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media-mel · 5 years ago

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VFX REACT EPISODE 3

EPISODE 3 - MARVEL

Thanos

Over a dozen studios worked on this movie.

They have different levels of resolution for different shots. So they have the highest resolution, the highest detailed 3D model of Thanos's face for all the hero close up shots. But farther away, all those details, mores would be gigabytes of wasted data.

He has pores and little wrinkles on his cheek, and when hey smiles, they stretch and squish. That kind of stuff, there's special technology for it, but it's such high end, such custom made technology. But it's those kinda things that make faces look real. Or the crows feet at the corner of his eyes, and his skin folding into those crows feet.

The stubble hairs on Thanos are catching the light. The stubble is probably the team needing Thanos to look real, and we don't identify faces without hair as being real, so they needed to stubble on him.

Black panther (1 on 1 fight in crystal cave)

This scene doesn't look good, but do you know why? This scene they shot in October, and the VFX team got it, it was December. They only had about six weeks to do this entire scene. "Okay, let's say they're given another six months, what do you do to make this scene better?"

First I would approach the production designer and ask "why do you have a black cave, on a black road, with two guys in black suits? Because now there's no way for me to have their silhouette read." We're in a tricky situation where I need to be able to see these figures, but they're on a black background. So I need to just artificially raise the light [ like a curves layer ] for him to pop out. And now he's kinda like grey and black.

But there's no contact shadow, under his armpit, underneath his head. And if you look at the background, the rules of the scene establish that the black levels in the background go deeper then what you're seeing on the suit. So he's just kinda artificially raised up.

If you look at his head, his head is shiny. The brightness shining on his head implies that the light shining on his head is brighter than that. But the lights in the scene around us that we're seeing with our eyes, are not that bright. It's a subtle thing, but subconsciously you can see that it's wrong, because you see light every day.

Having one single source of light, really just making a very dramatic looking image, would have improved it so much. Like Jurassic Park or Detective Pikachu. Ambient lighting is the death of realism for visual effects. Nothing IRL is ever just ambiently lit.

They probably apply a lot of motion blur to hide the flaws. There are a couple ways you can do motion blur in CG. The quick and easy way to do it is called motion vectors = Where for every pixel, you get another pixel that's a color, and that color represents a direction. Later on in post [production] you can stretch that pixel out based on that motion vector you're getting, make more of a motion blur or less. It's great for changing things. Here's the problem though, it can only describe 1 direction. So if my hand does an arc, and for that one shutter you're getting an arc of motion, When it can't describe a curve, it can only describe a direction. "So you're saying the motion blur isn't actually baked into the 3D render, it's an actual filter that's applied on top of it." "That makes sense because adding motion blur straight out of the render adds a lot of time, but it's how you get the curves in motion blur, it's more realistic that way. But, they rendered out a pass, and then they added it later." "Which is a valid thing to do, we do it all the time." "Absolutely."

This is a better shot because he's standing next to an actual light so you're getting some actual volume. But also, bear in mind, he is still blending into the background, so it goes back to the production design thing you're talking about. A good visual effects shot is more then just technical prowess, it has to have artistic vision as well. You have to have all the stuff that would make any shot look good. Just because it's technically accurate doesn't mean those things exist.

"It's interesting how such a small thing can take people out." "It's a big challenge we face as VFX artists. The more high end we go with our effect, the more any tiny little flaw stands out."

Iron man

Putting on the metal suit

Two things stand out to me:

First, the motion looks pretty decent for them putting CG on a head. The hard thing is, you have to project shadows onto a real face. You basically have to remodel the face in CG, and use it has a shadow catcher basically that from the 3D objects being there to cast a shadow onto that.

It looks really good when the mask comes down to cover his face, because the shadow looks really solid because not only is it casting a shadow, but it's removing the shine from his skin. There, that's an artist going in there and taking the time to figure out what the skin tone would look like in the shadow but also removing shine.

Second touch I really like, is the finger smudges on the helmet. That's the first thing you should learn as a texture artist, when it comes to making textures for CG objects, is surface imperfections. That will bring the realism up from "oh yeah that looks real I guess!" to "Oh that is a real thing." Like look at my chrome helmet, there's dust on here, there's fingerprints, and the fingerprints react to light in a specific way, there's scratches and wash. It's more then just a chromed-out sphere.

Iron man 2 putting on suit from suitcase

So outside here his face has a lot more light acting on it, so it's harder to fake a shadow on it, so they just get through it really fast by having the helmet close on it quickly.

It's not just the modeling, and the cool lighting and rendering, it's the animation. The animators are killing it here, like the design for all the mechanical intricacies. And that stuff-- you actually have to study mechanical design, you can't just fake it 100%.

"Like even [ the pieces of the mask fitting and locking into place ], that would take me like a week just to animate that! Shows you how many people it takes to do an entire movie."

Avengers

How much shadows are on his face are perfect. Look at those perfect shadows [ when the mask comes down over his face ]!

Anytime you see a CG thing and there's a flair over the top of that, that flair was recreated for that shot. If there's a flair over where you want to put a CG element, the problem is that you have a half transparent color circle, and somehow you need to like mask it out to put it on top of your footage-- even though its like half transparent-- it's like trying to mask out a window LOL.

The director of photography needs to choose lenses here that don't flare for the visual effects elements so they can add the flare in later.

Dr. Strange

You can actually do a lot of those particle effects while using After Effects and Trapcode Particular which is a particle plugin for After Effects.

Look at this, this is orthographic projection= doesn't have actual vanishing points ( like isometric pixel art ). Perspective projection = DOES have vanishing points.

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arc-trooper · 5 years ago

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I realized that I don’t want to work in videogames like I always thought but that I want to work in tv because i love storytelling and characters and world building, but I hate thinking about actual game design like level balancing, items, boss mechanics, etc.

So anyway I’ve started watching BtS things and taking notes, right now I’m watching Corridor Crew’s VFX Artists React series lmao.

#if i want to work in a sci fi show i better know what im talking about #particularly because like... i can't afford college dept...#if i NEED to go to school to get fucking hired fine #but let me at least try without school first cause i can't fucking handle the idea of dept #i heard Lindsey Ellis mention SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS and i got fucking light headed

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media-mel · 5 years ago

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VFX ARTISTS REACT EPISODE 2

EPISODE 2

Detective Pikachu

Bulbasaurs walking

Contrary to Sonic from Episode 1, the green on the CG Bulbasaurs match the green of the grass in the background, selling the realism. The eyes are pushing it a little, but even then, not that much.

Pikachu

The hairs on pikachu clumps up; it tuffs. It's not all evenly spaced apart. This is also realistic to IRL animals.

Hair has a lot of ambient occlusion. Underneath the hair, near the roots, most of the hair above is blocking a lot of the light. And you can see the layers of the hairs on top of each other. Hair is not 100% opaque, it is actually slightly translucent. So the fringes of the hair on Pikachu's tail is still catching the light, creating an outline of lighter hair against the rest of his tail in shadow. So the little tips of the hair catches the light, then the light passes through it after being diffused a little.

specific 1-point, directional lighting helps a lot in creating cg scenes.

Jurassic Park 1

T Rex in rain at night

Radiocity, global illumination = The way light bounces [ img: the "under highlights" on an egg when its on a white counter ]. If I shine a flashlight on my hand (which is near someone else's face), you can see the bounced light still appear on the other person's cheek. In CG, to get that, you have to simulate a ray coming out of the light, hitting a surface and scattering and bouncing off. But you have to do that many many times to get your scattering and get your environment.

So they couldn't do that in 1993, so they set their scene at night with a single source of light. Notice the rest of the T Rex (where the headlights of the cars aren't hitting) are just pitch black. So you don't have to worry about bounce light- great! But they also make it rain, so they can have specular lighting, make it feel like it's reflective, but all they have to reflect is a white spot. He's shiny on his hands, his toes, his thighs, but all it's reflecting is a blob of white (because of the singular direction of lighting).

Because of the animatronic T Rex, they had the perfect reference for lighting.

The museum scene

For one frame, the velociraptor that the T Rex picks up is completely missing. "What I think happened was that the actual files, the 3D models they sent to the cache to be rendered, for whatever reason on that 1 frame the velociraptor model disappeared." [ The way they talk about it, it's like it was a simple computer failure that could have happened at any point, at any frame through out the whole movie, and that they're lucky it failed then and not during a focused part on the T Rex or something ] "AAA we have to re render this and we have two weeks and it takes to months to render!"

Jurassic World 1

The effects here are technically better then they were in Jurassic park, so why do people think it looks worse?

In Park, when you see the raptors, they're real animatronic costumes, so that's what they're going up against.

There's two things you get with real: 1. Motion looks a lot more realistic, because when you're animating CG by hand, it can go anywhere *waves hands around* 2. Acting. These kids are acting so much better with real pots and pans falling on them and real velociraptors chasing them VS J World which is "aight look at this man with the green tennis ball" Because no matter how good these dinosaurs look, our eye can still register it as fake. So, we will always recognize subconsciously that the actors are never in any real danger-- and your suspension of disbelief is a little shattered.

J Park treated the dinosaurs as if they were real, they didn't make any shot last more then they need to. But because World is-- they can do whatever they want. So they're going artistic with it and creative-- but as they're being more artistic and creative, it's being less real.

Aladdin ( 2019 )

Genie (bad shot)

There's a specific part of our brain that recognizes faces. All the checkmarks are there, that's not just a person-- that's clearly Will Smith. And it's not even the fact that he's blue. It's like his proportions. His face looks a little too small for that size of a head, his neck looks a little too thick, and I think a lot of that is driven by the actual camera focal point, length and placement, and what not.

Amazing CG body. The muscles on his back, they flex, and they move, and they indent, pull the skin with them. And from the front, the body still looks good.

But it feels like a face of a man who does not have that body was just pasted on there. It almost looks like the blue on his face doesn't match, it may be a color grading thing where they just put a mask there and brightened his face. "Oh like a power window ?" "Yeah!" But now his face should be only as bright as his left peck, but it's brighter.

Genie (good shot)

This looks great, cause it's lit well and you're not showing too much. And also because of the lower angle, the proportions are specifically thrown off. He looks super huge, so it's triggering our brains a little bit less.

A big thing is the lighting. In this shot, there's a nice edgelight, and there's a clear defined keylight, and it's giving his face volume and character. Versus the other shot, which is just this ambient wash, with just like this little bit of light from the side.

See and this once again comes back to very specific directional lighting.

Genie (desert)

Notice the discoloration on his abs, almost as if it was body paint. So a lot of we know about media's reality is not actually reality, but what we've seen in special effects. So for example, when people get shot in movies, we expect there to be a pop and dust and blood, and that's not actually what happens when people get shot. When you do visual effects, you're not always going for reality, you're going for a simulated special effect. And therefore you'd have slight discolorations like this, this actually makes it look more real, like makeup, as opposed to an actual blue person.

Terminator 2

Dogget's character blending backwards to forward

This is mostly a compositing thing. This isn't CG 3D modeling or anything, this is classic After Effects type stuff.

With this shot, ILM kind of pioneered morphing. And morphing is actually pretty simple, it's a distort while doing a cross fade.

Michael Jackson's Black or White

You're not even really able to see the crossfade of these morphs, in fact they may have kicked it up a notch where they don't actually do a crossfade but rather a pixel color change.

(Lady's hair grows from short to long) The use of practical shot to drop her hair to help the morph. They have enough of this choreographed where they know when they needed to drop her hair to help achieve the morph.

It's important to note they're not doing an overall crossfade uniformly, they're doing splotches and bits of crossfading though different intervals of time. First it was her hair coming down, then parts of her face, parts of her shoulders, it all flows consistently.

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media-mel · 5 years ago

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VFX ARTISTS REACT EPISODE 1

Game of Thrones

Giant walking through water

Two ways to composite when you have people:

they're filmed on a blue/green screen and you tell the computer the green/blue is transparent. The computer will "kind of figure that out."

you hire a big team of people who cut everything out frame by frame by drawing a mask on it

"They probably had to animate the skeletons on top of his CG double, which is over top of his actual body."

Jon Snow petting dragon

"floaty hand" = Contact shadow isn't just right. There is still the dome of light from the sky, so the shadow of his hand should only be on the bottom of it, rather then the hand casting a shadow on the top and sides as well.

"We're literally talking about the 👌 Compositing, one tiny stage of an entire work flow and pipeline. They're missing the gust of wind that appears when the dragon flaps its wings to take off-- it should effect the people and surrounding nature.Not only are you simulating the wind on the dragon's skin, but also how it folds, how it stretches, how it wrinkles, and how the light passes through it. And how it influences the grass, and how it's influencing the dust, and how it's influencing the actor's costumes. And it's just-- it's too much. Unless everything is CG, it's too much.

Dragonheart

Dragon's shadows

In reality, shadows are much more dynamic then that. And, they're not just black because shadows are just the absence of light. The parts that are close to the ground, the area on the ground should be darker then just that flat shadow.

Ambient Occlusion = "Darkness that's calculated by how close surfaces are to each other."

Dragon should have highlights, it should be reflecting the sky, the ground, the world around them, the darker objects you don't really see, but it still creates this subliminal effect.

Index of a fraction = "The more a surface is turned from a camera, the more reflective it gets."The glass of a family portrait faced directly at you will be completely transparent, you can see the photograph underneath. But as it gets more and more turned away, it becomes more reflective, until it's almost a full mirror. So the edges of the dragon's scales should reflect it's surroundings more then the scales that are directly facing the camera.

Logan

Younger version of Logan coming down the stairs

Younger Hugh Jackman is 100% digital from the neck up. Actual actor is Hugh's stunt double.

Captain Marvel

Younger Samuel L. Jackson

One of the hardest things to get right, besides the eyes, is the mouth because you basically have a whole muscle, suspended by muscle, interacting against your teeth. The way it deforms and interacts on your whole face is really challenging. You essentially need to simulate the skeleton, muscle structure, and the skin's surface and how that wrinkles to get a good-looking mouth.

All up until this point, it's either hand animated to make it look as real as possible-- it never does, but they got close with Smeagle-- Or it's straight up a frame-by-frame volumetric capture of somebody doing it so you don't have to worry about any sort of animation simulation.

Seeing you smile and how your lips stretch across your teeth, and how it tucks in the edge [of the lips], and you have hairs, your neck, wrinkles come out of your face, even your ears are moving. Your pores stretch. Creating a believable human face is the holy grail of effects making.

Sonic (2019)

There's a lot to being a VFX artist. Half of it is simulating reality, and the other half of it is simulating what happens to reality when it passes through the guts of the camera. Like how does the sensor blow out? Does it blow out to pure white, does it blow out to pure color? When does it happen?

Sonic running past cars

The blue glow from lightening, the camera would capture it like that. It's daytime, meaning the camera is "stopped down", even though the camera is exposed way down, to the point where the clouds aren't even white, there's still glow coming from that electricity, which you wouldn't get-- that's not how the camera captures light.

Sonic sitting in the car

The green from his eyes is far more saturated then the green of the grass in the background. The camera shouldn't catch the amount of saturation that's in his eyes.

Pirates: Dead Man's Chest

Davy Jones

"All those specular highlights!"

Subsurface scattering = simulates light hitting the surface so it's not really bouncing, but going in, scattering a little bit, then coming out. Like the edges of peoples ears or shining a light through your hand.

They used Bill Nighy's real eyes for Davy Jones.

The lense simulations are flawless. The way he's going out of focus at the edges, the way the environment behind him is being transmitted through the focus at the edges-- it's all perfect.

One of the challenges with CG rendering are details that are the size of the pixel. For example, a piece of light reflecting off of a bumpy surface like his skin. The challenge with that is it's not consistent with each frame, so sometimes you get flicker, or aliasing. One frame, you'll have that reflection, another frame it's gone, another it's back. So they have micro details on his skin, and they're not flickering-- and that is a huge achievement.

Flying Duchman crew

All these weird creatures on deck are all people in motion capture suits. They filmed the entire scene with all the actors, then comped in all these characters over them.

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