Just A Test

On vacation in Europe this summer, I took this little picture. Nothing spectacular about it, but as a lighting test to get my class into advanced mental ray shaders and lighting, I thought it'd be a good place to start. I've built the scene and started with some simple renders:

Perhaps I've taken the colour corrections a bit far and the vignetting is too much. However it's just fun to play around on something simple rather than overly grand ideas that never get finished. This initial rendering is just using Blinns and Lamberts. Nothing fancy yet. Single area light, ray traced shadows, and some very basic Final Gathering. I'm using an HDRI for the reflections though I can see that I need to boost the gain on them a bit as there's some crushing of the brights which is dropping them into the ugly grey area on the surface of the saucer.


Anyway, all that to say that I've also jumped on the 3D bandwagon. Hopefully all two of you that read this blog have a pair of red/blue 3D glasses. Strap yourselves in and hold on tight! You haven't seen anything this powerful since Avatar:

Suiting Up: Revisited

As a class project a couple years ago we created an "homage" to effects like Iron Man and Star Craft 2 where a mechanical suit is being assembled over a person. I recently reshot the footage with our school's Sony HXRNX5U and have retracked it. This is a simple key and track test as a proof that the track is of a workable quality. I left the 2x4s in that I step onto so that it wouldn't look like my feet were slipping when I step up.

This is all part of a larger, semester-long project. In its first iteration, it was a single shot with a single design. This time around I'm wanting to give the students some variety. Along with the shot posted here, I (we, really. Forde Oliver and I filmed it) shot 4 additional optional shots. My hope is that those that want a larger challenge will edit together a sequence that shows more assembly animations and more complex mechanical modeling.

Along with more shots, I'm wanting to do more designs. In its first version, Tom had done the sole concept art. This time around, I'm hoping to have 2 or 3 versions for students to choose from. Should they choose, I'll even consider allowing the mixing and matching of concepts for more variety in the final work.

Stu Maschwitz's DV Rebel's Guide is possibly the greatest book ever. Smooth segue, right? Well it might not be a smooth segue, but it does get me right into something I want to talk about; shooting video. I've read many blog posts and forums on how to shoot quality video, but nothing is as thorough and concise as Stu's book. The biggest revelation for me so far has been about how to access settings in Adobe Premier for bringing your over-bright whites back into the usable colour spectrum and rendering it out to retain all that needed information. After doing a slight colour correct to my footage I was able to put detail back into areas that were too flat either in their whites or blacks. Wonderful.

I'm going to come back to the camera for a moment... the Sony HXRNX5U is a good camera. Not great in my initial shooting, but very good. Certainly better than my consumer level Canon HV30. I just don't understand the movement towards CMOS over CCD based cameras. Rolling shutter alone is a big enough reason to never use them. Tracking footage with rolling shutter issues isn't an impossibility, but it does limit how crazy you can go with your camera motions. Even on slight moves, if you're zoomed in, it becomes more pronounced. Shaky hands plus zoomed lens equals jello effect. No good.

Now the fact that this Sony pro camera has 3 CMOS sensors has seemingly given it the ability to shoot better in low light and the colours themselves seem to really pop, however looking at the final footage in Fusion channel by channel reveals a very noisy blue channel. It could be due to the fact that we shot on greenscreen and the solid colour green was messing with the camera's ability to cleanly "capture" other channels, but it seems to be really bad. I'm going to have to bring the camera home to do further testing on more "natural" environments to see what the results are.

Cairo Time

This is going to be a different kind of post. The other night we watched a movie called Cairo Time. It's not one I would have picked, but the trailer was intriguing. Watch the trailer. It gives away most of the movie but I'm about to do the same anyway.

Ever since I was a kid, I didn't just watch movies, I absorbed them. Assuming a movie is worth remembering, I can remember who I saw it with and where (similar to how my dad remembers what he was doing, when, and, more importantly, what the weather was like). Having been in the computer graphics industry for 12 years now (including teaching), I've taken that absorption of movies to a new level. I constantly look at settings, textures, and lighting and I instantly want to re-create it in CG. It's not that it would be better in CG, it's just that I want to know that I can recreate that material property. It's as though the entire image isn't enough to appreciate. I need to rebuild that scene and zoom in on it and admire that tiny highlight from as many angles as possible.

Cairo Time is one of those movies. It tells the story of a woman arriving in Cairo on a planned vacation with her husband. They're travelling separate from each other and his work with the UN stops him in Gaza to help with a refugee camp. She arrives to find a former colleague of his, Tareq, picking her up and taking her to the hotel. When she doesn't know what to do in Cairo, she calls on him to help her see the city. So what happens? Do they fall in love? Do they fight space monsters? You'll have to watch it to see. Or just read the rest of this post 'cause I'm going to spoil most of the movie.

What I really want to talk about in this post is the movie's use of colour. Gold and teal to be specific.

Right from the beginning, our main character, Juliette, tells us how hot it is. Sure, she does it verbally, but our lighting is hot too. The golden light accenting her hair heats her up and even tints her face red. The response she gets from Tareq is that the people there are used to the heat. It's interesting thinking back on it now. For the rest of the movie, she is consistently wearing colours, or lit in a way that is golden (or yellow, or red, or orange) while the rest of Cairo is more teal, light blue, or aqua. It really signals that she's the warm one and the visitor as she stands out. It's also interesting to see Egypt presented to us in a blue-ish tinge, when 99% of the movies we've seen about Egypt are lit in that golden light.

Here's an example of that (and one of my favorite compositions of the film). The city of Cairo and the blue sky. Desaturated distance haze reducing the contrast of our setting. In the foreground we get our two main characters. Again, Juliette is wearing yellow and her blonde hair really stands out against the water of the Nile. Having the bridge above water increases the perception of distance of our foreground from background and really makes it pop. Wonderful. Often when watching movies I think to myself, "I have to remember that and use it in CG sometime." Well now I'm documenting it.

Later, while on a boat tour of the Nile, Tareq sneaks in a photo of Juliette. He explains that ever since having a digital camera, he likes taking pictures of people and surprising them. He gets the best reactions that way.

Once again, we have the cool background of Cairo and the hot foreground of our characters. What this leads me to is another of my favorite shots in the film, not just for staging, but for the pacing of the shot. Here we have Juliette later on, looking at the photo from the boat trip...

... The background is out of focus, she's looking at her photo. It's tinged red from the boat canopy. Her hair and dress add that golden hue to the foreground. The phone rings and she leaves frame to answer it.

The blue of the Nile now takes over and the shot becomes cool again. I love this especially because she goes to answer the call from her husband who is explaining that he has been delayed yet again. The shot holds on this until the boat you see there makes it from the middle to the 3/4 point to the left. It has to go on for another 30 seconds before we cut to the interior to see her frustration. She's made a decision now. She's going to go to a wedding with Tareq (a previous invitation from earlier in the film). Something interesting happens now.

One thing is that we get one of my HUGELY favorite shots in the film. A train station. Golden. Now the colour of our environment has flipped. We're now mainly gold with more subtle blue accents. I love the exposure value of this shot. I love the background of the station with the barely visible scaffolding coming through the bright light.

Now on top of the colour of the scene changing, we're now seeing Juliette changing.

Cairo is golden and she is aqua.

Here's where we shift from her being a tourist and learning about the culture to her embracing it (and perhaps falling for Tareq?). That aside, what I want to come to now is the part of the film I'll call, "high romance." Colours shift and the look of the film is lush. After the wedding we're back in the hotel.

I LOVE this shot. I especially love her see through dress. Not because of some pervy reason, but because it adds a razor's edge to the scene. Like it can't be hard enough that she's married to the guy he used to work for and it's clear they're falling for (or have fallen for) each other, but her dress has to have the added allure of being translucent? C'mon! Imagine being him and trying not to pay any attention to that. The background sky which was cool and blue in the past is now golden and transitions us to our next setting and yet another of my favorite shots.

Gorgeous. The colours, the setting sun, her dress in the wind, the lens flare. The size of the pyramids in comparison to the size of our actors adds a more dramatic element to the scene with the pyramids dominating the landscape. The spacing of the pyramids and the road leading to the setting sun gives us a visual path that not only leads our eye, but also tells us that this could go anywhere. You don't want it to end at this point.

But it does.

And we get probably what is my favorite contrasting image of the film. Here's where I spoil the end of the film for you. She returns to the pyramids with her husband.

The colours of the scene have changed. We're desaturated and cool again. But she's wearing her yellow dress again. Could it be that she's back to being the way she was before? I'd say not. She's a changed person, but perhaps she's back to the way her husband knew her just a week ago. The composition of the pyramids in relation to our actors is totally different. Bunched together with the size of our actors larger in comparison gives me a feeling that is almost claustrophobic. All the open space of the desert and we cram it all into the middle? Where the previous visit to the pyramids was wide and expansive, this feels like a tourists photo. Some forgettable throwaway in an age where we take thousands of digital photographs and call ourselves photographers.

Cairo Time is gorgeous. I can't say it's for everyone. Slow pacing is the name of the game and the actors carry it beautifully in a colourful setting. Being in an industry that looks to what was the last explosive visual effect and wondering how it was done and how we can make it bigger, we can't forget where all of our knowledge of what makes a film beautiful comes from. Avatar is a spectacle. It pushed CG to a whole new level of what can be done on a large scale. If we want to make truly great art however, we need movies like Cairo Time to remind us what makes the intimate beautiful too.

Small Update

Just posting the updated, rendered turntable. It still needs fixes, but I'm feeling a need to move on to something else. I'll probably still do the hair research and post updates of that as I figure things out.

Face Model Changes

We're on reading week now so since I finished my marking yesterday I thought I'd fix some of the most glaring issues with my face. Er... my CG face that is.

Firstly, since I rushed the texture painting process, I went back and painted out my double chin. This one isn't as obvious in the render, but combined with the geometric problems, it made me look fat. But I was still thin. But I looked fat. It was weird.

Next, using my favorite Sculpt Geometry tool in Maya, I went in and pushed my jaw and chin around, tweaked my lips, massaged around my eyes, and adjusted my ear ridges. Some of these modifications are more subtle than others, but in the end, I think this looks tons better. I still haven't done any real hair, but I've been playing with paint effects hair in Maya and perhaps I'll try and get a beard going first before I move on to real, styled hair.

As a last thing to look at, I've never been happy with the way blogger deals with videos, so I've gone back to my Face Off project and compiled a movie showing my progress because that is what I had originally built my face model for. So here's a breakdown of the five segments:

1- Previs. I needed a video to explain to the wife what she was filming and why. This also helps with the timing of when certain actions have to happen.

2- Proof of concept. Once it was filmed and I had it all tracked, I took my face model, put a chrome shader on it and loaded in the HDRI I took of my kitchen. It seemed to be good.

3- Next was a roto/CG test. I wanted to see that I could actually get my fingers looking like they were on top of the CG model of my face coming off. I used projection mapping to attach the texture to the face. I grabbed that right from the video footage.

4- After taking off the face, I wanted to see what it would look like with the hole that is left over. This is pretty rough, but started to give an idea of how much work was ahead. How much? Lots.

5- Lastly, I just wanted to see how it was all coming together so I grabbed a skull model I had, modified it, put a chrome shader on it and comped it all together. This really showed me just how hard this was going to be with the hand moving on top. If I was smart I would have filmed two versions (one without the hand motion) and I might have actually finished this project.