Category: Visual Effects Fundamentals

MAYA MASK

For this unit we started creating a boot to learn organic modeling but we switch fast to a more good looking idea. We decided to create a mask using Maya and Mudbox.

We started by importing a head asset, where we would then learn how to do retopology using the quad draw tool.

Once we have completed half of the face we proceed to mirror the geometry so we have both sides identical. And we end up we a full-face retopology. That now we could send it to Mudbox and start building up our mask from there.

Before going to Mudbox I had to do some research and decide what I was going to model. At the time I was playing a game called Ghost of Tsushima and the main character wears a mask, and I decided to model that mask. You will see one mask different from the rest, that is because we had to model a full face mask, and the one I wanted to model was only half of it. So I research and found a good fit that would go well with the othermask.

Now we can dive in to Mudbox. Is a similar program like Maya but specific for sculping models. This is how my mask looked the first weeks.

I was focusing more on the lower part of the mask, at the same time that learning the program, because even though I had experience with Maya and other software like zBrush, Mudbox had a different way of working than zBrush.

At this point we were ready to put some more detail to the mask, what we did was go back to maya, to generate with basic shapes the horns and teeth of the mask.

So here we created the horns and the teeth and now we are ready to send them back to Mudbox and dive into all the details that we want to add to the mask.

We can see on the right image that it was the first reimport from Maya with the horns and teeth and on the left a more detailed mask with some work on it already. It starts to look how I want it to look.

Here it has already a bit more details and for the last step of details I’m going to add some more and we would be ready to paint it.

So, now that we have our mask painted and finished, we can send it back to Maya and start playing with the lighting and render settings to get a real good looking mask and have some cool renders.

We set up all the lighting and settings and now we are ready to render a small animation, that took about 12-15 hours of rendering.

And for the final result, here is the video of the small animation:

MA Visual Effects Nuke Term One

COLOR MATCH

For the color match exercise, we had to pick two different images, and make one look like is in the same place as the other. Using various techniques like white balancing both images for then grade it and color correct it. I did three examples of it and here you can see them.

IMAGE 01

This was the first attempt and as you can see is not as good as I would expect, but the next images I feel like are better executed. On this one, I did not plan to put one image on top of the other but to see better the result I had to.

IMAGE 02

This one, I tried to place the Eiffel tower next to the Big Ben. The scale on the eiffel tower is a bit of, but if I had used the real scale probably we would not see much of it since is much bigger, we would only see a small part of it.

IMAGE 03

This is the last image, I think I did a better job on this one. I roto out the globe and put it in the background of the plane.

MA Visual Effects Nuke Term One

PLANAR TRACKING

Planar track is a technique similar to the 2D tracking that we learn before, this one instead of selecting an image point to create a track, you create an alpha mask that tracks the shape of it. After this with a cornerpin we can stick it to the corners of the shape and merge it over to the original plate.

This is the original plate, where I’m going to swap some posters for others.

Here you can see the end result:

This is the node editor, we can see the structure where we create a mask and then generate cornerpins for each of them.

MA Visual Effects Nuke Term One Visual Effects Fundamentals

2D TRACKING

For this practice we learn how to 2D track a plate, here you can see the original plate I used for the exercise.

Here you can see the end result and I’m going to explain a bit what and how I did it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_sOQfj9ito&ab_channel=ANTONIUAL

This is the node editor structure. First I reformat and denoised the track because it was in 4K. And with the denoised plate I create all the trackers. And stick it to the track with transforms matchmove.

At the end I merge them all together on the original plate to write it out.

MA Visual Effects Nuke Term One Visual Effects Fundamentals

ROTOSCOPING

ROTO 01

Rotoscoping was a complete new practice and skill for me, I never did anything related to it and also I never personally research for it like I would do with other skills. So we first started with a little assignment about rotoscoping that was to roto a shot at least for 80 frames.

I loved the learning process behind the first classes we had with Aldo, it was all new and I enjoyed the hard work of rotoscoping so many frames for the first time. This video is the plate I decided to rotoscope. Wich Gherardo shot when we were able to go outside and took some footage for the course.

PLATE

The first thing that we needed to do was reformat and write out the sequence. Because we recorded the plate in 4K and we only are gonna render out the images in full HD 1920×1080, we reformat the plate so its easier to work with.

This is the reformat where we take the actual size from the plate and select the desired output format in this case we can see that is 1920×1080. Those are the only two settings that we needed to tweak.

After reformat we used the write-out node to render out the plate in image sequences. We only select the file directory that we want to save and click render order, where we can select which frames to render.

Next step was to start the roto process. This is the set up I had once I finished all the process.

We can see that I have various roto nodes for different parts of the roto, in this case, I’m rotoscoping myself. As I will show you a bit later in this case because is the first time I do it I obviously make some mistakes, the biggest one is not using a lot more shapes for the roto.

For the node editor, we can see 3 major parts. The first part is where the roto is. The green nodes are for creating shapes and the orange ones are some filters that we apply to the roto to make it look a bit better, smoothing the edges and blurring them out. The GREY BG where we create a grey background and the OVERLAY that is the color of the mask.

A part from using only one shape for the head, one for the torso, one for the leg and on for each arm I’m happy with the result of my first rotoscoping exercise. So here are the results, first we have the mask.

MASK

Here we can see the alpha channel.

ALPHA

And here we can see the plate with the grey background but I don’t know why it won’t embed the video so just follow the link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNshuQlDtHc&ab_channel=ANTONIUAL

As you could see, the plate is a bit shaky, this could be resolved with a tracking and stabilizing the footage but because we learn this technique a bit later in the course I could not apply to this project as I had already create the mask for the roto. But for the next roto project I already apply this techniques.

ROTO 02

So same, as before the first things we need to do is reformat and write out the image sequence. But in this case I also track and stabilize the footage so I have a cleaner plate to work. And for the node editor we can see that the structure is basically the same but we only have one roto node. This is because in this case, instead of having different roto nodes I decided to use only one and create inside of the node more shapes.

We can see if we go inside of the roto node, that there are a lot more shapes than just 4 or 5 that I used for the previous roto project. We can see also the shapes on the plate.

And here we can see the results. This roto was a lot smoother to do than the other one, it has a bit less movement but faster so I had to deal with other problems like the hair in this case, I could have done it better with luma key and other techniques to roto the hair but as before with the tracking and stabilizing, we didn’t do that at the moment so I will leave it for the next roto project.

This is the original plate:

PLATE

Here we can see the mask:

MASK

And the grey background:

GRAY BG

For the alpha it wont let me embed the video so just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJV38FDY9gI&ab_channel=ANTONIUAL

MA Visual Effects Term One Terms Visual Effects Fundamentals

ISO AND FOCAL LENGTH TEST

Post author By Antoni Coll Florit
Post date 19th November 2020
No Comments on ISO AND FOCAL LENGTH TEST

For the second week of the course, I rented a camera to test what we learn during the first and second week. I rented the CANON 5D MARK3.

Here are some images I took changing some settings every time a shot one.

***f/22 – ISO 8000 – 1/15s*** – ***50mm***

When I took these photos I set the ISO to be automatic so it would light properly and we can see some differences. We can see that the background on each shot is different and more blurry than the previous one. This is because of the focal length. The smaller the focal length number is, the more light lets in. Here are some other examples.

This are some shots I took that I think they look cool.

MA Visual Effects Term One Visual Effects Fundamentals

NOT THE HISTORY OF VFX

We are gonna identify and discuss some of the techniques, genres and formats that have been used in several films. I have not seen a lot of these movies but we are gonna discuss a few clips we have from the presentation.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)

A musical, comedy and terror movie, where they have used a mix of techniques. We can see in some shots that there are actual VFX components where it was probably difficult to achieve the same effect with practical work. But there are other shots where we can see clearly that are practical effects, most of them where the character interacts with the effect that’s implemented in the shot. We can see an example of this in the next images:

The left image is an example of VFX where the right one is practical.

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)

American werewolf in London is a terror film with comedy touches and use a lot of practical effects, most of them are makeup. You can achieve an amazing effect when done well. This is an amazing example of SFX.

GREMLINS (1986)

A comedy/horror/fantasy movie is captured in digital where all they use is practical effects with the gremlins and others sets. Digital captured makes it easier to implement practical effects to the shots. We can see an example of this here:

THE ABYSS (1989)

The abyss is done with VFX, they have a wide variety of VFX techniques and well implemented to the shot. It’s a science-fiction movie recorded in digital. This helps with the VFXtechniques in the film.

INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

This movie implements really well practical effects like miniatures with the live shot. They also VFX implemented and mixed with the practical one.

BLADE RUNNRE 2049 (2017)

Blade Runner is an action movie, captured in digital. This helps to implement all the effects, both practical and visual, being VFX and SFX in every shot there is no other way of recording this. In the video embed before you can see either both types of effects.

MA Visual Effects Term One Visual Effects Fundamentals

VFX INDUSTRY 2

Today we are gonna look at a few more experienced roles in the industry. This usually would be the entry-level to a company as a junior and then you obviously can progress and become senior, lead… etc.

CONCEPT ARTIST

A concept artist is in charge of the creation and design of any asset, characters, environment and any related product that needs to be designed. Basically, everything that you see in a final production one of the first steps that have been done is usually the concept artist generating ideas and designs, so the team can decide which direction to follow.

MATTE PAINTER-ARTIST

This artist create painted representations of landscapes, sets, and other locations as backgrounds for scenes. This is done because it can be impossible to find a location like the one that you need or very difficult to record using digital or traditional techniques.

PREP/PAINT ARTIST

This role is dedicated to cleaning up backgrounds of live action-footage, preparing it for the effects to be layered onto it by the compositor. There are a lot of processes used to do this, they remove dust, scratches, sort out dropped frames, basically, anything unwanted is removed by prep artist.

COMPOSITING ARTIST 2D/3D

As I said on the previous role we talked, the prep artist removes anything unwanted from the shot, and the compositors are all the contrary. They have the job of adding and layering various elements in the shot. They work with other VFX departments to solve problems to release a photo-realistic final shot.

MA Visual Effects Term One Visual Effects Fundamentals

VFX INDUSTRY 1

In the industry of Visual Effects, there are a lot of roles and people involved in the process creation of a project. Today we are gonna talk about 3 basic and important roles that you can find involved in every single project created.

Runner

A runner used to be a position where you would work and learn on set all the skills necessary to become an artist in the industry.

This position has evolved over time and nowadays its a lot more different. You still learn and get on set experience but is more as an assistant, where you will work under the direction of more experienced staff doing a bit of everything. From answering the phone, look after guests to when necessary in some occasions work in the actual production.

Matchmover

A matchmover artist match CG scenes with shots from live-action footage. By tracking the camera movement and recreating plates the are able to make the scene appear from the same perspective. They also do body and object tracking, using markers to recreate the movements of people, vehicles and other objects in CG.

It’s bascically the bridge between 2D and 3D. This is a good example of what matchmovers do.

Roto Artist

Roto artist has a very hard and tedious job. They manually draw and cut out objects from a shot. This process is done in almost every frame of the shot. If a shot is 10 seconds long that’s 240 frames, and 240 frames that you have to manually edit to add or cut out something from the shot. They need to have a really good eye and a lot of patience in order to complete this difficult and repetitive work.

Good examples of rotoscoping:

Finally, I wanna leave here an amazing video where you can see a good example of the VFX in general. I saw this video for the first time in my first day of the master and it inspired me a lot.

See you in the next post.