Just Wrapped up my First Ever Full on Articulated Roto shot. It took about 22 hours of work which is Quite a bit of time but since it was my first shot ever and there was quite a bit of learning and starting over involved i figure it came out ok this is the first part to my roto demo reel and my first step towards getting a job at a major vfx shop.
First Attempt at Rotoscoping
Tracking Done With Mocha For After Effects
And Rotoscoping In After Effects
This is a 1080p shot full screen it for all its glory
If you have not seen this video, you have been hiding under a rock for the past few months. I am not going to talk about the artistic side of his video because there is a great article on Motionographer with interviews from Patrick and some screen grabs of his storyboards and general creative workflow.
What I am going to talk about is how you can make an effect like that, using voxels. A voxel (volumetric pixel) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space (Wikipedia). There is a preset out on the interwebs for c4d written by Robert Leger that lets you break apart a model into voxels while maintaining the shape of the model. The original pixels animation used a script written in c++ and animated in Maya.
Register Today for the Online Launch of Adobe CS5 i am so exited for AE and PR to be 64bit native. They are going to reveal all the features April 12 stay tuned for more updates as they come
a couple of months back i ran across a web based image processing tool like Photoshop i posted about it here. Today i am here to let you know that that small be it cool website has been outdone a thousand fold and this pro tool set in my opinion is going to change the way we work on the fly and on machines that are not really ours the Aviary Tool set is a free web based app suite that contains 7 apps : image , color , effect , vector , screen cap , image mocap and sound. These 7 free web apps encompass what i believe all the needs of a visual artist of many talents.
I am going to break down every App and tell you what i like about it and such and hope as always this information will be useful in your daily work flow.
Effect Editor – Peacock
I am starting with this App first because I am so amazed with what Peacock is. Peacock is a Node Based Effects Editor for the common man, AND IT IS FREE. A while back the great flocks at dvGarage brought the power of node based image editing to Photoshop in the form of a plug-in called conduit, today The great people of Aviary gave us Peacock.
Image Editor – Phoenix
Phoenix is basically a online version of Photoshop nothing much to tell all the standard futures all thou one thing in particular my attention and that was the fact that you could make a peacock layer in phoenix kind of like dynamic link layers in after effect and PhotoshoporPremier
Audio Editor – Myna
Myna is my second Favorite after Peacock its a fully functional audio editor. You can record tracks right into the web app you can save sessions and even export wave mixdowns. The interface reminds me of audacity a bit but it has functional short cut keys and space bar is play and stop like mostly common in this type of app
There is a lot more that the Aviary Tool set can offer you They have a Color suite similar to Adobe kuler and a Vector App and a simple version of there image app. Go and Check them out you wont regret it
Matt Silverman, Creative Director of Bonfire Labs,particularly known as being a roto expert in addition to a motion graphics and visual effects artist. Several years ago, he took it upon himself to enlist some of the best users in the field to construct a set of timeless, concept-based, software-agnostic visual effects training videos.
The links for Series 2 (covering compositing, keying, tracking, paint, and rotoscoping presented by Ron Brinkmann, Stu Maschwitz, and Scott Stewart) are below; watch them while you can:
A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects
are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.
Credits:
CG
|Modelling – Texturing – Illumination – Rendering| Alex Roman
POST
|Postproduction & Editing| Alex Roman
MUSIC
Sequenced, Orchestrated & Mixed by Alex Roman (Sonar & EWQLSO Gold Pro XP)
Sound Design by Alex Roman
Based on original scores by:
.Michael Laurence Edward Nyman. (The Departure)
.Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. (Le Carnaval des animaux)
Directed by Alex Roman
Done with 3dsmax, Vray, AfterEffects and Premiere.
EDIT: Original MP4 torrent if you’re interested. Thanks to Brennan
So i Finlay watched James Cameron’s Avatar In IMAX 3D over the weekend, It was hard to get tickets i was trying since opening week the line was about two hours to get in the theater but i broke throe and sat 3rd row center, one of the few really good seats. The movie Was visually stunning. The 3D was so well implemented and not over used in a ‘in your face’ kind of way like the amusement parks do just because they can. i am not a movie critique so I wont go into details i will simply say that the movie was amazing and Mr Cameron is a visionary. now that we got that out of the way the minute i steeped out of the cinema i was obsessed, i had to know how? and with what ? and by whom ? all of this marvel was created so after some VFX research i found a bit of info i figured if some one out there was as impressed about this movie as i was maybe they will appreciate this.
Avatar’s VFX Master: Weta Digital’s Joe Letteri interviews [here]
FXGuide Red Center : on the Cameron 3D camera [here]
For thous of you with much nerdiar tendencys like myself the movie was screened using RealD in Imax this wiki is very informative on the subject. Cinefex , the world leading print resource for anything VFX has a very in depth looks at this masterpiece you can pick up a copy (print or digital) [here]
that is all i got for now i will keep at it and will inform you when i come across new information
on a side note this probably wont ever happen but if Mr. Cameron ever reads this id like to say :
“Hello Sir, i wanted to tell you to keep making epic sagas that changes peoples lives and you have changed my life in siginficant way also if you happen to be hiring for the next bigest movie of all time i am your man. “
First let me apologize for not posting in a while,
<usual excuses> work has been crazy, no time , moving , packing and my building got hit by a meteor</usual excuses>.
Now that’s done with here is what’s new. I just wrapped up an animation project that was quite long, no mere 30 seconds or 1 min but a full 3min:40sec of motion graphics. Now in our Mograph world that is a lot, (too much in fact) and i noticed something very interesting; my animation is all the same. I don’t mean the look of my animation, i mean the way small background things behave, like having clouds animate in the background and using “wiggle.expression” to animate them instead of using keyframes. Or when i animate fractal noise to drive a texture i just go in quick and dirty with a “time*45.expression” and leave . Now don’t get me wrong, these ways of animating have their place but here is where i came across my problem: when you have 30 seconds of sky and you throw a wiggle.expression on there and move on it works, but when you are looking at 4 min of sky all of the sudden you see the impersonal machine behavior of expressions. I started seeing noticeable patterns for all my animations. All the little things i stopped doing like animating evaluation values or complexity and substituting it by the exact same time*15.expression.
Now it may very well be that i don’t know any other expressions so all of them look the same but i figured a computer has a set number of rules it works by and no matter how you dress it up it will end up using the same set of rules to apply it. So i set out to modify my project from machine driven monotone animation to something with a bit of personality, and let me tell you it was hard going from this :
But it was well worth it. My animation took on character and a life of its own. Which made me feel more accomplished (and much cooler).
I did not go to traditional animation school however and the core principals of the art was something i needed to understand well before i could apply them to my animation. Here are some of the resources i found and used to make a learning curve a bit less curvy (?), than it could have been.
A great 3 part article from fuelyourmotionography.com about everything that i just discussed, only written by some one much more experienced than i am.
So the underlying point I’m trying to make is – sure you can go ahead and use the built in preset. We all can! But if you really want to stand out from the crowd it’s best to put in the effort to keyframe your animations. After all, nothing that looks awesome was easy to do
That’s all for this time folks. As always i hope that at least one person finds this useful in some way. If you like it, hate it or find it stupid please comment.
enjoy.
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