Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action
Friday, March 26, 2010
Peasant Village
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionThe result of our hard work! We are very happy with how it turned out. Please watch in HD on Vimeo! Simply click the Vimeo button in the corner… Enjoy!
Christoffer Lindvall & Martin Hjalmarsson
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Saturday, March 13, 2010
Peasant Village - Clean plate and Body Double
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionThis week I have finalized the village shot and I am currently trying to render it in nuke, but it’s crashing all the time. My solution for that is that I will have to render out portions of the scene separately and then do a final render with less nodes in Nuke.
Here is an image from the final comp. It now has more colors and more contrast.
I have also been working on the monster shot. I have done a clean plate which involved marker removal, removal of the character during the body double part and fixing the overlap of the two sequences. Most of the clean up I fixed with projections in Nuke. I removed the unwanted parts in one image and then projected it on to a sphere. Actually I had to use like 6 different projections so that I covered the hole shot. I had to do some small amount of painting frame by frame but not much.
The body double has also been animated and comped. I had to do some painting to get the transitions between the real character and the body double to work but I think it works pretty well now.
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Thursday, March 11, 2010
Peasant Village - Face tracking & Monster shot
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionI’m done with the face tracking shot, color correction will be applied when we have all the shots so we can match them. I’ve begun creating the final “monster”, the one that will break the wall from the inside of a house. It consists of a couple “static”.. ehh… pieces of meat and a big nasty tentacle that is now rigged. This tentacle will hit the character in side, throwing him across the snow… Here are some pictures and a previz of the “monster in the house” 
The previz is kind of dark, and lacks color… Damn cinepak codec!
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Saturday, March 06, 2010
Peasant Village - Shot 1 Compositing
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionPhew….it’s been a lot of work these couple of weeks with many late nights. Now I’m finally get to do what I really enjoy doing, which is compositing. Yay! I have been bad at putting progress report on the blog these weeks and I will have some more in depth pictures and explanation in a couple of days, but I’ll try to do a sum up here.
Well since my last entry I have been working full time with the mountain shot. I’ve modeled some simple objects that I placed in the village where I thought it needed some more detail. There have also been some tweaking on the houses to make them look more unique. I could have gone on forever tweaking and adding detail to the village but I have other shots to do. So when I felt pretty happy with how the village and the mountain looked I went on building the surrounding mountains. For those mountains I had to tweak the rock shader and the snow shader because I couldn’t displace them as much as the one with the village. Mental ray wasn’t my friend at this time because I really wanted to displace the mountains with finer detail but then I ran into memory issues.
When I was finished with the background mountains I did some quick test comps to see if they would fit together. Thats when I realized that my camera projection I did earlier didn’t fit in. So I redid that part of the mountain in 3d. Then I got more memory problems and had to do more tweaking on the displacement.
Luckily we have put up our own little render farm so I could afford some back and forth.
These last days I have been working on different types of snow. They are all done with Maya particles or nParticles and they are rendered with the hardware render buffer. I have done falling snow and some layers of snow blowing from the ground and the rooftops. I haven’t worked with particles that much but Christoffer was there when I needed some questions answered. Thanks Christoffer!
Now to the compositing. Firstly I have to say I really enjoy working in Nuke. I have worked mostly with Fusion before and this is my first big project with Nuke, but I must say that it was quite easy to pick up. I like they way it handles the exr format. I also like the 3d capabilities of Nuke because I do want to work with both 2d and 3d and with Nuke you get them both =)
In nuke I quickly put up a script with all the layers that was done at the moment. You can watch the result of that in the video below.
I have continued to build upon that script with more layers and right now the scene looks like these stills. I took the camera animation and some basic geometry from the village to nuke and with that I could easily place the character in the right place. The character is live action footage which I have luma keyed and then placed on a card in 3d. The sky is a panorama sky mapped on to a sphere in nuke.
These are not finals and I would be glad to get some critique. I have been working a lot with this shot and sometimes you get blind and can’t tell if it looks good or bad, so feedback is really appreciated.
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Friday, March 05, 2010
Peasant Village - Face tracking progress & Meat Snake Comp
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionI feel that I’m pretty much done with the meat snake shot. I just noticed a couple of problems with the clean plate, it is sometimes visible as a halo around the snake. Didn’t see this on my monitor at school but it was quite obvious on my laptop at home… This is most likely a result of a slightly different exposure in the 25 frame clean plate loop in the background. It will be corrected shortly. Click it to watch in HD on Vimeo.
I’ve been working really hard on the face tracking shot this week. It’s without a doubt the most complicated shot I’ve ever done, also, I am sick and tired of looking at myself every day, hehe… Many things have gone wrong, especially when rendering (a total of 11 render layers, some of which has up to 5 passes) and the shot is 400 frames long. Things are falling into place now though, and I have done comp tests of almost all the “effects” in the shot. Now I just need some tentacles coming out of my nose and mouth… 
Removing markers (click to enlarge)
Moving bubbles under skin. Just as difficult as I expected… The hardest part was lighting the bubbles in post and getting the masks to work so that the edges of the bubbles would blend nicely. A lot of fun though. The texture of the rendered face was created from 13 different projections that were baked to 2k textures. Baking them was a mess! Both Maya Software and Mental Ray either gave me messed up results, or correct results with artifacts. Then I tried baking using Renderman, and it worked like a charm! Learning Renderman is now my next big project, and Nuke… Hehe! I had to clean up the baked textures in photoshop, cloning from the other projections to remove bad parts (everywhere where my face was not facing the camera.) The textures were then merged with a simple layered texture node, and I keyframed the alpha so that each texture would be at opacity=1 at the frame they were baked.
Comping bubbles (click to enlarge)
Veins showing up (animated). I used Maya Paint Effects to create roots of a tree. I then animated the PaintFX so that it would look like it grew. After rendering this out, blurring it a bit in Fusion, I could reapply it as a texture in Maya. Right now I’m using a 2D displace in Fusion to get the bump effect, but I’m considering rendering out a normal pass instead.
Bloodshot eyes (animated veins) Pretty much the same as above. Couldn’t rely on my tracked mesh here so I had to rotoscope the eyes… I tracked the corners of both eyes and connected the roto masks to these trackers. This helped alot, getting the general movement of the eyes. Still, I had to key the roto every single frame of the shot. The rotation of the eyes were manually tracked in Maya. This was not too hard as the eyes tend to stay pretty still and then move very rapidly over just a couple of frames.
Eyes passes. RGB pass to mask the irises/eyeballs. HDRI reflections for extra specular. Animated veins using PaintFX.
Epic fails
A quick cloud test using Maya Fluids. We’re considering using something like this as an intro. Pardon the lens flare…
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Saturday, February 27, 2010
Peasant Village - Meat snake Compositing
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionThe last couple of days I’ve been doing some rendering… some more rendering… and then some compositing… I finally got all the passes/layers to work properly. I used 16bit float OpenEXR for all the renders and I am now very much in love with the .exr file format. All compositing was done in Fusion. I kind of wanted to get started with Nuke, but thought it to be better to take one thing at a time. Compositing the shot has been loads of fun. Created my first clean plate ever (it’s not THAT clean, I know, hehe) and was surprised by how good it worked. There’s been a lot of tweaking, going back and forth, trying to find the right shading/look for the snake and getting it to fit in. Will probably tweak it a little further tomorrow. Anyways, here’s some stills.
Click to enlarge
Comps
Passes
Fusion node tree
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Peasant Village - Meat snake, one frame comp
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionDid a quick comp test to see if my passes/layers worked. Click for 720p version. No motion blur yet… The two fingers holding the snake are CG Feedback would be much appreciated as final rendering of the entire sequence is ahead! Ta!
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Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Peasant Village - Rendering, compositing, shading and fluids
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionSo what’s going on? Me and Martin has been working together a lot, mostly discussing rendering, compositing and shading. Here’s some pics.
Comp test. No color correction at the moment, this will be done in the final stage to make sure all the shots work together. The gamma is a bit messed up because I got lazy and just hit “print scrn”, hehe…
Early comp test.
We created a “proximity shader” that can be rendered separately and used as a mask when compositing. It works great. By using the lightinfo node and a ramp we’ll get a nice mask with soft edges just where the bulging part is. The collider/locator is connected to the network so that when scaling the bulge effect, the mask scales as well.
Did a quick test with a 2D fluid to simulate blood. I’m emitting density to the fluid from the surface of the snake. Turning up the Z-value of the fluid makes it look like the blood slowly sinks down in the “snow”. Pretty neat!
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Friday, February 19, 2010
Peasant Village - Shot 1 WIP
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionI have continued with shot 1 last couple of days. I have placed all the houses in the scene and it’s starting to get slow in maya, but still manageable. I have also worked with the snow shader and the rock shader. I’ve done some tweaking on the displacement so that it can be rendered. Next week I will continue with adding detail to the village, adding a fence and other things laying around to make it look more alive.
These are two test renders with some comp work.
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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Peasant Village - Monster shot match move
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionNow I’m finished with the match move of our big shot. This is a shot were there is going to be a lot of cg. There will be bugs, a monster, demolition of a house, body double and some set extensions.
The sudden cut in the shot is were the the character gets hit and thats were we will be using the body double. So this is actually two shots that I merge into one continuous sequence. We decided the timing of the hit and for how long the character was going to be in air before I did the merging. The camera had moved a little bit between the two shots, but I just animated the position of the second shot to match the first.
This is the raw footage.
Camera tracked footage.
I did the final match move in Boujou (I tried to do it in some other programs too but I got the best track from Boujou) and then I exported it to Maya. This was a nodal pan so we didn’t get a 3d point cloud, but we took some measurement from the location that we used to set the scale in maya. The blue lines in the last image is lines which goes from the camera through points in the point cloud. From those lines, measurements from set and a screenshot from Eniro(swedish Google maps =) ) I could build a simple mesh for the set. Later when we know exactly where the cg will be we probably have to make a more exact mesh.
Last thing I did was four camera projections to make it a little bit fun to look at. I’ll probably need some more accurate projections to remove the character when he gets hit, but that I will do in Nuke.
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Peasant Village - Face mesh & Sculptris tests
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionI’ve kind of finished the mesh for my face. It was kind of easy using the pointcloud to snap verts to. The mesh needs some tweaking though, a simple rig and maybe three texture projections from different frames/angles.
This video shows a really simple test I did with stretchmesh, and also an animated texture. I put some shading on the material so the effects would be more obvious in the viewport - but in the final I will mask out the bulging part and probably relight it in post. It looks really weird right now, because the mesh is not animated or adjusted to my face.
I removed the black dots/markers in the projected texture. I still haven’t decided how to remove them in the final shot. I could mask out the area around the dots and render out these areas to hide the markers, or I’ll just use the trackers from Syntheyes to remove them in Fusion…
I also tested a new software, Sculptris. http://www.drpetter.se/project_sculpt.html Some guy, a genius IMO, created this sculpting tool that adds geometry as you sculpt. The screenshot below is a 10 min test where I started sculpting from a simple triangulated plane. I’m seriously considering using this tool when creating the “big” monster for the last shot me and Martin are doing together. I’m thinking I could start with Sculptris, then create a new topology in Topogun, take that mesh to Mudbox and then to Maya. I’m hoping this workflow will be successful - it would give me lots of artistic freedom not to have to even think for a second about topology in the first step of the creation.
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Sunday, February 14, 2010
Peasant Village - Object tracking and Body double
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionThis is a Maya Playblast (NOT render) from my object tracking scene (added some motion blur). I felt I was on a roll yesterday, tracking stuff, so I went on and tracked the object I’m holding in this shot (I created it from a black candle and some white pins). I used Syntheyes once again and the whole process went very smoothly. I imported the meat snake to the scene and constrained it to the tracked object, just to see if I was going in the right direction. This is just a quick test - and I noticed some problems right away. For example, I am not reacting to the shifting weight when the snake moves. The actual tracking object will be easily removed in post, it looks kind of weird now when it’s visible behind the snake…
My plan was to roto my fingers in post to make them appear to be on the meat snake. Now I think I will create simple finger meshes with projected textures instead.
I also created a body double. We will use this in one shot, and it will replace the Doctor for maybe 15 frames or so. In the shot it will be kind of small and moving at great speed - so it’s really low poly and has a very simple rig (we’re going with FK only). Some clusters can be used to animate the coat.
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Friday, February 12, 2010
Peasant Village - Face tracking
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionTo begin with, pardon my poor acting skills. But hey, luckily I’m not studying to become an actor… The footage for the face tracking shot is now final. The face was tracked with Syntheyes, and the solve was exported to Maya. I built a point cloud from three reference pictures, to use as guides when modelling the actual mesh. I did this because it is very important that the face mesh is very accurate.
There are some small errors, and I’m pretty sure it’s deformation of my face that causes some points to slide on the surface. The point cloud was created from my face in a relaxed pose, and one could say that my face in this shot is anything but relaxed. I will fix this by creating a simple rig for the face to control the eyes, eyebrows and the mouth/jaw area and then animate this rig to match the face deformation. Later on I will manually track the eyeballs to follow the movement of my eyes. Also I am not sure the 3D camera has exact focal length of the physical camera we used in the shot. We did take focal length notes when shooting, but we are not 100% sure we got the correct back plate/film back information. This will be investigated further.
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Thursday, February 11, 2010
Peasant Village - Shooting day
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionWoah! We just got in from a whole day of shooting. We’re frozen to the bones but had a lot of fun today. We got a hold of a Panasonic HVX200 and it worked just great! Though, when we got home to view the footage we noticed there had been a #¤&$£@$ hair on the lens… Sigh… Luckily, it’s only visible in the shots where we have the zoom at wide angle. So tomorrow we will reshoot a couple of shots and take a couple of extra reference shots. Here’s a little taste of our adventures out in the snow!
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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Peasant Village - Crowd simulation test render
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionThis is a test render from my current crowd simulator. The lighting, texturing and modelling of the environment is very simple. This is how it works:
- nParticles are emitted from a volume emitter
- Three different objects (bugs with different size and walk speed) are randomly instanced to the particles
- A mesh is used as a particle goal. The mesh is animated in the Z direction. The nParticles will try to reach this goal.
- The radius, goalU/V and goalPP of the nParticles are randomized at birth
- During runtime (after dynamics) the particles are constrained to the NURBS surface using the closestPointOnSurface node. A normal vector (at the position of each particle, using the pointOnSurfaceInfo) is stored in a PP-attribute and is transferred to the instance object.
- The nParticles self collision is on, preventing the particles from colliding.
- Some variation in movement is introduced using fields. A static turbulence field guides the particles in “paths” (though it is set to not have affect in this video). Each particle is also a radial field so I can separate, or clump together, the particles if I like.
- There is also a script that changes the instanced object depending on the velocity of the particle. This way the bugs won’t “slide” on the surface as they accelerate. This script is currently not in use - I’m having problems with “popping” objects because the walk cycles are out of sync.
I’ve been trying to find a way to access an attribute on the instanced object, depending on the velocity of the “owning” particle. This would be great, but I have no idea how this can (or if) be achieved. Anyone?
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Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action
Specialisation project by Christoffer Lindvall & Martin Hjalmarsson.
www.ascella.se
www.martinhjalmarsson.se
With project Peasant Village we will focus on creating visual effects for live action footage. The purpose of the project is to understand all the vital steps in the pipeline when making visual effects for film.
The goal is to deliver a series of filmed shots where we have added 2D and 3D elements that integrate seamlessly with the footage. We will work with:
- Camera tracking
- Simple crowd simulation
- Set extensions
- Advanced 3D comp
- Object tracking
- Organic modelling & animation
- Modelling, shading
- Sculpting
- Environment
- Body double
Links
Projects