VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 8
Feb 23, 2020Oh, ooo oo oo Don't tell me about that camera - How they do that seems impossible to me - The black hole actually built a rendering engine - Just for this. - Can you guess why? What's up guys? Welcome back to VFX, the
artists
react
, and today is a very special day because we have a very special guest. - Blender Guru himself. - Hello everyone. My name is Andrew Price. I'm from australia. I have been using 3D software for about 12 years. My channel is called Blender Guru, big fan of the program. Happy to startreact
ing. - Let's do it. - I wanted to talk about the Lego movie. - It is so beautiful. - I feel like I can play every piece. - Is each Lego piece like an official Lego piece in this movie? - Yes.Yes, that's what it was, consistent: every little piece is consistent. All colors are actually real colors which can also be printed in Lego factory. Honestly, this movie put the nail in the coffin of stop-motion movies. It's like when your animation looks this real, because it's indistinguishable from stop-motion reality. It's very detailed Yes, yes. Something about this film makes the lighting much more realistic than what had previously been done in animated films. Can you guess why? They filmed it practically and then faked it. So the reason this looks so realistic is because The Lego Movie was the first major animated film to use the Aces color coding system.
A cheap compact camera has a dynamic range of about 11 F-stops, while a DSLR has about 13 F-stops. And the Arri Alexa, which is the best camera, has 14.5 F-stops. Actually, the best device is the Mind you, it has 20 F stops. Previous animated films couldn't do something like this because if they were exposed to the sun, everything else would fall into darkness. They were reducing the power of sunlight because they needed exposure for everything else. - Just like the Sun wouldn't have to be forced to do that. - Exact. Yeah, which doesn't make any sense. - high dynamic range.
So what they did was they changed it to Aces, which allowed them to use an F-stop of up to 30. So they went from five F-stops to 30. In this scene, in the background we have some people having coffee. in the shadow, and we can still see the detail: we can see that he is wearing glasses, we can see the color of his hair. And then we have extremely bright sunlight hitting those coffee cups bouncing off your head, and that's the real value of the Sun in relation to everything else. By having this in the right place, you can have real values that look and feel that way.
In fact, it can also capture the entire color spectrum, so it's not just about high dynamic range. It is a wide range of colors. But the interesting thing is how that is applied in certain exposure ranges. When something is overexposed, colors become desaturated as things become brighter, something they didn't do before. When you turn it on for a 3D scene, it's like everything works as it should. The light has the right value, things are becoming clear as they should, you can actually use the true value of the light as it should be. - There are a couple of other really subtle things that play together to make this look really photorealistic.
One is that when you're shooting miniature things, your depth of field becomes very, very shallow. Imagine taking a telephoto lens and zooming in on something that is this big. If you filmed this in real life with a wide angle lens like a 28 millimeter lens of a real person on the couch, you wouldn't have as shallow a depth of field, but if you filmed a miniature, you would. So they're actually mimicking the real-life parameter, light envelope and HDRI light bloom, but the other big thing was the imperfections. You could even see the seam line when he was shaving, you could see the seam line in his hair.
Details, that's
great
. I can feel my fingernail running over it. Yes, exactly The Lego Movie. I think it was very successful because it made me want to play with my Legos after watching it. - The fog. Fog is good. - Oh man, I love this movie. - Be careful with your boss. Oh no, don't let yourself be dragged into the Mist. - This guy seems too calm for what's going on. - Franco Castillo? What's it called? - Wait, is that Punisher? - Yeah! The cool thing, the practical effects are totally like: upselling the visual effects. - Yes, exactly.Oh, man, you know, he's gone. Let it go, right? Oh, yeah, so this is... - "Mom!" - That looks a little rusty. -And he was never seen again. - Look like you don't... ahh, the tentacles. - They don't look like... - It's strange. - I hate that that doesn't seem right to me. I think part of this is that the texture is not motivated. Yeah, like that shit looks like a uniform... like they have... what's it called? Isn't it a caterpillar? - What's that one that looks like, oh... - A worm? Or a centipede? - In Australia, we have witch larvae.
It's a real thing, a witch larva, and it reminds me of that and it's something like that, it has like little blood vessels running through it, but it's like... the real creature. It has bones and things like that, so it should have, in my opinion, clean parts and then other meatier parts. - It's quite a texture. It's all uniformly viscous. - Another thing I'm noticing is that the lighting is also a bit like weird movie lighting. Look at the character in the front Yeah, like his face, the side of his face is very bright but the other side of his head is basically black, same with a man's baseball cap.
But that worm on the left side is not black. It's still kind of a shiny medium dark gray. - I feel like this is something that is the director's fault. The artist probably lights the scene with precise lighting, then the director says, "You know what? It's too dark." Add some more lights," and the VFX artist says, "But you didn't have lights on set," and the doctor says, "I don't care! I can't see it making it any brighter," and then suddenly , the CG object is simply not lit correctly. Look at the lighting again. Look at the lighting on his face and look at the lighting on the tentacle.
Oh yeah. . -The tentacle is evenly lit and his face is very clearly dark on one side. - Where does this edge light come from? You see it? Yeah, well, you don't see the edge light on Frank Castle around here. - One last thing to point out: one of the most challenging things you can give a composer is a smoke shot. You say, "Please put the CG object in the middle of this smoke." Imagine for a minute. that I give you a photo of Clint and I gave you a photo of the Grand Canyon and I ask you to cut Clint and put him in the Grand Canyon.
Oh, and for added realism, here's a bush to put in front of Clint. Great, I'm going to need an exact knife and a couple of hours to cut that bush, but I can do it and it looks good. Now let's say I have an image of a wisp of smoke and I say, "I want to Cut this and put that over Clint." How do you cut a wisp of smoke? Sure, there may be sharp edges, but the smoke is transparent. That's the challenge you face when trying to remove smoke and place it over a CG object.
But they have to make fake smoke on top of the real smoke so the tentacles mix them in, and then you end up with a shot that doesn't look real, right? - So the director... I think it was Frank Darabont who directed this. In fact, he released a black and white version of this film and apparently that's the way to watch it. The black and white version probably helps tie the CG together much better? What is this? - Panic room. - 2002. - Wait, a camera can't fit over those railings. -How did he do it? - They haven't finished yet. - He's still going!
Don't tell me that camera... No, no! This is like a trench race, but for the cameras. Oh my god, it's not over yet. He's still soloing so hard: Whoa, whoa! - That is incredible. He didn't need to do this, right? - Yes, as if anyone could have regular cuts. Well, it really gives you an idea of the space you need to have for each piece of the space. It's also a real-time breakdown of what's really happening, so it puts you in the vibe of these characters hiding from these guys. - So can you guess which parts are CG? -Those railings are probably CG. - So they just didn't have the railing there.
I think it's all CG. - There's probably a hidden cut here. - Even the door. Safe railings. - Definitely the railings. Is all that CG? What did I tell you guys! What did I tell you guys! Full green screen in this window here. - I think so. Look at this green screen. - That's crazy. - They're going to delete it. It's not green screen, it's not green screen. This is all CG. That coffee thing is CG and the chair is CG. Yes, because you don't see the camera in the reflection either. That's completely fake or green screen. - 3d counter, there it is. - Is everything CG? - Congratulations to David Fincher's team for this man. - That's a master class.
Chaffee, this is good. This is like the Lego movie in terms of I feel like I can touch it. Well, interesting because they were also around the same time. This was when the aces were happening. I know one of the first people to try aces, that's for a reason. Yeah, look at that. Look how embedded it is in the frame. There is the hand that you noticed. No, what was that? He handed her a knife. Is that guy holding a CG knife or is it a real knife that the actor actually used because he used Sharlto Copley, right?
Sharlto, Copley was actually crazy from what I've gathered. They just filmed it and they're like visual effects
artists
, you know. One of the guys who worked on the film emailed us and everything was tracked manually by the artists. go in there and hand just align your skeletal platform with what your movements were and just watch it and they did such a good job. The other thing is that all the paintings are the same, like they're sitting there piecing together a bunch of The background has a bunch of different elements because you have to first get a human out of the shop before you can put a robot back in.That's the hardest part. Yes. He's pointing out that deep down, I heard there are artists who would work on a take for three or four months. You just get that one shot and during the next one, like the summer, that's the only thing you work on to paint the ninjas' chest. and they only have chests, so originally Sharlto Copley proudly reaches out and grabs the knife, meaning they had to reconstruct that part of his chest so they can't erase Charles or Coakley's hand and put a robot hand in there . What a nightmare and you can! Don't I say how they do that?
Which is a job that requires a lot of time. It's just painful to watch. Look at this moment. I'm having flashbacks. Yeah, what do you think they did? that helped make it look as good as not, we had to replicate this, which we possibly did with The Boston Dynamics video. The way you do it is this real reference for the start of the movement of the real actor interacting with people. People like eye lines to match, movements to match, and rhythms to match. Getting real light samples from the set, aka getting a 360 degree HDR I of the set, if you're CG, is built in a photorealistic way that should come together and give you a pretty realistic image.
Photorealistic looking final product, apparently what they did was start with the CG model. They then sent the pops to be printed in 3D printing and then sent them to increasingly wet practical scale models of Chappie and built 11 of them in different damages. says Obviously it's moving so they didn't use that in the movie, but they used it as a reference So the lighting was actually they had something to compare it to that's amazing So like in the fog, they probably didn't have a tentacle reference But here you go a reference of a robot and you can match it one by one if you can match them.
It would look perfect if they couldn't build it and it wouldn't work in real life. And that means you're dealing with something that's impossible and couldn't actually work. So it also helps make it feel authentic. Yes. Yes, the black hole cell, are we okay? This critical take on imax was like Interstellar is actually one of our most requested videos in the comments. I'm glad we're finally getting to that and if you have any scenes, show whatever you want. us to react. Please leave a comment. We read them. They're a huge inspiration, there's a difference between the David Fincher or Chappie effect, where it's like, oh, that's something I know, and versus this, which is like it's beyond us.
Good? Nobody has seen anything like it, you can see wow. It's a physical model, right? Yes, that is the apple reflected in the window. Perfect a black hole You can't photograph it I kissed a black hole. Yeah, there's nothing there, right? It is literally just a super mass of gravity by which everything is absorbed. So how would you portray that in a film? There is the concept of an accretion disk. The power of gravity is so amazing that it is basically sucking in like a universe around it. So this is an accretion disk. Now, the reason why you get this effect ofhalo there.
It's something interesting. So for this, instead of starting with an artist concept, which is what you would normally do, right? In fact, they started with a physicist and said, "Tell us how black holes work." He throws us some math. They gave that math to the rendering engine guys, and they actually built a rendering engine just for this. So what happened was they had this buildup, they had the thing on it and then they sold this weird Halo effect and they say it must be a mistake, something this isn't right, it's not right and then they showed it to Kip and then he said, "Oh, of course," and what you're really seeing is what would physically happen to yours because they wrote down numbers. .
Yes, I went in and I understood that Yes, and it surprised everyone because physically that would actually happen with an accretion. Yes, then you are seeing the same accretion disk as a ring of Saturn, but you will see the other side of the black hole. It's reflecting around it, which is like the black hole's gravity is so intense. It's basically reflecting light from the other side and kind of pulling it up and around, it's a black hole that says that's math. And I'm sure they got in. And they added some clouds and some cool particles and tweaked it a little bit.
But that's incredible. In fact, they got two research papers out of this. Yes, it's actually like they contribute to the scientific community. It's not crazy? Is that incredibly Hollywood movie? We'll have to go back to interstellar again to talk about the robot and subscribe if you want to see I loved your take on the Lego movie and a lot of this other 3D stuff that you brought to the table. That's all? of your group learning? If you want to learn 3D, you're looking at this and saying, Hey, maybe I have a career in VFX waiting for me.
Come mix a guru. You will learn how to make a donut. I have some friends. I've done that, I've done it to do it. Yes. Yes, it's free, guys, like a screen is free and Blender is free. Yes, zero and yet barrier to entry for anyone with a connection, it works on everything. So yes, thank you all for your suggestions and leave some more. Also. We have a subreddit, our slash runner. We all go there all the time. So if you ever want to talk to us a little bit more closely than, for example, let's say the YouTube wash here, consider hiding it there.
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