IanHubert
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Photoscanned Vendors [Re-working the WaterWorks]
🕑 Added 2020-10-16 09:09:47 +0000 UTCHeeyyyy- want to know a secret technique to never finish a film? Take so long to finish it that eventually you begin looking at the first VFX shots you did a couple years before and start wanting to re-do them.
Cause that's a slippery slope.
It's full-blown BICMIB syndrome [But I Could Make It Better]. When you're trying to worldbuild with CG, there's always that question of when to model new assets, and when to just copy-and-paste an old one. Copying-and-pasting lets you finish stuff a lot faster, but it can make things look a bit overly homogenous, and if you use the same assets for too long it starts to hold back the quality of your work. It also tends to limit your creativity, because you're not making assets specifically for a situation, you're just dealing with general stuff.
With that in mind, I did some new photoscans with Nate this last weekend, making some new vendor guys to fill out the Waterworks Market.
I'll be uploading all this stuff as assets to the tier 7 folks in a few days here. They're maybe a bit too specific to be super useful, but there's hopefully lots of little bits in there to scavenge.
I really wish I had more than just 3 people to photoscan. It seems a little silly working hard to add all these rich characters and diversity to this scene when it's just the same couple people over and overrrrrr but maybe During A Quarantine wasn't the best time to get into this stuff, haha.
Alghough! There are lots of ways to get just basic head photoscans (including just getting a few front/side photos and stitching them together in face-builder). Maybe at some point it'd be fun to do that and create a repository of digital heads.
Also- I'm in love with this workflow. These guys won't hold up perfectly if you get too close, but they should work great for mid-to-background shots. I kind of want to make a few more. But yeah, setting up a little scene knowing you'll be able to copy and paste anything in the scene later is a little surreal. At one point Nate and I were talking about creating little signs for the shops, and the realization that we could just bash em together in CG to stick them into the practical set we were making felt like a very bizarre mishmash of techniques.
This is the guy who was going to have the jellyfish shop- it's the only one I haven't assembled yet because I didn't know how the jellyfish would turn out. Why is he a cosmonaut? Because when you keep trying to come up with ways to hide someone's face, and there's a sweet helmet sitting on the shelf, at some point it's going to end up on someone's head.
Also huge thanks to Nate! It's very rare that I have a friend I can just spend a couple days making cool stuff with. It's always invigorating!
And a quick scan of the card scanner I've had in a few scenes. Low poly but works great for anything besides closeups. ALSO I was able to use the same video file for the screen as I used in the practical prop.
But yeah so- below is the first time we see the Waterworks market; it's a shot I made back in... 2018? And this is effectively what the final shot is in the episode. I added a bus driving by and a few lighting-mismatched greenscreened people, but it's basically just a jpeg with some handheld-wiggle (even that low-poly lady is still there, frozen mid-stride). I'm so tempted to update it with everything I've learned in the past few years, and all of the new assets.
But I'm also recognizing that I've been sitting on some of this footage for 4 years now, and I really need to start releasing stuff before it gets out of date!!
Lot of stuff is close to wrapping up- just have to give it that final push and stop making jellyfish! (I'm kidding. Some days you gotta make the jellyfish).
Comments
niko777
when will you upload these?
Curd Williams-Hertz
Would love to see a video on the assembly process
iain
superb!
Zander
Ian if your talking about getting a repository of digital heads I'm sure a fair few of us here wouldn't mind doing the honors and sending you some multi-angle shots of our heads to use face builder on, it would be an honor to be a digital representation in some of your work.
Ian Hubert
Aha, it's true!! I like rendering them with shallow depth of fields and some glossiness sometimes, because they look like little figurines, yeah :D
Ian Hubert
I think so... mostly it's just a case of me being overly excited about the asset, haha
George Moise
these are fucking amazing!
Michele Coser
Amazing as usual! Funny also that photoscanned and rendered people looks like nativity miniatures!
Phillip Park
All of this looks amazing! Thanks for the update!
Alejandro Gallegos
Thanks for everything Ian. I was hoping one of these days you could show us your organization process? to manage so many projects at a same time, plan shots, scheduling shoots, gathering assets, figure out storyboards, etc.
yea thanks ian for the reply
Robert Singler Jr
That's what it seems like to me!
Ian Hubert
Oh thanks Daan! But yeah, same jar model, but different head. I made the model, yeah! I'll try to upload it soon, here! I'm still working on the scene a little.
Erich Stenzel
These are wonderful, Ian!
actually its different because its half cyber thing and that one is just a straight up head
The model is downloadable for tier 7: https://www.patreon.com/posts/assets-small-in-36014703?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copy_to_clipboard&utm_campaign=postshare
David McSween
Have you considered making the scans modular low those mix and match flip books, that have legs, torso and heads on separate pages?
did you make the model if not do you have a link???
Ian Hubert
It's just an old cyberhead! He raids it for parts mostly. And we just scanned Nate's head, then used booleans to separate it out into different panels, then stuck them on top of a metallic skull model. He was going to be part of a HyperBole racer but we'll see!
whats up with that awesome cyber head in the jar its so cool and how would you make something like that
Paul and Anna Spooner
Wait, why does book guy have a card scanner? Why do all the vendors? Is that, like, the standard method of payment?
Wow. Ian these are incredible thank you so much for all that you do.
Damn my BICMIB Syndrome is so bad
Bellus3d is an app on ios and works with iphone X and up, it gives you a 3d scan of a full head very easily. I actually use it to make a 3d head to use for face tracking, and also end up using it for shadow casting on the face
Jan van den Hemel
I was thinking the same!
This is way cool. Barring finding people to photoscan, have you considered using style GANs to generate faces? :: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ This is one made by NVidia. There are a lot of papers on how to do this and there might even be some software that is even available for free, that can be run on Google Col-Lab or some cloud service to generate meshes based on style GAN face generation to mesh and uv map any number of characters that are just made up by a computer and look real.
Markom3D
Yep, I did the same thing with Business Partnership putting it off for 4 months only, but the fact that a film festival deadline was coming up, that made me do it
Oh man, the same thing happened to me. Im about to wrap this film in post, saw some rendered shots from like 6 months ago and I know I must resist the urge to polish them or the film will take an extra month to finish, thanks for the inspiration. I'll thank you on the credits of my film for all the knowledge you share! Greetings from Tijuana.
Mario Taylor
This looks awesome, @Ian! Idea: can we help somehow? Some of us have cameras and a lot of us have faces. :) That combined with for example google drive could give you access to a lot of unique faces that you then can photogrammetr...ize? Edit: if we take photos from all the necessary angles that is; otherwise face-builder would work as you said.
