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Tag: Notes

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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.

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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.

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Manos - Modelling, Texturing, Animation

27/11 Realism, Rendering & AOVs

Lighting and rendering in Maya Arnold.

Import robot model

HDRIs

ShadowMatte for shadow catcher

Importance of AOVs

Allow for post-production to be smoother

Reflections

This class I feel is quite important as I feel that AOVs will be needed for compositing. It gives compositors a lot of options and freedom to do post-production if necessary data is given to them through AOVs. I forsee myself using them a lot in the future.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Categories
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.