In this project, I had the pleasure to contribute dust effects. This is something, I’d wanted to do since I watched breakdowns of loads of dust fx for ‘Prince of Persia’. So, I was really happy when Marijn asked me to work on this shot. As a refresher, I’ve included the final graded shot below:

View in full resolution: H264. (more…)

I (ed: Richard Levene) am Director of Creative/Technical Operations at Recom Farmhouse (http://www.recomfarmhouse.com) where I have been working for almost 4 years. Many of our jobs have been for car clients and I have produced many car renders over the years. Guess this is why my friend Marijn (vfx sup.) thought of me when it came to thinking who could do the car for this shot

I was tasked with animating, bit of modelling, shading, lighting and rendering the car for this shot. Have to admit that animation is not something I have done a lot of. At work we tend to produce still images and we have done very few animations, the odd car turntable but never a moving car. Thankfully the car was only required to move in one direction so I knew it would not be too tricky, but I was concerned with how easily/quickly I could animate/keyframe the fine details of the car like tyres reacting to the terrain and the subtle car body movement that add to believability.

First thing I did was import the matchmoved data into a new Maya scene (Maya 2011 x64 Subscription Advantage Pack) to make sure there were no problems. I always work in ‘cm’ units so had to make sure the track was coming in at the right scale. The tracking units were in meters so I grouped the camera and ground plane geometry provided by Marco and scaled it by 100 units. I applied the image sequence of the plate to the imageplane and everything lined up perfectly. Then imported the model of the car to check the scaling of the car to the plate looked correct. Which it did.

The release of Subscription Advantage Pack for Maya 2011 meant I was able to try out a new plugin shipped with the update. Craft Director Studio. I had seen a video demonstration of the plugin on the Autodesk Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KqLe66uFG8) at the point of the release and thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to test it out and it could be the solution to my animation fears.

The plugin comes with a few free pre rigged vehicles that you can control and parent your models too. You are then able to control your car and drive it around using your keyboard or joystick/pad directly in your Maya scene! You have controls to adjust the suspension and weight of the car, as well as the it’s acceleration, top speed, maximum steering angle and braking force. Check out the link above for a look at it in action (skip to time 1:04).

The model of the car I had was very dense so in order to get good real time feedback while controlling the car, I created a very rough proxy version and parented that to the dummy rigged vehicle instead. The parenting requires you to have your model grouped in the same way the plugins rigged vehicle comes. Groups for each wheel and body.

The best part of this plugin is that your vehicle will respect the ground plane. So if you have a very bumpy ground the car will react to it and follow the geometry.

So I subdivided my ground plane geometry quite a bit and used the Sculpt geometry tool to pull and push bumps into the road to mimic the bumpy desert ground. Very very quick and roughly.

I was now ready to record my car animation. I only had to drive the car forward in one direction so not much work or control was needed. After the first playback I could see the ground was too bumpy and it needed to be toned down. I adjusted that and was happy with the result, so I baked out the simulation to keyframes. With this I was then able to manipulate the animation curves to control the speed of the car and positioning to meet the directors in and out points.

I then parented my full res car geometry into the vehicle rig groups and I had my full res car animated Here is the approved playblast:

With this animation signed off, I sent over both the proxy and the full res geometry car animation scene to Erik for him to use for the cloud simulation and dust interaction renders.

Prior to starting on this shot, I had just completed a job using Vray on a project at work. I was very new to the renderer and thought this would be another good opportunity to learn it even more. I have always been a mental ray user but for the particular job at work, we needed the ability to interactively light our car with geometry mesh lights and the custom geometry light shaders that are available for mental ray do not play nicely with IPR. Vray RT and geometry mesh lights proved to be a winning combination. The Vray plugin for maya is very well integrated and it is very easy to use compared to mental ray in Maya. (Will leave this for another blog post)

With the car being black, you can only really light such a car with reflections so the hdr was very important for this. The hdr was supplied to me by Marijn, taken from on set while filming. It was not from the same location as the backplate sequence, but it was in the desert, so you would never know. However the time of day the hdr was shot at was slightly different, also the colour balance of the hdr compared to the plate was drastically different.

In order for the car to sit nicely in the plate some Photoshoping was necessary to get the hdr to match the backplate better. I very crudely replaced the sky and made the sun a lot higher as well as grading the ground.

I had reference images of the real car on set so was able to get a better idea of how it needed to look. I started to apply some shaders the main shaders such as the car paint, glass, black plastic, rubber, chrome etc as well as creating a tyre shader and texture to make it look like the tyres had been driving in the sand. Some quick UVing of the tyres was necessary for this.

Here is an early test with low sampling.

A few tweaks and I was ready to setup up for final rendering.

We had worked out in previs that the car would become visible through the dust cloud at around frame 35, however to be safe I setup the renders to start from frame 25.

I split up the car into 3 elements. The car body, wheels and shadow. The reason for separating the wheels from the car was due to motion blur. We knew we would want the car motioned blurred but I was unsure at how long it would take to render both the car and the wheels motioned blurred in the same scene. We worked out we could get away with motion blurring the car body in post using a motion vector pass (velocity pass) from Vray but the wheels would need true 3d motion blur. So splitting them up was the best option.

Various render elements were created along with the beauty to give Linus more control in comp, but I think as we had such little time he only really used the beauty pass of the car body and wheels. Lots of masks were rendered as well for all the various materials.

Review

I was really happy with the quality of the car. Looking back there are a few things I would change regarding the car. I would add more motion blur to the wheels. Unfortunately there was not much time for rendering so I kept the motion blur quite minimal to assure all passes were rendered in time. I would also tweak the car animation slightly. Near the end of the shot the car body jutters quite a bit (only a few frames) but this would not really happen on a car like this. The suspension would smooth it out. But think I am just nit picking

Overall I think the final shot looks amazing. I thought it was going to be really hard to marry all the effects together, but Erik and Linus did an incredible  job. Not only was this shot great, but every shot that was completed for this project looked brilliant. Huge credit to everyone that worked on this project and it was a pleasure working with everyone.

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.

It’s time for another update on the explosion. It’s been silent for a while now, as I’ve been working on some other stuff while running simulations and renders in the background.

As a side note: I’m really pleased with the way HQueue is working on my little farm. It makes simulations and renders much easier to schedule and manage, so its was well worth a little investment in time to set it up. I’m thinking of writing a little post on my experiences with HQueue so far some day soon.

Anyway, on with the fragments and fluids. I’ll start with a render as usual:

View in high resolution: H264.

This is a render of the latest simulation that I have run on both the ‘faces’ and ‘energy fluid’, it also includes the ‘sparks’ particle sim. As with the previous renders, I ran the render passes through my very basic multi pass setup to tune it a little and add some glows. (more…)

Now the exhaust wall stuff is done and made into a tool, attention has shifted back to the explosion animation and simulation. By now all the major systems for animating and hand-over to simulation are in place.

Let me start by showing you a test animation for that I’ve rendered out. I did a very quick multi-pass comp on the render to attenuate reflections a bit and add some glows. The animation is rendered at 8 times slow motion.

View in high resolution: H264.

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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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I just found a nice first few frames dropping out of a first test render for my new exhaust wall shader:

Note that this is straight out of the render, no comp work done it at all, not even applying the fresnel pass to tone down reflections a bit, no blurs, etc. It does nicely show of the new turbulence, reflect and refract parts of my new wall shader..

Anyway, I thought I’d share this quickly before I push a full animation through my basic comp setup in the coming days, while I finish animating and dynamics on the crash.

Cheers,

Erik

To place the cycle crash in context, I’ve started animating a short sequence (roughly based on my ‘previz‘). This is basically what leads to the cycle crashing. My son was adamant that the blue cycle be the one that snuffs it, so that’s what happens. I’ve rendered the second camera angle with the frame rate cranked up by a factor of eight. This will allow for moving in and out of slow motion during this part of the animation.

Here’s a quick flat render of the animation:

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Here’s a short update on part 2 of ‘Derezzing’ a crashing light cycle. My background render of the falling apart of the full body of the cycle (in 4 fragments) has completed and here is the result:

View in high resolution: H264.

The render crashed around frame 69 for some reason, so I restarted it from that point on, but had forgotten that I had added a ‘RDB Autofreeze’ micro solver to my dynamics setup. This is why there is a little jump in the faces lying on the ground towards the end of the animation. The cycle doesn’t completely disintegrate as the animation I had setup for this wasn’t reaching the rear end of the cycle, which is why it doesn’t completely fall apart there.

Anyway, this was done by basically turning on all fragments, so I guess I shouldn’t complain about these details. I’m really pleased by the result so far. This animation definitely nicely shows what’s happening to the fragments as they fall apart.

In the mean time, I’m animating a first go at the final animation sequence for the crash, which is progressing nicely. The basic animation path for the crashing cycle is done now, next up is creating the proper fragments, based on how the cycle hits the wall and direct each fragment into its initial path before the dynamics sim will take over. This is a bit more work than just throw the cycle into a collision object and let dynamics do all of it, but it allows me to completely control what happens during the crash and where each piece flies off to with what initial velocity.

Ok, time to get back to fracturing and animating…

Cheers,

Erik

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