“Dragon Hunter” is the working title of an independent fantasy film I’m currently visual effects supervising. Unsurprisingly (for a dragon movie), the film called for a small village to be destroyed. Unfortunately, there is a shocking lack of small, medieval European hamlets in the Utah area that the production could afford to destroy. The decision was made to make one up entirely from scratch.

The first element in the comp is a background that the perspective of the 3D elements will be matched to. I created this quickly in Photoshop by stitching together a bunch of photos to create a destroyed looking field that I liked. This doesn’t have to perfect, there’s a lot that can be done in AfterEffects to fix it up. Also note that I didn’t spend any time fixing the blending problems at the treetops except in the center- the rest will be covered by buildings.

Next is the village itself. The emphasis here is on speed- The textures are largely projected onto very simple surfaces, and the 3D orientation of the scene is just done by eye. There’s no point in worrying about being totally accurate- it just needs to seem right. Anything that’s not seen from the camera doesn’t exist in the model, and I’m also re-using these models in another shot.

I lit this with an HDRI, an ambient light, and a directional light. Normal maps were generated quickly in CrazyBump to add detail. It was rendered at full-res with Final Gather- but only one frame.

An ambient occlusion pass adds contact shadows and a feeling of dirt to the models. Again, I only rendered one frame.

Now to start adding some life to the shot. This flame lighting is a simple group of point lights. Flicker was generated quickly by setting a base intensity level that seemed right for each light, then writing an expression to add a small random value to it on each frame. The scene was re-shaded with a neutral lambert with no specular. The only light source was the flame point lights; falloff was set so that wherever the flames didn’t reach was just straight black. Normal maps were left attached to catch detail. I projected a CrazyBump normal map from the background image onto the ground plane to allow the light to appear to follow the surface of the ground. This is the only 3D element that gets the full 200+ frames rendered, but it only needed to get rendered at half-res. This saved a lot of time.

On to the composite! In AfterEffects I combined all of the above elements, and created an Adjustment Layer that used a Curves and a Hue/Saturation effect to quickly day-for-night the shot. I also did a little quick matting to soften some of the edges where buildings contact the ground.

To save time I let Maya continue to render the flame lighting on one machine while I used a single sample frame to set up how I wanted to use it in the composite. I ended up with a combination of three instances of the same flame lighting render being added in: one for some of the shadows, and masked areas of Lighten and Add transfer modes for the cast light. By the time I finished, the renders were complete- no waiting! Once I had the general village composited and lit in a way that I liked, it was time to add the flames and smoke.

The smoke was a series of stock elements time remapped to my liking and then multiplied over the comp. Nothing fancy here, but it works, and it’s fast. These elements are all standard def, but in the full-res render it’s unlikely anyone will ever notice anything amiss.

Finally, some HD stock footage flames I purchased a while ago. Just mask them out, time remap as necessary, and set them to Add transfer mode. The village is burninated!

I precomped my village layout and added a series of Adjustment Layers over it to add a little more real-world imperfection to the shot. I used AfterEffects’ built-in Wiggler to get some camera shake, then added some vignetting and some blurring on the edges of the frame (as if it were being filmed with a cheap lens). A little lens distortion, some film grain (matched to an earlier night shot for consistency), and a Reduce Interlacing effect to soften it a bit.

A final frame from the work in progress- Click to Play

Total working time from start to finish: about 4 1/2 hours.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, this shot is still a work in progress. There’s still some key elements missing- like, for example, a dragon (click here to see the final shot with the dragon added). Also, given time I intend to have the upper church facade collapse. I’d like to add some general debris in the central area, and those church windows need to be masked out to allow flames to be seen inside the building. There’s a lot of possibilities still to add, but the shot can hold up to a quick viewing now and can be finished to perfection later.

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Footage used by permission of director Steve Shimek and Dragonhunter LLC

Today’s shot breakdown is a complete CG face replacement, similar to the technique used for the “Two Face” character in “The Dark Knight”, except it took one day and $0. And it’s infinitely simpler and less impressive- but, hey, $0! Hard to beat that.

The footage is courtesy of FXPhD, which is a fantastic resource.

MoCap in PFTrack

Camera 1 of 2 as matchmoved in PFTrack - Click to play

The first stop for this shot was PFTrack to capture the motion of the tracking dots on the actor’s face. The footage was filmed on two HD cameras; the image above is from the left camera. The right camera was timed to match the footage from the left camera. When the facial dots are tracked and identified in both cameras it allows the matchmoving software to “triangulate” (although with only two points in this example- so what’s a two sided triangle?) the location of the dots in 3D space and follow them as the movie. These cameras are called “witness” cameras, a moving main camera could also have been used, although in this case it wasn’t provided.

A lot of the dots here are useless because the cameras’ placements don’t allow for them to be seen by both cameras at the same time. For production purposes I would really recommend 3 to 4 cameras to ensure 2 cameras on each dot at all times. I’d also have liked more dots around the lips to better capture their motion as he delivers his dialogue. I got good results for the center dots, which is perfect since I was only really interested in modifying that portion of his face.

Geometry Placement in Maya

Base geometry in Maya- Click to Play

I exported the resulting camera and point locations to Maya as a .MA file. In Maya I constructed quick geometry that combined the tracking points into a single mesh, then removed the nose for the purposes of my shot. I rigged my mesh so that the motion of the tracking locators exported by PFTrack were controlling the motion of the geometry. This could be done through bones and skinning or a series of constraints and deformers.

I then added geometry for my Pigman’s nostrils into the mesh. I projected the UV’s from the camera in order to make texture generation simpler in Photoshop. I also exported the UV’s themselves to help choose where to fade out my painting.

Texture creation in Photoshop

Skin texture as generated in Photoshop - Click to enlarge.

In Photoshop I used a combination of the clone tool and various brushes to paint out the nose and try to match as close as possible the lighting and skin tones of the original frame. I also removed the eyebrows in the same fashion.

Next I started adding in wrinkles and skin texture, largely by multiplying in and deforming photographs of elephant skin.

The final step was to create and alpha, which I did by consulting the UVs I had exported from Maya (to make sure my texture faded softly before leaving the geometry boundaries).

The final image was exported from Photoshop as a TIF with an alpha channel and reimported as a texture into Maya.

The texture with alpha mapped onto geometry - Click to play

The shader in Maya was really simple- since I wasn’t lighting the model, but simply reusing the lighting from the texture, I simply created a light in Maya and set it’s intensity to zero. This override’s Maya’s default lights, which are generally on if there are no user created lights in the scene. Then I attached the image to the shader with three connections- transparency (to bring in our alpha channel), and incandescence and ambient color. These last two allowed the object to render at exactly the original brightness. I’m sure there’s a slicker way to do this, but this was is so easy I’ve never bothered to research a more proper technique. I’m all about cheats and workarounds.

I also rendered an ambient occlusion pass to capture the nostrils (honestly, the nostrils were kind of an afterthought that was tacked on at the very end).

AfterEffects

The complete node tree in AfterEffects- Click to enlarge.

I actually used Nuke to do some targeted color correction to match the shadows and highlights on the face as the actor moves in relation to the scene lights, but other than that the entire comp was in AfterEffects.

The first step, as show in the splitscreen video, was to eliminate the tracking dots that would be visible in the final shot. I did this by tracking the dot, applying the tracking info to a solid with a dot mask prepared on it, then using that as an alpha track matte for a duplicate of the original footage. That duplicate was then moved around until a nice clean piece of skin was found that matched to the area around it. Sometimes a few quick levels keyframes were needed to match the lighting changes. This work represents the large, repetitive section in the upper right of the node tree above.

Once the dots were satisfactorily removed I brought in the rendered face texture and nostril ambient occlusion from Maya and combined them with the shot. This included, as mentioned before, some targeted color correction to match the lighting changes in the shot, as well as ReelSmart Motion Blur Pro to duplicate the motion blur, plus a little Add Grain. The result was luma keyed in order to replace the background.

With a shiny new Pigman I decided that it’d be creepy to have him peering out of some kind of decrepit looking jail cell. (Makes him look dangerous, you know…) The jail cell/broken wall with rebar exposed, was cut apart into foreground and background layers. All three layers were divided in 3D space and attached to a Wiggler-controlled camera to add some subtle movement and parallax to the shot.

The final result was color corrected and fine tuned by adding some vignetting, blurring, and lens distortion.

Conclusion

The final Pigman shot - Click to play

Overall, this shot was a blast. As mentioned earlier, the entire shot was completed in a single day, which is pretty decent for something like this. I feel that the results were pretty promising for similar future work, although I would like more cameras. I would also like to have better positioned tracking markers to facilitate removal and also better capture the nuances of lip movements.

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The final result - Click to play

Intro

Ok, so it’s kind of hard to think of a clever title for a breakdown like this. Still, the shot is fun, so hopefully that’s enough!

Maya to RealFlow

The dynamic simulation after returning to Maya- Click to play

This shot begins it’s life in Google. I started by searching for photographs of cracked walls, stone, and glass, looking for a fracture pattern that I would like to replicate in my concrete slab.

When I found an acceptable pattern (broken glass as it turned out), I imported it into Maya as an image plane and set to work duplicating it’s pattern in geometry. To do this, I used the Create Polygon tool to create a face over one of the glass fragments, then used Append to Polygon to build out from there. The end result was a good match to the real-life fracture pattern, with each fragment of the real glass being copied by a face in my polygonal mesh. I then broke this apart into individual objects, extruded them to about an inch deep, and centered their pivot points. This was certainly the most tedious part of the shot, taking about 2 to 3 hours of mind numbing work, but it was incredibly easy and gave me a true-to-life fracture pattern for the concrete slab.

The bricks were simpler- I created a cube, rounded the edges a bit, and stacked them into a pattern behind the concrete. I then selected the bricks in the impact area and used Maya’s Solid Shatter to break them into random chunk- I wasn’t as concerned about their pattern being realistic since they’re behind the concrete slab. I also selected random bricks throughout the wall to fracture as well, to maintain a feeling a realistic randomness. These meshes were also center pivoted.

To get the models into RealFlow I exported as an .SD file using the plugin provided with the software, and it worked fine. Inside RealFlow I made all of the objects into Rigid Body dynamic objects and left their mass and other settings alone. I used the Attachator script from Dynamic Boy on the NextLimit scripting page to create Fixed constraints automatically to one key object. I then created a gravity field. The purpose of the Fixed constraint is to hold the wall chunks into their proper places as a wall until a certain amount of force is applied to them. The object that I attached them to I simply moved out of the way of the collision and turned off dynamics for, to prevent it being affected by the scene’s gravity. Next, I selected the constraints and set the levels of force that I wanted to apply to the break them apart from the wall- I had them much weaker in the center and progressively stronger as they reached the edges. I also set a release frame on the center constrains so that they would fall at a given frame even if they hadn’t been shoved aside- I didn’t want any individual faces still hanging around erroneously after a long simulation!

The particle dust in Maya- Click to play

Finally, I learned that it’s useful to select all of the objects and scale them from 1 down to 0.99 or so, preventing them from touching each other as soon as the simulation starts. This helps lessen the chance of errors, and you can simply scale them back to 1 when you export to Maya.

The actual explosion was simulated by slamming an extremely massive sphere into the wall. The final simulation ran over night, and had no problems. I used the propagation solver with time steps set to about 20. I then exported the .SD files back into Maya.

Finally, in Maya I used the original reference image of the fractured glass textured onto a plane as an emitter for cloud particles. I textured these with some noise, made them very transparent, and emitted a large number of them on each frame. I was only interested in the alpha channel, which I would use in AfterEffects to create the dust. I left the geometry on with a Use Background shader on it so that it would be properly occluded in the composite.

Render Passes and AfterEffects

In order to get the image I wanted in After Effects, I decided to render a depth pass, an ambient occlusion pass, a motion vector pass, and a beauty pass. For the 2Dmotion vector pass I used the LM2MV_v2 shader from La Maisson, allowing me to save significant Maya time by rendering the motion blur in AfterEffects using re:VisionFX’s ReelSmart Motion Blur plugin (I don’t go anywhere without it!)

In AfterEffects I simply pieced all of the various passes together and added some stylistic touches to make it look more “filmic” (or “muddy” in a less impressive term). I increased the contract in the color correction, and added a bit more blue and green. I added the explosion using stock footage from Detonation Films HD, which I luma matted. I added a bit of vignetting, and some vignette blurring, as well as a touch of optics compensation to fisheye the image a bit. I also added some light rays using Trapcode Shine, and some light wrap. Finally, I added a lens flare and some grain in Nuke (I like their lens flare and grain effects much more than stock AfterEffects- if you can afford Knoll’s Light Factory for AE it’d be perfect, but I don’t own it yet.)

The final beauty pass from Maya- Click to play

Depth map pass - Click to enlarge

Ambient occlusion pass- Click to play

Conclusion

The final result - Click to play

I decided to attempt this shot because I just bought RealFlow and was excited to explore it’s capabilities. One of the things I noticed quickly was that RealFlow has a fantastic rigid body solver, but I could find very few impressive examples of it in action. Having attempted shots like this previous in Maya, I knew what a pain it could be, and decided to see how RealFlow could handle it. The results were very impressive to me, especially given that I had literally just received my license for the software earlier in the week and had never used it before. With it’s strength and ease of use, I feel entirely confident that the program is capable of handling even the most complex rigid body interactions, and look forward to trying much more impressive shots in the future. Maybe a collapsing wall or tower for “Dragon Hunter II”…

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Done on a Saturday evening from basically nothing.

The finished shot- Click to play

Introduction

This is a shot I did entirely for fun on a Saturday evening and was definitely not being paid for by anyone. There’s nothing technically impressive about this shot; it was just to see if I could do it, and I think it came out looking pretty cool. It definitely shows how much can be done with basically nothing.

I had seen the trailer for the film “Australia”, and it had a great shot of a ship burning during the Japanese attack on Darwin, Australia (I assume that’s what it was- the film hasn’t come out yet!) I thought the shot looked fantastic and, since I’d fried my brain working on a shot that wasn’t really progressing, I decided to give this a go as a diversion.

Straight-forward AfterEffects

I started with a left-over plate from a recent project I had worked on for Second Wind Films in Rhode Island- I highly recommend them if you need a project shot in New England, they were great to work with. All I wanted out of the plate was just the dock on the left and some of the moving water on the right- obviously, everything else in the shot would be stripped out.

Location plate- Click to play

I replaced the sky with a photograph of some clouds, which I corner pinned and animated to make the top, closer clouds move faster than the lower, further-away clouds. This helped give it a feeling of being film instead of a photograph, and added a bit of depth and parallax.

The water was replaced with some old stock footage I had of an ocean- it’s actually really small, but once it’s in the shot you really can’t tell- especially since there will be a ship and smoke over top of it.

The final background plate- Click to Play

The ship itself was another stock photograph which I rotoscoped to extract from the background.

The flames and smoke are stock footage from FinalLight FX and Detonation Films HD. I absolutely love this stuff- it makes you look very professional, and I’ve found dozens of projects to use it in- definitely worth the price. Unless you are an absolute expert, I never recommend attempting to create your own flames or smoke in AfterEffects. Use some real footage and your project will benefit for it. I simply picked out a few elements that matched the scene and luma keyed them off the background. This is done easily in AfterEffects by duplicating the element, placing it above itself, then setting the lower copy to be luma masked by the upper copy. Then just use Levels on the upper copy to get the opacity and alpha you’d like.

There are two things I’ve learned to making smoke and flames look real- with smoke, it’s not just obscuring the background. It’s also distorting and blurring the background. This can be accomplished by using the smoke as a mask for an adjustment layer with a blur on it, and by using a Displacement Map driven by the smoke. Additionally, never multiply your smoke- that doesn’t really match how smoke behaves. With flames, it’s important to use masks and color corrections to add light and color changes to the environment around the flames- remember that the flames should be illuminating their surroundings! Also, if you’re close enough, you’ll want to distort and blur the background as with the smoke. Additionally, if you’re close enough, you’ll want to use a blurred copy of the flames to drive a Displacement Map that distorts the air above the fire, creating that wavy heat distortion effect. Most of that wasn’t necessary here, since the flames are too far away to be clearly visible.

The Japanese Zero fighter is the weakest part of the shot, I feel. It’s simply a photograph of a Zero that I quickly rotoscoped and animated into the shot with some motion blurring.

The flag is a photograph of an Australian flag mappen onto cloth-tagged geometry in Cinema4D and animated. It is the only 3D model in the shot.

The reflections in the water are created by using the water itself to drive a Displacement Map effect that distorts the image based on the water’s motion. It’s a technique that works great for things like this, and I also used it for cast shadows over grass on “Dragon Hunter”

Conclusion

A high quality version of the finished shot- Click to Play

Ultimately, there’s really nothing too complicated about this shot. It only took a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, and was done entirely for fun and for a challenge. I think it came out fantastic, considering the total lack of resources, and shows how much can be done with even the simplest location footage and photographs! It also shows the benefit of using real effects footage for flames and smoke rather than faking your own.

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing “behind the scenes” of a really simple effect!

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Using Maya camera projections to create an environment from simple photos

Afghani Aerial Ambush final shot- Click to play

Introduction

I’m a fairly competitive person, which so far has been good for me in learning VFX. When I see a really amazing shot in a film or on television, I don’t have the brains to realize “That was done by teams of dozens of highly skilled artists, with every imaginable resource available to them.” Instead, I usually think “Hey- I could do this!”

So just a few days ago I was reading in FXGuide (a fantastic site, if you’ve never visited) about “Quantum of Solace” and discovered that some of the dogfight sequence was generated entirely in CG. In looking at the photographs and later reading about the same sequence in Cinefex, I realized “Hey- I could do this. Or at least do a no-budget, cheap facsimile of this that will in no realistic way compare with the original!” And so another weekend wasting project was born. I hope you enjoy reading about how the shot was made as much as I enjoyed making it.

The footage of the men running is courtesy of FXPhD, which is another fantastic resource.

Projected Environment in Maya

The Maya scene as a playblast- Click to Play

The key to the whole shot is camera projections. I could have done this in Nuke and probably had a lot easier ability to manipulate the shot quickly, but I decided I wanted to use displacement to try to make the ground plane feel like it really had rocks and shape to it. That meant using Maya.

The first step was to select a stock photo of a mountain that I thought could be interesting to have a helicopter crash into. I then pulled that photograph into Maya as an image plane and created a polygonal plane at the base of the mountain in the photo. Using the photograph as a a guide, I then used the Sculpt Geometry tool to pull the plane into the basic shape of the mountain- the closer you take the time to get to what would appear to be the real shape of the mountain, the more accurate your projection will later be. If you have footage, it would certainly be easier just to matchmove it and build base geometry from the point cloud in PFTrack.

A test of the environment mapping- Click to play

Once I had the mountain basically matching in shape, I projected the original photograph from the camera that I had been using as my viewpoint during the modeling. I then pulled the photograph into CrazyBump and generated a quick normal and displacement map, which I also projected onto the geometry. The displacement map has a tendency to pull the shape of your mountain up and into the background, which obviously breaks the illusion of the projection, so you have to do some test renders and push and pull the base shape to get something works properly.

The background mountains and sky were basically a freebie- I just mapped my original stock photo onto a sphere and stuck it in the back. I have a tendency to get lazy, I’m afraid.

Once my environments were set up I simply imported a stock model of an Apache, created my camera, and animated everything as I liked it.

I rendered several passes from Maya to work with in the composite, but nothing to extravagent- there was a sky pass, a mountain pass, a chopper render, an ambient occlusion pass for the chopper, a pass for the cockpit, a reflection pass for the windows, a pass for the tracers, and a pass for the broken glass after the bullets strike.

Compositing in AfterEffects

The comp was actually fairly straightforward. I just imported all of my various passes, plus some stock explosion footage I purchased long ago, and three bluescreen shots of guys running. I then assembled everything and began the process of making it all match and look as I wanted it to. I exported a .MA with the camera and a few key locations (helicopter, crash site, machine gun site, location of the running people) from Maya to AE in order to allow me to place things properly. The smoke and sparks were created in AE using Trapcode Particular. The running people were placed into the shot in 3D using the camera and location information from Maya. I added a little bit of camera shake to the whole thing, plus some lens distortion, chromatic aberration, grain, and color correction and voila.

The final shot at higher bandwidth- Click to Play

Conclusion

This is certainly on a much lower level than what was seen in the Bond film, but the techniques are the same. I found that you really need a lot of resolution- the Bond guys were shooting their projection plates on IMax stock, and I certainly didn’t have anything near that resolution. That left me having to hide quite a bit.

The technique works really well, and gives you a fairly high degree of camera freedom, as long as you don’t leave the cone of any of your projecting cameras by too much. Using multiple projections for the appropriate angles would work much better. The use of displacement to add realistic detail to the environment was pretty effective- none of the rock detail you see in the final render was modeled at all.

To request a bid for your project or for any questions please use my contact form.