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.

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