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there are EXCEEDINGLY powerful and chaotic energies in this image

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Incredible.

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okay but Vader literally turned off the lights on his chest panel to make an impression on the Rebels. That whole emerging from the darkness by the light of his saber thing? That was intentional dramatic effect. What a drama king.

Leia got away because he wasted 30 seconds scaring the crap outta those poor rebel mooks.

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the original

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2017 mood

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the back of my hands are cracked and bleeding but catch me in hell before i ever wear lotion, the devil’s yogurt

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Graduation

Graduation! Wow! Beginning of life! 

I really wish I had posted a bit more from my Thesis film, so expect some more updates to come soon on that front. My graduation/The Premiere of “Rad Rovers” is happening next weekend. So excited! 

I also finished my first/last research paper for school which was a 50 Page paper on designing pipelines for Deep Compositing and for Virtual Reality film production. I will now be graduating with Honours in the Major because of this and I couldn’t be happier. I’ll post a link to that once it is published online. 

But yeah, its never been such an exciting and/or terrifying time for me! Feel the adrenaline! Woo! 

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Deep Compositing! 

While it may not look incredibly impressive, this is the first result of much research I have been doing into the history and use of Deep Compositing. I’m delving into this for personal edification and as a part of my Honours in the Major Project in Emerging Compositing Technologies.

Onto my long ass paper! 

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I don't update this blog enough. But this is a pretty important moment for me. Once these two shots are final I will have a working version of every shot in my movie. 

 Now, there are still touch ups and thing I would like to do before the deadline on Tuesday. However, if I had to be done it would be done. Which is actually kind of leaving a pit in my stomach. I'm that much closer to graduating with every finished shot. It feels so close yet I know it is still a few months away. A few short months.

I logged a 99 hour week last week and this one is looking to be around that same ballpark. Oh boy oh boy! 

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My Thesis Film Blog

So once again I will be reskinning this blog (figurativley) and now post the progress of my final film I will be making here at FSU. I will post images and what not but I also want to post more updates about my current mental state so again I can track my Lovecraftian descent into madness. 

So I have been in development on this film since last May when we started on story development. I have always been a huge fan of science fiction and I am a huge nerd for real science and I can never get over my addiction to space so naturally this is what I was drawn to for my thesis. 

My film, tentativley titled Rad Rovers, is the story of ExoMars, a rambunctious rover that has only been on Mars for a short while, and his relationship with the veteran rover Spirit. ExoMars just wants to do stunts and live life to the edge, while Spirit knows that they have a job to do and doesn’t have time for his shenanigans. Hijinks ensue and everyone learns a lesson. (please excuse my application of gender to non-gendered objects. It is only for clarity, I promise.)

This film has gone through many changes very recently. As of last week this film was going to be fully CG and all of the environments and robots were modeled and textured. But after discussions with faculty and dump trucks full of ego, I came to the descision that I should focus more on what I want to do professionally, which is Visual Effect Compositing. So now I will be taking my robots and integrating them with actual photos from Mars.  

This is a very significant change and a shake-up to my whole production pipeline. I have spent that whole of last week doing comp and render tests and while I feel confident that this is do-able and I can pull it off. There is still a gaint pool of anxiety in my heart. Helpful and motivating, but terrifying all the same. 

So for now I will continue shouting my thoughts and art into the dark void of the internet and see where that gets me. Just doing it now is sort of cathartic. I hope you feel welcome to ask me any and all questions as I would love to answer anything you throw my way about workflows or process or technology or whatever comes to your mind.

Look forward to art and tests and renders and stuff. Hope you enjoy! 

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Look at the diversity in their designs tho! It's not character variation based on boob or butt size each one is actually unique and different and shows that there are varieties in Female body types as well.

It's not just perfect little button noses and big eyes and skinny hips. They actually design people and show that not all Women look the same.

Female characters of Laika

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MY FIRST MATTE PAINTING!

This is a breakdown of the matte painting I made for my VFX shot. I made it in Photoshop and it is the first matte painting I had ever done before. I think it turned out pretty well. It definitely could be a lot better and I’m gonna have to hide a lot of it behind atmospheric effects, but that’s the learning process.... hiding your mistakes. 

I was going for a very acidic and scary look. At first I was referencing the Dallol Volcano in Ethiopia because it had such a unique alien landscape, but in my reference adventures I wound up settling on Yellowstone’s acid springs along with a lot of sedimentary rock and strip mines. I got to see SO MANY pretty pictures. It was a good time. 

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Neat Method for Keying in Nuke!

So this is a method of pulling keys in After Effects that I tried to emulate and adapt for Nuke. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, but it actually worked really really well! So I thought for my behind-the-scenes blog I would make a post about it. 

I did not come up with this method, I only adapted it for Nuke. All credit goes to James Whiffin from Digital Tutors, that's where I learned it from. Lets get started! (Also warning for hella long post) 

So this is my plate, featuring the wonderful collasasaurusrex as my sci-fi adventurer. The armour pieces are from a master chief suit that I made. 

So the general theory behind this keying method is to isolate the plate and use Keylight to sample just the smallest amount of green that we can to make the key more accurate. Essentially we are using Keylight to generate a very precise garbage matte. We will walk through the steps, starting with DENOISING the plate. Always step one. 

I think isolated noise patterns are just the absolute coolest looking things ever. 

Then after a really quick garbage matte we will pull a super rough key using Keylight. Primatte will also work for this, as we are just trying to get a very solid core matte, the edges don’t really matter. 

After you get a solid core matte, you want to erode out the edges of your alpha channel until they are showing just a few pixels of green. The Erode should work for this, or you can just use the mask expansion that is built into Keylight. That’s what I did. 

Voila! Now we have a super precise garbage matte that draws perfectly and tracks our subject through the shot. Now when we sample the green with a second Keylight node, we are only analyzing the section of the green that matters without bogging down the calculations with frivolous values.

So that is the method. It uses two keylight instances and helps to make the Keyer more accurate in its calculations. Here is the node structure I had: 

And here is a very rough temp version of the final comp. Just to show it with a background. I also removed the right arm because I am replacing it with a cool robot one! 

So that’s all folks! Thanks for reading and sorry for cluttering your front page with a long post. If you have any questions or comments or this is a terrible method and you can’t believe I am doing this instead of a different way then let me know! 

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Here we are on set shooting the plate for my shot. We have the wonderful

collasasaurusrex

in costume playing my badass Sci Fi adventurer who will tackle this new dangerous planet with his cool Robot arm/Apple Watch. Can't wait to put this all together :}

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Unto the New Horizon

So this blog is now 100% dedicated to being the new Behind-The-Scenes look at the process for my summer-long VFX Compositing project. 

I am super excited to be embarking on this new quest and the first images will be posted later tonight. Here is the summary of the shot: 

A massive, harsh, and acidic landscape lies before an intrepid armoured explorer. He is perched on top of a rock , taking in his new conquest. As he leaps down to the floor, a message notification rings out from his robotic right arm. He checks the message. 

Cool, yeah? I’m going to build the environment in ZBrush with matte painted backgrounds built in Photoshop. The robot arm will be modeled inside Maya and lit, textured, and rendered from RenderMan. The arm’s motions will be tracked using Syntheyes. Finally all the assets will be composited together in Nuke! 

The primary focus of this project is to become a better compositor and to learn RenderMan. It will be a lot of fun and I will be updating this blog frequently throughout the process. :)