If you call yourself a vfx artist and you haven't seen the Third and the Seventh...
Well... You should have. This is an exquisitely created and rendered film. Beautifully abstract and beautifully artful.
The Third and The Seventh
The film is digital. That is to say that it was rendered, and is not simply photography.
It could be called a form of visual masturbation. A way of saying, 'Hi, look at me. I'm amazing. Bow in awe.' And I have certainly accused people of doing exactly this. But in the case of this film, it is clear that the artist, Alex Roman, has a powerful understanding of the design principles underpinning his virtual construction, and an incredibly deep understanding of Art. From colour, to depth of field, space, framing, mood, atmosphere, balance and meaning. And I say meaning tentatively because one is not completely sure how much intended meaning there is in the film, and how much of a straight form and design work that is it.
The film is clearly a showcase of talent, and that talent is prodigious. This is something that can make even experienced CGI artists stare in awe and wonder and learn from. It is a film that can be analysed, broken down and examined in minute detail and it will hold up.
In some ways, this film is the very foundation of what design CGI is. Without the trappings and burdens of other areas, this is a pure art and design work. Immensely beautiful, and unmatched. Principles are not just applied, they are deeply understood. They are not used gratuitously to cover up ineptitude, bu they have been studied, understood, and used with great care.
I gush on about it, I fear, but the truth is, the only argument that can be mustered against a film like this is that it's entirely focused on iconic visual production. But that argument pales in the face of a reality that is inspirational and incredibly nuanced. As the artist says:
"A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal."
The compositing breakdown can be found here: Compositing breakdown
Sunday, 16 September 2012
Week 5 - Blender Compositing
This is a fairly new topic to the Blender community, though it's been done in the past, rarely have the tools available been sophisticated enough to composite live footage with digital footage as easily as it is now.
Now with the new features such as motion tracking and sweet core rendering improvements, one can finally use real footage and comp it with digital without enormous amounts of work.
The above video is a good example of the breakdown when using the blender program. The video is breakdown of the following one:
While the actual composite would need a bit more work as there is a bit of telltale saturation and contrast issues with different lighting in the scenes, that's easy to rectify. The salient point is that now there is a free alternative to the current industry heavyweights that has actually started to be useful for vfx work.
Blender has long been the underdog in the 3D world thanks to a pipeline that is somewhat difficult to integrate into a studio environment. While this is still an issue, the gap is rapidly closing as various studios start to stagnate between their nearly releases with nominally decent upgrades sometimes, and other times not so much. Sometimes even a reversion.
This is in stark contrast to Blender's constant and astounding rate of improvement. Features and versions are updated on a monthly, and sometimes even weekly basis. Thanks to a thriving open source community, this is one of the few examples of open source software actually working. Not only has it stayed lightweight and usable, but has continued to mature and develop features that, while rarely completely rivaling their purist counterparts (Nuke is obviously a better tracker and vfx program, Zbrush a far better sculpting program, and so on), it still holds up against the 3D modelling programs, and the recent render enhancements, simulation additions and other massive packages has allowed it to serve as a decent, understated option for those without thousands to shell out on mainstream packages and plugins.
A look at the blender gallery proves that the software is firmly capable of standing on it's own, but it's heartening to see that in an industry where some of the commercial counterparts aren't innovating, at least the little kid in the corner is not only innovating, but also catching up to it's big daddy's in leaps and bounds.
The question that remains is, what happens if the little kid grows up to be a legitimate contender for the throne?
Now with the new features such as motion tracking and sweet core rendering improvements, one can finally use real footage and comp it with digital without enormous amounts of work.
The above video is a good example of the breakdown when using the blender program. The video is breakdown of the following one:
While the actual composite would need a bit more work as there is a bit of telltale saturation and contrast issues with different lighting in the scenes, that's easy to rectify. The salient point is that now there is a free alternative to the current industry heavyweights that has actually started to be useful for vfx work.
Blender has long been the underdog in the 3D world thanks to a pipeline that is somewhat difficult to integrate into a studio environment. While this is still an issue, the gap is rapidly closing as various studios start to stagnate between their nearly releases with nominally decent upgrades sometimes, and other times not so much. Sometimes even a reversion.
This is in stark contrast to Blender's constant and astounding rate of improvement. Features and versions are updated on a monthly, and sometimes even weekly basis. Thanks to a thriving open source community, this is one of the few examples of open source software actually working. Not only has it stayed lightweight and usable, but has continued to mature and develop features that, while rarely completely rivaling their purist counterparts (Nuke is obviously a better tracker and vfx program, Zbrush a far better sculpting program, and so on), it still holds up against the 3D modelling programs, and the recent render enhancements, simulation additions and other massive packages has allowed it to serve as a decent, understated option for those without thousands to shell out on mainstream packages and plugins.
A look at the blender gallery proves that the software is firmly capable of standing on it's own, but it's heartening to see that in an industry where some of the commercial counterparts aren't innovating, at least the little kid in the corner is not only innovating, but also catching up to it's big daddy's in leaps and bounds.
The question that remains is, what happens if the little kid grows up to be a legitimate contender for the throne?
Sunday, 2 September 2012
Week 4 - An Interview from the Matte Painter in Star Trek
This post will be referencing this article:
http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/star_trek_next_gen
In this CGSociety article, we get a short look into the process that the matte painter behind the Star Trek: Original Series remaster, Max Gabl. It's often interesting to hear the thoughts of the artists who are responsible for creating the scenery behind what we see in movies.
For those unfamiliar, a matte painting is essentially painted footage that is combined with the live footage. Matte paintings are frequently used and in particular in situations where shooting live is too difficult, expensive or actually impossible. While 3D renders are used a lot, matte painting has an advantage in terms of the time taken, and the pure ability to recreate. Especially in terms of terrain, where generators can sometimes create somewhat unexpected effects, and render times of any CGI can be very long.
In this case, the artist had a very quick turnaround, and discusses how he would create up to 3 planets in the course of a day, quickly brushing in 3 different layers of detail; the surface, clouds and atmosphere; using references from NASA images for realism. These paintings would then be projected or mapped onto a sphere and rendered in Cinema 4D.
What's interesting is that when he started on the series, it would take him 3 or 4 days to complete a single planet. Which is quite a considerable amount of time, but considering how a single episode could feature multiple planets for large number of shots, it was important to get a strong sense of realism and detail. The planets had to look just right, and he would liaison with the art director to ensure an absolute sense of quality. It's certainly impressive to see such an increase in speed and skill in what would have been a relatively short space of time.
Matte painters are frequently overlooked in discussions on a film outside of the effects industry. Their intense application of detail and frequent hand painted photorealism is impressive considering that they often knock out these immense paintings in the course of a day or three. In addition to this, they're often expected to be proficient in compositing in various programs, as well as 3D. Essentially meaning that they are not only very highly technically proficient, but also multi-talented across multiple disciplines and skill sets.
This frequently means that they know a lot of tricks and time savers to push high quality content out as quickly as possible. Like his process for backgrounds on a planet; where because the camera didn't move he was able to create them as 2D images with photoshop and the occasional 3D architecture render.
This is in contrast to his process for planets, which are animated and rendered in Cinema 4D. In addition to all this is the implicit rule in 3D.
'Don't make what you can fake.'
"For The Original Series, I usually created one high-resolution 2D image of every planet. We projected that 2D image onto a 3D sphere that was rotating, but only slightly, so as not to give away the fact that it was a 2D projection. For The Next Generation, you are looking at fully textured spheres that rotate quite a bit more, sometimes over 90 degrees, and that means much more surface has to be created."
http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/star_trek_next_gen
In this CGSociety article, we get a short look into the process that the matte painter behind the Star Trek: Original Series remaster, Max Gabl. It's often interesting to hear the thoughts of the artists who are responsible for creating the scenery behind what we see in movies.
For those unfamiliar, a matte painting is essentially painted footage that is combined with the live footage. Matte paintings are frequently used and in particular in situations where shooting live is too difficult, expensive or actually impossible. While 3D renders are used a lot, matte painting has an advantage in terms of the time taken, and the pure ability to recreate. Especially in terms of terrain, where generators can sometimes create somewhat unexpected effects, and render times of any CGI can be very long.
In this case, the artist had a very quick turnaround, and discusses how he would create up to 3 planets in the course of a day, quickly brushing in 3 different layers of detail; the surface, clouds and atmosphere; using references from NASA images for realism. These paintings would then be projected or mapped onto a sphere and rendered in Cinema 4D.
What's interesting is that when he started on the series, it would take him 3 or 4 days to complete a single planet. Which is quite a considerable amount of time, but considering how a single episode could feature multiple planets for large number of shots, it was important to get a strong sense of realism and detail. The planets had to look just right, and he would liaison with the art director to ensure an absolute sense of quality. It's certainly impressive to see such an increase in speed and skill in what would have been a relatively short space of time.
Matte painters are frequently overlooked in discussions on a film outside of the effects industry. Their intense application of detail and frequent hand painted photorealism is impressive considering that they often knock out these immense paintings in the course of a day or three. In addition to this, they're often expected to be proficient in compositing in various programs, as well as 3D. Essentially meaning that they are not only very highly technically proficient, but also multi-talented across multiple disciplines and skill sets.
This frequently means that they know a lot of tricks and time savers to push high quality content out as quickly as possible. Like his process for backgrounds on a planet; where because the camera didn't move he was able to create them as 2D images with photoshop and the occasional 3D architecture render.
This is in contrast to his process for planets, which are animated and rendered in Cinema 4D. In addition to all this is the implicit rule in 3D.
'Don't make what you can fake.'
"For The Original Series, I usually created one high-resolution 2D image of every planet. We projected that 2D image onto a 3D sphere that was rotating, but only slightly, so as not to give away the fact that it was a 2D projection. For The Next Generation, you are looking at fully textured spheres that rotate quite a bit more, sometimes over 90 degrees, and that means much more surface has to be created."
Sunday, 26 August 2012
Week 3 - Asian M/V Lonely
I spotted this music video a week or so ago in an asian restaurant while catching up with a friend. It really caught my eye, because of the really interesting use of visuals. I can't say the same of the quality of music, sadly.
What is immediately apparent is the way in which the video has been washed out. Indeed, this video is an incredibly well applied use of colour, because if you take a second look at it you'll notice that it shifts between a number of different colour effects. Rather than sticking to one set of hues, we actually see quite a broad application of effects.
Despite this broad use of effects, both the way it was shot, and the way that it moved between scenes and colour palettes made the effects seamless. Rather than being a jarring mishmash. Furthermore, it's important to note the subtlety. Quite often colour is used in really strong shades, whereas this was far more subtle. Noticeable, but really only because everything else was comparatively desaturated.
Much of the effects are in how the film was shot, with a lot of offscreen lights, expensive lenses, and excessive use of smoke machines. Indeed, the smoke that drifts across all the scenes helps blend the foreground and background together to not only create a more homogenous effect, but to also sell the twilight feeling of loneliness that's the central theme of the clip. Together these allow for a much broader sense of depth to the desaturation of the film and colours than what you'd get from straight grading of footage.
Nonetheless, it's interesting to see how the video transfers from a pale, slightly pale orange/yellow tone to a subtle green over white/grey. The shift is barely noticeable as the singers transition from the yellow skin tones to ghostly pale. After this they move out of the indoor scene to the outdoors road and without a pillar transition the colours are blended in over the course of a few seconds. You'll see them go from grey and white to mono greens, reds and skin tones. Indeed, there's an excellent separation of colours through much of the footage. Full colour washes are carefully applied and subtly applied.
Possibly to increase the apparent quality of the film, lens flares are applied lights, but selectively to the very bright ones. In all cases, these lens flares throw a particular shade of colour onto the footage, creating contrast and adding to the surreal footage.
Watch the footage and pay attention to when the singers pass a pillar, these are the transition sections of the film. Each singer is identified by a specific colour palette, related to her clothing, and while the blend is seamless, it is noticeable if you look for it.
See how much you can see in the footage, and what the editor allow to say in, and what they comped to work with the rest of the footage.
I'm certainly impressed with how much colour there is, despite the deliberate washing out. That's largely the difference between the use of on set film effects and pure colour grading. The former gets a much deeper and richer balance of tones and colours, which the other is simply a way to control what you've already got.
What is immediately apparent is the way in which the video has been washed out. Indeed, this video is an incredibly well applied use of colour, because if you take a second look at it you'll notice that it shifts between a number of different colour effects. Rather than sticking to one set of hues, we actually see quite a broad application of effects.
Despite this broad use of effects, both the way it was shot, and the way that it moved between scenes and colour palettes made the effects seamless. Rather than being a jarring mishmash. Furthermore, it's important to note the subtlety. Quite often colour is used in really strong shades, whereas this was far more subtle. Noticeable, but really only because everything else was comparatively desaturated.
Much of the effects are in how the film was shot, with a lot of offscreen lights, expensive lenses, and excessive use of smoke machines. Indeed, the smoke that drifts across all the scenes helps blend the foreground and background together to not only create a more homogenous effect, but to also sell the twilight feeling of loneliness that's the central theme of the clip. Together these allow for a much broader sense of depth to the desaturation of the film and colours than what you'd get from straight grading of footage.
Nonetheless, it's interesting to see how the video transfers from a pale, slightly pale orange/yellow tone to a subtle green over white/grey. The shift is barely noticeable as the singers transition from the yellow skin tones to ghostly pale. After this they move out of the indoor scene to the outdoors road and without a pillar transition the colours are blended in over the course of a few seconds. You'll see them go from grey and white to mono greens, reds and skin tones. Indeed, there's an excellent separation of colours through much of the footage. Full colour washes are carefully applied and subtly applied.
Possibly to increase the apparent quality of the film, lens flares are applied lights, but selectively to the very bright ones. In all cases, these lens flares throw a particular shade of colour onto the footage, creating contrast and adding to the surreal footage.
See how much you can see in the footage, and what the editor allow to say in, and what they comped to work with the rest of the footage.
I'm certainly impressed with how much colour there is, despite the deliberate washing out. That's largely the difference between the use of on set film effects and pure colour grading. The former gets a much deeper and richer balance of tones and colours, which the other is simply a way to control what you've already got.
Saturday, 18 August 2012
Week 2 - Colour Correction Part 2
My Giddy aunties. Why are people so incompetent!?
Ok. So that's a tad over dramatic. Needless to say, After Effects is a perfectly effective and capable system for colour correction, there is absolutely no need to fork out hundreds for a plugin. It's quite clunky and not very user friendly (Sliders are far less intuitive than one of those colour circle thingys).
I started with this image that I rendered out in Terragen recently. I saved it as an OpenExr so I could take advantage of the extra information made available by the 32bit format. As you can see, it's fairly flat in terms of contrast and colour depth and so on. But there is quite a decent amount of colour variation. A good base to work from.
Note that examples will be illustrative of effects. And not really meant to be particularly strong aesthetically.
The first thing I noticed was that the exposure tool didn't work properly, thanks to the way After Effects interprets this kind of imagery. I checked a bit on OpenExr documentation, and someone mentioned EXtractoR. So I tested, and it did the job.
I actually blew the colours right down for this. The cloud arch had some nasty exposure issues.
Anyway, there isn't much point going through every detail, so here's a few pointers I've gotten from experimentation.
If you want a wash like colour correction, use Tritone and check Blend With Original. You get to pick the highlight, midtone and shadow colours and the blend makes it look less obvious. It's easy and quick. Note however, Tritone isn't particularly effective for all but a few general effects, you really want to use it to control the overall colour set, and layer on more effects.
For those who want a bit more control over their footage Gamma/Pedestal/Gain is an extremely powerful base to work with. As it essentially allows you to control those three effects per colour channel. Need to bump up the red? Drop the other two, add more contrast? Fiddle with the gain and gamma. In the end though, you can only work with what's there...
Other options for controlling colour levels include the Levels (individual controls), Colour Balance, Hue/Saturation, and Selective Colour.
The next and last point of call is a really powerful one, and that's the Change Colour tool. Which is dangerous if you use it too much, but it essentially does exactly what it says, changes whichever colour you want into another one. Don't like that nasty blue? No problem, use the eye dropper and pick it out, then get to work.
If you want to select multiple colours, you will need multiple layers of this, and be sure to fiddle with matching softness if you get nasty borders between colours.
To illustrate, I made the sun green. But I do not advise doing this quite so aggressively unless you want people to laugh at you, a lot.
Or you may want to reconsider your editing package...
Ok. So that's a tad over dramatic. Needless to say, After Effects is a perfectly effective and capable system for colour correction, there is absolutely no need to fork out hundreds for a plugin. It's quite clunky and not very user friendly (Sliders are far less intuitive than one of those colour circle thingys).
Note that examples will be illustrative of effects. And not really meant to be particularly strong aesthetically.
The first thing I noticed was that the exposure tool didn't work properly, thanks to the way After Effects interprets this kind of imagery. I checked a bit on OpenExr documentation, and someone mentioned EXtractoR. So I tested, and it did the job.
I actually blew the colours right down for this. The cloud arch had some nasty exposure issues.
Anyway, there isn't much point going through every detail, so here's a few pointers I've gotten from experimentation.
If you want a wash like colour correction, use Tritone and check Blend With Original. You get to pick the highlight, midtone and shadow colours and the blend makes it look less obvious. It's easy and quick. Note however, Tritone isn't particularly effective for all but a few general effects, you really want to use it to control the overall colour set, and layer on more effects.
For those who want a bit more control over their footage Gamma/Pedestal/Gain is an extremely powerful base to work with. As it essentially allows you to control those three effects per colour channel. Need to bump up the red? Drop the other two, add more contrast? Fiddle with the gain and gamma. In the end though, you can only work with what's there...
Other options for controlling colour levels include the Levels (individual controls), Colour Balance, Hue/Saturation, and Selective Colour.
The next and last point of call is a really powerful one, and that's the Change Colour tool. Which is dangerous if you use it too much, but it essentially does exactly what it says, changes whichever colour you want into another one. Don't like that nasty blue? No problem, use the eye dropper and pick it out, then get to work.
If you want to select multiple colours, you will need multiple layers of this, and be sure to fiddle with matching softness if you get nasty borders between colours.
To illustrate, I made the sun green. But I do not advise doing this quite so aggressively unless you want people to laugh at you, a lot.
Or you may want to reconsider your editing package...
Blender may be more usable, but unfortunately, at 1080p resolution, it'll be slower, especially when you start computing frame by frame. So don't go hopping over just yet peeps.
Till next time folks.
Sunday, 12 August 2012
Daniel Shawyer - Week 1 - Colour Grading PT1
This first week I didn't want to do anything particularly stressful. Something easy, something familiar, but necessary.
Colour Correction, or Colour Grading, depending on who you ask.
Turns out it's surprisingly more complicated in After Effects than I expected. I've done similar effects in software like Photoshop and Blender, and it's far simpler it seems.
What's irritating is that it's like when I looked up procedural rain to see if there was anything better than motion blurred rain. Turns out the most advanced tutorial for that was painted rain. The rest used motion blurring. Which is a poor and unrealistic effect.
So I took a few hours to create my own rain procedural editing. I never got around to doing the tutorial as it involved layer channels, heightmaps, noise, lens blur and a bunch of other layered effects that take a while to explain. It ended up looking suitably epic though.
Anyway, back on topic. After going through explanations of processes and the like, I really cannot find any systems that are satisfactory. Most people seem to be satisfied with a brief, crude vignette, + hue/hue saturation shift. Which is silly.
The following videos illustrate how this works:
This guy actually discusses some nice subtle techniques like tinting and vibrancy controls. he has a bit more of a refined process to his correction strategies, which was nice to see.
The other tutorials told you to grab a $400+ plugin to use instead. This is also silly, because After Effects is a massive editing suite and honestly should not require an external plugin to do something like colour grading.
The most popular plugin was Magic Bullet by Red Giant Software, who do a number of high quality video production plugins. The following video illustrates this:
Indeed, it seems to me that After Effects has missed a massive section of usability in it's toolset with regards to this. To take an example, Blender, a free and open source 3D rendering program has a better set of tools for colour grading and effects than After Effects does. Blender's compositing node system allows one to quickly and easy string together layers of effects that allow for massive control quickly. I'll find a screenshot comparing the two systems sometime next week when I spend a load of hours creating my own colour grading system.
Because the current system is absolutely, mind the British, bollocks.
I couldn't find any discussions on creating a clear high colour contrast effect you might see in a Korean or Japanese music video. Where the majority of the scenery is pale and the clothing and people are relatively high colour. Or where you have the reverse of this, the environments are high colour, as well as the clothing, but skin is pale and clear. This is due to cultural differences that I don't have time to discuss. An example of this can be seen in the recent Gangnam Style music video (even if part of the effect is from the camera's themselves.):
Noteably, though, Color Finesse seems to be a very powerful tool. It will be interesting to see what can be done with that.
Part 2 next week. I'll create a few workflows and see if I can create a general colour grading system that allows one to control the various intricacies easily.
Colour Correction, or Colour Grading, depending on who you ask.
Turns out it's surprisingly more complicated in After Effects than I expected. I've done similar effects in software like Photoshop and Blender, and it's far simpler it seems.
What's irritating is that it's like when I looked up procedural rain to see if there was anything better than motion blurred rain. Turns out the most advanced tutorial for that was painted rain. The rest used motion blurring. Which is a poor and unrealistic effect.
So I took a few hours to create my own rain procedural editing. I never got around to doing the tutorial as it involved layer channels, heightmaps, noise, lens blur and a bunch of other layered effects that take a while to explain. It ended up looking suitably epic though.
Anyway, back on topic. After going through explanations of processes and the like, I really cannot find any systems that are satisfactory. Most people seem to be satisfied with a brief, crude vignette, + hue/hue saturation shift. Which is silly.
The following videos illustrate how this works:
This guy actually discusses some nice subtle techniques like tinting and vibrancy controls. he has a bit more of a refined process to his correction strategies, which was nice to see.
The other tutorials told you to grab a $400+ plugin to use instead. This is also silly, because After Effects is a massive editing suite and honestly should not require an external plugin to do something like colour grading.
The most popular plugin was Magic Bullet by Red Giant Software, who do a number of high quality video production plugins. The following video illustrates this:
Indeed, it seems to me that After Effects has missed a massive section of usability in it's toolset with regards to this. To take an example, Blender, a free and open source 3D rendering program has a better set of tools for colour grading and effects than After Effects does. Blender's compositing node system allows one to quickly and easy string together layers of effects that allow for massive control quickly. I'll find a screenshot comparing the two systems sometime next week when I spend a load of hours creating my own colour grading system.
Because the current system is absolutely, mind the British, bollocks.
I couldn't find any discussions on creating a clear high colour contrast effect you might see in a Korean or Japanese music video. Where the majority of the scenery is pale and the clothing and people are relatively high colour. Or where you have the reverse of this, the environments are high colour, as well as the clothing, but skin is pale and clear. This is due to cultural differences that I don't have time to discuss. An example of this can be seen in the recent Gangnam Style music video (even if part of the effect is from the camera's themselves.):
Noteably, though, Color Finesse seems to be a very powerful tool. It will be interesting to see what can be done with that.
Part 2 next week. I'll create a few workflows and see if I can create a general colour grading system that allows one to control the various intricacies easily.
Monday, 6 August 2012
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