Breakdowns that will skyrocket your creativity

1. Behind the scenes of Cloverfield on-the-set and taking a grasp of the stylish compositing and visual effects by Double Negative that went into the film. Creators break down VFX challenges from referencing & matchmoving to final steps.

2. Probably the best VFX sequence from the beginning of this decade is the truck collision of Matrix Reloaded. Incredible sketches turned into an action packed piece. This was year 2003 guys, wouldn’t say it is on a lower level compared to today’s VFX.

3. A movie not in my top 20 or so, but the visual effects put into it by Digital Domain and ILM are ridiculously detailed. My favourite is the aircraft carrier sequence.

4. Behind the scenes of “2012”. The fact that they built a photoreal LA and ripped it apart with only actors (and some live action elements obviously) being real, is astonishing. If anyone has seen compositing flow-graphs (maybe Nuke) for “2012” I’d be most interested to geek out at them. 🙂

5. I think Pirates of the Carribean has always nailed the CGI-story importance ratio. The movies are not just effect sequences, but VFX is used superbly to enchance the adventure. This “Creating the maelstrom” gives awesome insight into what went into their simulation techniques.

6. The superpunch of Matrix Revolution is yet another great example what is possible in nowaday’s computer graphics. I hadn’t realised that Neo and Smith were full CGI characters before watching this breakdown. Thought they were dummies shot in high-speed.

7. After watching this breakdown, I jaw-dropped realising that it was also CGI. You’ll know what I mean by “it” after watching the piece 🙂

8. Some fun from The Legend AK himself. Everyone who likes good humour will enjoy this.

9. One of the movies that integrate CGI that well you won’t even notice, is Inception. VFX is most certainly not the main focus of the movie, yet it melts into the shots like butter. “Real world physics are slightly disappointing.” 🙂

Also, here’s a bonus clip from the Paris coffee shop area being blown into the streets. Turns out it was mostly practical effects.

10. A great behind the scenes of the motion capture technology that was a key feature bringing Avatars to life, especially their facial movements.

Plus, here’s pretty interesting video showing the B-rolls from Avatar

 

Also you cannot miss these Behind the Scenes of The Hobbit. There are 7 more on the channel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC3egW63F5Q

 
There are many more, don’t hesitate to post your favourites below 😉

Aiming for photorealism, not there yet

Long time no post, been quite busy with some work and enjoying the Summer. Anyway, here’s something simple I put together one evening. Made in Blender 2.63, rendered with Cycles and some minor post in Gimp. Product visualization animation coming up soon (hopefully) and due to the fact I’ll be rendering it on my laptop, it’s going to take awhile. I let these “cook” to 2000 samples or so on my desktop’s GTX260, took around 1.5 hrs each.

On a scale of 10 points, please judge the level of photorealism 🙂

PS. if anyone wants to see the Cycles setup for the metal or any other mat, I can show the “noodle-work” if wanted.

Ferrari Turntable

Just finished rendering a quick turntable of my Ferrari. Give it a view here:

Found some awesome breakbeats for free at Vimeo Music Store, suits pretty well I think.

Adobe’s surprise

Wow, just read Andrew Kramer’s activity on videocopilot.net and followed a quick link to Adobe’s site. Pretty much jaw-dropped, when I saw the new features After Effects CS6 has got. Geeky term- Global Performance Cache is one of the biggest new updates to the AE’s heart. It means that everything is sped up. For example, if there is some footage loaded into RAM and if one applies an effect to the same footage layer, the footage is lost from RAM, obviously. However if the effect is disabled, the original footage, which was loaded previously, magically comes back into RAM and ready for real-time preview. That saves like…50% of our time in AE!?

I couldn’t believe my eyes, when I saw that there is an integrated 3D tracker in AE. We’ll just have to see, how well it operates with shaky-blurry footage, but sure looks promising. Talking about tracking, it seems that now it is possible to launch Mocha directly inside AE without leaving the program. Yet another minute saved!

Anyone remember duplicating text layers and offsetting them in Z-space to make and fake a 3D text effect? Or using that destruction effect, which had some kind of 3D capability? No need for that anymore I guess. The layers can now be extruded with a slider and also rendered with a new raytraced render engine, delivering better soft shadows, transparency and DoF blur. I also noticed a slider for index of refraction in one of their presentation videos!

Can’t wait to get my hands on that!

Behind the creation of the 458

Heyz,

As promised, here is a 17 page pdf explaining how I created the Ferrari 458 renders.

Download the PDF here:

Download the full final scene here!

Now also on blendswap!

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/vehicles/ferrari-458-italia/

Also, here is a small texture contribution, which was created by MaxE.

Potenza s001 tire bumpmap:

458 Italia Complete

Almost two months of work and a lot of trial and error later, it has finally paid off. These are the final shots of a Ferrari 458 Italia, made in Blender and rendered in its new render engine- Cycles. I will follow up soon with a long explanation of the creation process of this work.