We Fixed The Worst VFX Shot Ever

There's a

shot

that holds the crown for

worst

visual effects

shot

of all time, the mummy rock returns now, whether or not it's the

worst

visual effects shot of all time, yeah, maybe not, but it sure seems ridiculous now that we had such an overwhelming response. of you asking us to fix the shot and you know we finally have a day off from the studio so I'm going to get my vfx brothers together and sit down and talk about it and see if we can fix the scorpion king. This movie is another honest attempt to recreate the charm that Indiana Jones had.

I loved the mummy. No, the mother did it. The mother was successful. Oh yeah, here we go guys, pretty good so far, okay, so far, good, looking good so far. The animation is Great, they're using that kind of Jurassic Park limited lighting there and oh look that doesn't look bad, the animation of the scorpion itself is excellent, who

ever

animated the scorpion killed it and also the lighting is really solid like the body of the scorpion. It fits the scene really well and I like the cues with all the flames going out and that affects the lighting of the scorpion.

Everything looks great and they have this close up of the rock space and I think it's a great find. It happened at that moment when

ever

yone realized that the human face is much more difficult than just having computer generated things in the scene, the expressions don't seem to synchronize at any particular point, which makes the face look a bit unnatural, yes, like half. of his face smiles the other half of his face frowns right here rock happy rock angry and that's the thing and it's like the lips adjusted before the eyes adjusted I think that's what it all looked like a little bit just It feels like it's not quite synchronized ah, he's too dry too, but I guess you know, if you're a scorpion buried for thousands of years, you'd probably be a little crusty, it's got mummy dust all over it, let's pretend it's been there.

There were eternal flames burning. For thousands of years while he was buried, he would be quite sweating, right? If you look at the faces of the other characters in the scene, you can see that there is this level of specular detail in all of them, it's like maybe it's like a The sharpness or specularity on their skin is brighter, but it looks a little bit waxy and sticky compared to everyone else in the scene and it's like everyone else in the scene has the same skin tones, is in the same lighting conditions, so they are very, very good references of what it should look like. her face.

When you pause here, you can see the little inconsistencies in the face when we look at the rock face, it's just kind of plastic, everything is like that, yeah, super smooth like an Apple and then also look at the lighting mismatch. there also see how hot that light is. You know it doesn't even show on the face. Another important thing I noticed, so there is a lot of sparkle on the door of this fire, which shines and reflects on the film. on your camera sensor and that's what's happening here we're seeing this yellow streak coming out of the side now the scorpion king has been composited on top of that flare when technically it should be underneath that flare because that flare is something that's happening on the sensor and if he is part of the scene, that flare would be on top of him, so we could fix that too and that would make him look more part of the shot.

Sam, what are you going to fix on the shot? What are you going to do? I'm going to use some cool tricks to add some noise to the shots and maybe give the guy a little more weight and then I'm going to do some 2D lighting to do it. blend in with the scene and probably do a little pass to highlight some highlights, hopefully that works Peter, what do you have? Those flames get no respect from the sensor. I'm going to extrapolate them and add some bloom to the edges, you know, add some optical. The flares really turn that light on some imperfections that kind of thing like Gordon Ramsay of optical flares I like Clint What do you have that old door?

It's not old enough, so I'll make sure the ashes of all the lost souls fall. outside that door when you interact with her nico how are you going to fix the face that's a good question that's the main offender it's just rox's mug right there there's a cutscene of ps2 just growling at you i have a plan to fix that so before Skip this I just want to mention that we actually have something pretty big going on here, you know, we have this series of reactions from vfx artists, they're not building a black and white, they won't, if we can't get this shot, no one will go.

To keep taking our videos seriously, that's the end of the series, right, we might be digging our own graves with this episode. vfx artists dig their own cg grace. Okay, okay, okay, gentlemen, everyone has their tasks for the day, let's do it as one. two three scorpion one two three the original shot is smooth as butter but it's a big heavy creature fucking so I felt like it could use a little bit of camera movement you know on the face here we see this white fire in the corner here. and we look at their skin in this area people's skin is not that matted you know if you've been underground in a cave for years with your oily skin and you haven't washed your face and maybe it's the desert in your heat it's going to reflect the white, so basically what I did there is very, very subtle.

What I'm doing is taking the footage and just extracting it all until it's like the close targets of the scene I'm isolating. that I'm just bringing out those tones a little bit more and then to make it look a little more natural, I add a little bit more additional detail. I'm actually using noise as my alpha matte just to simulate the roughness and pores of human skin and I think it helps because you can see that it has a little extra shine right now compared to the other characters in the scene, this combines Better, yeah, what's up, son?

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Am I going to rebuild the rock and cg? Am I going to go get a bunch of photos and do photogrammetry and reconstruct his face? Do I have a secret 3D rock? model, that's too much work and I only have one day to do this, so here's my point: you guys saw our fake Tom Cruise fake. You should be able to do the same technique. I'm going to take a real Dwayne Johnson. I'm going to put it on a CG Scorpion King. I don't think anyone's ever done that before, so the thing about deep picking is you need to get a lot of original material in your face, now the rock right now doesn't look like Mom's Coming Back rock, it's 2001, but you know, I have a good idea that the Scorpion King movie exists and that's just Rock as Scorpion King throughout the entire movie.

I spent about two hours reviewing the film, pulling each time from the rock. Up front, it's simply the Scorpion King experience and the most authentic source material you could hope for. With these Scorpion King rock elements, you should be able to replicate his appearance very accurately, in theory I think this will work very well. Boys like to see deep fake. This is actually something I've also been thinking about a lot, what if we start using real faces on cg characters or even better yet, what if we train the deep fake algorithm to learn a cg face and then put it on a real person, what will it look like?

There are some really twisted things you can do. I think this is the first step to finding out. First, I'll just play the original for you guys, okay? I'm so excited dude, there's no way it works with all the firelight inside your head flashing like that dude, okay, so that's the original, here we go, I'm nervous, this isn't working. I'm nervous too. that's weird it looks a lot better but it looks like yeah actually i think it's a little better it's really tamed uh all the expressions was that expression where his lips were like that a lot of the shot still screams like early aughts cgi from 2000, like that sticky skin look, but changing that face and enhancing it improved the whole shot as a whole pretty substantially once again, we're fixing this shot and not redoing it, but I think the little changes we've made will still do big difference alright guys it's time for the big reveal nico wait before we do the big reveal I just wanted to say I feel like I got the perfect shot let me show you all oh really everything yeah. you redid the whole shot, dude, you liked a space battle zoom, oh man, that's really good, dramatic, the whole thing, the refocusing, I mean we can go with that one, no, I guess we don't have to show the other one that I love The JJ Avenues players and the fire in front of his face, okay, I want to see Alex's real ending, that's pretty good.

Wow, I think the shine was worth it. The forehead glow, the face is definitely much better, the chest glow, your glow technique. it works boom like that it looks cool yeah man that's right this is the biggest difference here when you get close to the camera we still struggle with some of the limitations of technology and we have to do it in a day I'm not trying to do it . Make excuses but definitely like when you walk through the door right here the camera movement is really nice and gives you some grounding but it's not over the top the dust touching the door helps ground you to the world a little bit more, let's not rule out.

Peter's flash over the arm here is one of those things that's so natural like in a normal look that once it's there you just don't notice it at all, but when it's not there it makes it look like the rock super ct we have now . I definitely think it's an improvement, it was a fun day in the studio. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the shot, and in fact, if you think there are other visual effects we could try to fix, I'd love to try. more of these and if you want to see what they look like, consider subscribing.

We have many more strange experiments to do. We just got the motion capture suit back and we have some cool plans you ever wanted to do. An obstacle course obstacle course only exists on the computer, so in real life you are doing weird things but you can't see what you are dodging until you look at the computer screen, maybe you didn't want to do it. that, but you will do it after seeing us do it, yes, subscribe to the runner team and enjoy the rest of your time in this sinister land.