Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Peasant Village - Shot 1 Matte Painting
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionYesterday I worked on the matte painting for the mountain where you can see the village. I began with doing some tests on the scale of the matte painting. On my first tests I made the the details too large and it looked like a miniature village. Now I think I’ve got a pretty good scale on things, but I’m not a matte painter so please tell me if I should change something.
Because of the large camera movement in this shot I needed a really high resolution matte painting, but it was only near the village I needed that resolution. So I got the idea of layering the camera projections in a layered texture. I began testing with some simple textures but I couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t get the alpha to work on the top layer in the layered texture so I only saw the top layer with black around it. After a lot of testing and frustration I found the solution.
The top layer texture file need an alpha embedded and you have to pipe it through a duplicate of the projection node (see image below). Also the alpha can’t be all white(100 opaque) because then it isn’t recognized and maya will instead use the luminance as an alpha. You have to have some black in the alpha channel to make it work.
So now I have two textures at 4000x2250. One that covers the hole mountain and one that covers the mountains near the village. I’ll see if I need some more detail when I bring the real houses to the scene. Around the houses I’m gonna have some separate meshes for the snow and use the snow shader.
All the other mountains in the background will be simple cards in Nuke. I will transfer the camera animation to Nuke, that way I can easily bring stuff into the shot.
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Thursday, February 04, 2010
Peasant Village - Exploding wall
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionA quick test, seeing if I could make a wall explode. In the final scene, a monster (kind of, it’ll be an abstract monster) will break the wall from the inside of a house. The breaking of that wall will not be as brutal as this, more like something’s pushing itself out… This is just a Maya playblast, NOT a render. I added some motion blur in post. The breaking of the wall was made with Pixelux DMM plugin. I also added splinters/smoke/debris using 4 different particle systems.
I’ve also created a whole new crowd simulator, which is now pretty cool. I’m not using a surface as a particle goal anymore, neither am I using expressions to move the particles across the surface. This enables me to use the power of self colliding nParticles, fields and goals to direct the particles - which is awesome! The nodes closestPointOnSurface and pointOnSurfaceInfo are my two new friends (which is pretty sad, I know…) More about this next time!
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Peasant Village - “Stupid” crowd sim & The Bug
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionI’ve been continuing my work on the “stupid” crowd sim. One might debate if you can really call it a simulation, because the particles that drive the bugs are “stupid” and do not consider each other at all. I’ve also been testing a couple of plugins (brainbugz and crowd maker), but decided that it would be more fun do do it on my own.
Anyways! It works pretty good. The problem is that the particles do not collide, so the bugs can walk through each other. I tried fixing this by first making each particle into a radial field to repel the others. This did not work. Neither did redoing the sim with nParticles and using the built in “self collide” function.
The problem is that I have the surface as a particle goal (with a value of 1). I am driving the particles along the surface with expressions. So after the fields have no affect, or the collision is “over” the particles snap back into place (to the position given from the expressions). And this looks kind of weird. Got to solve this…
The actual bug was made from scratch and was modelled, textured, rigged and animated in two days. As it won’t be up close in the final scene, we thought a normal mapped low poly version would suffice. We’re aiming at having a couple of hundred bugs in the final scene (with maybe 5 to 6 variations of the instanced bug, speed, size, texture etc).
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Peasant Village - Shot 1Previs
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionHere is the previs for shot 1. My first idea for this shot was to do a transition from 3d to filmed footage, but it was too hard to get a smooth dolly. So I will do this shot in full cg instead except for the character. I will put a filmed character on a card in 3d space and then comp that in to the shot. The character isn’t in this previs but he will be walking in front of the camera at the end of this shot.
I have also done some house modeling for the village. These are really low poly models because it will be a fast moving shot and quite a lot of motion blur and therefore I don’t think I will be needing more details. In the image at the bottom I have just put a radial blur to see how it looked with motion blur. I did some test on how to do the motion blur in the final shot and I think I can get way with rendering a motion vector pass and do the motion blur in Nuke. But if doesn’t look good in the final I will do the motion blur in maya. But that will of course increase render time quite a lot.
Critique is always welcome 
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Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Peasant Village - Meat Snake Rig
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionI actually finished the rig last week, but had some problems with Vimeo not accepting my videos. Anyways, here is a short video demonstration of it.
In the final scene, the Meat Snake will be lying in the snow, moving just a little as if it is about to die. Then our hero (the Doctor!) will poke it a couple of times and then pick it up to examine it further. Two shots, one for the introduction and poking of the snake (I’ll poke a white water balloon in the snow) and one shot where I lift it and toss it around a bit.
In the second shot we’ll use some home made contraption that will make the object tracking easier. We didn’t think too much about this the last time and ended up with some crappy thing we constructed out in the snow…
It was pretty much just a toilet roll with some screws, dots and lines. Though it probably would have worked OK we forgot that it also needed to match the weight of the snake…
Here’s the video. You might want to view it in HD to see the comments. Parts of it are a bit laggy, but it’s actually Maya lagging when I’m running Stretchmesh, a Wrap deformer and two Hair solvers simultaneously.
Peasant Village - Meat Snake (the rig) from Peasant Village on Vimeo.
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Friday, January 29, 2010
Peasant Village - Snow shader
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionToday I have been working on a snow shader. This shader will be used in several clips like where we are going to change the environment.
I have a polygon plane which is displaced with a texture. The shader itself is made with a blinn shader. Color is mapped with a ramp which is driven by the facing ratio. This there is some slight variations in the shading depending on the viewing angle. To get the micro specular highlights which you can see in real snow I have connected a granite texture to the incandescence. That one is also driven by the facing ratio. To the bump I have connected a 3d fractal to give some more detail. Then there is just a little bit of dark blue in the ambient.
This is a render straight from Maya with the default lighting.
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Thursday, January 28, 2010
Peasant Village - Meatsnake WIP 2
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionI’ve been working on a shader for the snake. Right now I’m using the fast_simple_SSS shader, and I think it works pretty well. I probably need to paint some maps for the SSS though, it’s totally overkill in the “tail” area right now. Displacement works really well, so well that I don’t think I need the normal map at all. The render below is just the basemesh with displacement. I also used what I recently learned about linear workflow, so the render has the correct gamma adjustment.
Time to get started on the rig! I think it’ll be a lot of fun, my plan is to make the rig very dynamic using the Maya Hair solver. Stay tuned!
Click the image for highres version.
Christoffer
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Peasant Village - Change of plans
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionAfter working with our filmed material for a while now, we are starting to doubt if it is of the quality we are looking for. The issue is mostly technical. The camera we have used just ain’t good enough.
A few of the problems we have had with it is:
- CMOS-censor gives distorted images when moving camera too fast
- Image stabilizer also distorts the footage
- Noise
- Chromatic abberation
- Focus problems
These problems made the tracking of the video almost impossible. The distortion in the footage made it really hard to get a correct camera solve.
The solution for this is to somehow find a new, better camera. So today we contacted “Film i Västerbotten” (resource center for film and video in Västerbotten) to see if they could provide us with a professional video camera. To initiate this process, we had to write an application and send it by snailmail, which we have done this afternoon. It’ll be in the mailbox by tomorrow morning and hopefully we get an answer pretty soon. We might have to change our schedule a little, but we still have a lot of CG elements to work with during the waiting for their reply.
Christoffer and Martin
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Peasant Village - Meatsnake WIP
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionI’ve been working on the “Meatsnake” (pardon the name) for scene 6. A pretty simple basemesh was exported from Maya to Mudbox. Sculpting was fairly simple as I didn’t have worry too much about topology or matching any reference pictures I had. I had the design thought out in my head at an early stage and that’s what I followed.
After roughly sculpting the shape and large details of the snake I started projecting textures on to it. I mostly used highres pictures of raw meat (thanks Joaquin for having those photos on your computer… weirdo ) and picked details from maybe 10 different photos. After texturing the entire snake I subdivided it further and displaced the mesh again using the texture as displacement. The sculpting continued, now using the texture as reference for where to add details.
I am done sculpting, so the next step is to take the model back to Maya along with displacement and normal maps and start working on a shader.
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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Peasant Village - Object tracking test
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionThis is our first object tracking test with Syntheyes. The solve was imported to Maya where a simple basemesh was aligned and modified to roughly fit Martins face. An animated texture was projected onto the mesh and rendered out for compositing.
We now know we don’t need as many markers in the face, and that they can be a lot smaller. Less motion blur would also be preferable. It seems to be very important that the mesh correct. Otherwise you get errors like in the area between the nose and the eye where the “texture” slides above Martins face. Placing the markers where the skin doesn’t move is also a good idea, markers that move around will most likely upset the solve.
Object Tracking, first test from Peasant Village on Vimeo.
With all this in mind, this is what we came up with when shooting the actual scene. We’ll probably get a few extra markers for free, like my teeth and the corner of the eyes and maybe even in The Beard! (gosh it has to come off soon)
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Peasant Village - Deinterlace tests
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionDeinterlace comparison
Today I have been doing some tests on which deinterlacer we are going to use. I have tested the built in deinterlacer in Adobe premiere which removes one field and then interpolates between the fields. The other one I’ve tested is Smart Deinterlacer, a freeware filter for Virtual Dub. It only deinterlace where there is a lot of motion in the image and also uses information from both fields.
I have decided to use the deinterlacer in Premiere because it’s easier, faster and I think it gives the best results.
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Sunday, January 24, 2010
Peasant Village - Project Plan
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action
We are done with our Project Plan! Project plan link
We have been filming intensely for the last five days and we are finally satisfied with our shots. The next step is to edit the material. Two hours of footage must become around 90 seconds! When we’ve got our shots done (edited, TGA sequences, 720p) we’ll get started on the tracking process and then the previz.
Christoffer & Martin
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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