Erik is letting me, Marijn Eken, write a guest post on his blog to introduce a series of posts about a music video we collaborated on.The music video was for the official song of the 2011 Asian Cup, by Jay Sean. You can see the completed video here.

Jay Sean feat. Karl Wolf – Yalla Asia ft. Radhika Vekaria.

For this project I was the visual effects supervisor, overseeing the whole production from concept to delivery and also doing the color grading. I was also on set for the filming, which took place in Doha, Qatar. It was shot on the Red One camera, which gave us the nice option to send around trimmed R3D files to the artists. We used ShotRunner to communicate among the group of 8 people that worked together over the internet.

There are over 100 vfx shots in the video, of which 64 green screen shots and we completed the work in essentially two weeks time. But, for this series we’ll focus on one shot that was a particular challenge.

The client’s idea was to have a pack of dogs run through the desert and turn into a car. They suggested a morph, but I couldn’t see how four dogs morphing into a car would look good. So I opted for having a dust cloud form from the dogs and kind of conceal what actually happened and have the car appear from the cloud. Here is the finished shot.

View in full resolution: H264.

The first challenge was how we would shoot this. Doing this in two passes (one with the dogs, one with the car), would require some kind of motion control to get the same camera move twice, which was not an option. So I quickly realized we would have to do the car in CG. The only real elements would be the desert and the dogs.

I had planned to use golf balls to aid the match-moving. But the reality of the shoot proved I couldn’t use them. The dogs were going to chase after a gazelle. Yes, a real live gazelle. So this made it quite impossible to plan out a route in advance. Luckily the desert floor was hard and cracked, which gave us some features and I just had to hope we could track it later.

We ended up getting very little usable footage. The part we picked had only one dog in it, but we needed four. So we ended up duplicating the dog in the final shot. Linus Hofmann did that and will elaborate on this in a later post.

The footage was particularly shaky, so we needed stabilization. We didn’t want to run it through some stabilizer and then track it, because that would probably make the match-moving harder and less accurate. Marco de Goeij tracked the original shot and provided me with a solid track. What we then did, was use a 3D method for stabilizing, rather than a 2D warp. Since the desert is essentially flat, I created a simple piece of geometry inside Nuke to match that and projected the original plate from the tracked camera onto that surface. I then duplicated the camera and filtered it’s path to create a much smoother camera path and rotation. Looking through this smooth moving camera, we got our stabilized shot. This was the camera that was passed to the others to create all the CG elements from. See the difference between the original and stabilized shots here.

View in full resolution: H264.

It was a bit of a challenge to work out how we were going to have all the elements for the shot come together, as multiple people at different locations and with different software were involved. Richard Levene would render out the CG car in Maya and hand over the animated car model to Erik, so he could use it as a hold out for the dust simulation in Houdini. Linus Hofmann had the job of bringing it all together in the compositing in Nuke, which required a fair bit of tweaking to get just right.

It was a challenging but ultimately fun project to collaborate on. The quality of the end result amazed the client, which is alway nice to hear.

Here’s another update on the ‘exhaust wall’ part of the ‘derezzing’ sequence. As I was getting the exhaust wall network up to a level I was satisfied with, I figured, why not make it a tool and apply it to the red bike easily. That seemed like a jolly good idea, so I quickly got to work.

First, however, let me show the results coming out of a test render of my new tool (8 times, slow motion). Note that this render focusses completely on the exhaust walls. The background is still a placeholder, so is the grid (too low res texture), and the red cycle animation definitely needs quite some animation love, especially when it hits the ground. It’s also the ‘raw’ render output, with only sRGB applied. But…. with all those disclaimers:

View in high resolution: H264.

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Here’s part 2 about my ‘derezzing’ cycle animation. I’ve now more or less finished the setup for ‘disintegrating’ individual fragments that will explode of the cycle when it crashes into the exhaust wall of its opponent.

After some basic cleaning up of my script, I thought, “let me do a multi fragment test and see what happens…”. This reminded me of how awesome the procedural nature of Houdini truly is! I added another fracture plane to my breaker and held my breath while I ran a simulation of the cycle without any animation, just sitting there in 4 fragments and let the Tron universe do its thing

The following image is the result that I found when rendering frame 23 once I stopped the sim there…:

I was rather blown away by this, I must admit, even though that may sound really narcissistic (lets just call it lasting boyish love of all things shiny and glowy). The only thing I did to the render coming out of Mantra was throw it into the comp I had already prepaired for a rerender of my original test animation which follows below (which is nothing more than a slightly rebalanced throw-together of the render passes). Note that the blue glowing particle stuff coming from between the fragments is not yet the explosion of fluid as seen in the real Tron Legacy shots. This will be a separate fluid sim.

Anyway, as mentioned above, I rerendered the first test animation through the current setup. You can see it below:

View in high resolution: H264.

The next steps involve quite a bit of keyframe animation of the cycle hitting the wall and the initial movement of the fragments before they are handed over to a dynamic sim. While working on that, I’ll run a render of the full cycle disintegrating in the mean time on my ‘farm’ (as in the single frame above), I just want to see it moving .

Until the next post…

Cheers,

Erik

Together with a bunch of great guys, I recently worked on the music video of the official song of the AFC Asian Cup: ‘Yalla Asia’ (by Jay Sean featuring Karl Wolf).

The full vfx team (in no particular order) was:

• Marijn Eken (vfx sup, color grade, camera stabilize, compositing)
• Richard Levene (3d animation, shading, rendering)
• Marco de Goeij (matchmoving)
• Linus Hofmann (compositing, dog rotomation, 3D ball animation)
• Alexander Lehnert (compositing)
• Martin Lindgren (compositing)
• Gottfried Hofmann (particle animation)

Specifically, I contributed a dust simulation to the ‘dog morph’ shot at around 1:10. On this shot, Marijn Eken was the vfx super visor and did the final grade, Richard Levene created the car animation (animation and shading/render), Marco de Goeij did the camera matchmove and Linus Hoffman did compositing and rotomation of the dogs.

View in full resolution: H264.

In following posts, I’ll be discussing how I did the dust sim for this shot, and some of the other guys will talk about their part as guest-blogger. We managed to pull off this shot (and the rest of the clip) in a seriously short amount of time, burning too much of the good ol’ midnight oil than I care to think about. But it turned out quite nicely, so we’re happy to share how we created the shot!

Cheers,

Erik

Here’s part II of ‘Rezzing’ a light cycle. In the previous post, I discussed the fx animation part of this effect. In this second part, I want to get into the shading, rendering and compositing.

As in Part I, I’d like to start with showing a breakdown version of the close up rezzing animation:

View in full resolution: H264.

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