Week Three and Four

Here's the final result for the week three project.  I repeated the clip three times in the YouTube video because it is so short by it's self.  So if you were wondering what the jumping was, that's it
Week Three Comp

During week four the project was to take a CG (Computer Generated) car and put on top of a background image (the plate) and make it look photo-real.  Now I didn't like that plate that I was given so along with my assigned project I chose another and did one for myself as well.  Here is the assigned plate with the car comped in.

Click to enlarge

The image at the top of this post is a plate I chose to do for myself on top of the assigned project.  I also did a quick breakdown on how it was put together so be sure to check that out!

Breakdown

Week Three Already!

Before I start, last week we focused on lighting so I'll post some pictures from that. We were assigned to portray a mood by only using lighting.

 

Now for the real deal, keying. Keying is when we take a shot and composite it into another. Like before, what better way to explain than to show an example. Actually, now that I think about it, this is almost like the other video with the car and the motorcycle. This time however, we have a plate (background) and footage of a person. We actually got to choose the footage and plates (which I organised for the whole class ;) Anyways, I chose a shot of a city street at night along with some footage of James, a student who graduated last block.

 

Now James was filmed on a greenscreen. This means that I have to extract the green and put him on top of the plate, making sure to get all the strands of hair! Not only am I overlaying him but, matching color and noise. For those who don't know I put an example of noise below :)

The project isn't due until Monday but I thought I'd get a head start so I'll post what I've done so far!

 

Noise on left, less noise on right

 

Lighitng Week Two

 

Sneek peek to week three project

 

 

Block Three!

 

 

It's already the beginning of week 3 ahhhhh! Time flies, especially when you take into account that there are only 12 weeks a block! I better get everyone all caught up then. So all in all block three is all about compositing. Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. What better way to show you what it means then with an example.

 

Week one the assignment was to composite a CG (Computer Generated) car into a scene with a motorcycle driving on the road. We would have to make the car drive behind the motorcycle. I'll throw together a quick breakdown so you can see what had to be done (im just learning the software though so the breakdowns will get better!). That brings up another point. Breakdowns are when the final shot is shown layer by layer to show the amount of work that went into the composite. These are mostly used when showing off work to employers, not so much for film. In film you want the final perfected shot. Anyways, heres that first shot, and a little teaser for something that I'm working on myself!

 

I almost forgot!  The software we use is NukeX for all those interested =)

 

Week One Assignment

Teaser

 

 

 

Re-Cap

Well I think its about time I get to writing in this thing again!

Since my last post we have done a few projects in class ending a big project towards the end of block 2, the group project.

One of the last weeks of block two we did a group project.  There were 4 leads with each team having 5-6 people in them.  I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the leads to work on the project!  It went smoothly, however as I had predicted it had been a little chaotic towards the end.  We had 2 1/2 weeks to make a animated short with a story built around audio.  Each group got to choose there audio from a live action movie.  Now we couldn't simply recreate the scene in the movie with the audio, we had to make an entirely different plot.  This had to be nothing like the movie.  We spent the first day brainstorming and thinking of ideas for our short and by the end of the day had a good solid one.
Now the plan was to finish the animation at week 1 /12.  That would give us plenty of buffer time in case there were problems in the pipeline of the production, which there were..  We ended up working down to the last night to get the final video put together.  I had a great team, and they did a lot of work.  That is also something worth mentioning though.. Being the team lead I had the smallest part in the animation.  Now some other leads chose to do the hardest roles in the short, but here was my logic.  I had to make sure everything was running smoothly, check on people constantly to make sure work was getting done, help with problems (everyone in the group was coming to me with issues they were having).  Doing all that on top of having a major role in the animation would have been too hectic and caused me too much distraction from the group.  I think I made the rite choice in doing this, and in the end it payed off!  Our group got a 90/100  on the project.
I do have to say that if I was going to do this again I would change the pipeline a little (pipe line is a term we use in production, one task moving down the chain "pipe" to the next).

Group Project

Side Project

Over the weekend there was a convention held here in Orlando called MegaCon.  Its a  is a large multi-genre convention that caters to the comic book, sci-fi, anime, fantasy, and gaming communities.  DAVE School had a booth there we we showed of what we did here at the school.

There are two flat-screen TVs in the back that are on stands.  They were duplicating what was being done on computers by students below, I was one of these students.  I was modeling in Audtodsk Maya so I thought I would bring in some things from school to work on.  One of these things was a pen that I made the day before.

 

Youtube - 3D Pen with Filmed Pen

Youtube - Pen Turn-Table

 



More Mocap

We have been working more and more with motion capture these past few weeks and I have learned to love and hate it. Motion capture is great because you get fast accurate results. However, the way that you edit this data can be messy. We use a software package called Motion Builder. This program can read C3D data. C3D data is just the format in which the motion capture cameras are recorded in. Now don’t get me wrong Motion Builder is a very powerful tool, but I find it to be extremely glitchy. For those interested what version, we use the 2011 32bit edition in class. Neither here nor there we had to learn it and I’m happy I did because the technology is only getting better and better. Having a background in this will only help if I want to pursue motion capture in the future. But that being said, as of now I don’t like it’s not my favorite thing in the world.

So, for our project we had to pick a well-known movie scene with a significant amount of talking and moving around and re-tell it using motion capture. To tell you the truth I think the hardest part was finding a movie scene to use! I decided to use the movie Step Brothers, one that almost every 90's kid has seen in our teen years. Here’s a link to what I did with the original video in the bottom right corner. It’s not an exact match, but its close. We only got two takes with the mocap actor. The class only got him for 1 day so we all had to do our scenes that day. There are 24 of us so it was a little rushed but it was still fun to get a taste of the fufill process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_j29nS0Q3o

T-Shirt Contest

I won the T-Shirt contest! So not only will my design be on every new t-shirt but I also get drive on access to the school. Here at Universal there are the theme parks and the backlot. The back lot is where all everything behind the scenes goes on (ride repair, stages for recording movies, advertising etc. The school is located in the backlot which you need clearance to get into. Normal clearance covers just walking into the back lot. You need special permission to drive onto the backlot and I get that privilege for a while now!

I had a meeting today with the founder of the school who chose was judging the design. He asked if I could make a larger resolution image (bigger). Now I think this is common knowledge but I will explain anyways. A rasterized image (normal picture) has a certain resolution. Once you go beyond 100% the image becomes blurry/pixelated. A vector image on the other hand can be scaled up infinitely with no distortion or blurring. This is because vector images are driven by mathematical shapes. I never really took the time to teach myself about vectors to much because I never really needed them but, because Jeff (the founder of the school) wanted a larger resolution image/vector I though "What a great time to learn!" In about 2 hours I had converted my image into a vector. Now it can be scaled as big as the school wants!  Oh and he did as that I change the color around "DAVE" to be white just to make it pop a little so that was the only other change that I made to the design.