VFXhack

A terra cotta bunny, a playboy centerfold and a Mandril. What do these things have in common you ask? If your answer was the cast list to the greatest YouTube video of all time you’d be wrong (that would be cool though). The correct answer is that these are all images used and re-used in the testing process of creating digital imagery. The folks over the unfortunately named Art Fag City have put together a post of 20 CG Image Archetypes for your browsing pleasure. Lots of good history and links here. Take a look.

[LINK] (http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/07/28/img-mgmt-20-archetypes/) to the original post (marginally NSFW because it has a naked teapot in it)

Thanks to Azathoth for the link

The video proves once and for all that CGI and Radiohead are two great tastes that taste great together. The basic idea is this, screw the cameras 86 the lights scan everything and make the whole piece out of realtime streaming data. The result is imagery so deep in the uncanny valley that it’s cool. This behind the scenes gives a great overview of the technical and creative issues involved. I love the image of Lidar scanner on a dolly. The only problem, “Ready, and, SCAN!” just doesn’t have the right ring to it.

LINK to the full video thanks to JC for the link

Ever wanted to use a really expensive super-fast modern computer to create a logo design that looks like it was airbrushed on the front of a 70’s T-shirt? Well you’re in luck! Freelance designer Harry J. Frank has posted a nice little tutorial that’s all about the chrome logo and glowing grid that floats in space for no reason (don’t forget the cheesy star filters). All you need is a couple hours of spare time a copy After Effects and an unhealthy nostalgia for electric pink and blue.

LINK to the full tutorial on graymachine.com

Just finished this little write-up for the work that I did for the series finale of Jericho. The whole show was a blast to work on and many talented people poured a lot of hours and hard work into this baby. Hope you enjoy.

The Mission

Jericho tells story of small town struggling to survive in the landscape of a post apocalyptic America. In the final episode of the show’s second season, the creators wanted to give the fans something special. The VFX team worked with production to give the audience a glimpse at what the rebuilt capitol of drastically altered capital city would look like and a stunning climax that pitted the shows main character, Jake against the might of the Cheyenne air force in a dramatic aerial battle. The challenge to the VFX team was to make these important story points completely realistic. The VFX was not to detract from the story but enhance it by delivering seamless effects.

The Approach

The reveal of the capitol building under construction in the new Capitol of Cheyenne was not to be your run of the mill matte paining. The story called for a city under drastic expansion and rapid construction. Reference photography of the current city of Cheyenne could be used as a base, but new buildings as well as construction cranes, vehicles, pedestrians and construction workers would have to be added after the fact. The show’s most difficult sequence came in the form of the final aerial battle. Knowing that it would be impossible to tell the story through the use of stock or custom shot aerial photography, the visual effects team settled on a mostly CG approach. The scene called for a variety of different aircraft and many camera angles to cover the action. There was dialog between Jake and the pilots of both the Cheyenne and later the Texas planes, so plates of the actors would need to shot on green screen and combined with the CG planes and backgrounds. At one point in the battle, two of the planes are blown out of the sky by air-to-air missiles. Knowing that a photo-real explosion would be difficult to achieve by using CG alone, it was decided that scale models were to be built based on the CG planes and animatics and blown up using traditional special effects methods. Later these elements would be composited with the CG planes.

Shot Elements

Once the methodology was decided upon, the wheels were set in motion to gather all the practical elements that needed to be shot. These fell into several categories. First HDRI 360° photography of the first unit location for the reveal of the Cheyenne Capital. The HDRIs captured on set were used as a basis for the background buildings and were used as a lighting basis for the 3d elements in the matte painting. The raw photos for the panoramas composed of 38 different camera positions with nine exposures for each position.

The final shot was to be from the perspective of a hotel room 12 stories above the street so the HDRIs were taken from atop a 40 foot platform. Many elements were also gathered to create the feeling of activity in the scene. A camera was again placed on a platform to match the high vantage point of the final shot. Many passes of ground activities of civilians, military, construction workers and their vehicles were taken. To create the illusion of more extras costumes were changed multiple times and movement patterns were varied from take to take.

The aerial battle plates consisted of two main parts, the green screen photography of the actors for inside the plane cockpits and the explosion plates of the jets. The green screens were filmed on a high definition video camera with Jake (the main character) sitting inside a cut out portion of a real plane cockpit that was a close match to the model that was shot on first unit.

The glass on the cockpit windows was left in on most shots so any of the actors reflections could be lifted and used in the final composite. The pilots of the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets were also filmed against green with the intention of modeling a digital cockpit for those shots. Pivotal to the success of the green screen shoot was the animatic that was created by the VFX team and cut by Jericho editorial. This animatic was worked on with the creators of the show so that all the major action of the scene was represented in a rough 3d form. This gave the actors an excellent idea of what was happening in the scene and helped them achieve the proper eye-lines and emotional impact rather than just acting against a void.

When it came to shooting the plane explosions, great care was put into the planning and preparation of the shoot. The animatic was again used to determine the detail and placement of the plane models. A VFX shoot team was assembled consisting of a DP and his crew, a pyrotechnics team and few model makers and painters. The plane that was to be destroyed was an F-15 fighter and the fiberglass shell from a remote control plane kit was used as the base model. Four shells with a wingspan of a little over 5 feet were prepped and painted to match the markings and textures of the CG models exactly. On the day of the shoot the model planes were packed with explosive and lifted onto a 30 foot armature. Three cameras were placed at different heights that lined up to several shots in the animatic, a live switcher was used to line up the video feeds from the camera to the animatics. The three cameras rolled simultaneously on each explosion at 120 fps. The higher frame rate was used to compensate for the smaller scale of the models. All together 3 models were blown up for the shoot.

3d Techniques

Before any modeling or texturing of the 3d assets was started, an exhausting search for reference was begun. The new Capitol building under construction in Cheyenne began as model from a stock library. Pieces of the substructure and framing of the building were then created using the stock model as a guide. Then pieces of the original model were stripped away to reveal the unfinished skeleton. The construction cranes for the 3d matte painting were modeled using photo reference, along with other street props. The hero buildings were generic models that were placed in the scene with projected textures of the building matte paintings used to enhance the details.

The aerial battle sequence started with the creation of a detailed animatic which served as a master template for animation, camera movement and lighting. After editing, the stand-in planes were replaced with hi-resolution versions. Careful attention was taken to make sure that the planes were authentic. The Cessna Citation that Jake flies in the scene not only had to look real in the CG shots but be a perfect match to an aircraft shot by production taxiing on the runway in the previous scenes. Many photographs were taken of the markings and logos on the plane to make sure the match was seamless. The F-15s and F-16s also had to be extremely detailed as they were seen close-up from nearly every angle. The cockpit and pilot seat of each plane also had to be rendered and textured to accommodate the green screen footage of the pilots. A lot of photographic reference both still and moving was used ensure that the shading and behavior of light across the planes surface was highly realistic. The flags and markings of the new Air Force in the Jericho story line also had to be created and applied to the planes.

2d Techniques

Many of the compositing shots in this show made use of the tight integration between the 3d and 2d working environments. For the Cheyenne Capitol shot, a 3d track was created for the scene. 3d elements were rendered with basic lighting using the track data, then the same track data was used in the compositing software. This allowed the compositor to place elements in the scene on 3d cards and have them track perfectly with the rendered elements. It gave the artists the flexibility to paint detail directly onto the parts of the image that needed it without having to request another element to be rendered in 3d. This technique was used to great effect when building the sky environment for the aerial battle scene. The shot began with the camera created during the 3d animation process. A basic sky dome and rough 3d landscape was added to each shot and rendered. The compositors than painted over the rough landscape using stock aerial photography to add detail while maintaining the basic lighting and depth from the 3d render. The 3d camera move was also brought into compositing for the addition of photographic cloud elements placed at different distances from the camera to create the illusion of volume and depth.

To create the photographic look of the planes, a multi-pass pipeline was used. Each component of the 3d render (reflection, color, specularity, etc.) was rendered as a separate element and combined in composite to achieve the final look. Using this method, the compositors had an extreme amount of control in how the subtle lighting effects played across the surface of the ships. Perhaps the most convincing of composite effects done for the show was the explosion of the two F-15s. Since the line-up of the shot footage of the planes exploding from the VFX shoot lined up perfectly, a quick dissolve from the CG plane to model footage was all that was needed. In fact the explosion proved so effective that close-up shots of the explosion from the VFX shoot were added to the edit towards the end of the editing process. The clean-up of the explosions involved removing the rig from each shot and pulling keys from the sky behind the model.

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

Conclusion

It is rare to get to work on a Visual Effects sequence for a television show that i so pivotal to the storytelling of the episode. In the case of Jericho Episode 207, the story and visual effects were intertwined in such a way that one could not have happened without the other. Because of the tight integration between story and effects, all of the work done on the show had to be seamless. Anything out of place would distract the viewer from the emotional impact of the action. An imaginative combination of techniques both old and new were used to create scenes with an amazing degree of authenticity. The VFX team for this show worked tirelessly to make sure that the fans of the Jericho series would not be disappointed.

The folks over at Max Bumps have put together a little how-to on the new video Ladies Of The World from VFXhack fave Flight of the Concords. It includes a little Q and A as well as some fun clips of the boys from New Zealand’s 4th most popular folk parody band. The VFX crew over a Ghost Town media tracked the Brett and Jermaine’s heads onto stunt skaters on Venice beach to produce a 70’s flashback extravaganza. The result is a nice mix of Xanadu and the Sabatoge video. The clip is fun, especially the sexy hermaphrodite, and the effects are pretty good for music vid schedule and budget. The heavy use of Colorista and Magic Bullet help blend everything together.

LINK the the full article

Reader Eeetu sent over a link to a fairly long running forum on on VFX talk containing many posts of jawdropping examples of node tree hell. Of course Nyarlathotep points out that these ain’t squat compared to the exposure sheets that were needed to do this stuff in-camera in the olden days.

LINK to the thread on VFX talk

This clip is 10 minutes of pure VFX gold. It’s a behind the scenes explaining the process behind the Death Star mission briefing in A New Hope. There are some great details here and the process really is a combination of practical and computer techniques. I love that the animation wasn’t keyframed but “performed” real-time by manipulating a bunch of dials and knobs. The creator of this animation was Larry Cuba, a CG pioneer who programmed the film Arabesque with with John Whitney.

LINK to an excerpt of Cuba’s 1985 masterpiece Calculated Movements

Special thanks to Agrapha for the Star Wars link

This may look like a map of the human genome but it’s actually a screen grab of an After Effects comp for a Timex commercial. I remember back in the earlier days of CG when we used to laugh at Flame Artists (at that time referred to as “Flame Operators”) who would brag about using over 20 nodes in their comps. My how things have changed. Here’s another gem of node based abstraction from a Battlestar Galactica shot.

Got a giant mess of a file you want to share? Send your screen grabs and I’ll be happy to share your misery.

LINK to more info on the timex spot

Thanks to L.J. for the BSG pic

Kerner Optical posted this incredible behind the scenes footage of the miniature tank work they did for Pirates 3. I got the opportunity to blow up some models for the a TV a couple of month ago and nothing in VFX compares to the rush of exploding something for real. Beats being chained to a monitor that’s for sure.

via VFXPlanet

I’m always on the lookout for a new way to simultaneously do something productive and keep from getting bored while I’m on set waiting for a VFX shot to come up. My latest arts and crafts project involves creating the ultimate LED tracking marker. Now you may ask “Why LEDs? Why not a triangle inside a circle, or newspaper, or a tennis ball for god’s sake!” Well those methods are still valid but the in the right situation and LED tracking marker can really do the trick. Here are some reasons why you might want to go the LED route.

1. LED stands for Light Emitting Diode. As the name suggests you don’t need to light them because hey are a tiny light source onto themselves. This is perfect for areas of the frame that don’t have enough exposure for your common variety tracking marker.

2. LEDs hold up better when they are out of focus. When you shot a greenscreen with a long lens and an open F-stop, the background of your shot is gonna go way out of focus. Regular tracking markers turn to mush in this situation causing more a problem for clean-up than helping with the tracking process. The LED will bloom but tends to hold it’s intensity and not break-up as much.

3. The are small. LEDs are compact and light. A little bit of snot tape on the back and the can be affixed to anything from a patch of skin to a set wall. Ball up in some strong tape (sticky side out of course) and you can even throw them up on a wall that’s too high to reach. No more asking that grumpy grip if you can borrow his ladder.

4. Power is not an issue. A single battery can keep an LED running strong for days depending on the temperature. Battery life deteriorates rapidly in the cold so if you are shooting outside in the winter, make sure you grab a few packs of extra batteries for your kit bag.

There some things to watch out for with LEDs though. Their biggest strength (the fact that they emit light) is also their biggest weakness. LEDs can spill unwanted light all over the place if they are to close to (or on) the subject they are shooting. Fortunately, LEDs come in different flavors that include color variations and frosted plastic casings. The frosted casing cast a lot less spill but also need to be aligned to point at the lens for maximum effect. Try and find some samples and try out some color and casing combos before you head out. You never know how things could change on set, so it’s important to carry a bunch of LED options with you in your kit bag.

At this point you may be asking yourself “Wow, LEDs sound great. Where can I buy some?”. Well, the short answer is you can’t. You have to build LED tracking markers yourself. But never fear intrepid VFX explorer! Here’s a step by step on on how to create your very own set of LED tracking markers.

Step 1: Buy some LEDs

You can get these babies on-line or at your local electronics supply store. The come in different colors and you can also find them with frosted plastic. You can frost clear ones yourself with some dulling spray or spray mount. You can also file off the top of the plastic to expose the diode if you want them to be even brighter.

Step 2: Buy Some Heat Shrink Tubing

This is a great trick. Heat shrink tubing is a strip of vinyl that shrinks down to 1/2 it’s original size when exposed to heat. You can get it in all different kinds of colors including green which makes it almost invisible when affixed to green screen.

Step 3: Buy Some 3 Volt Batteries

These are the kinds of batteries that most cameras use. You can buy them from a store but it’s much cheeper to buy them in bulk on-lne.

Step 4: Cut the Tubing, Slide in the Battery Apply Heat

Cut the tubing so that is just a little bit larger than the battery, then just slip the battery inside the tubing. Apply heat with a heat gun and “Viola!”, the tubing makes a nice tight jacket around the battery. Make sure when you are applying heat that you hold the battery and tubing with a pair of pliers so you don’t burn yourself.

Step 5: Insert LED

All that’s left to do now is slip the wires of the LED between the battery and jacket and you’ve got yourself a tracking marker. You can stick these to surfaces using double sided tape, stick them to people with a Band-Aid or just rest them on flat surface. Happy shooting!

LINK to a del.icio.us tag with places to buy the stuff you need to make your own.