Impatient Procrastinators Visual Effects.

I'll be posting different projects shots and some short tests as I complete them.
Here's one for now... I didn't use HitFilm on this. I won't post anything with that software till I'm a bit more comfortable with it.



Let me know what you think and thanks for watching.
p.s.
Watch in HQ if possible.

Hey, that is looking really nice and you have captured a perfect match move there well done!

Thanks SketchWork. Compositing the shot was the easy part. It was the matchmove that took the longest.

This may be a bit off topic but I didn't want to start another thread and waste space in the forums.
Anyway, Here's 2 tuts on motion tracking in Blender 2.5
Yeppers. Blender has finally added match moving to it's UI. I've been waiting almost 4 years for this and am glad that it's here. Now I won't have to come up with the cash to buy Syntheyes and instead use it to buy HitFilm. Hell yeah!

It's still being worked on but I hear that it's very stable... and very fast, faster than Voodoo. Don't get me wrong. I love Voodoo but it's soo damned slow and takes forever. I don't think Blender exports .ma files though. That's what HitFilm uses to import matchmove data yeah? That's cool, I'll stick with Voodoo till they figure something out.
Soo yeah, this is going to help a lot of us out, that use Blender in their work flow with the Lab products.
I'm so stoked right now.

http://www.blenderco...amera-tracking/

Nice Video Spydurhank!

May i ask that, how many light sources you have had when you rendered the dragon?

I don't think Blender exports .ma files though. That's what HitFilm uses to import matchmove data yeah?

There is a script for export camera data. I hope it helps.

Thanks Messen.

I had 2 sun lamps set to 1. as well as some environment lighting set very low. This was a cheat since It was really hard to get the sun lamps to light the whole scene properly while at the same time, not cast too harsh of a shadow.


EDIT
Oh and thanks for the link to that script.

If any of the admin folks see this, here's my entry for the HitFilm contest. It's a time freeze effect where the camera moves hand held through the scene, kinda like when Hiro from Heroes used to stop time. The clip was degraded when I uploaded through the HitFilm Youtube exporter... not sure what happened so I uploaded the clip through my regular Youtube account.

Everything except the video background was rendered out of Blender and imported into Hitfilm, so the energy shield, dragon, leaves, lightning and floor light plane are really 3D. It took me a while to figure out all of the grading and color correction filters in HitFilm but they are very impressive from what I can tell so nice job on that guys.

If at first watch, you think that the Voodoo matchmove is off due to some jitter in the leaves and energy shield... take a closer look at the dragon, floor light plane and the lightning. They stay where they should and there is no jitter.
The reason the leaves and energy shield seem to jump around a little is because they are really close to the camera while the dragon, lightning and floor plane are farther away which is causing a ton of parallax.



Thanks and let me know what you think.

I think, we have the winner

Here's my third entry to the HitFilm contest... well, it's really my second entry but... whatever.
The footage was degraded again when I uploaded through the built in YouTube uploader in HitFilm so I'm still not really sure what's going on there. I'll upload both clips though, so you guys can at least check them out. I'm kinda upset that the HitFilm uploader keeps downsizing the quality of my footage because it looks so damned awesome in the HitFilm preview window but I'm sure it's something that I'm doing wrong.

Anyway... You guys already know my workflow so there's no need to explain it again.
I opted for a time freeze effect again but this time I went for a 1960's to 1970's horror film type of effect that you would have seen in the theater back in those times, such as grainy dirty or scratched footage with a bit of bloom and defocus except with this thought in mind... what if they had acces to our tech and could create the effects that we can today... I think it would be awesome.
All of those effects were super duper easy to make with HitFilms Filters and such. Not so easy in Visionlab so the High res version will be a bit different than the one I made in Hitfilm.

High res version.


HitFlim version.

Damn, I haven't posted anything in a while and I'm feeling past due.
I really lucked out this Christmas. My awesome girlfriend Courtney, bought me an Aurora Alienware desktop. This thing is insane.
Here are the specs for this beast.

2.5 terabytes with room for 2 more hard drives.
1 gig DDR5 AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card and a slot for an additional card.
8 gigs of ram which is easily up-gradable.
8 Intel core i7 2600k processor.

I did a little test run with HitFilm to see what this computer can do. I added 3D layer on top of 3D layer of every 3D preset that comes with HitFilm. The last that I counted was 10 to 20 layers but, I kept duplicating the more render intensive presets to see if it would bog down the new computer. It finally did slow done the computer but it was an impossible scenario that I will probably never be in. It does pretty awesome with Blender too. It's great with particle, cloth, and liquid simulations and objects with physics applied to them don't even faze the computer.

All in all, I'm pretty stoked with this computer. It's definitely the fastest computer that I've ever used.

It's been a while, worked on this last night. It took around five hours to render out the ocean simulation over night. It took forever to matchmove in Blender because it doesn't have automatic tracking yet. Rather than having to roto masks for the front porch to composite the ocean into the scene, I modeled the geometry of the front porch and textured it with stills taken from the actual live footage. That only took about 30 minutes to do. It's a lot easier than having to manually roto masks. I rendered the geometry as a separate image sequence from the ocean sim to have more control in the compositing stage. I had a spot light which you can see a reflection of on the ocean sim footage. I added an empty in the same 3D coordinates as the spot light for use in Hitfilm as a "point" I selected the matchmoved camera and the before mentioned empty and used the brand new HitFilm export script mentioned here. http://community.hit...ndpost__p__8289

After placing every thing in order and after some grading, I added a plane with a light flares effect on the timeline, changed the plane to 3D and parented the light flare effect to the empty that was exported out of Blender as a point in HitFilm. I also added a nice sky background and used the clouds preset in Hitfilm and slightly animated the effect, it's very subtle but really gives the shot some more depth.

This was really fun to work on and I hope you guys like it.

Very cool. That's an intriguing shot, and creating the geometry rather than masking is an interesting route.

I'm looking forward to you starting to play properly with HitFilm.

Thanks Tarn... may I call you Tarn? Sorry, the old FXhome site is how I'm used to knowing folks around here and I get rather nostalgic at times.

I would have preferred to use the actual footage in the composite but realized that it would have been a pain to roto masks for all of the geometry in the scene. In retrospect, I could have used... moving track mattes? Is that what they're called? because the footage was already tracked, hmm... it could work I think?

Let me tell you though, I know it's impossible at this stage in the software but man... it would be a hell of a thing to be able to export a scene from Blender into HitFilm because although my new computer is fast... it took five hours to render the ocean sim in Blender. It took HitFilm about a minute and a half to render this clip, and that's with all of the layers, grading effects, motion blur and 3D effects and such at 24fps 1920x1080. HitFilm is fast... so bloody fast that it blows my mind. Ram previews played at nearly real time even with all of the before mentioned layers and effects.

Other than waiting for the Blender render times, the compositing stage took me the longest because I haven't sat down and really played with HitFilm too much. Very interesting tools in the software, I'm very impressed.

Anyway... this new script has given me a ton of ideas which correspond with Hitfilm. Just being able to import a camera and empties from blender has so much potential. Will be posting clip of an idea that I had soon.

Here's some pics of my set up.



By spydurhank at 2012-01-22



By spydurhank at 2012-01-22

Here's a WIP of a blue giant that I made in Blender last night. Gonna a work on animating the solar flares and the surface of the star, will work on photo realism once I get it down properly. Hope you like it.



By spydurhank at 2012-01-24

Here's the star that I was working on in Blender, except it's yellow now. The surface and solar flares seem like they're moving a little to fast for my taste but it actually looks pretty good, I think. Will most likely slow down the animation from now on unless it's a close up or something like that.

Anyway, this is for part of an idea that I had for using the new Blender to HitFilm, Camera and Empty exporter. It's gonna be a space battle with fighters and huge destroyer type ships but first, I had to see how well I was able to create a star and composite it with a background in HitFilm. It's looking like everything is going to work so far and I'm pretty stoked about it.

If I were you I would make the actual star be a little bit more visible like in your first picture but otherwise it's looking great as well as your previous work. Especially the water looks really great. Keep up the good work.

Thanks, you don't think the pic is too... clean?
It sorta does to me, especially when it's animated, that's why I blew up the brightness of the animated star clip.
Maybe you're right though... now I'm sure you're right. It's because the animation was way to fast. Damn! How did I not notice that before? Good eye man and thanks again.

Yeah I like to be able to see the actual planet itself but the flares and surface are good just maybe a little less of them. I guess if you look up some pictures of planets beyond our galaxy most of the time you can see the planet itself. Not sure what look you're going for but that's just me.

I've been starting to dabble a little into Blender mostly just animation but hopefully I can get a lot more practice so I can do some stuff you've done. You're inspiration to me personally so keep it up.

Looks really cool. Something that might be worth trying is adding some subtle light streaks/flares so that it looks more like it was shot by a real camera. The film Sunshine does some very cool stuff in this area.

Thanks Vik and Tarn, that really means a lot. That's a good idea, I'll see if I can find Sunshine on Netflix to check out your suggestion.