Life is funny.  Things are going one way and then ZING!  Off you go in another direction.  That onomatopoeia was meant to represent me changing direction slightly.  

On Sunday my car had major problems leading me to crash at my sisters house for a few days (hence the lack of an update) and it looked bad . . . very bad.  As soon as you have engine problems on a car with 235,000 km’s you start to think in mid 4 figure amounts.  I had had an interview the previous Friday and I was stressing a little about a possible move with a massive car expense and not much sleep was coming my way.

I iz a happy cat!

As it turns out, it was a relatively minor problem with the car (considering what I thought could go wrong), I was offered the job at a decent wage doing cool stuff in a great new city and I will be teaming up with one of my very good friends from Animalia again!

Soooo to cut a medium length story slightly longer: I will be starting with compositing and VFX on children’s animated television show with Ettamogah Entertainment down in Melbourne in mid-June.  I am really looking forward to it as I will get a chance to get my hands on some new-ish (for me) software for some production experience.  While I have used Maya and After Effects for personal projects, I am chuffed to get down and dirty with them with the possibility of some suh-weet houdini action as well.  All this is good for you, dear readers, as there will be a broader range of tips coming your way!

And, in a great twist, I will be working with my good mate Rodrigo Guimaraes again!  Rodrigo and I started on the same day together back on Animalia and we (and the other compers) had a blast hanging out together on the project, so it is with a glad heart that I will see my Brazilian mate again.

Throw into the mix a move to Melbourne, a very funky city and things are looking very exciting indeed.

8mins 52secs, 33meg Quicktime 840×526 h.264 mov

SKYDOME!!!  Yeah boyeeee!  Okay, this is a pretty basic tutorial, I admit it, but it is a bloody useful one, especially if you don’t know Maya.  Did you also notice how many comma’s I used in the last sentence.  That is Very Bad Grammar if English is not your native language.  Luckily you are here to talk about visual effects and not English (although I did teach English in Japan for a year, shhhhh, don’t tell them about my grammar).

Anyway, this technique is certainly no secret.  I originally found this on a website somewhere, but they didn’t really explain it too well and didn’t even have screenshots so I had no idea what the hell they were talking about.  On Animalia the compositors had to make their own skydomes quite a few times as they often weren’t provided for us.  We sometimes got them on moving camera shots (and most of the bloody shots were moving!) but there was also a library of regular matte paintings, mostly painted by Dudley Birch.  Luckily, a few of the compositors I work with were also Maya guys, so they showed me how to operate Maya on at least a basic level to pull in shots, strip geometry and make a skydome, so thanks to John Kitching and Rodriogo Guimaraes for the info.

Okay, okay.  You may have strong feelings about fan films.  Me?  I am kind of up in the air as I have seen some shockers and I have seen some amazing work.  Either way though they always involve people who are doing it for the sheer love of making something that they believe in and are willing to get off their bums and give it a shot, and I always give that two thumbs up.

Check out the recent Half Life 2 fanfilm “Escape From City 17 – Part One” which has been doing the rounds recently.  Short, sweet, focused and with very passable VFX all made for $500.  As far as I know most of the hero 3D models are meshes straight from the game.  The match-moving is top notch which opens up a lot of possibilities for set-extensions.  If you have solid tracking, suddenly you aren’t limited by what you see.  Having said that, the locations were well chosen and more importantly, the whole thing captures the atmosphere of Half Life 2.  I will go on record as saying that Half Life 2 has been the most immersive game experience I have yet had.  So much care was taken with everything, from the look to the models, to the texturing and, possibly the most overlooked factor, the sound.

So, given that fanfilms can be great, why not volunteer?  As an aspiring compositor I would urge us all to consider helping out, as fanfilms can provide the most important thing . . . footage.  Chances are you don’t have the ability to set up a greenscreen shoot for your own stuff, rustle up costumes and actors and make all the 3D props.  By being involved in a team, suddenly you have access to ready made elements and you can concentrate on your compositing.  Another thing is that unless you are really lucky and working with something like DigiBeta or Red camera, you will be working on crummy DV footage.  Most likely crummy DV footage with badly lit greenscreen with the default sharpening filter on the camera left on.  Think of this as a test though . . . if you can develop the chops to get decent keys from this footage, when you graduate to film you will be laughing!

The downside is that you have to spend a bit of time weeding out the crummy projects.  If they don’t have strong leadership and focus, keeping everyone on the same page, they can become a dismal timesuck with nothing to show at the end of it.  I am not against cutting your losses if things go downhill, but do your homework first so you are not leaving people in the lurch if you decide to leave.

Sooooo, having said all that I just signed up for a fanfilm named Star Wars: The Forgotten.  I found out about it on a thread talking about online collaborations and the problems facing people and I contacted the director, Douglas, wishing him good luck.  We exchanged a few emails but at the time I was working on ‘Australia’ as well as teaching at Uni, so I had literally no spare time.

Come February and work is thin on the ground everywhere in Australia, so along with upping my Maya skills I thought I might check in and see how it is going.  Seems that it is full steam ahead and Douglas even has an old VFX maestro on board: George Muhs who worked on VFX for such films as “The Hunt for Red October”, “Robocop”, “Ghostbusters 2″, “Scrooged” and  ”Earth Girls Are Easy”.  Not a bad pedigree!

I had my first online meeting on Monday after downloading my footage and checking all the design docs and I have to say I was impressed with the organisation.  I feel confident that the people running the project have it sorted and that is a big thing when it comes to fan films.  I have checked my shots and done a few quick tests in Shake and while the footage is certainly not perfect, I reckon we can get something decent out of it.

Maybe the film will be great, maybe it won’t.  I don’t know at this stage, but I can tell you that I am busy honing my compositing skills and I have already met some interesting new people who I might get to work with again in the future, so it is all good!

Check out:

RvD2: Ryan vs. Dorkman 2 – a very impressive lightsaber battle with FX contirbutions by our own Daniel Broadway

http://www.theforce.net/fanfilms/

http://www.fanfilms.net/

>> UPDATE <<

Whoah!  I just recalled that one of my first exercises in compositing was a Star Wars Lightsaber duel (surely most nerds would say the same thing) in Combustion.  I ordered the DV Garage Composite Toolkit and the Composite Toolkit Companion and followed their excellent tutorials to produce this wonder.  Unfortunately the tutorial was for After Effects, so I had to convert almost every step to make it work in Combustion, but I sure learned a lot!  To be honest, it still doesn’t look too bloody bad for someone’s first go at real compositing

Of course, at the time, I had no real idea what I was doing.  Now it all seems so straightforward and obvious, but back then it was some kind of arcane magic that you could make cool stuff happen!

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I mentioned in my last post that a lot of compositors come from non-3D backgrounds.  Being a 2D medium, compositors often come from working with Photoshop or editing software such as Avid and Final Cut Pro.  As such, a lot of compositors might not have a full appreciation of the 3D pipeline.

As I suggested, my opinion is that whatever your job in the pipeline, it is a good idea to have at least cursory knowledge of the skills that bookend your position.  That way you will be able to communicated effectively with your workmates and be more efficient.

Sometimes, depending on the production, you may find yourself needing particular minor things done and you need them done quickly, not when someone finally has a chance to get to them.  The following are reasonably basic skills that can really help out a compositor:

Import match-moved camera data.

At some point, if 3D is being integrated into live action, a Match Move artist (using something like PFTrack or Boujou) will have produced a final locked-off match move solve and camera setup that is being used by the 3D guys.  Knowing how to, at the very least, set projects and open files in Maya is something that everyone in VFX should know.

Even if you are not going to do an entire 3D project, things like cards with textures (eg buildings, animations of people etc) can be easily inserted and rendered out.  Of course, with applications like Nuke and After Effects you have the ability to import 3D scenes and objects, but it is always handy to know how to do it in Maya.  Plus, you have a lot more control in a dedicated 3D application if you have to do something more advanced.

Skydome

Once you have that camera data imported, make sure that you know how to choose and look through the approved camera for that shot.  Making a basic skydome is pretty basic stuff.  On ‘Animalia’ (a children’s animated TV show), we made a *tonne* of skydomes ourself if backgrounds weren’t made or if it was decided during dailies that a new sky would be needed.  The lighters and renderers had their plates completely full, so bothering them to do something so basic would be a waste or their time.

 I was lucky enough to sit next to a guy who had studied Maya (John Kitching) and he showed my how to make skydomes.  As a 3ds Max user, Maya was a bit of a dark art, but even I could follow his instructions.  I mean, really, half a NURBS sphere with a panorama texture placed on it.  I think a smart compositor can figure that out!  Thankfully I have been putting a lot more hours into Maya over the last 2-3 months, so it is becoming a lot more straightforward.

Particles

Ahhh particles, how I love thee  I love ‘em and they are what I really loved to work with in 3ds Max.  I have only just started transferring my skills over to Maya, and to be honest it is a bit of a struggle.  PFlow in Max is an excellent node/flow graph way to get very good results very quickly and intuitively.  Maya seems to involve a lot more coding, but also appears more robust when dealing with large numbers of particles . . . something which Max would choke on (at least until the arrival of Krakatoa).

Having said that, the first thing I will be learning in Maya particles is how to create my own smoke, fog and steam.  Why?  Because you use them all the time in compositing and while you are usually given filmed elements, sometimes you want the smoke to go just there or you want the steam to have a particular look.  Sure you might be able to achieve that with retiming, warping and tracking, but if you know how to make your own, then you’d be crazy not to.  It seems to me that for these types of elements, sprite particles will do the job.  No need for fluid simulations, just a bunch of particles mapped with smoke textures that face the camera!  Voila!  Instant custom made element.