I’m done with this challenge. Took long enough, but this is it… all done.

I’ve made a lot of adjustments (the smoke, camera animation, paralax, colors, fixed the dress, etc. …) In the end the Shake node tree was really a mess and it was really hard going back to fix stuff in the beginning cause I had a hard time finding stuff in there.

I also made titles and added some sound. And that was it. Keeping my fingers crossed I get a lot of votes ^^

Watch vfx308_doen_final.mov

Done some more work on the challenge, while I was taking a break from some other work. Now the node tree looks even more hideous and I should really clean it up and make it a bit optimized.

I fixed the lightning on the pots (Photoshop + Clone tool = awesome) and fixed the dress a bit (it was flickering). After that I went working on the smoke. I wasn’t satisfied with the look of it so I put a lot of more nodes into it, and I kinda came up with quite a nice feel to it. But I still have to work out the animation of the warps.

I then put it all together and am now rendering a pre-render for the CC test #2, which I also adjusted to not flicker like that and adjusted the vignette.

I think it’s coming together nicely and it looks like it will be done in time.

Here’s a test render of the smoke

Watch vfx308_test_005.mov

Continuing my VFX308 challenge attempt. I’ve been at it for the better part of the day and I feel like I’ve done quite a lot. It’s still far from finished, but it’s getting there.

I’ve decided to go with the invisible girl motif, but not completely invisible. So I added a slight monochrome layer of the girl over it all, and distorted the background under it. But I think I overdid it with the add-ing and will have to tone it down a bit.

I’ve also started adding the finishing touches (the vignette, grain, CC) but I think I overdid it (I tend to do that a lot). So I guess some corrections will follow.

Watch vfx308_test_004.mov

I’ve spent the whole day working on my VFX308 entry and I must say, I’m semi-pleased with what I’ve accomplished so far.

Somewhere along I’ve changed the concept and made my life a little easier but still a lot harder. Confused? Well, I am too.

Probably the ugliest piece of script I’ve put together so far. But I can’t be sure of that… I’ve made some ugly scripts. But what can I do; there usually isn’t time to clean them up. Altho, it might render a bit faster if I optimized it. But there’s no time for that, still lots of work to do.

Anyway, I’ve decided to give the dancer a bit of a ghostly appearance, so I made her vanish with quite some keying/rotoscoping/painting work. I can’t show the moving thing yet, since I’ve got some flickering issues on parts where I’ve been patching up the parts of the dress that got covered by the dancer. But I can show some stills.

I think it looks quite good, but it still needs a lot of work. I’m also not sure if I should make the dancer at least a bit visible… or make her hands visible in some way. I dunno yet, we’ll see.

More to come.

After almost 3 weeks I’ve continued work on my submission for the VFXTalk’s challenge VFX308.

I’m slowly getting the results I want, but I still need to tweak a lot of stuff. The lightning is still a pain in my ass, since I still didn’t get around to it. The smoke is also a pain, but mostly because of the time I lose waiting for previews. The Warper nodes are really slow, and I can’t always work with P3 (0.1,1) proxies. So it’s a little difficult to animate it.

What I still need to do?

1. complete the animation of the smoke
2. adjust the lightning
3. fix the problems from the original key (roto, anyone?)
4. color correction, retime
5. maybe add a fancy touch
6. …

Plenty of work to do still.

Here’s the third adjustment to the “human torch” excercise.

In this adjustment, I first corrected the colors, so they’re not all pink and pale. I then added some glow to the arm (and the flame too) so it looks like it’s really heated up. Afterwards I did some corrections to the warps of the flame, which I’m still not completely happy with, but will leave it like that, since I’m done with this excercise. And then I cleaned up my node tree so it doesn’t look that messy.

Here’s the final thing in motion

Watch hero_flame.cmp.tst.002.mov

I attempted the “human torch” effect again today. I basically started from scratch; at least for the flame part. I launched Particle Illusion and imported the source footage. After that I started playing around with the emitters to figure out, which one would look and work the best.

After that I went back into Shake and loaded up yesterday’s script and started making adjustments. First of all, I changed the colors back to more red-ish, since it looks more “natural” (I don’t know why I don’t just let it look fiery?).

The final script looks a bit like this

The left part is for the flame, and the right one is for the keying and making the arm all glowy (come to think of it, I could add some more glow to the whole thing… well, maybe in part 3).

For now I think I’ve done a pretty good job. I only have to figure out how to close the flame up better (the Warper didn’t do the trick, at least not in the five minutes that I’ve spend working with it).

I’ve also uploaded a test render.

Watch hero_flame.cmp.tst.001.mov

I got “inspired” today by episode 20 of the show Heroes and felt like I needed to play around a bit. So I quickly took my IXUS camera and shot myself in front of my blue wall and started “creating”. The idea was to create the “flame-boy” effect – where the “hero’s” hand/arm bursts into flame.

At first I tried creating it entirely inside Shake, but got nowhere. After about an hour and a half, I gave up and launched Particle Illusion, where it was fairly simple to create and animate the “flame” the way I wanted to (altho, I didn’t really spend too much time on it, since this was a quick test). I know stuff like this is usually animated with fluids or particles in an app like Maya, but I don’t have the luxury of having knowledge on that stuff. So I guess I’ll pursue creating this entirely with 2D apps and I’ll see how it goes.

This is part 1 of this test composite. Stay tuned for part 2 (when I’ll get back to it).

I love the effect of rays and volumetric light and that is why I gave it a shot to make the effect in Shake.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward. You got a “light source” and position a radial (actually zoom-) blur behind it and adjust the colors, and luminance and other stuff… the broadness of the shine/rays is defined by the distance of the source of the radial blur from the “light source”. This is easily adjustable in a static shot (or a shot with not much movement).

So I wanted to figure out how I could attach the rBlur to like a track of the light source and still have the correct width of the shine. That is where I came up with the directSpread macro.

The basic idea is defining two points:

• the light source
• direction

and then position the rBlur source for a certain amount behind the light source in the opposite direction from the direction point. And in addition, I added an option to calculate the relative distance between the points and adjust the distance for the rBlur source according to that.

There was quite some equations in there.

Watch directSpread.mov

If you think this is useful, then download this macro and test it out.

Download directSpread.zip

I’ve been playing around in Shake today with some off the materials I got from different books on compositing. And I’ve decided to test my “integration” skills.

So I did some tracking, keying, color matching, etc… and I came up with this.

(Pay attention to the two guys in the background)

And here’s what the script looks like:

Watch matchmove.cmp.tst.002.mov