Join us for an engaging episode of CGCast as we dive deep into the world of advanced CGI tools and film analysis with Franklin and Tyson Eibel. This week, we explore the groundbreaking features of Flowline, marvel at the visual effects in "Aeon Flux,"
and dissect the trailer for "Dungeon Siege," while also touching on compositing techniques essential for seamless integration of CGI elements into live-action scenes. Expect insightful discussions on real-time fluid dynamics, the challenges of compositing,
and reflections on recent movie releases like "Cars" from Pixar and the controversial "Dungeon Siege." We also share tips on compositing software like After Effects and Premiere Pro, and address common pitfalls in keying and tracking processes. Perfect
for aspiring animators and industry enthusiasts looking to stay ahead in CGI trends and techniques. Tune in to uncover the latest innovations and critiques in the world of computer graphics!
Welcome everybody. Today is the 4th of December and we are
reaching our 10th episode. Wow, it's like a big occasion
and stuff.
That's amazing.
Yes, yes. Ye of little faith wouldn't think we'd reach this
far.
Anyways, today I have with me Franklyn and Tyson Ibele.
And today we'll talk about various things such as Flowline,
Some movies like Aeon Flux, which Tyson saw in the trailers
of Dungeon Siege and Cars.
And the very funny Dead or Alive, even though it was not
intentionally funny.
Also, talk a little bit about compositing and some other
stuff at the end of the show.
Plus, I'll give the forecast for CG cast.
Okay, so have you guys seen the demo for Flowline?
I have.
And what do you think about it compared to real flow?
Well, I mean, I don't want to shoot down real flow, but
there's absolutely no comparison.
Just the amount of detail they were able to get in the
particle.
Like, I'm not quite sure how it works.
I'm assuming it uses a similar method, you know, calculates
specific positions for different particles and then, you
know, uses those to create a, you know, some kind of subdiv
ision mesh.
But, like, just the, you know, quality of that demo video,
a couple of shots on there.
not all of them were amazing but um ones that stick out in
my mind was that that dirty water
kind of going down the alleyway i don't know if you it was
kind of like reddish water and there's
like some high depth of field or like small small depth of
field and uh that just looks super real
that just that was totally i've never seen any uh blue that
looked that cool and then there's also
the like a like a rolling wave shot that one was pretty
amazing some of the underwater shots with
the bubbles and whatnot i mean rearflow can do a lot and um
you know it's great it's better than
like i use 3D studio max and it's you know much better
than the uh the particle solutions for
3D max but uh just seeing what Flowline can do and you
know knowing the past work of scanline
they're an insanely good company um high high caliber stuff
for sure i can like there's just
no comparison at all i don't think i was in time but other
programs have skyline made um i'm not
sure they made any air for us but they've done some uh
visual effects sequences they had that uh
what was that the dam breaking apart they had the airplane
crash they've done some really cool stuff
and i know they've been actually uh like they like to
concentrate on these like physics simulations
and uh i i think uh cg talk just did a little feature on uh
fire or maybe it wasn't cg talk
anyways like you know cg liquids and fire and you know the
future of it and i know full line
or if not full line but scan line was like you know the
company that they kind of interviewed
there and um so i know they've been i knew they had been
researching this for a while
but uh i hadn't until i saw that demo video i hadn't
actually seen the full power i just seen
some some still images but seeing the actual animation that
action just totally you know
Z Kindle's my faith in that, not my faith, I mean, I always
thought they were a cool company, but my complete sense of
awe in the work that they can do.
So it's very, you know, refreshing to see that even, you
know, all these with Maxwell Renderer and all these other,
you know, ultra realistic solutions that a lot of packages
have adapted for getting results.
A company like Scanline can still come up with something
that's totally fresh and new and mind-blowing.
Very impressive stuff.
I wonder how long it would take to calculate things like
that.
Yeah, that's the one thing that's a little disappointing.
It didn't give too many details about render times or
calculation times.
Well, I can imagine it's not something you can run on your
286,
but I know they've done stuff for a few different films,
so it can't be anything too ridiculous because it has been
used in a pipeline, obviously.
Maybe in the future, it would be compatible with the future
physics processing units make.
The users.
I mean, you know, 10 years from now, maybe.
I don't see physics processing units becoming the iD
Advance anytime soon.
Well, it would lessen the burden because I think they
should be coming out by next year
because the Nintendo Revolution is supposed to have one, so
that means they're pretty far ahead.
well these are rumor these are film quality effects and
simulations and there's a huge
difference between film quality and game quality even
though you know games are getting pretty
intense the difference is absolutely massive so you know
something that yeah i'm not saying that
the ppu will do it in real time but it should like lessen
the burden a lot yeah that's true
because it's i mean you're i'm not i'm not too familiar
with how physics actually work when it
comes to like you know cpu whatever but if the physics
processing unit isn't doing it real time
then it's just doing the exact same job that a cpu would be
doing yeah but in less time that's
the point to save a lot of time on the processing oh okay i
'm not i'm not educated on the subject
so i'll just refrain from commenting that's all right
whatever it could be good also you have a
probably cringing knowing that i'm totally wrong yeah could
also be good for doing some real-time
previews to make sure that
the water is going the right way or something
like that. That would be interesting.
Yeah. It would be interesting to see
the workflow
for the program.
Do you know? Yeah,
Franklyn? That would work
like something like a second pass.
Like the first go, you have a really
rough look of how it's going to look
in the end and it refines that.
That would be pretty cool.
Like a blobby water.
I wonder what they do for the bubbles, if it's part of the
simulation or if it's just extra particles.
That's one thing that was extremely cool.
It's one thing that I noticed that is lacking from up until
now,
from basically every single fluid simulator out there,
is bubbles that happen when water churns and whatnot.
And you always get these wonderful surface liquid sims,
but when you look at a cross-section of the simulation,
You never get any of those bubbles or those kind of swirly
vortex-type effects.
And Lone Lion definitely has those going on.
You could see in the shark videos.
So that was a very cool feature.
Yeah, but I wonder if it's actually part of it
or if they just added particle effects for that after.
Well, either way.
It looks super cool.
It could be a separate simulation for sure, who knows.
Let's see.
Yeah, but you're not really sure right now.
It doesn't really matter as long as you can get the job
done, right?
Even if there was 200 simulations involved for each of
those shots.
It still looks ultra real.
And like I said, because all those shark shots are actually
part of some kind of dinosaur
or historic film or whatever.
I haven't read too much about it.
Which means that it has been used in a pipeline.
So the chances of it being pretty simple enough to use in a
production are good.
So, you know, even though there might be, you know, a dozen
simulations for each element, it's still usable in a
production.
So, which is good news, because I know there have been a
lot of just in my own research, I've come across a lot of,
you know, university, you know, students at different
universities who are doing, you know, like their.
what do you call it, degrees or whatever on, you know, on
physics simulations and CG.
And a lot of it looks fantastic, but it's just not usable
in an actual production
because they're concentrating more on the raw, you know,
science behind it rather than practicalities.
So, very cool.
Speaking of the PPUs, I just remembered that those guys at,
I forgot the name of the company that makes it,
They said they'll be able to get real-time, simple fluid
dynamics by the second generation
and maybe advanced fluid dynamics by the third generation
of the card.
Yeah, I've heard of some stuff like that.
So that'd be cool in games.
Imagine seeing those simulations in games in like 10 years'
time.
Yeah, that'd be very cool.
That'd be awesome.
Or even like the hair simulation and all that.
Yeah, so it kind of goes together.
They kind of started the hair simulation.
You already have like Klottenherz variations.
Oh, do you?
Yeah, like tall lights on the game.
But it's nothing that spectacular.
But it's still cool, I mean.
Yeah, it gets the job done.
There you go.
All right, let's move on to some movies.
Tyson, I heard that you saw Aeon Flux.
I did.
I went to their premiere last night.
What did you think about it?
10 o'clock after work.
Well, I didn't really have any expectations going in.
I had seen one episode of a cartoon once, just like on a
fluke.
I forget how, I think it was on TV just randomly or
something.
And it was pretty quirky.
It was kind of interesting, but it wasn't like my style or
anything.
So I never really followed it and I'd never read the comics
or anything.
So going into this movie, I didn't really have any
background information on any of the characters or story
lines.
So that was kind of good, I guess.
it was all new to me.
I can't really come out and say,
you know,
oh,
it didn't follow their comic book or,
you know,
they,
you know,
the cartoon was so much better because,
you know,
I wasn't really familiar with both,
but just to like,
you know,
Cole's nose version of my review,
I'd give it about a six.
Was it a 10?
There was some,
I made a post on CGU talk and just mentioned that there was
some cool effects,
you know,
some,
uh,
a couple of them are shown in the trailer.
Like she's got all those little,
you know,
lock in her cell and she's got all these little balls that,
you know,
when she whistles,
they come and come and save her and that was kind of a n
ifty idea that you know she's got these
little helpers but and you know just the just the uh the
fact that they were all cg and they were
they look pretty believable even though they were just
little spheres they were comping they were
comping pretty well but you know um there's some other cool
facts uh the cities look pretty neat
when they showed long shots or you know she's she does some
uh some big stunts but besides you know
the typecast effects for a movie like this,
there was nothing really insane about it or great about it.
I mean, you know, it's pretty predictable.
Obviously, like, I mean, I didn't predict the actual
storyline,
but you can, sometimes you go to a movie and you can just
predict things like,
you know, near the end of the movie, they're going to, you
know,
have a plot twist and this character is probably going to
die and whatnot.
And I found that, you know, through the most of the movie,
I was able to kind of guess at a lot of those things.
You know that the original creator, he wanted the feature
film to be an animation and not live action.
Yeah, I can imagine that.
One thing that, you know, I think in the comic book, at
least, or the animation, the character was always like this
extremely skinny, like a really weird looking girl.
and I found that
Charlize Theron
I think that's who played it right?
I found that she just kind of looked
I don't know. I'm just not a big fan
of that whole mean girl look
and in the comic books it was more
like this weird almost like creature
and in the movie it was more like
oh Charlize Theron is
you know out to kill everyone
in her cool looking costume
and her huge guns and it was just
I don't know it was just a little cheesy. It was like
Charlize Angel's with only one angel.
oh yeah
it's no Oscar material
but it's a rental I guess
this guy
Andy Grisdale
andygrisdale.com
he made a little short about
Aeon Flux in complete 3D
it's a bit interesting
that's pretty cool
you want to spell that website out
so people can see it
A-N-D-Y
G-R-I-S
D-A-L-E dot com.
There you go.
And you'll be able to see a little short.
Anyways, yeah, apparently it was made for like
a video game, right?
They were trying to
pitch a video game and that's why they made that?
I think so, I'm not sure.
That's what I think I read on his site.
Anyways, that was a pretty cool animation.
There were some of the shots in that animation
like, you know, a single
shot in that animation made it better
than the entire movie last night.
Damn. Nothing too mind-blowing in the animation.
Just some really cool camera angles and the two dads
running around.
The animation, his animation, the effect when the girl is
falling with the hair flowing up.
That's so cool.
That was pretty cool, yeah.
That was something.
I'm always a big fan of like, you know, like the one shot
where she's flying through the air.
And she's, she whips out her binoculars as she's flying at
like, you know, a thousand feet a second.
And then she goes from like, you know, free falling to like
totally controlled, you know, gun slinging, whipping around
in the air.
I thought that was very cool.
Yeah.
where she's totally like
surfing through the air.
I hope they remake
Aeon Flux but in 3D in the style
that Andy did. That would be so cool.
I don't know. I think, you know,
Andy's animation was really cool, but
I think it's more of like, what's the word
for it? Just more of like something
that you only want to see once and for a short
amount of time. It's very cool for what it
was, obviously, and I enjoyed it a lot, but
having it be like an hour and a half
would be a little much, you know?
Well, if he develops, there's a
better story development.
Well, I don't even just mean story.
I just mean, like, the look of it, you know?
Like, 3D's good for something like that,
for, like, a short cinematic or whatever,
but for a full movie,
a lot of the times when you're going
for realistic-looking CG,
it just doesn't work.
And he says his wasn't really stylized.
It was, you know, the proportions
were all relatively correct,
and everything kind of was going
for a realistic feel.
I'm not sure.
They should do it stylized,
kind of the style of the comic.
And that's what was kind of lacking
from the movie, I think.
the style is uh you know from the little bit of the comic
or the the animated series that i saw
it was very weird and stylized very um well yeah it was
definitely i can't really think of a
an analogous show or cartoon but very original and it's
just the look of it like especially
like i said that just the girl she looks so like gawky and
scrawny and it just didn't translate
very well to the movie i don't think and a lot of that you
know just has to do with her character
she's like this assassin who you know her whole life is
based around killing killing so she isn't
really i mean from what i gather her appearances besides
the fact that she tends to wear very
skimpy clothing her appearances aren't really a concern at
all because you know her whole basis
is just to kill these bad guys so and yet in the movie you
know charlize was like this you know
incredibly good looking best dressed killer's car she's
like uh yeah exactly and you know like
perfect proportions you know a lot of people would consider
her to be good looking and whatnot so
whatever it's just it was just more like a cheesy movie but
whatever speaking of cheesy movies have
you seen the trailer for dungeon siege i have that's many
have seen this oh had a good laugh
ue ball a strike again yeah and i mean it's almost like you
know you think at this point
just to you know say his movies aren't good would just be
kind of you know following the bandwagon
And like, you know, every time he comes out of the movie,
just having that preconception.
But he has yet to redeem himself.
Well, I think it's...
He does it intentionally. That's the problem.
Well, yeah, I mean, I know that.
But I'm just saying, like, sometimes, you know, every time
he comes out of the movie, it's like, oh, Uwe Bull.
You know, you hear all these complaints and you almost want
to say, well, you haven't seen it yet.
You know, don't make fun of it yet.
But it comes to the point where after seeing this trailer,
I just realized that I don't think the man is capable of
making an editing room movie.
You know, we should screw him over by everybody watching
the movies at the theater
so he doesn't get the tax breaks.
The movie's actually successful.
We won't be able to do it anymore.
Probably it doesn't work.
No way, because, like, I mean, it's kind of, you know,
ironic.
If the movie is successful...
See, it only makes...
Even if he makes $1 profit, he loses.
He loses all the tax breaks, so we just make him $1 profit.
And he loses all the millions he could make from the tax
break.
I'm not too familiar with his whole situation, but getting
back to the point, to the topic at hand, the Dungeon siege
trailer all night.
And as I was mentioning before, a bit of Lord, actually a
lot of Lord of the Rings, a bit of Power Rangers.
And, you know, there's got to be something else that is,
you know, similar to, but it was just like, oh my goodness,
like, come on.
It's a joke.
I feel sorry for the, you know, the actors who are making
the actors in movies like that.
You know what I mean?
like people who
like a lot of them
are probably unknowns
besides Burt Reynolds
Reynolds
and
how would you want to
how would you want to
appear in a movie like that
it's just so
like bad
Uwe Boll has blackmail
on them
but I really
that's the only explanation
that makes sense
I really feel sorry
for the guy that
the
Brian Reynolds
I forgot his name
Burt Reynolds
no no
another guy
the guy who made
Dungeon Siege
I really feel sorry
oh the author
he had really high hopes
for it
and
you ball got his hands on his baby and uh that must that
must really hurt yeah poor guy well
yeah i mean the trailer speaks for itself you got the uh it
's i mean immediately i wasn't really i'm
not really sure what dungeon siege even is it's like if it's a
role-playing game or whatever but
immediately with the uh the initial shot in the trailer
with you know those four people trudging
over the landscape as you know total war of the rings hack
it's like right away apparent what kind
what the movie's going to be.
And then, of course, you cut to the obligatory, you know,
massive fight scenes with all these, like, you know,
orcs battling all these humans and pillaging their villages
and whatever.
And then you get to the, of course, the romance scene,
which you know, you know, the entire movie is going to,
the plot will be driven by the fact that either, you know,
the main character has this, you know, flaw that he's in
love with this girl
and somehow, you know, that's like his downfall
or the girl will have some kind of you know spade formation
for him and he's got to get her to her
or vice versa so that's kind of like a cheesy obligatory
love scene they're just like there's
absolutely nothing and plus you know the the poor acting
what does the one guy say he's like
everyone's gonna die he's like you know contorting his head
in this way but and it was or we're gonna
kill everyone or whatever and it's just like oh man there's
not one there's not one element in
that movie that or the trailer that makes the movie look
any bit original and they have a
bit because to have the ninjas drop them down that was a
i don't remember ninjas in dungeon
siege no or in the medieval crimes at all you know they
were you know 1000 laser now we're
in siege one and like what okay first of all what was it
like a computer game or yeah it's a computer
game i played dungeon siege one and if i saw that movie i
would have never known that movie was for
dungeon siege dungeon siege is very generic itself just
basic fantasy farmer his family gets killed by
these monsters and he has to go and do something i forgot
what okay so the game didn't have much
of a story and i'm not sure where they got the story for
the movie that's the one thing i mean
i do give him credit for finding enough material apparently
to fill an hour and a half because a
lot of those storylines are i mean unless you're playing a
game where you're involved in and you
know the plot is based on decisions you make a lot of those
storylines are pretty you know linear
and simple you know guy attacked by monsters as a child or
something you know something taken from
him like a magic ring and he has to you know he grows up
and has to go find it or some kind of
dumb story like that and there's so many fantasy movies out
there it's just like in that in that
genre that you know Dungeons and Dragons or that you know
medieval mad sword and sorcery genre
it's just like nothing original is going to come out of
that anyways and when you stick someone
like you bowl on it he's like the originality is in
negatives i mean he just takes away from
the whole genre so oh the fact that movies like that are
being made mixed beating yes all that
could be spent on he also has his hand on two other there's
two more movies we can expect from
him blood rain which could make an interesting movie but
the uh ue ball has it and far i like
that a qualifier. Could be a good movie, but
you both got it. Yeah, it
could be interesting. And Far Cry,
Far Cry is kind of sad to see
that he has it. That's some interesting
story there. Yeah, I have.
I played a little bit of that game. It seemed pretty cool.
Yeah, except those monsters at the end
were too hard to kill. I haven't
played the whole thing, so I haven't gotten that far.
Also, there's
another movie
that's coming out that
looks like it was made by Uwe Boll,
but surprisingly was not.
talking about the dead or alive trailer which is so many
great trailers coming out lately
this uwe boll movie yeah that's i don't know it's not the
season hollywood is disappointing us now
i'm still waiting for attack of the killer raisin bread
that's called amic that's that's what i'm
waiting for that one for unfavoring my money for my theater
my theater ticket money it probably put
you balls movies to shame yeah just the title puts his
movies to shame race but um no the dead
or alive trailer um that's funny there's a pretty basic
Pareto run so you could talk about that one
actually I played that game I beat dead or alive 2 with all
the characters and I'm kind of
disappointed that they did that horrible crap the girls
have swords and they're all friends and most
of them are like enemies well yeah it seems to be like a
ninja well I mean I guess there's
this in Charlie's Angels anyways but I mean there doesn't
seem to be any difference you know you
have these four or five or i didn't pay attention girls you
know they're of course untouchable
because they have such amazing skills and they're all
fighting you know this infinitely huge army
yeah and then instead of you know fearing for their lives
or getting ready to defend you know
their territory they're you know cracking jokes and it's
just like i mean like from a like if it
was a comedy or something then you know haha funny whatever
but like to you know with the
movie Dead Alive where it's based on
a whole plot is
driven by violence or whatever. It's just like
and all these campy jokes and whatnot.
It's just like, oh man, there's no way a movie like that
could ever redeem itself
or be worth
seeing. Kind of reminds me of Street
Fighter, the movie.
I never did see the Street Fighter movie.
It's pretty bad, but
if you've seen
the anime movies,
the anime movies are much better. They're more
serious, more interesting.
and more violent.
They're just much better to watch.
It means much.
Like anime and period?
Yeah, they are.
They're animated by Japanese companies
made them and they're much better.
No, but what are you talking about?
Mortal Kombat?
Street Fighter.
Or Street Fighter?
Oh, much cooler.
But they're pretty old.
That's the thing.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Any more trailers?
Let's talk about a good one for now.
There's some hope for...
Oh, there's the cars from Pixar.
At first, I wasn't so excited about cars.
The first show that I saw didn't excite me.
But the new one is making it look much better.
Yeah, there's some very cool stuff going on.
They've got the, well, first of all, like the photoreal
environments,
which is very, very cool to see.
Not that Pixar hasn't, you know, done similar things in the
past.
It's just, this is, you know, taking it to that next level.
And you can just, just the interaction too, you know,
having these.
I can just imagine kind of the cool sequences with these
cars, you know, going down these, you know, these roads off
in the, you know, the desert or whatever.
And just, I'm predicting that they're probably going to be
real enough that you'll forget that the entire thing's CG
and you'll see the car's eyes, but you won't realize that
everything is actually animated.
Yeah, I hope the story doesn't suck.
But I heard that Pixar wasn't putting as much effort as
they normally did
because this is probably their last movie with Disney or
something.
Right.
But I'm surprised. It's looking pretty good.
I didn't have my hopes high for Cars.
And I saw a lot of people were kind of complaining about
that
kind of hillbilly car character.
But I think it's pretty funny looking and I like his voice.
So I definitely have yet to have anything.
Bro, I have yet...
How do I word this?
I've yet to see anything worth complaining about.
So definitely my hopes are high.
I have something to complain about.
On Pixar, their site,
they used to have their short movies for free.
You could watch a few of them for free.
But now...
Yeah, you have to go on iTunes to download them.
That's not cool.
Damn it, Pixar.
I think after all the money they make on these amazing
movies
that at least let us see their short films for free.
Actually, Disney makes all the movies.
They don't.
Well, I mean, it's not like Pixar is this poor group
of starting guys in somebody's attic.
They've got enough money to buy milk and cookies.
Good point.
But we still love Pixar,
even though we have to pay five bucks to see their shorts.
I don't think Pixar could really do anything at this point
that would ever make me not love them like a spouse.
except hire Uwe Boll as a guest director.
Yeah, I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
Oh, God.
You never know.
Start a rumor, right?
That'd be cool.
See how far it spreads.
Uwe Boll directing Pixar's next movie.
You heard it first from Franklyn's mouth.
No, I'm sure if you ever started a thread or a rumor like
that,
you'd be completely disconnected from the CG community and
exiled.
Sent to Russia or something.
Actually, there was a rumor started.
that Uwe Boll was going to direct the Halo movie
and somebody even submitted it to the Internet Movie Datab
ase.
I think that was just because he's directed so many other
video game movies.
Yeah, and that's...
They just heard, oh, another video game movie.
It must be U-Bowl.
But I think, I mean, the fact that Peter Jackson is
producing it,
even though I really know nothing about the movie
and for all I know, U-Bowl could be directing it,
but the fact that Peter Jackson is producing it
probably hints at the idea that he's not going to put all
of his money into someone like you,
Ball. But producing it, he is paying for it. I hope it's
good. Halo has a cool story.
Bad game, but cool story. Good game and good story, my
friend. I have figuring. I'll have to
buy you some plane tickets so I can come over here and bite
you in real life. All right. We'll see.
forget them no it's tedious and boring anyways okay um let
's talk about some compositing
techniques i myself know very little about compositing
since i've never actually had to
use it for any of my projects um franklin can you tell us
what is compositing and what it's used for
okay uh well in theory compositing is basically just mixing
elements from one plate into another
So you just transfer or composite in a certain element you
want from one plate into, say, a live-action clip.
So what it's mainly used for is taking 3D models or things
like that that you've tracked and mixing it in with its
live-action counterparts.
Sounds easy enough, but what are the common problems we
deal with when compositing?
Well, there are a range of things that can go wrong, I
guess.
like bad tracking, like artifacts and stuff like that.
Yeah, you gotta love when compositing goes bad.
You know, it's actually, it is quite,
I mean, you said it sounds easy enough,
but getting a composite together is quite difficult.
I mean, I have a ton of respect for the guys
working on movies like, you know,
King Kong or Narnia,
where it's just absolutely seamless
because there is so many elements that go into,
you know, there's the tracking
and then there's the, you know,
going right back to the basics
so just getting the cg to really to look realistic and then
you got to match the grain and then you
gotta you know keep key out your whatever blue screen
shooting you did and then you gotta mix
it all together you know do your color correction do your
whatever else you gotta do and it's just
a i mean even i'm simplifying it beyond beyond huge reason
there's just such a huge like especially
on such a large scale like in movies and stuff oh yeah
exactly there's so much like planning that
have to go into your head dude look at you put that one
shot you can't just leave a lot of it
up to motion blur and you know like fake it and stuff no i
mean a lot of like you know 10 years
ago a lot of it well i say that kind of tongue-in-cheek
because you know jurassic park still
holds up today and that was made you know 10 years ago but
10 years ago when a lot of the cg was you
know obviously more noticeable a lot of it was faked and
you can just imagine the conversation
between the directors and the animators
or the visual effects supervisors
who were like, oh yeah, we'll just bore that
every little motion blur, you'll never notice.
But nowadays, yeah, where you've got like,
well, King Kong is for example,
and it's kind of on everybody's mind at the moment.
You've got shots of Kong just sitting there,
not moving at all,
and yet it still looks totally believable and realistic,
and that just blows my mind.
I wouldn't even know where to start on something like that.
But wait, what is harder,
Putting a 3D character into a real-life environment
or putting a live actor into a 3D environment?
Obviously, well, you know,
I mean, it all depends on the situation.
When it comes to anything that has these visual effects,
there is no ABC answer, I don't think.
I think it has to do a lot with the style you're going for.
If you're trying to put the real-life person
into a stylized environment,
I think that'd be a lot easier, wouldn't it?
Like, if you don't want to launch a reel.
Once again, I mean, it all depends on the situation.
There are times when you want a live actor
in kind of a stylized environment.
Like Sin City
Yeah, that has some great examples.
I mean, a lot of the whole movie was just shot on blue
screens
and put in CG environments.
And even though most of the time you could tell
what environment is CG, it's still...
Unless you're actually looking for it, it still holds up.
And it maintains its style.
You know, these really saturated colors
and kind of a small color palette.
one you read and then you've got other movies like uh well
actually sky captain of the world
in the world for most another good example of the stylized
uh on cg environment with live action
characters but then you've got other movies like uh star
wars where you've got these you know super
realistic looking space battle scenes and there's mind-
blowing cg effects with uh live action
characters so it goes both ways and i mean just because one
is stylized doesn't mean it has it's
Less work to get it looking good.
Can't forget Pumpin's Rings.
You can't forget Lord of the Rings.
That was awful.
They're all pilot movies.
But they're great examples.
At the end, on the third movie of Lord of the Rings,
I saw they rushed the compositing to get into theaters on
time.
That was a big letdown.
It killed the ending of the movie for me because you could
see
the white outline on Gollum at the end.
It was horrible.
Even my mom noticed it, and she knows nothing in CG.
I think I was so bedazzled by the fact that it was such an
amazing movie.
In the first movie, I didn't know what to expect.
I didn't notice any errors, but I was a lot more critical
of the movie.
But by the third one came around, and it was obviously
apparent that Peter Jackson is a genius director.
When I came to feel like that, it was over my head.
I didn't even notice because I was so...
Did you see it?
Did you see it?
No, I heard the cinema.
I fell three on opening night in cinema.
But you didn't see that?
Maybe it was my cinema that was having a problem.
Who knows?
I mean, sometimes you have bad quality,
you can create artifacts.
I had to go all the way to Geneva to see it on good theater
,
and I can't believe that that stuck out so badly
at the end of the movie.
Could have just been...
Anyways, Franklyn, what kind of programs
are used for compositing?
Any tips?
Oh, well, I haven't done too much compositing myself,
really.
But people use a lot of prose like Premiere and a lot of
Premiere.
I mean, After Effects and Combustion.
Can you tell, speaking of Premiere and After Effects,
what's the difference between Premiere and After Effects?
The difference between Premiere and After Effects?
Yeah.
Well, I'll help you out, Franklyn.
A mirror is basically like an editing suite.
Yeah, it's like, throw it just out for your editing.
Yeah, it has some filters you can add to your footage,
and you can do, you know, very basic color keys and
whatever,
or like, you know, image transfer settings,
but overall it's just meant for editing,
whereas After Effects is kind of the other way around.
It specializes in all the different filters
and ways you can key your footage,
setting up mats and everything.
And it does have the editing
capabilities, but not to the same
expense that Premiere does, obviously.
So they're kind of, I mean,
they work together, I guess, because you can kind of
comp your footage together
and put
your plates and comps together in
After Effects and then edit your footage together
in Premiere.
Usually, personally,
I just stick with After Effects completely
because it's kind of like the all-around package
for, you know,
for compositing, whereas Premiere is kind of like
the home user editing suite.
So that's kind of the difference.
So After Effects is a bit more robust.
You can...
Yeah, much more. There's no comparison.
Okay, I'll check that out next time.
What about tracking?
I heard that's a hard thing to do in compositing.
Well, I mean, it all depends.
There are a lot of automated trackers
out there, like 4G or whatever, that basically do the
entire process for you if you shot
a good plate, if you shot a clean enough plate that the
computer can extrapolate the tracking
information without a problem, then really the tracking
process is just kind of a write-off.
I was kind of actually, for the longest time, I was
confused about how it works.
And basically what these automated trackers do is they'll
run through the footage and
they'll compare each frame to the last one and if there's
any points that um basically that the
computer can tell that they uh they stay in the frame over
time like let's say you've got a
tracking marker on a blue on a blue screen set or whatever
so you can add in your you know cg
environment after you shoot your your actors each little
tracking point they've placed on a blue
screen set um a program like boju will let's say a frame
one it'll identify these unique points
because it can tell, you know, it'll just find differences
in the image
and where the edges are and whatnot.
And then what it'll do is it'll run through all the frames
and it'll, based on a threshold, it'll track the position
of the points that it's found.
Now, some points, obviously, like let's say you're doing a
pan, a really wide pan,
some points are going to go off the screen or if your
footage is noisy
or if, you know, it accidentally tracks a moving object
like a leaf or whatever,
some of those objects it'll it'll only track for a few
frames because it'll realize that
um that it's not a a worker like a point that can be used
for the final um camera mat but basically
anyway so it calculates you know like let's say you've got
some hd footage you'll calculate maybe
two or three hundred of these points um all automated you
just kind of i mean you can do
manual settings but a lot of it you can just do through the
wizard depending on how clean your
plate is and then it'll use the individual point
information for each of those points that it's
tracked over the frame range to basically calculate the
camera move and it'll just you know i'm not
sure what the exact terminology is but it'll use those
points to determine the parallax and
and it's able to kind of generate a 3d grid from all those
points and then what you can do after
that so after you do that you can basically get your camera
track from that like just from that
and then import your camera move or whatever into your 3D
app.
Is that hard to do, importing it into a 3D app?
Importing the camera move information? No.
A lot of apps have it all set up
to take information like that from tracking programs
because obviously a lot of these,
because it's so easy to do an automatic track
rather than a manual track,
a lot of 3D apps already have the built-in integration
for programs like Oju or whatever
so that the entire process is made really easy.
But then you can actually take all those points
and all the ones that made it through the entire track,
which means your program is able to track them
without having any errors, like tracking errors.
You can actually take those into your 3D app
and import them as a point cloud.
And that's really cool because you can set up in your view
ports
the actual tracking points that the program found for you.
So what you can do with those then is use them to match up
your environment or whatever.
So for example, as opposed to having to import your camera
move,
but then completely have to take camera measurements or
whatever
to determine the scale of your scene and whatnot,
you can just use that point cloud as kind of like a
measurement marker
to line up whatever objects you need to...
yeah to uh mad into your scene so let's say you've shot a
city and you've got some buildings
off in the distance that you need you know maybe you got a
big dragon flying through your city and
the dragon kind of goes behind those buildings so you'll
need to put a mat over them as opposed to
you know taking in your tracking points and having just a
camera match and then having to go actually
you know manually match up the buildings yourself you can
just use your point cloud as a guide
and I think that, you know, make a short story long, that's
extremely cool.
And I mean, I've done lots of manual tracking myself using
3Ds Max's camera tracker utility.
And it can be a real pain sometimes just because it can be
hard to organize.
Like even in a shot that requires maybe, you know, 16 or 20
trackers or somewhere in that number,
it can be really difficult to organize all those and get
the measurements for each one
and then match your camera and then debug all the tracking
errors.
So that's where a program like Bonjour or whatever other
trackers out there
that I can't think of at the moment, if it can do it all
for you,
then that's super awesome.
So that's a big part of compositing
because most films nowadays that need CG elements,
you'll rarely see a CG element composited into a still,
like locked off camera.
This is because a lot of the times that makes the CG
element really obvious
and it's harder to tell when something's fake
if the camera's moving or whatever
because when it's locked down,
a lot of people can just imagine,
oh, they placed that over the image
where if there's a camera move,
then it's like, whoa, how'd they line that up?
So tracking is obviously a big part of comping
because it's used so often.
What makes that map?
That concludes my thesis and my dissertation
and whatever else.
I have one more question.
When you're composing a live action
in front of a 3D scene,
sometimes you can really see the live action person stick
out.
Is there a way to prevent that horrible effect?
What do you mean?
Sometimes it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Is it the lighting?
There's a huge number of factors.
It's the lighting, it's maybe the blue screen keying.
Maybe you can see the blue edges or whatever,
or the green edges, depending on if you use a blue or green
screen,
around the person.
major problems.
If you're new to keying,
a lot of films, these are professional
rotoscopers and keyers and whatnot, so
they obviously won't fall prey to these
simple errors, but a lot of the times
when you see amateur footage or whatever on
something like hair,
it can be pretty tricky to key out
something like individual hairs because
colors are...
If you're shooting with a DV camera,
the colors can sometimes be
mixed on the sub-pixel level,
So that's where you tell your compositing app,
you know, I want to key out all the green
and you set a threshold or whatever.
It's still not going to get stuff like, you know,
really fine edges or whatever.
So that's where hair can be an issue.
Lighting can be an issue.
Not just hair, but anything with a fine edge.
Just a grain issue.
Grain, that's another issue.
If you don't match the grain correctly,
that can totally throw off your whole...
Everything can look super real, can be matched perfectly,
but if your grain isn't right,
that can totally throw off your shot.
So, I mean, it's not an easy question.
It's like asking, what makes a 3D image look bad?
You know what I mean?
Like, it's not going to be like, you know, one element.
It's going to be a whole series of factors that are
involved.
Although usually it's a combination, because if there's one
problem,
the chances are that there's numerous problems.
Because usually a lot of these things, once you get into ke
ying and tracking
and copying and whatever all those terms are, they become
pretty elementary.
and it just becomes a simple process rather than a big
effort.
Well, that was so interesting.
I'm going to have to, I don't know, put a piece of tape
over my mouth or something
because that's talking a lot.
No, that's all right.
It's pretty cool.
You're making the show interesting.
It's pretty long.
I think that's about it.
I think we could conclude.
Is that good?
Yeah, we've done 47.
Cool.
I mean, just read some emails.
we got two emails fan mail hey olivier i'm an aspiring 3d
uh this one is from kareem by the
way kareem elgonemi i hope i said your name right hello ol
ivier i'm an aspiring 3d animator who is
trying to get into the industry i enjoy listening to your
cast and hope you keep pumping out new
shows each week kareem elgonemi well thanks kareem thanks
for your support keep listening
And we have an email from Fabrizio Vigano.
Hi, I like your CG podcast.
Can I use iTunes?
I mean to register to your podcast so I can directly
download the new episode.
Yes, Fabrizio, you can.
We're on iTunes.
Just search for CGCast in the podcast section and you
should be able to find it.
Some final comments.
The forecast of CGCast.
CGCast. We have some good stuff planned out. Hopefully a
videocast in the future reviewing
some stuff, some books, which would be video format. I want
to see what your response to the
video would be. Next week, I'll have a interview with Bryn
Morrow. He went to the Vancouver Film
Festival, Vancouver Film School, and he talks about it. He
tells us how it was. Pretty interesting
stuff and we have some other people coming up on the show
hopefully soon and so good times ahead
you guys franklin tyson any final comments uh no uh feel
free to go to my website at tyson
ibell.com t-y-s-o-n-i-b-e-l-e or simply cg sorry simply cg.
net for the forums that i run with
Cameron's.
Of course, his last name alludes me at the moment,
but Cameron James.
I probably refrain.
That's all the way. I partnered with him
on a forum, and I don't know
what's up.
It's okay if it's late. I'm sorry. That's my
excuse. You'll forgive me. So yeah, check out
those two sites at the end of the minute. Some good stuff
there. Yes, yes. Check out
the photography sub-forums.
True. Apparently you've posted some
work there, Archer. Yeah, I need to go and comment
back, but I've been dizzy lately.
Franklyn any final comments
oh no nothing much
just uh
maybe some people
should send me fan mail
oh yes
Franklyn wants fan mail
Franklyn wants fan mail
what's your email
Franklyn
it'd be nice to feel loved
okay hold on
let me just find out
what Franklyn's email is
franklind at cgcast.com
franklind at cgcast
yeah
yeah cgcast
okay so that's about it
um
I hope you guys enjoyed it
and good night
good night
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
