Taylor Webber VFX

Hi! This is my university blog full of all of my visual effects projects for the course Visual Effects and Motion Graphics at USW. I am currently a second year and my skills are developing daily. If you would like to see some of my completed university projects head over to my Vimeo account and have a look: Vimeo.com/itsjusttaaylor. Thank you!

[itsjusttaaylor]

Here is our final render. 

There is one very minor thing we need to fix before we can upload this properly, which is the shaking on the first shot of the box. We forgot to stabilise it! Oh well, we will fix this in due course.

[itsjusttaaylor]

Evaluation

I have really enjoyed doing this project from start to finish, researching into old legends and coming up with a concept. I am very very happy matt joined me on this project as i had planned too many shots to do by myself, and would've struggled to finish or had to cut shots. 

i really like the end piece i think all the shots are done really well, and we both split the shots equally, both having 6 shots each. I think those 6 shots show how much we can get done in a limited time frame, and the various skills as well. I feel like i have definitely accomplished more in FMP than i have in any other project, as we only had a couple of months same as advanced compositing, but i feel i have challenged myself in FMP by doing 6 shots and learning new things such as C4D projection mapping and artificial lighting. I am very glad we didnt limit ourselves to one shot each this time, as it proved how much work we can do and the quality we can do it at. I 100% feel i have challenged myself and learned from everything on this project.

I have really enjoyed this project, as I've not only focused on face tracking, i have developed skills in C4D, editing, smart vectors, and clean up.

The thing i don't really like about the piece is that the story doesn't really come together as well as i hoped. I feel maybe we needed more filler shots to help tell the story of pandora, instead of vfx shot after vfx shot. 

I think matt and myself work really well together, and were not afraid to tell each other what we think or what needs changing. I feel we definitely know each others strengths and weaknesses and work with that.

i am proud of my C4D shot as well, even if the particles didn’t look the best they could've, but we did follow tutorials and ask geraint, but particular is a bit hard to get right. The lighting in the shot looks super real, and reflects the particles i made. These box shots with the particles really help to sell the piece and bring some life into it.

One thing i would change about our final piece is the grade, i feel like we ran out of time a bit. This meant that some colour in the veins were lost, but the piece still works. 

Overall, i am very happy with how this turned out, how me and matt worked together, and the amount of work/quality of work we produced.

[itsjusttaaylor]

I lowered the bump map and this is the first couple of frames, and it looks a lot better than before. I also love the little watery warble effect the particles are giving as they appear from the box. Really helps to sell the appearance of these flickering lights 

[itsjusttaaylor]

I rendered the shot about 80 frames and thought id check to see what its looking like, I noticed the bump map was far too high and looked very unrealistic. It looks good far away but close up its super obvious the bump Mao was put in

[itsjusttaaylor]

I have adjusted the lighting size and the amount of illumination that it emits, as before it was a bit too much, but now I think it looks a lot better.

[itsjusttaaylor]

Here is the development of what I've done, and how the light source works in the space.

[itsjusttaaylor]

here is a render of one frame of my shot. I have finally fixed all the little tweaks, as the sides of the shelf were either too far forward or too far back, which meant the light was bleeding into the sides too much. I had to move them in z space to reposition and get the track right again. 

I think I will lower the strength of the light as the particles won't be emitting this much light. I think this looks a lot better now I have added the new bump map, repositioned some things in z space, and fixed a few things. 

I am super proud of this shot, as before I started this project I didn't know a thing about C4D and now I have made this really cool interactive piece.

[itsjusttaaylor]

For the bump map I created two versions of the crushed box then used masks to merge the two together, as before when using just one super crushed version some detail was being lost and it made it look a bit strange. 

This bump map really adds to the piece and really helps to sell the interaction with the light

[itsjusttaaylor]

here is the bump map I created in after effects. Really helps to sell the interaction with the light

[itsjusttaaylor]

Roles

Here is a list of what I did in tis project. 

Open Box Shot: Entirely done by me

Old age shot: entirely done by me

Face Vein Shot: entirely done by me

Poverty: I prepped the shot and produced the clean plate, created and animated the asset of the crack.

Matt did the comp work for this shot and made sure the lighting and angles were right.

Crazy Shot: Entirely done by me 

Window Shot: I created the matte painting for this shot.

Matt did the clean up, comp and tracking for this shot.

I did the online edit, and matt did the initial offline edit. 

We are both working together to make it look the best we can.

[itsjusttaaylor]

So today we asked gearing for some help on cinema 4d as we didn't really know how to put the light in and make it looks real. So he made a quick ‘magic tree’ in photoshop and put it into the scene. He went through with us how to put the light pass in through luminance and alpha, and by putting the light pass onto a plane. 

We then added a light into the scene facing the box, and put a compositing tag onto the plane to say not be seen by camera so its only producing light. 

I then went into after effects and crushed the original footage into black and white to create a bump map, I then added this back into the bump area of material and animated it to match the scene. 

I think this looks crazy, and now we know what were doing I feel a lot more at ease and less stressed. so tonight we will make two sets of particles, one with bigger particles as the light pass, and the other as the actual particles. We will then put the light pass into the box scene and make it look good with the bump map and lighting. We will then render this scene in C4D with just the light pass, and then add the particles in separately by tacking them in in nuke. We will do this because particles need blending modes and effects to make them look prettier, which will be easier to render in nuke after.

[itsjusttaaylor]

here is the matte painting i have made. I dint want to use a standard skyline so i picked skyscrapers from thailand. I then used different grass textures to add bushes, ivy, and plants growing on the buildings. I also added some pollution into the lake, some holes and rubble.

Im glad the other matte painting didnt work out, as this one looks better i think.

[itsjusttaaylor]

matte painting problem

So when we finally got matts window shot working out we saw that the matte painting made for th shot was the wrong perspective and looked totally wrong in the window. My bad. 

So I'm just going to create another one now for the shot

[itsjusttaaylor]

Here is version 2 of the edit, which only needs matts updated window shot, and the particles added on to the box shots. 

The box shots are already made in c4d so all we need to do it put the particles in c4d and render each shot. 

Matt only has to put the matte painting into the window shot now.

[itsjusttaaylor]

when watching back the render I noticed that the veins on the bottom left of the cheek didn't move, I thought I fixed this before but it obviously didn't work. So I went back and found that a transform node was throwing everything off, so I re did it and moved it before the vector distort

[itsjusttaaylor]

script

Final Script v1 According to Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman placed on earth.

She was created by the Gods, each giving her a gift.

She was drawn to one gift in particular, a gift from Zeus, which she was told could NEVER be opened.

However, Pandora couldn’t contain her curiosity.

*cuts to black, then opened box*

For Pandora didn’t realise that Zeus had packed the box full of all the terrible evils he could think of and so she unintentionally unleashed pain and suffering upon the world.

She had released old age and weakness

Agonising disease and illness rapidly consumed the world, spreading immense suffering across millions of people

What once was a thriving world, fell into poverty and hardship. As resources depleted, hope started to diminish.

The only certainty surrounding the world was death and sorrow

Pandora looked upon the misery and torment she had unleashed, blaming her own curiosity.

The blame she placed upon herself drove her to insanity, however, still inside the box remained one thing, the means needed to restore humanity. Hope.

[itsjusttaaylor]

So after a while of playing around, I have finally refined the veins on her face. I played around with bump boss and where the lighting should be and how intense, plus the purple glow around the veins as well. 

I am calling them veins but they're not really veins, its the idea of a disease taking over her body. 

I have also had to render each area out separately as I have pre comped to save render times and load times, so. every time I changed something I had to re render and change everything else.