Things I Learned From Recent VFX Shots

Jed

Honestly thought the photoscan at the end was real, one of the best photoscan integrations I've seen

Hairynscary

Great info from your postmortems! Appreciate it. Rescuers reference takes it way back.

Chris Alldridge

Have you heard of Agisoft De-lighter? It’s free and *ridiculously* easy to use! You can take your RealityCapture exports and run them through it, click the areas you want to remove highlights/occlusions from, and then export it to Blender. The result is staggering, to the point where I now use it on all of my captures (even those that look uniformly exposed). Sure, it’s designed for occlusions but it works wonders for highlights too! Hope someone finds this useful!

YakovlevArt

would love an in-depth on compositing vfx. It seems like it would save time, rather than rendering a full blender scene for 15-20hrs for like 1minute of animation. Or is that normal?

Blaek Creative

Love the videos man, def do a new tutorial on blending + compositing the irl footage with the cgi footage!

Pete Burges

This is a great scene, and I'm sure they borrowed a lot of ideas from this sequence in the 'How to Train your Dragon' movies...

Thank you SO much for your content. I don't even use Blender (Houdini for me) but I find your workflows and attitudes so inspirational. You remind me why I got into 3D all those years ago. So happy to be able to offer my little bit of support. Thank you from over the pond/

Ha! Don't let your friend gaslight you... Today's soundtracks are mumblecore background patina of drones compared to the John Williams/Alan Silvestri golden age: Raiders Lost Ark, Predator, Aliens, Back to the Future, etc. C'mon! ^_^

Ian Hubert

Oh that's SUCH a good sequence :D

Kash

Cycles X is kind of different. I have watched the one you shared. Thanks

Carter Burr-Kirven

Have you seen this one, "Thoughts on Optimizing Your Cycles Renders?" https://www.patreon.com/posts/thoughts-on-your-37312614

Jay Gonzalez

for that curly cable you were talking about.. have you tried modeling the curved cable and then giving it a curve modifier and then giving the curve a cloth modifier or something of that nature?

Theo

Love that you mentioned the rescuers down under, but I gotta say the true stand out scene in that movie has to be the mice sending the sos signal, and you just get to see every different mouse's radio setup and how they jump into action to pass it on

Kash

Hi Ian, For the DJ shot the bushes in the front look so flat I think you can add some real geometry. Also can you do a quick tutorial on your workflow in rendering with CyclesX? I get a lot of fireflies, but your renders are clean. how do you do it?

Shoot I saw that like two other people beat me to it but here's my version of making a phone cord. If you have a really long cord, you could convert the curve to a mesh and check keep original. Then take the highest and lowest verts on the mesh version of the curve, separate them and extrude them and then use those for a knife cut so the loop cuts on the cube align correctly with the highs and lows of the curve. https://youtu.be/beN9EbiPk9k

Ian Hubert

I'm not *entirely* sure I understand the specifics of the question, but I do know that in real world "blender units" (where every square of the grid equals one meter), blender starts to give you a hard time if you model something as legitimately large as a city :D That said, if you're only ever going to see it from a distance, I'd personally say cheat it as much as possible!

Hi guys ! quick question : I need to build a city and it will be shot from very far. no close ups. Should I use real scale or cheat the perspective ? Does it matter ? (sorry in advance for the random question, I don't know where to ask...)

Ian Hubert

Yes! That's a great idea!! I had no idea the mesh deform modifier even existed- looks like it could be SO useful!

Ian Hubert

AHH!!! That works perfectly, thank you! And I didn't know about the surface deform modifier! I gotta find out more about that! Thank you so much, Maxime! :D (okay and just googled it- that's a WILDLY powerful modifier! Thanks so much for sharing that!)

Maxime Gérardin

Hey Ian, I made you a little video for the phone cable thing (just noticing now somebody did the same thing haha). But anyway here's the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x40qPVgEVPc And I never post comments but I always enjoy watching your content like, a lot!

Arch

One potential way to do the cable it to simulate the single string of vertices then use the skin modifier on that and use that as the target mesh for a mesh deform modifier on the cable.

Ian Hubert

Thanks Raffo! And that's great for single straight cables (SO useful!), but I'm trying to make it work for a spiral cable, like an old phone cord... my thought it that I might go the other way, make the phone cable a bezier curve, parent it to an empty, then parent that empty to one of the vertexes in the cloth simmed vertex chain you described? No idea if it'd work haha

Raffo VFX

For the cables thing, just extrude a single vertex many times, select any vertex and press ctrl+H and choose "connect to new object" It will connect that point to a new empty! Repeat this to another vertex and then apply cloth simulation, pinning the external vertices to a vertex group. Great stuff anyway, super cool the noise modifier trick for faking phisics <3

Paul Major

You offer the most value of any Patreon I'm aware of, thanks as always.

Seriously dude I can't thank you enough for creating such, inspiring and informative content! Even in my low times, seeing a post from you always brings me joy!

Kays Al-Atrakchi

"soundtracks today are just as competent, if not in general even more finessed and technically exemplary". <<--- Yeah, no. Not even close, take it from someone who knows a thing or two about the subject. ;-)

Ian Letarte

I had a bit of tutorial that speaks to the phone cord situation: https://youtu.be/dH9AJTZ7Lrs?t=130 that could help to point in the right direction. Also this video is gold. I love seeing all the crazy shots you've been working on and hearing what lessons you learned.

Felicia White

by the way, I also sent you geo node moths!

Felicia White

AYE Felicia White! That's me!

Ian Hubert

SAME! Just a week and a half! :D

Ian Hubert

Oh whoa! Just looked em up on instagram! They look really fun! :D

Ian Hubert

Haha!! From what I can tell you can do friggin' ANYTHING in geometry nodes... I should look into that!

Ian Hubert

WAIT LOBSTER MOTORCYCLE? YOU MEAN COMBINE THEM? Paul was that the solution all along?

I mean, everything is possible with shape keys, it's just A LOT of work :D But I'd say you could eventually consider soft body sim for cheese strips and bits falling off

As much as I deeply hate crustaceans, I'm all in for the lobster motorcycle! :D All those shots are frankly fantastic, good job!

Kai Christensen

Loved the huge variety of tidbits and doodads presented in this video. It's been wild to watch how much better your shots have become even over just the past two years -- when I saw the Dynamo Dream teaser, my first reaction was "Wow, that's some incredible CGI". These days when you share something new it's more along the lines of "Wait, that's CGI?? There's no way!" You've successfully made it past the uncanny valley on a large amount of the shots you showed here imo, super cool! Photoscans I think have helped a ton, but also lighting and attention to sensible details have improved subtly over time as well. Anyways, I'm mega excited to see the upcoming greenscreen shoot and all the fun post production that will come with it. Really appreciate all the time you put into making Patreon stuff on top of doing the actual work on Dynamo.

Dawson Henderson

Man, I love these patreon videos. Honestly, probably the best investment I've ever made. Ian could upload any video for any amount of time and I'd watch it and be so invested and interested the entire time. And I can't wait for Pete's episode! I'm so excited!

Russ

Hey Ian, you gotta hook up with Finley Mimbles. They're a super talented bunch of filmmakers in the Tacoma and Seattle area.

Blake Rizzo

Love this so much!! Also so so excited to see stuff from the B I G G R E E N S C R E E N shoot!!!

Babksy

thanks for this master class, I learned a lot your knowledge is so valuable and I am very grateful that you share those with us

Chris Alldridge

Ian! I have a cheesy question for you: if you wanted to animate the stringy cheese dripping down, would you use shape keys? If so, what would your solution be when those delicious dollops of dairy hit the ground? I’d imagine they would start to twist and fold in on themselves, though I suspect that would be impossible to achieve with shape keys? I love cheese. So much.

Long Wang

Alway waiting for the new Patreon Episode, Here it is~

Benjamin Lacey

On the curly cord front, have you tried geo-nodes on a basic rope cloth sim? Loving these teasers for Pete's episode, so excited for it!

thank you I will check that out, I ask because I’ve been watching some resolve videos and really want to see your take on post effects since I like your way of teaching, it is very effective and entertaining.

putperest

he already has a fantastic video on post-processing: https://www.patreon.com/posts/some-post-35533684

Hey ian, Love your work, I just subbed to the Patreon and I was wondering if you could make a video on color grading or how you do your post processing fx , Or if you already have someone can point me in the right direction, thank you.