of material instancing however, is new, and I need some time to understand. I will need to look into it further. Also I will need to look into NPR(non physical rendering).