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This is one of my favorite bits of incredibly clever fuckery that goes on behind the scenes of 3D modeling, and I have an intense compulsion to talk about it right now.

If you've never seen the true geometry of the merc models, you're probably wondering what the hell is going on with the one on the left. Minecraft Steve 3D-printed looking motherfucker.

Believe it or not, it's the exact same model as the one on the right. The light is just being instructed to interact differently with its polygons! The one on the left is being given flat shading, while the one on the right is being given smooth shading.

The mercs have far fewer polygons than you probably think they do. And that's not just because the game was made in 2007! Most stylized faces probably aren't going to have many more polygons than this, especially faces designed for video games. Thanks to the magic of smooth shading, they don't need more than that.

So how the hell is this possible?

I'M GLAD YOU ASKED! Class is now in session!

For our example, let's focus on this area of his ear.

On the left, with the flat shading, you can see that there's a pretty stark difference in the perceived color between those surfaces. But on the right, with the smooth shading, it's... well... smooth!

To understand how smooth shading works, first you have to understand what a 'surface normal' is. They are also just called 'normals'.

See, a single polygon can only ever be perfectly flat no matter how you arrange the vertexes. If you have three vertexes making up a triangle, and you fill in the space between those vertexes to make a face, that face is completely flat. It doesn't matter whether the vertexes are 2 millimeters or 2 miles apart from each other; the plane that intersects all 3 points can never be curved.

In simple terms, the normal of a polygon is defined as the direction in which the face is pointed. Because the face is perfectly flat, this direction can always be expressed with a single line.

On the left is a simple example of the surface normals of a cube. Each blue line represents the direction that its face is pointing.

On the right, the red arrows are pointing to the normals of these ear polygons. In these two clusters of two polygons, you can see there's a pretty big difference between the angle of the normals. This means that there's going to be a big difference in the way light bounces off of them - and that's why it looks so blocky when we just let it be flat shading.

On the left, I've illustrated how light is going to bounce off of each polygon the same way, all the way across that polygon.

If we GREATLY increased the number of polygons, we could make it look a lot smoother, but we don't want to do that. More polygons equals significantly more work for the computer, so the solution is a little concept called 'interpolation', which I've crudely illustrated on the right. See how the angle of each light bounce is ever so slightly different as we move from one normal to the other?

Instead of just calculating the light the exact same way across a whole polygon, smooth shading also looks at the normals of the polygons around it. The rendering engine then pretends that the surface is curved, based on some very complex math.

I don't fully understand it myself. But I imagine that it is probably grossly oversimplifying it to say that it's taking the average of the two normals. Hopefully that description kind of gives you an idea of what it's doing, though.

Imagine if you took a sheet of paper and lightly pressed it over the two angled polygons to try to give it a bit more of a curved surface for light to bounce off of. That's what smooth shading does, but instead of using a piece of paper, it uses whatever material is defined for those polygons.

And that's just a little bit of the magic of shaders in 3D rendering! It is shocking just how much of a render's quality depends entirely on the way light works. There is a whole bunch of stuff happening that honestly has very little to do with the quality or poly count of the model's geometry - it's the shaders and the light simulation that are doing the REALLY heavy lifting, and that's why RTX technology in particular is such a huge fucking deal!

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Class dismissed!

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Check me out! My full robotic form has been visualised! Thank you @novaceresart for this wonderful art :D

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Prey (2022)

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg

Cinematography by Jeff Cutter

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The State of the VFX Industry- or: Why I am so fucking furious about the Chip and Dale Movie

I’ve been thinking long and hard about if I should really do this… and if yes, how.

I hope the following is in any way interesting or informative and not just me rambling about something.

Let’s start out here: I’m a VFX artist with a couple years of experience in the VFX and Animation industry. That’s about as much as I will put into this post for privacy reasons.

About a year before the pandemic I got the oportunity to work at M/PC- which is one of the biggest VFX studios in the world, making anything from the Harry Potter movies over the Disney Remakes, Marvel films, that Dinosaur Documentary that just came out, etc.

If a movie contains VFX (meaning it’s live-action shots with any type of effects edited over), there’s a VERY high chance M/PC was working on some of the material- if not almost all of it.

My exact experience with how I got there or personal details are irrelevant here- but this is what I can say about them.

They hire people from all over the world, push them through a harsh crunchtime for as little pay as possible and then throw them back out. In some cases, they forget to extend work permits, which has resulted in people being deported in the past. Sometimes they extend work permits on such a short notice that the people end up only being allowed to work in the country via a loophole, and of course they end up losing that workpermit if they end up getting fired- which is very common, as they like to throw people out the second they don’t need them anymore.

I was shushed several times for bringing up labourlaws (not unions, not anything- just the actual labour laws in the country we were in) because that could get me fired if the wrong person hears it. I wasn’t from that country; So I had to clock in every morning and do 150% because I knew if I just stood my ground and said “no” to Overtime I’d be packing my shit and stepping on a plane a month later.

The office we were in itself had no windows and only sparce ceiling lights, which was why if we locked our PC screens, they turned white- to create a light source. We did however get little USB lights :) because, you know. that helps.

Frequently, we were asked to work through lunchtime and also do more overtime after work, which was why I would quite commonly have workdays where I spent between 10-12 hours straight at my desk working. They would always tap on the harsh deadlines for shots- most of which weren’t our fault for being overdue, which resulted in them asking us to come in on weekends. In winter, I had a moment where I realized that I hadn’t seen the sun in about 2 weeks. When I then said “no” to overtime for a day, just so I could refresh my head, I was told I “needed to be careful if I wanted to keep the job”.

Not because I was not doing my work the way it was in my contract- but because I wasn’t willing to spend 10 hours at the office on a sunday- which was NOT a workday according to said contract.

Over time, I ended up getting more cocky about saying no to Overtime when I didn’t feel good, or asking for someone else to take a task I was given because I knew I wouldn’t be done with it by it’s deadline due to the other things I still had to do- which was probably was led to me being laid off.

The only people who got to stand up against this pressure were people in higher positions- and even they were expected to be at the studio every single day of the week, no matter what was going on. I had a lead who left work around 3 pm on a **sunday** and was only allowed to do so because it was his sons birthday. I am still sort of shocked that they made him come in at all.

These time constraints aren’t an accident. They aren’t a miscalculation. VFX artists are treated like this to keep the cost low, to be as cheap as possible. Specifically M/PC is known for this. Cut corners where you can, mistreat your workers as well as you can and whatever comes out will be good enough.

On top of that- remember how people were angry that they didnt list ANY VFX artists on the stupid dinosaur documentary? Approximately half of all VFX artists working on a film don’t get credited. This isn’t about the studio I worked at- this is a general thing. You can work your ass off for hours upon hours for years just to get that stupid flop of a movie out, and they won’t even credit you. This may not sound like a big deal, but ultimately it means that if you say you worked on those movies in a future job interview and they go and check if you actually did- they won’t find you, and it looks like you were lying about your work experience.

Now, obviously, whenever I tell people that this is happening in one of the biggest studios in the industry, they go like “but if it’s that bad, why is nobody sounding the alarms about it? Why is nobody fighting against it?”

For the same reason you hear vague sexual abuse allegations from companies like that but never see who made them or what exactly happened. If you speak up against it, and they find out who did, they make sure you can never work at their company or any company connected to them ever again.

*And they are ALL connected.*

The one’s that don’t directly belong to T/echnicolour are just besties with T/echnicolour, and they share informations like that. Because, you know. Nobody wants to hire a snitch.

While I was working there, the studio in Vancouver closed down. If you heard “the studio that made sonic and cats closed down”, that was it. And no matter how much the internet liked to make this about “the poor studio and the poor animators being kicked out because mean, mean fans made it so they didn’t get money boohoo”…. that. was not it.

The details here are muddy on purpose, so I can’t clearly speak on this- but what I can say is that, while the closure of Vancouver loomed over them, they never got a clear info or anything. The remaining workers just showed up one day after doing overtime for way too long and the studio was gone and closed. We, at the other studio, received an email thanking the nice collegues over from Vancouver for their faantaaaastic work.

Right after this email dropped, we were all immediately called into a meeting on the company floor, where first we were told that our jobs were not affected by this (which was true, they weren’t, they just hadn’t been stable to begin with), but they also made it very clear that if we went to post about this on social media, or talk to any journalistic publication about this incident, we would lose our jobs and be *blacklisted*. I can’t quote them verbatim, but I do remember them mentioning how “most of us were very young”, and how “this would be very unfortunate for us”.

They knew they fucked up, and let us know if we spoke to anyone about what had happened we’d never work again- because they wanted it to be muddy. They wanted the general narrative to be “the poor poor studio that made sonic and cats had to close down because of public backlash”. That story is MILES better for their reputation than “we squeezed every last droplet out of the foreigners we made work there in hopes they don’t know their own labour laws and then purposefully run that office’s finances into the ground so we can fire them all at once”

This all is also, by the way, why I am purposefully leaving out a lot of information in this post. Not because I’m insane and paranoid or anything- but they do that. They check the internet for stuff about them. And I’d honestly enjoy NOT using my expensive degree to go back to work in a coffee shop because I made an inconsequential post on tumblr dot com- but I feel it would be the better thing to do than to sit there and be fucking pissed without doing ANYTHING.

So, to bring it all back- Why am I so pissed about the chip and dale movie?

The reason for why a lot of VFX-heavy movies look like absolute shit, is not because VFX itself is a problem or doomed to be ugly or because the artists are bad or blind or whatever- it’s because of all of those exploitative factors.

The artists don’t get a say in anything. If you speak up about something being wrong, you might get fired. Your opinions don’t matter. The timecrunch is so tight that you don’t get the chance to make it right- and to be clear, nobody who is officially an “artist” gets any time to make it right. The people making the decisions and who would be able to speak up are the people who are handleing the money. The issue with VFX is in not even one case the VFX itself; the issue with VFX is the capitalistic nature of the goddamn film industry. All of those movies aren’t movies that wanna tell a story or that want to inspire- they are money machines. The people who make the decision don’t give a fuck what the movie looks like or if it’s good, and they especially don’t give a fuck about if the people working on it die doing it- as long as it’s cheap, it’s good.

That is also why productions prefer using 100% VFX instead of costumes and puppets. Because costume makers, SFX artists, makeup artists and puppeteers have labour unions. They get paid properly for their work. They work humane hours. They might take longer and have the chance to make it right- which in turn makes something more expensive. Not because their work is worth more; but because they have the priviledge to expect fair compensation.

VFX artists don’t get that priviledge- not to mention the countless VFX artists who live and work in the global south, a lot of them also for a Technicolour studio, who get way less for all that work… only so rebel fucking wilson and james corden can dress up at the oscars and piss all over that labour.

And while making those jokes as just some guy on the internet is like… sort of annoying for people who are affected in some way, imagine if people who are literally responsible for why these things are ugly in the first place, and for all the labour abuses made those jokes.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, GIVE IT UP FOR THE FUCKING CHIP AND DALE MOVIE

Everything about it, from how they used old assets without crediting the original artists, to how the jokes don’t make fun of the production houses but treat it like this was “just a thing lol” to the fact that the “2D” lead characters aren’t actually 2D animated but cellshaded 3D characters in order to save money-

is deeply, incredibly insulting.

To make the same artists that have been through production hell by the hands of the producers and execs who commissioned this piece of shit work on a movie that actively mocks their entire profession is one of the most disrespectful things I could possibly fucking imagine

This is on the same level as if let’s say amazon made a trademark “amazon pissbottle”, making fun of their own labour rights abuses, while having the same underpaid workers who gotta piss into bottles bc they dont get pee breaks package and deliver the fucking things

I want to genuinly tear my hair out about the level of disrespect that this movie is on. When the trailer first came out, I had no clue what to feel and was just SO confused, but by now I have sorted my thoughts and feelings and gotta say- fuck everyone who is responsible. Fuck everyone who planned that shit out.

and also: genuinly, fuck everybody who likes it. As much as it “is funny” or whatever, the whole thing is a symptom of a diseased industry, and I am genuinly hoping that more and more people get the chance to speak up about this- because it might only get worse from here.

If you really read this until the end, thank you for hearing me out haha,,, This wasn’t meant to vent or make anyone feel sorry. This was meant to put the situation of that industry into perspective and give an appropriate backdrop for what’s going on, and why a lot of these things are genuinly dispicable.

Next time you go to the cinema and the VFX looks like shit- just know that this is not a VFX problem, and making fun of VFX itself is misguided. Make fun of the people responsible. Make fun of the director. Look at which studios were involved in the making of the film at the end of the credits and drag their ass. Tag their social media profiles, ask them how much their regular artists get during crunchtime.

Let them eat their fucking OT cake themselves.

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This blog may not be a project I can devote all my time towards but ohoho I really do want to. If you thought that a page dedicated to talking about visual effects would biasedly always speak positive of it then you are incorrect. I would love to be scathing towards certain aspects and studios, and I plan to

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BTS: The camerawork of Pixar’s Soul

We could talk for days on every beautiful aspect of animation that Pixar’s Soul pulled off brilliantly, from the modelling, character animation, textures, shaders, and lighting, all which deserve high praise and recognition. However, while those already have been talked about by many people, I want to focus on an element that immediately grabbed my attention and enthusiasm upon watching the film, and that is the camera animation.

 The camerawork in animated movies often goes completely unnoticed, honestly due to the simplicity of it all, mixed in with audience subconsciousness that forgives and forgets what might constitute as awkward camera animation. In most 3D animated films, shots have many “locked-off”, unmoving cameras that cut where needed, only mostly moving when absolutely necessary (not to say the large number of films out there don’t as well). It is a totally different environment compared to a film set, where there are dedicated professionals operating and experimenting with how a camera moves throughout a scene. Pixar absolutely does a great job with how carefully and detailed they plan out storyboards, but the benefit of real film sets is always about experimentation, changing things on the day of filming. The constrictions of physically accurate camera moves have also been scarcely considered in the past before, with sweeping impossible animation commonly seen as it serves the scene. This is not inherently negative, as the freedom of animation is most often a benefit. For a company that keeps pushing towards a certain type of realism, however, it is important to ground concepts like the camera closely in reality for best results, and exaggerate where needed.

 While an unfair comparison in terms of age and budget (15 million to 150 million), one shot that strikes me as poor camera animation appears near the start of Hoodwinked, replicating a handheld move that does have charm as something rarely seen before, but also horribly linear and choppy. I bring this up as example of why camera animation matters, especially when done right. The act of replicating genuine camera movement, whether it be for the tone of a shot or realism, has to be fully committed to, otherwise you are left with the ironic nightmare faced by camera operators, having the audience notice jarring camerawork. Soul’s camerawork has not been particularly talked about, alongside being a niche subject, due to how well it works. It ends up like invisible VFX, something that is meant to be seamless, unnoticed yet still great.

View post on imgur.com

  Matt Aspbury, a cinematographer on Soul, explains his process working on the film (via the Go Creative Show). Pixar’s in-house software, Presto, does come equipped with a CG camera package of lenses, dolly tracks and crane rigs, as well as utilising mocap-esque camera setups to actually translate the real movement of an iPad, etc. into the CG scenes, similarly to how Avatar and the Lion King remake used virtual cameras to frame their shots with that “real film set experimentation”. The idea of animation polish is still an important aspect, cleaning or reanimating this captured data to better reflect certain camera rigs or cameras, as the weight of an iPad will visually show differently compared to a heftier cinema camera.

 So congratulations to Matt Aspbury, Ian Megibben, as well as the additional animators and layout artists. Soul looked beautiful, and even though it is not completely consciously noticed, the camerawork was another piece of beauty that added to the overall film.

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All of this, definitely. Practical and visual effects are two ways to achieve certain tasks for film, both with their pros and cons, and ultimately they are usually at their strongest when brought together. I also just wanted to further highlight the modern Planet of the Apes films as some of the best CGI characters to date, it is really sorely not talked about enough.

This is one of the few examples of the studio and directors truly understanding how much time, money and effort needed to be placed into the VFX to elevate the story, and that is exactly what they did. Even the most recent film is coming up on 5 years old now and it is still perfection. Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, we work best when we give each other time to shine :)

Whenever Tumblr talks about how practical effects are always better than CGI, I think of stuff like this

I’m not saying CGI is always better than practical effects, or that practical effects are always inferior. Rather time, effort, and the skill of the creator factor in much more than CGI v Practical. 

For example there are two examples of CGI faces roughly a year apart

Now lets compare a CGI ape from 2017 to a cat person from 2019

Here is a mostly practical car chase vs a CGI car chase

How about 2016 digital de-aging vs 2022 practical aging up

And my personal favorite: a practical effect everyone jumped on saying it was a bad CGI effect until they found out it wasn't 

Again CGI isn’t always good or critical effects always good, its time, money, effort, and experience that make the effect good

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What is your favorite film (and why)?

My most favourite film would have to likely be Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989). It is absolutely the best of the series, with great writing, visuals, score, acting, and directing. River Phoenix completely embodies Ford's Indiana in his brief opening. Sean Connery as Henry Jones leads himself as a greatly intricate character alongside Indy as their dialogue is a greater unravelling of the film's underlying themes. Out of all of the films, this one seems to have the most heart as father and son slowly learn to grow together again.

Douglas Slocombe shows off some masterful cinematography with some of my favourite setpieces, and Industrial Light & Magic's work on it also shines, with the iconic shot of Donavan's poor choice being a brilliant mix of practical effects and the first ever digital composite of a full-screen live-action image.

Perfect, perfect, perfect.

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Here is the full version of the render created for the blog header artwork, done by me :)

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A Briefing: Keying and Rotoscoping

Hey, today we are breaking down the concepts of keying and rotoscoping simply. In VFX, often elements of the filmed footage need to be removed or temporarily cut out in order to properly composite elements together, and these are the two techniques to achieve that.

 Keying is most known to be the process that deals with blue and greenscreens. In a modern context, it involves having the computer recognise certain chosen colour data and subtracting them from the footage to leave behind transparency. These create “mattes” that allow for more seen elements to be placed behind them. There are several types of keying, and some of the following are:

-          Luma key: using luminance values to create the matte, this is most used for high contrast video, like sky replacements.

-          Chroma key: uses a range of colour hues to create the matte, these are capable of handling blue/greenscreens that have more range in hue, saturation, or luminance across the shot.

-          Colour difference key: one of the oldest, in software these are often created just to solely handle blue and green keying. This typically works by subtracting one channel (RGB) from the average of others.

Rotoscoping sounds to be a similar process to keying, and is defined as the technique of manually creating a matte for the purpose of compositing, but the artist is hand-placing masks to isolate elements of the frame. While painful sounding and slower than something like chroma-keying, the high level of accuracy, and usually the conditions of the footage, is the reason behind its use. Roto artists can handle all the details of moving cloth, individual hairs, and more. Keying is not a perfect process, and most often in Hollywood, roto artists are tasked to cut out elements from blue/greenscreen footage anyway. It may sound counter-intuitive to film on colour screens if they are to be rotoscoped, but even then, these are still great at giving high-contrast outlines for the roto artists.

(These VFX shots in Parasite would have likely needed to be rotoscoped to remove the blue wall at the back, due to the water particles and warm bounce lighting altering how keying would have handled it)

 It is important to note that keying and rotoscoping are not limited to the digital realm and have existed as optical techniques for a long time. Keying? When we look back at colour difference keying, we can see that optically subtracting one certain colour channel from film is possible using chemical processes, and famously used on films like the original Star Wars trilogy. This process involved getting your footage, placing a blue filter over to see just your blue channel, projecting it as black-and-white. Combining this with the same process but using a red filter gave you a “female matte”, that was then inverted to block light out of the original plate.

Only the white parts let the original data of the footage come through, creating your key. A long process compared to a simple digital colour pick, right? Rotoscoping also involved getting your frames onto animation cells and manually cutting your elements out, even more painful compared to today.

 So that is an explanation of keying and rotoscoping, both old and new. Hopefully you learnt something!

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This shot and others in the film were just jaw-droppingly amazing. Big props to the FX artists and matte painters and their work, I’m hoping to get the chance to talk about it more some day :D

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

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VFX vs. CGI

“I hate CGI!!!” yells the grumpy movie-goer. They may not know the proper terminology, but they are actually pointing towards the poorly “green-screened” person in a particular scene. Unfortunately, following modern and general industry definition, keying out green-screen elements is not CGI. It is a very small thing but knowing the difference between VFX and CGI is a key factor in understanding who actually possesses at least some knowledge when complaining about it, which can make all the difference in conversations.

 I personally find it very tiring to hear people speak on topics they know nothing about, and here is no exception. Nothing is free of critique, including visual effects, but the blatant hatred towards this film department that many movie-goers hold does not help towards larger issues like VFX artist job stability, monetary valuing, and general respect within their own industry. The last thing needed is the combined voices of millions of unknowledgeable people dictating one’s job stability, especially when they call every possible thing that was not immediately filmed “CGI”.

 So what are the definitions? CGI is computer-generated imagery, and generally regards elements that were created and rendered in a 3D engine. Digital 2D animation does also fall under the CGI umbrella, yet our focus for now will stay on the most common definition for films, 3D rendering done within the computer. Visual Effects is the larger umbrella that CGI sits within and encompasses a larger range of techniques, from motion tracking, to rotoscoping, keying, matte painting, and the overall compositing that combines all these elements into one. These techniques can sound confusing when in today’s context they are done in the computer (“If VFX is done digitally then is it not computer-generated?”), but that is an odd argument that can begin to delve into calling everything, even colour grading, CGI. It is important to un-confuse and separate the terms in this way for matter of ease, historical context and them being distinctly different concepts.

CGI can exist without VFX. VFX can exist without CGI. Both intertwine and remain very close but are separate. The difference to note is that VFX greatly predates computers, and that CGI must obviously always take place within a computer. Digital VFX techniques of today are not called CGI because they do not historically need a computer to be done. 1857 brought the world’s first visual effects image with Oscar Rejlander combining different sections of multiple film negatives into a single image. Numerous other “optical” visual effects would continue in the following decades as techniques like matte painting, keying and stitching became known, editing and altering the film itself without the use of computer technology.

 The only CGI shot in the original Star Wars: A New Hope involved the Death Star wireframe animation the rebels watched when discussing their battle plans, created by the University of Illinois as the best showcase of what computers could output at the time. The rest of the VFX in A New Hope involved optically keying those famous ship miniatures, beautiful matte paintings placed in front of the camera (originally painted on large sheets of glass, only viewable from one angle), and creating a completely new motion-control camera system that would need to be built again from the ground up by the time Empire Strikes Back began production, questionably functional only because of how new the technology was.

 So, in short, VFX is an age-old process that has CGI prominently under its umbrella but not required. The optical effects and techniques listed have not gone away, they have just been updated for the digital realm, a more stable and workable environment. VFX is here to stay, same as how it has been embedded in film since the birth of cinema. We can only hope that further discussions and arguments about it come from individuals who can understand the definition of two terms, at least as a starting ground.

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An Introduction

Hello! I’m chroma, here to ramble, talk, critique, and discuss the world of visual effects. This is an aspect of filmmaking that often gets misunderstood and misconstrued to sound worse than it actually is. All films utilise certain tools and techniques, and VFX is just another tool in the overall process. Hopefully my posts clear up confusion around certain topics and offer a different perspective to films you may have not heard. Stick around, and you might learn something new!

 Authors note: The large majority of what I talk about holds a lot of personal perspective and experience that I do not possess. I am only just starting to grow within this industry and not a professional, I am just sharing my thoughts after having listened and directly talked to several artists smarter than me.