Turning our Most Famous Videos Into Trippy CG Art!

Ten years ago we launched the first viral video in the corridor. We wanted to take a moment here and create some pieces that reflect our

most

iconic moments for the Quarter channel, our

most

iconic moments of filmmaking, let's get into it, so today we're doing a rendering challenge. That's going to reflect the 10 years of

videos

that we've been posting in the corridor and well, I feel like this wouldn't be a rendering challenge without our great friend Clinton Jones, so I think I'll call him up to have him. Back for one last rendering challenge Hi Clint, what's up?

Hey, hey, we're doing this 10 year rendering challenge and uh, I just don't think we can do it without you. Would you be down? Yeah, absolutely, yeah, of course, man. That sounds fun, okay, I could drive there, I'll probably be there pretty quickly, yeah, do you want to meet at the studio right now, yeah, sure, I'll be down right now, cool, okay, peace, see you around, put on your old shoes, what's happening? Guys, hey, yeah, yeah, so let's do the renders here, yeah, cool. 10 years ago we posted the first viral video on Minecraft Runner, the latest minecart that has often been incorrectly called Minecraft.

The latest Minecraft was the actual release date of the latest. minecart February 17, 2011. Isn't that also the day Peter was born? Yes, I didn't shoot, that's what I did. We get to know Notch after doing so. He was wild. We were like, Wow, this is going somewhere, so I wanted to take a moment here and reflect on this history that we've made and where we've come from and create some pieces that reflect on our most iconic moments for the runner channel, our most iconic moments. of cinema and there are five of us and We are going to make five works of art, they will be a portrait of the character and the environment, so the general idea is that we will see a character in a world around him and that will speak with a video. or an experience or story that stuck with us what I'm really excited to see here is what it looks like when we revisit it the Minecraft video is 10 years old I was a baby basically what I've learned since then if I wanted to I would revisit that video or that concept.

I would. Don't know. I'm very curious to see what it would look like. I'm deciding between two

videos

. The longest lightsaber, but at the same time, the portal tricks are pretty sweet. I want to revisit those bets because, like that stake shot into the back wall, it just wasn't enough to put it out, so do you feel like the quality of that shot lacks your standard losing bets and yeah, absolutely mate , tentatively I'm going to say dubstep weapons but or frozen crossing we'll see, I don't know, there are a lot of thoughts floating around here, the city boss robot and his dog standing on top of a mountain as a more or less sequel to the Boston dynamics.

I would need the blessing. from Clint, you know, Sam, yeah, do it, that would be crazy. I don't know, I'll keep my judgment until I see it. 120 frames at 24 frames per second, which gives us five seconds of footage to make it perfect. Ideally. loops no, it has to loop, oh of course it has to loop, that's our constraint, make it work, let's jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, buddy, we've done a lot of projects. the last 10 years lots and lots of projects lots of videos we back up old projects on these hard drives it's a really bad storage solution luckily there is a great google doc useful for my rendering I want to make a piece that has one of the newer photos scans mine, one that was taken last week for Peter's game and the oldest one I can find because I think I want the contrast to be there, I want like Slim Sam and then daddy Sam with a gut, you know, I want to see it like I want to see my body change to do that.

I have to find the oldest skin I can think of and the first one that comes to mind is the one I did for Footloose, which was like the first time I figured out how to do a 3D scan. We were using an Xbox connection or that project is too old. Sometimes these projects just disappear and no one really knows what happens to them. What other videos? One is the video for Far Cry 4. Far Cry 4. Okay, can I find it? a driver, oh, okay, cool, oh, he's blinking, oh, oh, that's really cool, I'm not going to lie, this is really cool, that was me when I was 27 or 28.

Now I'm almost 35, I'm a fucking old fart, but wow, this would be really cool, I think I have a really cool render on my hands. Dubstep Guns has a very special place in my heart because I saw Dubstep Guns when I was 12 and I thought this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. I've ever seen that shot where Mike shoots the laser at him and there's the shock wave and everything I thought was so cool. I've seen it thousands of times and we go too hard, too hard, we went too hard, you're breaking my heart. here man, if there's one thing I learned from the whistle it's that composition is everything.

I decided to use a centered composition for this with Sam holding the dubstep gun as the main subject of the shot and then in a sort of triangular formation behind him we have Nico and Mike, so I decided to take a look at the portal tricks, not the first, but one of the first videos I directed for Hall Digital. The idea for the shot was that I wanted to have Sam and Nico right in the foreground with the pillar. behind them with a portal because in my opinion the iconic shot from the portal tricks is basically the thumbnail with the blue portal on the side of the pillar with Nico spinning a basketball on his finger so I wanted that to be basically the main one.

Visual component of this video with the addition of a real basketball falling through the portals over and over again. That's the idea. The first Primtech video has the first shot I did after taking C4D again, so these bets here took me a week the first time. I made this, even you can still see some glitches, some errors in that export and I thought I was going to recreate the zombie meat harvester shot from Prim Tech, so my inspiration for this was the Boss Town dynamic series, which I think which is our most current series. Something iconic we've done.

I used to be the 3D guy. I was the Clint or the wren of the group, but as times changed, my role in the company was resolved and my 3D skills have disappeared since then, perhaps so sitting with this piece will not alone. Was it a tribute? I also get a chance to sit back and say okay, just an old dog, but I have some new trick. The first thing I start is blocking everything out to make sure I have all the pieces in place. Once I have all my pieces laid out, I can frame them and see what looks best aesthetically from here.

I'll start populating the scene with assets and replace the block with higher quality mega scan assets that you always go to. mega scans at some point in your process because they just have tons of real photographic elements that you can drop into your scene and it just works. The setting was the most fun part of this. I downloaded some heavy metal machine textures and put them in. some cubes uh this is copying ian hubert's style thanks ian but yeah basically you put an image texture on a cube you take that part and extrude it and then there's another part of the image texture which is like a circle, so you say, oh, me.

We'll cut out a circle and extrude it and basically let the texture of the image dictate how to model this object and so we end up with something that looks like it could actually be a factory machine or something because it's extracted from the image. references and it's a natural way to model industrial things, so I actually went back to where we originally filmed, it's under the road like a street over and I basically used this app on my phone called Polycam, if I pointed at things it starts scanning . It is using the phone's lidar sensor.

You've seen Peter talk about it before. It's actually quite amazing to use the scanner. You get two things. You get the geometry of real pillars, but you also get that dirty look. texture that comes with it, including the very real spray paint graffiti that is on the wall. I've been playing with this program called Mine Ways, which can basically take Minecraft worlds and turn them into 3D models that I'll use them for. some things are unrealistic to basically create maps to have scenes in future videos, but in that process I discovered that it's a lot of fun to take some of these things and render them really well in octane, so that's the main idea.

Here I have this huge map of this huge world, actually look at how many things are in here, it's pretty crazy, there's a lot going on here, I found this really cool pack of mountain scroll textures that are basically just black and white images, they look like maps of noise, but when you apply this and you lift something up if it's white or you lower something down, it's black, you end up with mountains and it actually looks very, very good, so once I did this and I chose my little place where the robot, well let go of the robot, I'm actually in business here, the thing is I need to do motion capture, so I turned on the suit, sam recorded it for me, I imported the fbx file from xsense, that was pretty cool, so we also had the dog that was equipped with Clint's reverse kinematics.

Inverse kinematics is really cool, basically instead of having to rotate this part into this part and this part, you can just move this part and everything else will follow accordingly. I was a photo scanning cliff. He came over and scanned me a bunch of pictures of me basically naked in my backyard. From here I'm going to export this to mixamo. then I'm animated in my scene, I actually have Sam and Nico in costume and I said please let me 3D scan you, which I did and then I took those 3D scans and brought them into Blender and made some modifications to make them fit.

Mike's original piece was a different story. I texted Mike asking if he could scan his head and send it to me, which he did, thanks Mike. Then I took that and forced it into Sam's body like I've said many times before. It's so far away that you won't realize, which is the most important phrase you'll learn as a VFX artist, so my original plan for Sam and Nico was to film them on a green screen with the camera and just have them standing. Waving back and forth and I was sweet, but then when I went to drop them in the shot, it wasn't actually working very well because their feet aren't aligned, so I was like, I have to call, I have to call the clone .

Hi Peter, sorry, I don't have this number saved. He is just your creator mom. I had a question for you. What was that 2D to 3D software called? It's like Facebook. Oh yeah, it's an interesting research paper from Facebook called. Python and yes, it uses AI to take your 2D photo and turn it into a 3D model of a person. It's pretty good and it's also free and accessible to everyone. Well, thanks Peter, wait. I'm sorry, who is it? Basically, using Pi Foot generated these 3D models. but it doesn't render the textures, so Peter went further and reprojected these textures onto those models, as you can see if I turn to the back of Sam.

Look, the texture projection is duplicated on his back. there is no texture for the back of the model, so it is simply duplicated on the back. You look at Miko for the weapons. We have the original dubstep gun here that I grabbed. She was lying in a bucket below. I took it out and put it on a C stand and quickly 3D scanned it and we're ready to put it in there, it's done, it's done in the original video, they used an after effects plugin called lasers cheat code. They don't add any light to the scene around them like they would if the lasers were real, so in this I wanted the lasers to be a three dimensional object that sheds light on the scene so you can take this dimly lit scene and fill it with beautiful blue, green and red lasers, the lasers illuminating the scene definitely helped and if dubstep guns 2 gets the green light on Corredordigital.com I will definitely be using this technique and the visual effects for that video so head on over to Corredigital.com to give it a try. green light, so there are two things that are animating, there is the ax and then there is the stakes.

Sam, the ax is very simple, very simple, all I do is rotate the ax at the center point and I go to my keyframes and make sure they show up. really cool as far as what's at stake, what I'm doing is I'm using this emitter and the emitter has instances of the stake model and I'm doing this little session that's unseen, it's kind of like a feeder and that's I'm going to keep the stakes on this slide, so to animate the basketball I really thought about going through and doing animation curves and setting everything up precisely, but I thought, you know what happens if I just try to shoot some hoops digitally?

I set up a rigid body simulation on the basketball, gave it some initial velocity and spin, gave it a position and got it so that it bounces off the backboard, goes into the net and falls, it's quite aesthetically pleasing if I don't say so myself. . So to put all this together and make itfeel alive, I need to have some plants and some foliage, so I found this plugin for Cinema 4D called Forester. It has really pretty trees, really pretty trees that move with the wind perfectly and the leaves flutter perfectly. I'm not going to just stop at the trees, we have flowers and once you combine the grass and the flowers and the textures and The trunks and the trees suddenly got a landscape, so remember that every portal you're looking through has to see something on the other side, which means I have five portals to put something behind.

I took some images from Google Street View, like the two blue portals in the bottom left are actually a completely separate render, it's the same scene. I just made a new camera that looks down from under the basketball hoop and of course the portal in the middle. I wanted to reduce the whole scene there. I couldn't. I didn't just put the same image on that, I needed to render a perspective a little further back and slightly down from the same shot, so if you look closely, it's a completely different render there in the center and then I did that a few more times.

In fact, I was able to finish this entire render in about two and a half days, three days at most, whereas the original shot took me a full week just to do what was involved in the slides. I'm very happy with the result and I'm excited to be able to do it. show them all, I can't wait to show them to the guys, I want to see what they do too today, we're looking at all the sweet 10 year renders we all made, it took us 10 years to make these, well 10 years to get to this. The point is to be able to do this, yes, so technically these deliveries took 10 years to make, we are joined by Griffin and Jordan, it's Griffin's birthday and I would love to satisfy him, it never gets old, okay everyone, it's time to present the work we have done.

I've been working really hard so I put a lot of effort into this, unfortunately due to time constraints I was working on this Falcon video, the render settings were pretty bad, you got the transition, the balls faded to the floor, technically makes a loop. So I managed to find a little bit of time this morning so I put this together pretty quickly in the same way that the light mounts the edge light on Niko's legs and Sam's calves. You've got the damn basketball hoop in the orange render on the left. everything is possible only because of modern technology, this was not possible like 10 years ago and trick shots, yes exactly, that's crazy, but it has the same vibe, I love it, thank you, I am very satisfied with it, so trash guns came out 10 years ago.

It was this summer and I was a man, I was 11 years old, no I was 13 years old when Dubstep Guns came out, tell me it was very inspiring when I first saw it so I wanted to make it as my artwork to pay homage to it. you are the sweetest saint, oh sweet, I love those particle effects, yes, the lighting fits very well, especially when it turns off, when it turns green from Sam's explosion, yes, you see the rubble in the foreground, the little ball color, this is so nice. not just orange, it's not just warm tones, it's like it has purples and magentas and blues and like me, I find myself constantly waiting for that to happen again and when he gets up, I'm like, oh, here we go, that's it.

My favorite part of the loop is that they are falling super cool that's super sweet come on clancy jones if this doesn't impress me where can't they be friends god dude your animation is so good you rebuilt the whole environment yeah all. dude this looks like a real photo it's such a good detail it looks like a photo on the left yeah my favorite is the fire it's so therapeutic I guess it's satisfying we have a 10 year old render 10 years old that the environment changed. In Minecraft, I have never played Minecraft, but is it so calm and majestic?

Minecraft is one of the most accessible games. I mean, yeah, I want to dive into this. Do the old camera next to you and also the old HVAC. there's a hvx there it's like a little nod you know one of the first cameras we used im legitimately a little nervous yeah that's it for me it's all about that vapor wow dude it's very painterly it sucks , I definitely have it. some horizon zero dawn vibes from all of this, the whole post-apocalyptic thing, I love how you even timed the scratch so it's like it loses tension there because of the stick, it's like, oh it itches, the lighting with your foliage is killing, it really feels like it. like a painting that has come to life when it comes to art, especially like traditional art where you are painting or drawing once you are done you put your signature on the piece and every artist has their way of making a signature.

I was nervous at first. This render because dubstep weapons are very important to me and I wanted to do it justice. I didn't want to have a mediocre render commemorating the 10 years of this video. I'm happy with myself. I was able to recreate that snake photo, I think. In two years I have made some progress. I honestly think this is one of the best renders I've ever made. The funny thing about this is that when we recorded the original video I had very, very little experience in 3D, so everything you see in the original portal. The trick shot video was done simply using after effects, but now one hundred percent of this was done in 3D space and rendered.

It's been great, it's been really liberating to want to make a really strong piece of digital art and it's really nice to have this work and know that I can still achieve it, I think this piece does a really good job of putting markers on both ends of this period of time, from when we started to the present, we never thought that this would be something that would take us. So far in the future it was like, okay, this is what we're doing, this is fun, but hey, we're trying to make movies or TV shows or things like that, it turns out that what you're watching right now is this. video this is the race that has cemented and created a foundation for all of our lives.

Anyone who's a fan of the channel here would instantly see like wow, like I remember that other version of this Sam that's not Sam now, this is like this other version of him and that's all summed up in a nasty Kinect photo scan from 2014. So I'm happy to announce that we will be doing our first nft launch on the broker, that's right you can own the first viral video we have. I have made in Minecraft on the runner channel the latest minecart plus these five renders that will be for sale at the maker's place as of now there is an auction now I know that many of you are critical of nfts, particularly their impact on the environment is something that needs to be addressed what we're going to address, we're going to take the amount of carbon that is created with an nft, we're going to multiply it by a hundred and we're going to offset it.

I'll link it to the description. below to the website we are using for our estimate so if you are a collector and would like to own a little bit of racer history head on over to the maker's place the auction is starting right now thanks for watching everyone. see you in the next video