I realise you have probably heard this pithy little acronymn before, but really, they are words to live by. Or an acronymn to live by. Or whatever.

If you are doing a small project, or more likely, a one man/woman project there is the temptation to think big. Sometimes a little too big. There is nothing wrong with having grand plans, and I am all about using our Mad Skillz to make low-budget look high budget, but there is something to be said for a simple, snappy idea well executed.

While it’s not compositing, check out this little short. Under 1 minute, tight like a drum and funny as all get out

Or perhaps you have heard of a little movie called District 9? If not, then shame on you and everything you stand for. If you have, I am assuming you have seen director Neill Blomkamp’a original short “Alive in Joburg” made a few years ago. 6m25sec and it got turned into a feature. A solid idea well executed with no extra fat.

For one more example, go back and check out that short vid I posted, Escape from City 17. Short, snappy, low budget but focused and done well.

K.I.S.S.

I didn’t get into to much detail about the actual eqipment that I use in the video, so here are some pics and links of the stuff that makes the magic happen!

DigiDesign MBox 1 rear panel

I believe I wrongly called my audio interface an MAudio, but it was actually made by DigiDesign (much like Autodesk, Avid seems to own everything audio/video and it gets confusing!). I am using the MBox1 USB audio interface which is a bit of a dinosaur these days, but it does what I need.  The temptation was there to get something with more inputs and a mixer because they look cool and have lots of knobs on them, however the fact is that I do most music and audio recording by myself, so will only be using a maximum of two microphones (one vocal and one instrument).  Resist the urge to buy equipment you don’t really need, but try and futureproof as much as possible.

Shure SM58 - the industry workhorse

For a microphone I looked long and hard but in the end I couldn’t go past the Shure SM58 for performance at a very good price.  As I was just getting into audio recording I didn’t want to splash big bucks on equipment that I didn’t know much about.  As I get better with home recording I will have a better idea of the qualities I am looking for a in a microphone.

Sennheiser HD 280 Pro - Niiiiiice

Okay, okay, I splurged a bit on these headphones, but these are your direct interface with your audio.  I have a nice pair of Sennheisers for listening to music but they are *not* the headphones for mastering music.  They up the bass and do crazy things to make the music “pop”.  That’s great when I am listening to the Flaming Lips, but when you are mastering audio you want a flat, non-enhanced version of the music hitting your eardrums.

17" Macbook Pro HD

Za beast!!  I wouldn’t technically call this a laptop as if you have to carry it around in a satchel for an hour your shoulder feels like Mike Tyson did a bit of warmup work on it.  However, a fantastic computer all ’round.  Get the anti-glare screen as the reflections on the glossy screen are truly insane.  Unfortunately I only have a 20″ monitor to share with my PC workstation so they are both limited to 1680×1050.  This will soon change with 24″ monitors being so cheap these days.

Wacom - worth the money

While I use the Wacom for the work, I tend to use the mouse for the vidcast as it just seems like I need to do a lot of precise clicking and keyboard work.  I have started using a Wacom in Maya as well due to have a sore wrist (yay for RSI) and it is starting to become second nature.  The Intuos 4 looks sweet, but unless you really, really need it, it might be an idea to pick up an older but cheaper Intuos 3.

The rest - MS mouse, MAudio Axiom 25 and my pig mug.

The rest of the motley crew.  The MS mouse has lasted for years and is still comfortable to use.  I finally picked up a midi controller earlier this year, the MAudio Axiom 25 and it is totally sweet for making muzak.  Nice keys, pads and dials for under AUD$300.  The pig mug is my constant companion and has been with me since I was a kid.  Thank goodness I just find a tea store in Melbourne and it has been full of proper Early Grey all weekend (coffee at work, tea at home is my motto . . . until I get a coffee machine at home ;p)

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Alrighty, back with another one of those block rockin’ beats to quote those Englishmen, the Chemical Brothers.

Last time we looked at offset tracking in Shake, a relatively straightforward and easy affair . . . not so in After Effects as it turns out. Hopefully this will help you out. Thanks to my co-worker Dan Bryant for showing me this method which I then finally found somewhere else on the net with Carl Larsen’s video over at Creative Cow. If you are an After Effects user and aren’t checking Creative cow, then shame on you!

Alrighty!  I am back . . . back with some awesome moves that arrived in the post, the early post . . . the post that hurts the most!  Actually, today we are going to have a quick look at getting organised before you start your project.  Exciting?  Possibly not.  Essential? Definitely.



Now, at this stage in your career you have probably been working on projects by yourself or with a couple of friends or classmates.  If it’s the latter you would have noticed how quickly things can spiral out of control when you don’t organise things, especially if you have multiple people working on scenes.


Today I am going to focus on naming and setting up files as opposed to organise particular processes for modeling, rigging, rendering etc.  As I have stated before, what I suggest here is not the only way (or the best way), it’s just to get you thinking about some of this issues.


In terms of file structure you might need to take into account the kinds of files that will be output from different software, where they should be rendered to, where are the temp directories, what is the approval process, will you publish versions that are reviewed so they can’t be changed etc.


I am not going to go into details about how you should name files as it might vary every case is different, but keep in mind things like using things like “lowercaseUppercase” (also known as camel case), “using_underscores_instead_of_spaces” and “not_using_reserved_characters!!”.  A lot of this stuff just makes for consistency but some of it is crucial for scripting purposes.  Your IT people or data wranglers may need to run batch scripts on files and, for example, the script might look at the number of underscores in a filename to decide what to do with it.  If you name the file incorrectly, the whole things comes undone.


Once you have figured this out, work out your naming conventions for your scene files and your objects.  Naming things sphere001, sphere002 and not parenting objects correctly etc is a sure way to get stabbed in the ear with a pencil!  Why?  Because somebody opening your file will have no idea what is going on.  You have to assume that someone else is going to need to look at your files at some point and will need to figure out what is going on.  See also the tips on scripting.  It may be the case that your TD will need to run a script on, say, every current Maya file changing the name or attributes of a common object.  If you haven’t kept with the naming conventions, it will screw everything up.


The same goes with work in progress scripts and renders.  A method I have used before with good results is to name files as majorVersion_wipVersion, sooooo, something like:


comp_v01_01.shk

comp_v01_02.shk

etc


The first number is the major version, the second number are your WIP’s.  When you submit for review, cut off the last two number so you are left with comp_v01.  Not only does this cut down on having massive numbers of versions, but it also avoids your director having a heart attack! (”Version 78?!? What they hell are you doing?!”).


Same goes for your renders.  This way you will always know where you are up to.  When you submit version 01, move it to a published folder and copy it and immediately rename to v02_01 when you need to make changes.  This way you will always know what the latest version is.  *NEVER* go back versions and *NEVER* name anything with the word “Final” in it!


As always, comments or suggestions are welcomed!


ETA: Damnit, why won’t wordpress and Firefox add proper line breaks?  You would think this would be a basic feature.

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Offset tracking?  What about tracking in general, Matt?  Hold your horses and steady on!  I freely admit that this is an old tutorial I did for the University course I taught, so apologies to my previous students . . . please don’t let this make you feel any less special.  You are all unique snowflakes!

Actually the real reason is that upon reflection my original tracking video might raise the ire of Teh Appel Corporation as I used the standard footage provided in the shake tutorial book . . . soooooo, rather than risk a multi-billionaire dollar lawsuit and put Steve Jobs already strained health under more stress, I will look at doing a re-edit with some techniques I learned on ‘Australia’.  

Now, these concepts can be applied to pretty much any compositing software.  As far as I know they all have the ability to offset or append a search region.  Why do we do this?  The main reason is because your main tracking points become obscured or head offscreen.  The thing is, as an aspiring compositor or 3D person, you might not know that this is possible, so you will be fighting your footage trying to get “the perfect track” on a point when it either just can’t be done or you can get a better track quicker and with less time wastage by choosing better tracking data at some point in your clip.

So, without further delay, check it, like, totally out.  As always, comments, questions and additions are welcome.  Only unnecessarily over the top profanity is frowned upon.

Offset tracking. Sexxy, no? No.

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I finally got my desktop fired up and grabbed this video I made last year for class.  I have a 50meg version of this I will try and get up soon if 80meg is too big.  I have used Simon Reeves’ excellent breakdown on his website www.bankaffairs.com.  Check it out for some very clear examples of using RBG passes for compositing in CSI Please note that all images are copyright Simon Reeves and are to be used for education purposes only.  Check out Simon’s main site at www.simonreeves.com.

Note: for clarity (and my own workflow), I have reordered the channels of the RBG passes before feeding them into nodes.  You don’t have to do this in Shake.  In the node being masked you can choose which channel you want to use as the mask.

Images (c) Simon Reeves

I will start by saying that there are a few threads on various forums, so feel free to check them out, but this post is a distillation of those threads and personal experience.  I will also keep this reasonably general, as obviously different reels will focus on different things.   These are the basics that I believe you should cover.

Actually, this is a resume not a demo reel. D'oh!

I remember reading a couple of long threads about what you shouldn’t have on your reel.  To my mind, if you didn’t put on everything that someone mentioned, you wouldn’t have a bloody reel!  For example, it is routinely stated that you shouldn’t do light saber battles.  Fair call.  Fair call, that is, unless you do something like Ryan vs Dorkman, which is a pretty damn cool low budget saber battle.  Same thing for spaceships: “Don’t put spaceships on your reel unless they are better than ILM’s work”.  O RLY?  Are you not supposed to put anything on your reel that is not up to the standard of the worlds best VFX studios?  Well that’s great advice if you work at ILM and have a team of people to make your shots look amazing, but it’s not really that helpful if you are starting out and need to show your hard-surface modeling chops.

Also, I will categorically state that my current reel is in no way perfect.  Reels should always be looked at with an eye to revise and cull, but they do take a bit of effort to organise, so you don’t want to be fiddling every week on the bloomin’ thing.

The Creative

Don’t put anything on your reel that you feel is not top quality.  If you don’t think it was good work, why would anyone else?  The reason for this is that even if you have something good, if you have something bad next to it, it will actually negate or bring down the impact of the good work.  This is a big one with student reels, and I am still a little guilty of it.  You want to pad out that reel and show off all you have learned, but I guarantee you that you have some real crap there.  Come on, admit it.  It’s time to be honest

Following on from that, HR and lead artists would rather see a reel with one amazing 10 second shot than a sub-par 5 minute reel.  Actually, any 5 minute reel will probably get dumped on general principles.

Speaking of time, show your stuff quickly.  I have watched demo reels where it takes, honest to God, 30-40 seconds to show work after all the fancy mo-graf intros and fade in and outs.  Such reels would be instantly binned.  A few seconds for you contact details and the straight into it!

Focus.  If you are an animator, don’t feel the need to do an amazing lighting/texturing setup .  Seriously, you could have just the rig and it would be fine.  They will be looking at your animation.  Ugly texturing and lighting take away the focus from what you are trying to show.  Same with modeling, show your models and meshes.  If you are a great texture artist as well, great, but don’t feel the need to pretty it up if that is not what you do.  It’s like the suggestion of not showing bad work next to good.  If you have a mega cool mesh and it is textured with a couple of bad procedural textures it is going to look terrible.

If you do specialise in several areas, consider have separate reels for separate job applications.  Of course, if you are a generalist it is a different story.

Keep it to around 2 minutes.  Mine is a little long (I feel) at around 2:20, so some more cutting might be in order.  No one wants to watch a 5 minute reel.  This means no short films.  Most studios have a backlog of reels and want to get to the good stuff fast.  Investing 5 minutes to find out where the story is going is not your passport to success.

The Technical

The main focus with the technical side of things is to ensure that your reel and details are seen with the least amount of effort or problems.  If someone has to scratch around to find your contact details or, heaven forbid, install software to watch your reel, you are going to be binned faster than Superman folding washing on laundry day!

Quicktime.  That’s it.  Don’t faff about with crazy codecs.  You can’t be sure that studios will have DivX orXVid on their computers.  Almost all facilities will have Quicktime on their computers.  H264 is pretty popular these days and gives excellent files sizes although it seems to gamma up the video a bit.

PAL or NTSC.  Unfortunately some places still want actual DVD reels, which is frankly a pain in the arse.  Granted they are easier to watch as you just take it into a meeting room and slap it in the DVD player to watch, but the quality is very average and you have to faff about with postage, which if you live in Australia, starts to get expensive (errr, because we are very far away from everybody).   Soooo, set up two reels and save the projects so you can quickly burn a PAL or NTSC DVD.  Unfortunately a bid hard to test them if you don’t have the other format DVD player, but oh well.  Also, keep in mind that you can create DVD’s with data folders, so I use that to put a very high quality Quicktime and PDF copies of my documents with a note on the DVD menu to check the disc on a computer if HR wants to see better quality copies.

PDF or plain text.  Don’t send your resume and breakdowns as Word files.  Firstly, you can’t be sure the people receiving it will have Word, secondly Word files are often treated as suspicious virus carriers by IT.  Pretty much every computer will have Acrobat Reader or failing that, Notepad.

Music: Up to you really.  In my experience most reels are watched with the sound off.  Obviously if you are an animator and showing some lip-sync work, sound will be needed.  Perhaps note this in the intro to your reel so those watching will know to have the volume up.  As for synching all your reel to beats in your music, well, it takes an awful lot of effort for not much result.

Put your contact details everywhere:  This is a major bugbear of HR people.  Put your name and contact details on your resume, put them on the physical DVD, put them on your reel at the start and end.  And, for the love of God, name your files something useful.  The number of online reels I have scene name “reel.mov” or something similar is astounding.  Name it something like “your_name_animation_reel_0904.mov”.  If someone sees it, they know exactly what the file relates to.

This topic came up recently on CGTalk and I also covered it in the compositing course I taught at the Queensland College of Art.  I do have a video screencast as well that I did that I will try and dig up as I think it is on my main PC which is in pieces at the moment.

Inspiring, no?

The question was: “How do I use ID passes (or RGB mattes) in my compositing?”

I guess the first place to start is to remember that compositing is all about colour channels.  Pretty much the first thing you do when you get your plates is check the colour channels (red, green and blue) to see what kind of information is there.  When you are working with straight CG images, it is a bit different.  You will often have various black and white mattes rendered out for you to isolate various objects in a scene.

As we (hopefully) know by now, mattes are essentially greyscale (grayscale for you North American types) images that affect an area of your based on the intensity of the pixel colour value, usually with pure white affecting the change the most and black affecting the least.  These can be things like images, patterns, keys or rotoshapes.

The good thing about CG is you can output just about anything relating to your render.  Diffuse, specular, shadow, reflection, refraction, velocity, ID’s . . . the list is long.  The most basic pass you will get will be something like a foreground character that has it’s alpha channel already pre-multiplied (RGBA).  That is, you could stick it straight over a background as it already has an alpha channel.

Often, however, you will be given a pass that has an object, or several objects, shaded pure red, pure green and pure blue.  Why?  Well, we know that we can use this colour information to mask our objects.  By using or reordering/shuffling our channels, we can isolate a particular object using our RGB.  

Let’s look at an example scene.  Behold the power of Autodesk Maya.  I fully realise that this scene is beyond average and should not be used as an example of my actual 3D skills.  I am trying to make this as simple as possible.  No, really!

Basic colour pass

Now, our very nice lighting and rendering department has given us not one, but two extra passes to help finesse our scene.  The first is a straight RGB matte pass:

RGB matte pass

The second pass is an RGB lighting pass.  This is essentially our scene with 2 or 3 lights (key, fill and rim) and a basic shader.  Again, the lights are pure colours:

RGB lighting pass. Only red and green in this example.

So how do we use these passes?  I am going to use Shake and the reorder node for clarity here.  In Shake, and other compositing apps, you can often just choose in the node or effect which channel you want to use to affect that node or effect.  I am a big fan of clarity though, and as such, I prefer to use the Reorder node so I can instantly see which channel I am using:

Shake script overview

So, as you can see, I have split off three Reorder nodes from the tips_RGB_matte image:

RED

tips_RGB_matte RED channel

GREEN

tips_RGB_matte GREEN channel

BLUE

tips_RGB_matte BLUE channel

And here are the reordered red and green channels of our tips_RGB_lights pass:

RED

tips_RGB_lights RED channel

GREEN

tips_RGB_lights

ALRIGHTY!!!!!  We are pretty much ready now.  As we can see, now we have a bunch of nice clean mattes which we can use to modify not only the objects in the scene, but possibly use to relight the scene entirely.

Soooooo, going down my super mega awesome compu-tron 2000 script, we can see that I have brightened the cube, multiplied the sphere by a strong green and added a slightly horrific shade of orange to the cone.  Not brilliant but you get the idea.

Brightening the cube

Greening the sphere

Orange cones are good cones

On to the basic relighting, we can use the two lighting channels to change the colour and intensity of our key and fill lights.  To change the intensity I expanded the alpha after the reorders (essentially a levels call):

Relighting using the key light (red tinge)

Relighting using fill light (green tinge)

It’s possibly not as clear as day and night in the above shots, but as you can see, with just two extra passes from your 3D application, you suddenly have a lot more options for adjusting the looking of your comp without fussing about.

As always, if you have question, comments or suggestions, let me know below.

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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.

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Here is a cool tip that was passed on to me by one of our supervisors on Australia.  The idea is to use a colour lookup curve to shape how the edges of your matte are blurred, pushing the white pixels out to the edge or pulling them back into the core of your matte.

As always, if you have any questions or tips post them here. I would be especially happy if you have your own blog and can show how to replicate these techniques in other software. I just don’t have enough time or knowledge to do the tutorials in each application.

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