Almost back from the dead

Oh man, I can't believe it's been 7 months since I last posted.

Oh well, here I am, updating away. I suppose it's fair to say that I haven't really had anything worth saying throughout the year, least not in regards to VFX. But I've been spending the time well, taking any spare moments available to improve my craft and my knowledge.

Surprisingly, I've found that Adobe After Effects is a rather good compositing program. And as of last week, I have completed my first bunch of VFX composites for film work. More on that in a bit. I had been using Combustion primarily until the start of the year, and thinking of After Effects as more of a motion graphics program. But when faced with VFX shots for a film (don't get too excited, it's for a short student film), I chose to work with After Effects. Why?

Well, primarily because it's the program I've been using more often recently, but there are other factors. I find that whilst Combustion offers better results and more comprehensive tools, After Effects facilitates a more streamlined workflow. Naturally, there are features in the one that I miss in the other, but that's just how it is I guess.

The other factor is that there are far more tools available on the web for learning After Effects. I have, for instance, started a love affair with Video Copilot, which is an insanely helpful site. I was quite naive to the potential AE affords, but no longer, thanks to Andrew Kramer and the team at said website.

Conversely, Combustion offers very little. I don't know why, but finding anything more than the most basic tutorial for the program is very rare. I still can't wrap my head around Combustion's native motion blur feature, or how to make it useful. Using the velocity channel in an rpf file is very good, but processor intensive and has some annoying limitations.

So long story short, I've learned quite a bit. I've learned how to composite VFX shots, which I guess is a very good skill to have. I've also learned why we go through the processes that we do in VFX compositing, or at least, I've come to some promising conclusions as to why we do it that way.

Now it's time to start talking about this film work....

A preview

Ok, so here's that shot I've been talking about. I still haven't finished it, but it's a nice work-in-progress for you to check out:



So the animation is out, and the camera move gets downright weird at one point, but that's okay, because it was all about lighting and compositing, and in that sense, I feel that I've almost nailed it. I'm just gonna add volume lighting and some more particle effects -- and a heat-vapour once the rocket's flame clicks off -- and it should be done.

After that, I'll put together a tutorial on how I did it, but no promises just yet :)

Now then, let's get pished!

WIP for year's end

Was just impatient to show off a work-in-progress of my recent project. As mooted before, it's just a practice exercise for me to learn with, but I'm happy with what I've got so far. Check out these pics:

Before

After

As you can see, I've dramatically lit the scene by playing in Combustion. I will reveal later on how I did this, once I've got the whole thing sorted out. Note also that the flames on the logs were added later. It was made in the same file in 3D Studio Max, but rendered as a separate pass. I think it can do with a bit of tweaking here and there, but it shows the power of compositing and how, with a bit of smarty-pants trickery, you can get some great atmos out of an otherwise boring shot.

Coming up next will be some volumetric fog and some extra particle effects, plus the full video which will really show off what I'm trying to achieve here. But that will have to wait until 2008!