VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 42

oh yeah that would be so hot that this scene is stuck in the mind of any kid who watched this movie in the 90's, what if they did the trick and he landed backwards? They say well that was

great

, the rest of the movie. scene they're going backwards we're going backwards the classic are you Dante's Peak or a volcano man big thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring today's episode stay until the end to find out how you can take the next step in your creative journey hey what's up? Everyone, welcome back to another VFX episode. The artist

react

s.

We have Freddy here again today and today we will see not only the destruction but also the volcanoes. Volcanoes are interesting because they represent some of the things that are very complicated and difficult. To do visual effects you have fire, smoke and lava, then you have fluid simulations with liquids with gas and then you have fire, but very different types of fluid simulations, it's the kind of thing you couldn't do on computers until recently, this It didn't stop people in the '90s from trying to do it on computers with varying degrees of success, yeah, and you know, who doesn't love watching things explode?

Volcanoes are cool, don't even act like volcanoes aren't cool. Volcanoes are. Great, you're afraid of volcanoes as a kid, liar, you're afraid of volcanoes and quick on your feet, we're not going to make quicksand, today we're going to make volcanoes, considering how little danger the quicksand ended up being. I was too afraid. quicksand but volcanoes, prepare for some visual effects, yes, welcome to the most extraordinary and unforgettable experience available on this planet, so the plot of this is that this guy wants to make a theme park not with dinosaurs but for an active volcano, Guys, poor man's Jon Hamm, yeah. no, it's Lucius Malfoy, it's fighting Malfoy.

He looks pretty surprised for a guy who built a mega resort on a volcano. Oh hi, that was the joke that it doesn't have glass, by the way, there's hot lava there with no fire. avoid the hot lava in the middle everyone, yes there should be fire and smoke coming out of that direct line necessarily, here's the thing nico, when was the last time you were around hot glowing magma? Last year when I went to Hawaii and there was smoke and stuff, yeah. oh it's a 40 he's the authority on this i feel so bad for that extra did you see that extra that just died guys the extra on the right dies oh no another guy died guys look at the second guy to die, I loved that first lava?

Drop that just splashed and didn't bounce off the camera at all. I thought, oh no, he's right here, never mind, I need to see this guy own this jet ski once again, God, yeah, I think if you got hit with the fly. lava like that you would splash I don't think it would take your body off just kidding I just love the idea it's like he took a jump look look at this environment right now like where are you going to jump? your jet ski right now a lot of light wrap you can always notice a lot of light everything is bright and light wrap everything just super light wrap stars effect just like grab that light wrap slider just kick it up keep going keep going I wanna see the thing glowing from the outside oh vfx break here we go oh that's not a fun little rig there they didn't resort to like just a mega light wrap for it here either yeah that's some nice green screen work yeah that's cool , okay, how much of this, how much of this, like the docks, wow, everything, nothing was on fire, they're getting the reflections, yeah, they're getting the reflections, probably from above.

I'm not going to lie, the animation is

great

to see. I'd rather see a shot where they put in a couple hundred pounds of TNT and just blow up that TV. Yeah, I just want to see some pretty TNT explosions. What would happen if they did the trick and he fell backwards? They're like, damn, that's how it was. cool, okay, the rest of the scene they're backing up, they're backing up and they just like to rearrange their whole schedule so the car backs up. I mean, that's basically what happened with the true lies when they did the shot where the car explodes. and it lands on the other side of the bridge, so it's like we're left with that wow, so what's happening at the waterfalls is increasing some activity around Dante's Peak.

What do you think the odds are against an eruption there? The classic is You're Dante's Peak or the Volcano Man. You know, the funny thing is, I didn't see either of them in theaters. But I'm probably more of a Tommy Lee Jones man than a Pierce Brosnan man. That's blasphemy. Pierce Bros is the sexiest. property in Hollywood right now that looks great, wow, that looks great, it was great, it looks great, I think they blew up some stuff here for this, it looks great, this looks better than Sky Fire, I mean , Skyfire is much more complicated, yes, of course, but like.

There's kind of like the miniature work here is really good, you notice we all went there, I love it, we didn't do that at all for Sky Fire, I love it, look at all the little wood particles and twigs though, oh that's cool , friend. the timing detail is like just the center of the house breaking up all these miniatures, so it's worth noting that all those explosions we were seeing were probably real miniatures, but as practical filming rather than digital visual effects, yeah, I mean, in order. To make the miniatures look real at this scale, you have to shoot them in slow motion.

You know, if you want something small to look big, you have to slow it down so that gravity moves at the speed it would move at if they had useful calculators for that. They do, yes, in terms of similar scale to the amount of slow motion you have to do, so there's a lot of copulation work done in that shot when it's crawling around the mountain as the camera rises over the city in the that they are helping each other. as much as they can because there are no nearby trees overhanging the buildings, just nice flat, clean roofs of the buildings.

I see a soft carpet around the buildings on the billboard, but they are very selective and you know everything still has hard edges. for the most part, yes, it's the only shot where the composition betrays him. I want to know how they really did with the volcanic ash. Wow, that was it, that was okay, so they're probably just putting a big ton of ash in a giant bucket and then it sends an explosion underneath, it looks like they're actually pumping air in, yeah, actually, yeah, air, the vacuum cleaner. The loop secondary itself looks so good that the base of the mound will be approximately 100 feet wide.

Wow, that's a lot of foam carving, yeah, slide it off the carrier. Wow, that looks great, yeah, how do you develop a skill to do this? Oh yes, I make full-scale mountain models. I mean, it's a skill that is in short. Nowadays, I'm sure all the people who would have gotten into this are doing it on computers, so the reason all those pyroclastic smoke simulators looked so good is because they weren't simple, they were actually simulations with the highest simulation settings on the system. actually, actually, okay, lift up the volcano, now the volcano also has a pretty crazy job because they're doing a lot more with lava, so the interesting thing about volcanoes, what you see is you see a lot of different types of things trying to obtain. comp together, right, wait, it's just water there's definitely, there's definitely a lot of miniature like water things, there's stock footage of the fire, there's an initial fire, like there's three different colors of orange going on here, you know, and what you get is the thick shots, like mottled magma, they end up looking really good, this is going to destroy everything it touches.

I'm curious how they would have gotten the actual lava flow that you have, like all the cooled sections of the skin, essentially, that's how it is. actually flowing and then coiling under the lava, so I guess they did it practically somehow, I think they got us out, but behind the scenes of this, I guess it's not actually lava, I mean the lava kitchen, so it was practical. They were filming it, but the fact that they were able to pull it off shines. Are they lighting it from below? No, they are using a black light to get that glow.

Oh wow, that's clever, that's really clever. I love all these little solutions and tricks I come up with. What really sells the lava for me is the cooled rocky bits on top, yeah oh it's paint so they painted the top, yeah I mean that makes sense because yeah they're literally like spray paint on top. The paint will harden and then crack and yes, it will harden and that's just a layer of paint that dried and now it will float on top just fine, but it looks like they basically miniaturized their sets and blocked them. We take it out and then we shoot it, yes this still requires a lot of CG

artists

to sit down and composite these things onto the actual footage and then put all the fire in there, but when you start with something that looks very real it makes the compositing a lot easier sometimes it's a cg render that looks very real other times it's something practical this scene sticks in the mind of any kid who saw this movie from a blockbuster video in the 90s did you talk to someone our age know this scene because it was so visceral it's sweet this shoe is melting it really sells that the ground is hot oh man oh man oh man something about the idea of ​​knowing what the ground is and yet you're still melting through it you should give it a thumbs up well at the end like the last thoughts that pass through your shocked mind must be pulling your thumbs it's like ah this is the most intense pain I have ever felt in my life hey, if you guys aren't subscribed, what are you doing with your life ?

Are you watching this to subscribe? It's very simple and if you don't do it, I will be very disappointed in you as a person. This mass suicide adhered to the Mayan calendar which predicts that the end of times will occur on December 21, 2012. an amazing theatrical movie, it was so much fun the way they brought this to life it's so cool it's starting oh yeah, that would be so hot, it would be crazy how fast heat travels, I mean a big explosion in the distance. You would feel the heat of that on your face instantly it's radiation ah this shot I love this shot good use like shock waves and ground and then what are we tracking after all this?

The RV in the middle, I see, I think they're taking the hits. much more precise, I mean, who knows, but I think they're giving me impacts a little more similar to what I'd like to see with chunks of lava hitting here, I mean, this is like the granddaddy of all things that come from the sky . scenes oh yeah i love it not a single soft feathered edge in sight no its a full cg probably oh yeah i mean i think what really stands out when comparing this to Dante's peak or volcano is the fact that everything is unified in the scene, which is probably because the scenes are almost 100 cg, if not 100 cg, but you don't end up with blurry edges of smoke that someone had to mask by hand, it's almost like one of those things in which is like what domains are.

If you live on the computer, at least you have cohesion in terms of that, the moment you try to put a bunch of different elements together, it's a lot harder if you can do it right, it can look amazing. but it's like that's the risk, yeah, you know, it's like shooting some fire elements and shooting some lava elements and shooting some smoke elements if your white balance changed if your camera changed if your exposure changed if some of that changed your elements now they look different and they're not going to match perfectly, we see that in the volcano when one shoots pink and the other shoots orange and one fire is yellow and then it's white, you know you don't have that problem here, this shot just There I have it.

Actually, a feeling is almost real right there when the cracks start to form. I think we're moving to maybe projecting the footage in geometry so it has that lighting built in if they did it completely in cg. I feel like I would see it. more interaction like that, look at those trees there, they don't move at all while those explosions surround them, so they probably saved a bit of render time by just using the actual plate footage, but in this next shot, all the terrain is starting to fall apart now we're starting to see a lot more completely computer generated imagery.

I want to see the visual effects breakdown for this scene. Oh, okay, yeah, you're right, yeah, you're right, yeah, they were real pictures, but they were, you know. this started where you said it was right, it was another 300 feet back from where that shot actually starts, oh no, you know what I mean, it could be a full shot of a helicopter, actually, you're right, yeah, no, that's it a whole, it is complete. Overall, it was a great shot of an old helicopter, yes, but it's like the lake there. They had to have replaced a lot of the lake just because you can't just have a little puddlehere because that is going to scam. everything has to be oh yeah that's how they jumped it oh yeah that was a good jump too they had to rebuild all the land around it obviously removing the ramp how much dust from the actual RV was left behind because I feel like we're looking at the color contrast and the lighting is a little different in the original footage that I'm looking at here instead of the finale.

It's a little more muted in the render. I think they probably tried to make it match the fake smoke trails They did, yeah I was just using it for reference otherwise it's a pain, because you have a section of the smoke where it hits the blue ramp, dude this guy must feel as good skimming as the preview and then to the final shot, yes. You did it? There are so many stages to making something like this work. For one, you have to film it well. Two, you have to simulate a really cool simulation, like the curling feathers and all that, and then you have to light it well and render it, and hopefully all that. it works fine, but it's still not married to the footage, so you have to compose it, add everything like cool stitching and stuff to make everything look pop and all these things have to work in a row and do visual effects.

It's totally illogical, yes this is like anyone who likes simulations, this is a movie for you, oh yes, this is yes, it's a very fun movie. I've been searching my whole life trying to build my database. Comment below any salmon. not just any fish, salmon, specifically salmon based vfx in the comments, this will be the central database repository for salmon based vfx links. I'm counting on all of you to comment on the following, don't let Freddie get discouraged. Hello guys, are you sick? of trying to learn things completely on your own, think about floating in the unknown space of having no one to guide you or no wise teacher to accompany you and say: hey, this is how you do it, this kid, guess which ones?

They are all those problems. past with today's sponsor Skillshare If you are a lifelong learner, this is the product for you. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes for creative and curious people. They have classes in things like film and video, photography, creative writing, graphic design, illustration. and one of my favorite classes I've taken recently is comedy film making. Make your low-budget videos 100 funnier with Amber Schaefer. She is incredibly talented and goes through the process of not only writing and creating a script that is fun, but then how to perform it, edit it, and present it in a way that is also fun.

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This works even if you've had a free trial of Skillshare in the past, the community of creative people on Skillshare will be there waiting, oh boy, I didn't expect to see so many different movies about volcanoes today, but here we are, it was so much fun, this really turns out and it's good, don't be scared, volcanoes are still a problem, there are still volcanoes everywhere. world, have you seen any of the images of the Icelandic volcano right now? Yeah, did you see the one where they're playing volleyball next to him without a care in the world?

You won't catch us '90s kids playing volleyball around the corner like Those Icelandic People, wanna know why? Because we grew up with these movies, we grew up with Dante's peak. Thank you very much for watching until next time. Be careful with active volcanoes. Yeah, so volcanoes you shouldn't trip over. Also check out the volcano park. in hawaii it's a trip