The first cut of the sequence... not completely satisfied with a few of the shots i think the specular on the hand match shot needs boosting and I'm not sure what looks wrong with the hand pan shot but something does and I want to re work it. The back plate on the final shot also needs some tweaking as the perspective slips a few seconds before the end.
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
Colour Grade
I added a colour grade to enhance the aesthetics of the shot. I wanted the footage to look like it was shot on a 35mill camera so a little over exposed, blacks slightly crushed etc.So the footage I tweaked the curves and added a little orange hue, blew out the levels to give an over exposed look then crushed the blacks using contrast. I also added a magenta solid and turned the mode to soft light to give the highlights a little purple hue. then I just added a black solid with a elliptical feathered mask to give a slight vignette.
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Beauty passes
I wanted to render out just the beauty passes from my animations as I think they look really nice un-composited and the quality of the beauty pass kinda gets lost when composited. So here are the un-edited, un-composited beauty passes.
I don't want to rant on about the compositing as most of the things i did are discussed in a previous post. However I did just want to show an extra element I added in the compositing. I added a glow to the specular channel to highlight and ...glow the shiny, reflective elements.
Smashed
The shot in which the hand jumps through the wall needed a transitional cross over point from when the wall didn't have a hole to when it did. I decided to make some dust and rocks to act as an explosion. I first made a particle systems in 3dsmax. I used a pfsource with a spawn event to create flying debris. I added gravity, spin and rotation and then instanced the particles to some random shaped rocks that I made with the texture used from the hand hole.
To enhance the debris I added some dust particles made in after effects. I started off with a white solid with ccparticle world. Then I added some turbulence displacement and guassian blur, vector blur and fast blur.
below are the video tests from the dust and debris
To enhance the debris I added some dust particles made in after effects. I started off with a white solid with ccparticle world. Then I added some turbulence displacement and guassian blur, vector blur and fast blur.
below are the video tests from the dust and debris
Monday, 25 April 2011
hole in the wall
The hand hole was modled in 3dsmax. I started by making a rough outline using the line tool. I refined and added a few more points then added a bevel modifier to extrude along the z axis. I then added a subdivide modifier to add more verticies, a tesselate modifier to give some random rock like quality and a noise modifier to enhance the randomness of the rock shape.
I textured using unwrap uvw, below are the uvw templates and the texture I made from a still of the wall. Using offset and clone stamp in photoshop I made the edges of the texture match.
I textured using unwrap uvw, below are the uvw templates and the texture I made from a still of the wall. Using offset and clone stamp in photoshop I made the edges of the texture match.
Making a false background...
The final shot in the sequence shows the possessed lego hand jump through the wall. If it were to do this in real life it would leave ahole in which it jumped through. However as this isn't real we'll have to make one. I could make a false wall, comp it in then animate a hole being made in the fake wall Ive made but that doesn't make any sense because I would have to erase digitally the wall thats already there. So I decided to create a false hole via a masked alpha channel. However when the hole is made there is nothing behind it in the background. The solution to this was to take a still shot on a fish eye lens of the scenery behind the wall then align it correctly in 3dspace using the cam data from the matchmove. see image below.
The second part was to add the foreground video and use the alpha channel of the hole from the 3dsmax render to cut a hole on the video and reveal the background.
The second part was to add the foreground video and use the alpha channel of the hole from the 3dsmax render to cut a hole on the video and reveal the background.
comping crystals hand
The starting element I needed to created was to erase crystals hand and replace it with the back ground image. Not too tricky as it was shot on a tripod all it meant was too mask the hand and drop in a still from the sequence where nothing was in the way. Then just a case of key framing some color correction onto the background plate when the light changed.
The first initial problem I faced when adding the matched hand to crystals real hand was the joining section from her wrist to the animated hand. Having just the hand would mean that when it dropped it would leave an area of the wrist that wasn't modeled and would be too tricky to paint in the back of her sleeve. Therefore I decided to match a stump base acting as her wrist.
I then had to rotoscope the area that needed to be underneath the sleeve and thus invisible to the camera. This just involved keyframing the mask frame by frame until a seamless mask had been achieved. I feathered the mask slightly just to make the join a little smoother.
The second stage of the stump was to add some shadows where the sleeve ended and the stump started. This could have been done in 3dsmax by modeling the geometry of the sleeve but I decided it would be easier to just mask in after effects. I duplicated the diffuse channel model and tinted it to all back. The using the mask made for the sleeve I feathered the edges to give a slight gradient on the shadows, duplicated the mask and changed the mode to subtract to give the look of some contact shadows to the stump.
The next part was to add the hand itself. I added the passes into the comp (diffuse, shadow, specular and reflection), changed the modes to : add for the specular, soft light for the shadows, screen for the reflection and left the diffuse as normal. I matched the color of the diffuse using curves and de saturated it slightly as it looked more correct to the original plate. I also boosted the levels of the specular and added a glow effect aswell just to give a little more dull shine to the model.
I added a grain match to the final renders also to match further the quality of the video. I had also intended to add motion blur on to the model however after an extensive 39 hour render time for a previous test scene when compositing it didn't look right. The reason for this was that i shot the footage with a pretty high shutter speed around 2500. This pretty much reduced and motion blur to zero especially things not moving particularly fast. The motion blur did enhance the animation but looked out of place in the composit. when I lowered the blur amount to a correct level for the footage the blur amount was so low it wasn't really noticable however it still kept the render time ridiculously high. so the decision to abort motion blur was made.
The final element in the compositing I made was a slight glow around the edges of the alpha to look as though the light from behind was engulfing the foreground image. I autotraced the alpha channel of the model which gives a rough mask for the duration of the shot then added it to an adjustment layer above all the other layers and feathered and altered the glow radius until it gave the correct look.
The first initial problem I faced when adding the matched hand to crystals real hand was the joining section from her wrist to the animated hand. Having just the hand would mean that when it dropped it would leave an area of the wrist that wasn't modeled and would be too tricky to paint in the back of her sleeve. Therefore I decided to match a stump base acting as her wrist.
The second stage of the stump was to add some shadows where the sleeve ended and the stump started. This could have been done in 3dsmax by modeling the geometry of the sleeve but I decided it would be easier to just mask in after effects. I duplicated the diffuse channel model and tinted it to all back. The using the mask made for the sleeve I feathered the edges to give a slight gradient on the shadows, duplicated the mask and changed the mode to subtract to give the look of some contact shadows to the stump.
The next part was to add the hand itself. I added the passes into the comp (diffuse, shadow, specular and reflection), changed the modes to : add for the specular, soft light for the shadows, screen for the reflection and left the diffuse as normal. I matched the color of the diffuse using curves and de saturated it slightly as it looked more correct to the original plate. I also boosted the levels of the specular and added a glow effect aswell just to give a little more dull shine to the model.
I added a grain match to the final renders also to match further the quality of the video. I had also intended to add motion blur on to the model however after an extensive 39 hour render time for a previous test scene when compositing it didn't look right. The reason for this was that i shot the footage with a pretty high shutter speed around 2500. This pretty much reduced and motion blur to zero especially things not moving particularly fast. The motion blur did enhance the animation but looked out of place in the composit. when I lowered the blur amount to a correct level for the footage the blur amount was so low it wasn't really noticable however it still kept the render time ridiculously high. so the decision to abort motion blur was made.
The final element in the compositing I made was a slight glow around the edges of the alpha to look as though the light from behind was engulfing the foreground image. I autotraced the alpha channel of the model which gives a rough mask for the duration of the shot then added it to an adjustment layer above all the other layers and feathered and altered the glow radius until it gave the correct look.
reflection and lighting
As the scenes have been matched and animated Its now time to render... I made a lighting right out of omni lights positioned into a cone shape. The idea behind this is that using lots of low intensity omni lights will give good soft shadows and speed up the render time... this is instead of using say a sky light.
I wanted also to add a reflection to the material. So first I changed my render-er to mental ray instead of the default scanline.Then in my materials I added an ambient/ occlusion to the diffuse map with around 32 samples, made the bright color the red of the lego pieces and checked reflective. I then added a falloff map to the reflections map, changed the falloff type to fresnel and added a raytrace map to the black channel of the fall off parameters.
I wanted also to add a reflection to the material. So first I changed my render-er to mental ray instead of the default scanline.Then in my materials I added an ambient/ occlusion to the diffuse map with around 32 samples, made the bright color the red of the lego pieces and checked reflective. I then added a falloff map to the reflections map, changed the falloff type to fresnel and added a raytrace map to the black channel of the fall off parameters.
Monday, 18 April 2011
animating the hand...
The hand is made up of mainly rectangular elements and the way in which i wanted it to move was literally as if it was made from Lego. I didn't want to rig it and skin the object to move like a human hand. With this in mind I made a simple bone rig and linked the corresponding parts of the hand to the bones
After animating the hand to give it a run cycle it was then a case of linking it to a dummy object and using the dummy to animate the distance of the hand traveling.
After animating the hand to give it a run cycle it was then a case of linking it to a dummy object and using the dummy to animate the distance of the hand traveling.
Monday, 4 April 2011
Can't get with that track
Recently I have been having extremely difficult problems with the tracking shots. Firstly the object tracking shot went haywire and produced an inverted rotation solve to the object.
Above is the original shot I was trying to track. Syntheyes confused the markers placed on my hand. It thought the points closest to the camera on the z axis were the furthest from the camera and vise versa. This in turn made the object rotate the opposite way to the rotation of the hand. After hours of trying to correct and resolve the track using the inverse settings, zero weighted and constraints it still wasn't budging. I then decided to re film.
Here on the left is a cardboard 'mitten' to be worn on the next shoot. My idea behind it is to give a larger and flatter surface area than just a hand. This should give more parallax in the scene and thus provide an easier solve.
Here is a still from the shoot. The track had a lot more success this time. The increased surface area made syntheyes solve the track with no problems and got to a 0.23 Hpix error in the first solve.
The mitten worked better also as the tracking points where recognized by syntheyes better (being as there is a more prominent black on white texture). This made the manual tracking aspect much much easier and quiker.
The second problem I have been having is pulling a track from footage shot with a fisheye lense. Due to the distortion around the edges of the frame I makes refference points look as if they are moving within the scene (however the movement only comes from the distortion). This in turn produces extremely wild camera solves.
I tried to un distort the image and then make a re track. This again didn't work and I haven't found and supporting articles on the internet to help with this problem and it appears that pulling a track from footage shot with fisheyes is an extremely hard thing to do. The footage is to be shot on a standard lens which isnt ideal as I wanted a wider depth of vision for the animated hand shots.
Above is the original shot I was trying to track. Syntheyes confused the markers placed on my hand. It thought the points closest to the camera on the z axis were the furthest from the camera and vise versa. This in turn made the object rotate the opposite way to the rotation of the hand. After hours of trying to correct and resolve the track using the inverse settings, zero weighted and constraints it still wasn't budging. I then decided to re film.
The mitten worked better also as the tracking points where recognized by syntheyes better (being as there is a more prominent black on white texture). This made the manual tracking aspect much much easier and quiker.
The second problem I have been having is pulling a track from footage shot with a fisheye lense. Due to the distortion around the edges of the frame I makes refference points look as if they are moving within the scene (however the movement only comes from the distortion). This in turn produces extremely wild camera solves.
I tried to un distort the image and then make a re track. This again didn't work and I haven't found and supporting articles on the internet to help with this problem and it appears that pulling a track from footage shot with fisheyes is an extremely hard thing to do. The footage is to be shot on a standard lens which isnt ideal as I wanted a wider depth of vision for the animated hand shots.
I used to be a teenage handmodel
Above is a preview of the hand model made for the project. It was constructed from literally building a lego hand in 3dsmax from the separate lego pieces I constructed. I attached most of the palm however there is 3 separate pieces for bone attachments.
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