Week 45 – 1 Week to Go! Cleaning Up Comps, Tweaking the Edit, Additional Sound, Peer Review, Presentation

A week and a half left to hand in and everything is going according to plan. Most of the compositing was done with 2 weeks to spare, which was in keeping with the original schedule, so I’ve been doing the odd re-render to clean up a few things. I noticed that some of the 3840 particle renders that I had composited, didn’t look quite as good as some of the others, due to the fact that I had reformatted the size to HD before putting it together with all the other nodes – rather than having the whole scene as 3840 until the end of the pipeline and then reformatting before writing out the file. I didn’t think it would matter, but there seems to be a minor difference.

I also found that the purely CG scenes, the music notation in particular, seemd too ‘clean’ in comparison to the other shots, so I graded the colour to match the opening shot and added some grain to make it more like the camera shots. As for the molecules shot, I re-rendered the shot with z-depth and changed the flares slightly, so they didn’t look as ‘out of the box’ as the original preset did.

Tweaking the Edit

I haven’t needed to do too much for the edit, mainly because I’ve been replacing the scenes as they’ve come in. Recently, however, I have really been focussing on the timing of the glyph shapes with the music to be as accurate as possible. Clealy, I accounted for some minor timing issues as I key framed the whole piece way back in the beginning along with the collision particles and used them as a basis for the rest. The timing has been relatively good, however, so I’m quite happy with the small amount of lag here and there.

Titles, Credits and Additional Sound

I added in a few foley sounds to the mix for effect – a wave sound to match the beach scene, as well as changing the equalisation for that shot as well to make the sound more ‘tinny’ like it’s coming out of the headphones. I tried to mimic the idea of the ‘detuned’ sound you get when a car drives past, but it messed up the soundtrack too much so I settled for a car sound driving past to put it more into the scene. In addition, I added some fire sounds to match the bonfire and finally I created some additional new music for the credits – this amounts to a simple series of notes on a synthesiser (from the original melody) that matches the glyphs at the end. I re-used some of the glyphs from the film, but placing them on a black background and with some added godrays, they essentially feel like new shots – and combined with the music it has ended up being reminicent of something like ‘Close Encounters’, which I quite like, as it gives it an other-wordly feel, and it’s quite funny!

Peer Review

The scariest moment of the whole project is when you play what you have in front of your fellow classmates, especially if they know what they’re talking about. It’s a worthwhile process. Thankfully, there weren’t too many suggestions to changing the whole thing, but useful ideas concerning grading and colour, by and large. One shot that seemed to be out of place was the beach shot – the girl in the shot is wearing headphones and was originally designed to show sound bleeding out of them but unfortunately without the VFX they’re hard to see (the VFX didn’t look good), and I don’t know if it was exaggerated due to the addition of the ‘radio’ type equalisation I did on the sound to bring the audience out of the previous perspective. Also, the fact that the words ‘and sound’ seem to come in a scene after the previous text makes it a bit disjointed. So, I tried bringing in the glyphs again to the shot, but it doesn’t look good. I’m now toying with the idea of trying to do a last minute replacement shot, so I’ve hired out the Go-Pro with the prospect of trying a few things: possibly on the head of the guitar for a ‘down the neck’ shot; clamped to a pair of headphones, relating to the original idea somehow; or fixed to a little handheld radio that’s being carried around. We’ll see what tomorrow brings after a crash course in using a Go-Pro.

Presentation

I have also put together most of the slides for next week’s presentation. I have had to look back at the original programme of study reports to check on the consistency and evolution of my project. Essentially, have I produced what I set put to produce in the beginning? That, and many other questions over the nature of the methods etc need to be addressed. This will be the last one, and it’s a bit longer than the previous presentations, but there’s plenty to talk about.

New Shot

Well, it wouldn’t be a proper finish if I wasn’t trying to cram in something at the last minute! Last night I tried a few alternative versions with the GoPro – headphones on, radio shot etc. The headphones shot, which was my priority, turned out to make my head look too alien from the close angle to my head, so i’ve opted for a shot of the radio. There wasn’t too much effort on the initial composite as I’d just plugged in the new images to the old version of the beach shot:

Having said that, as the glyphs are now full frame, the original resolution wasn’t good enough, so I’ve had to re-render the whole scene for particles at double HD resolution and geometry at HD. I don’t have time to send the geometry through the render farm, so I’ve opted instead to use the sotware renderer at home and subtly apply the amount of geometry in the comp. I increased the amount of godrays in this one a little and it seems to work well.

Week 44 – 2 Weeks to Go! Final Composites, Editing, Tidying Up, Titles and Credits

I’m now getting to the stage where I have only 3 scenes left to composite. Having said that, I will, time permitting, redo a few of them to clean up the odd issue. Most of them could probably do with a re-render depending on the issues each of them have. Clearly, though, time is a major issue and I need to draw the line under what I think is acceptable and what I think I can improve on in a very short space of time. Our final films will be shown at the DCA – so it will be great to see them on the big screen, but the downside is that any minor faults will be amplified somewhat! So, I need to do my best obviously!

This also week sees ‘Concerning dragons’ on the BIG screen in City Square, so that should be fun.

Godrays and Lightwrap

Last week I forgot to throw in a picture of lightwrap in operation so here we are (this is the end of someone’s foot!):

The idea is that you can take the light from the background B and apply it to the foreground A. It can be blurred etc, and it depends on the intensity and how diffuse you make it. Good for covering up roto problems and placing in roto’d people into the scene more convincingly.

Godrays is a node that allows the colour of your scene/node to be splayed outward depending on where your place the centre point and transform point. It’s easy to get carried away with this one, so I’ve done my best to be subtle about it and enhance the glyphs by first rendering out a separate pass with just them, and applying it over the original ones to give it a slight blur but also the impression of bursting out from the source:

Editing in Adobe Premiere

I had done a rough edit before semester 3 with the storyboards, then replaced that with a version using the footage without VFX. So, now I have been replacing the shots as they come in to see how it’s shaping up and what needs to be done. All seems to be going well apart from an unknown issue that keeps crashing the program, when I try and render out the scenes as they are. At the moment I’m tryng to suss out what the problem is. I’m going to try and render out each scene as a separate movie clip, maybe a png or something, and try again. To be continued…

…The ‘png’ file conversion seems to be working, as I converted all the tif sequences into mov’s with a png codec, and Premiere seems to be running more smoothly. I can only assume that it can’t handle too many tif sequences at once.

Tidying Up

All of the scenes have been rendered out, and I’ve put a rough edit together to see how it runs. It looks pretty good, although it’s hard to see it with fresh eyes as I’ve been focussed on the minutae for so long. Some of the scenes have a few little problems like: some glyph transforms needs put right as they run off too quickly; a few additional roto masks to brighten up the church roof or tone down the light coming in the windows; the fake flash lighting in one shot needs the roto sorted out. Anyway, small issues really. I don’t think at this stage any major changes can or will be forthcoming.

Titles and Credits

I have begun creating initial ideas for the title sequence – so far, I’m using an extended version of the scene where I’m writing the musical notation but this time with the text ‘Holographic Music: An Interpretation of Cymatics’ as the title. I have created 3 versions – one red, green and blue – which slip over the other to create a kind of chromatic abberation, till a little godrays and animation has the text fly out and fade subtly. I don’t want anything too flashy, as I’d like the film to start simply and build to a crescendo of sorts at the end. For the credits, I plan to use some cymatic images over a black background with an extended simple melody that will accompany the glyphs. (Images to follow)

 

Week 43 – 3 Weeks to Go! Nuke – problem shots, reflections, depth, flares, lighting, lightwrap

It’s now getting to the stage where I’ve almost completed the first round of passes in Nuke. What I mean by that is that I have a version of each scene, some in more need of repair than others, in terms of additional rotoing, lighting and general tidying up. One thing that annoys me on a daily basis is the lack of memory on the computers in Uni that i’m using – not that I can really complain – but what seemed like a lot of memory (100GB!) a while back, is now a case of juggling things between drives to free space on a daily basis. It’s largely down to the amount of images that I have rendered.

Problem Shots

Some of the shots I expected to be simple have turned out to be problematic for various reasons:

• the last shot at queens view is shaky due to the zoomed in nature of it, and thus the glyphs over the top need to be matched for shakiness. So, I added a tracker and used a transform matchmove node to match the movement. I also had to key frame 2 separate transform nodes as the roto and glyphs scaled and transformed as well:

• In addition, I had to reimport the original footage again, as the colour graded footage I created in After Effects, for some reason is unusable – it jumps randomly from 1 frame to another, so I’ll colour correct it in Nuke
• a similar problem existed for the drive past scene where the graded footage seemed corrupted and looked interleaved – is there some kind of corporate battle between Nuke and AE to prevent me using both?!

Reflections

To make the VFX sit in the scene in a more believable fashion, I had rendered out the light line passes, and they have helped. But more is needed! So, for the shots within the church in particular, I have begun rendering out tif’s for purely the glyphs in the scene. The idea is that I’m going to flip them over and blur them to be used as reflections in the floor. This can be done pretty easily by using a transform node and scaling the H axis as -1. Once blurred, the only thing left is to mask out the area furter away from the reflections by using roto techniques and feathering. I’ll add images shortly.

Depth

I’d forgotten to mention that last week I had started to incorporate depth passes into the pipeline as well. I’m only using them subtly, as much of the footage is mainly in focus and the demand for depth is minimal. I am aware of overdoing depth, but it can help to slightly blur out the foreground or background of the shot:

Flares

Here’s a shorthand bullet pointed way to create pretty good flares in Nuke:

• Track footage
• Create first flare – ‘burst’
• Merge using plus operation
• Hold CTRL and LMB drag from tracker x y position to x y position in flare node
• Presets –
• many bright – multi tab – asymmetry – repeat controls how many points on the star
• falloff – how sharp they are
• Ring color – colour of the flare itself
• Size mult – size of the flare
• Create a second flare – ‘streak’ – plug it into the first (drag the arrow from the first into it!)
• Alt + E to turn off expression links (green lines!)
• Use ‘bright’ preset
• Change colour inner ring to blue/white
• Colour shifts – chroma spread etc control chromatic aberration
• Size – radius to make inner/outer bigger etc
• Set anamorph to 7/10 (type in numbers!)
• Bring down size mult
• Bring down brightness
• Add 3^rd flare – multi penta (for additional streaks) – this moves with the camera, so don’t need to copy the position
• Change ring colour and inner colour to blue
• Go darker on the ring colour to feather out the edges – then bring up outer falloff so it’s feathered
• Anamorph to around 10
• Do copy animation expression for position!
• Add a 4^th flare – ‘magenta’ – multi penta again
• Decrease multiple flares to 4
• Use random offset to push them closer together
• Flare tab – up the size – and offset
• Size in the multi tab can vary the size in all of them
• Shape – corners 0 (flare tab)
• Change ring and inner colour to magenta/red
• Change chroma spread and shift to suit
• Size of flare doesn’t really change, but brightness does depending on distance
• Use multiply node to control brightness of all flares

Lighting

Additional ambient lighting was going to be a problem – I tried doing it in Maya with the proxy collision objects as the surface to light, but it was going to be too time consuming to tidy up the geometry to make it accurate enough. It was only designed, after all, for the particle collsions. So, I had to fake it in Nuke! One solution which seems to work as a kind of ‘flash’ lighting effect, was to use a combination of a radial ramp with a circular section roto’d out. I then keyed in the flashes to coincide with the glyphs:

Week 42 – 4 Weeks to Go! Compositing in Nuke, Light Line Passes, Geometry Passes, Render Farm

Nuke

So, with the geometry and depth layers coming in as the render farm works through the files, I am focussing on compositing with Nuke. The main nodes I seem to be using so far include: read/write, merge, unpremultiply, premultiply, colour correct, grade, glow, blur, copy, and as of yesterday lightwrap. Lightwrap is a useful way of bringing in light around the edges of the foreground node using the background colour to bleed into it. This is good for covering up edges etc. Having said that, there are a couple of shots that will require redoing, including the beach shot where the roto is too rough.

Shortcuts:

• F – to frame the selected node or backdrop – this is much quicker than using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out
• D – this is an easy ‘disable’ or ‘enable’ shortcut for turning a node on or off
• Copy and paste work as usual!

Light Lines

I managed to render all of the light line shots at home over the weekend to save sending more through the far – these were created using an inverse ambient occlusion pass and composited using the ‘plus’ operation on the merge node:

Problems

The static shot from the back of the church has caused a problem, in that the central point of all the glyphs don’t match where the speaker is on the boom box. I don’t know why – anyway, I got around the problem by addign a transform node and slightly scaling up the background to match the glyphs./ The only problem is that the light lines are out of scale with the back of the wall. So, in work around fashion, I have masked out the top overlapping part of the light lines only for the section that is obvious, using a black rectangle:

Model Problems – When putting together the geometry renders, there was one glyph that didn’t align – the G1 polygonal particle goal was distorted – it seems that I had made some error way back in the construction of that layer. I missed it back then and only noticed that there was a problem now. So, basically I had to rebuild the polygons from the original nurbs to save time overall, and subsequently only have to re-render the poly goal particles for the 5 scenes that it appears in, rather than all of the nurbs and geometry again. One disappointing factor is that there was a beautiful colour ramp that seemed to work really well with the original, but flawed, version. I have to content myself with righting one wrong and losing one thing for the sake of the whole.

Sean Yu

Today, Sean took us for one last class relating to Maya and Nuke, although he will be around to consult on the upcoming Fridays. Most of the Maya material he was covering was valid, but ultimately pointless for most of us as we’re already well-established on our respective roads. The Nuke material was a bit more relevant, discussing the ways to use the ZDefocus, shuffle and colour correct amongst many of the nodes I’m familiar with. I must remember and add grain to my composites as well as some, at times, overused flares!

Glyph Template

Just to update, here is the current template for comping each glyph:

I have also decided to colour correct the collision particles to a light blue, away from the original orange, as it seems to sit in better with the general colour scheme of the glyphs as a whole:

Cymatics Text Shot

I wasn’t happy with the 3D track of the text shot – I had tried a couple of times to re-render and even tried to keyframe out some of the jerkiness of tha shot, but I wasn’t happy. So, I have tried another 3D track of the shot and I have rendered it. It’s much better second time around thankfully – job done on this shot.

Molecules Shot

The molecules shot is done now as well – I tried a couple of different versions of text which I wasn’t happy with, including text from photoshop – I settled on using the same font that I used in the cymatics text shot (Adobe Garamond Pro) for consistency. In Nuke, I used two separate layers of text, slightly misaligned, with the foreground text being a light shade of blue, and the background one being dark grey. This lets the viewer still read the text even though it sits in front of the central light, created from a radial node with glow, and a flare added for some ‘movie magic’!?