VFX ARTISTS REACT EPISODE 2
Contrary to Sonic from Episode 1, the green on the CG Bulbasaurs match the green of the grass in the background, selling the realism. The eyes are pushing it a little, but even then, not that much.
The hairs on pikachu clumps up; it tuffs. It's not all evenly spaced apart. This is also realistic to IRL animals.
Hair has a lot of ambient occlusion. Underneath the hair, near the roots, most of the hair above is blocking a lot of the light. And you can see the layers of the hairs on top of each other.
Hair is not 100% opaque, it is actually slightly translucent. So the fringes of the hair on Pikachu's tail is still catching the light, creating an outline of lighter hair against the rest of his tail in shadow. So the little tips of the hair catches the light, then the light passes through it after being diffused a little.
specific 1-point, directional lighting helps a lot in creating cg scenes.
Radiocity, global illumination = The way light bounces [ img: the "under highlights" on an egg when its on a white counter ]. If I shine a flashlight on my hand (which is near someone else's face), you can see the bounced light still appear on the other person's cheek. In CG, to get that, you have to simulate a ray coming out of the light, hitting a surface and scattering and bouncing off. But you have to do that many many times to get your scattering and get your environment.
So they couldn't do that in 1993, so they set their scene at night with a single source of light. Notice the rest of the T Rex (where the headlights of the cars aren't hitting) are just pitch black. So you don't have to worry about bounce light- great! But they also make it rain, so they can have specular lighting, make it feel like it's reflective, but all they have to reflect is a white spot. He's shiny on his hands, his toes, his thighs, but all it's reflecting is a blob of white (because of the singular direction of lighting).
Because of the animatronic T Rex, they had the perfect reference for lighting.
For one frame, the velociraptor that the T Rex picks up is completely missing. "What I think happened was that the actual files, the 3D models they sent to the cache to be rendered, for whatever reason on that 1 frame the velociraptor model disappeared." [ The way they talk about it, it's like it was a simple computer failure that could have happened at any point, at any frame through out the whole movie, and that they're lucky it failed then and not during a focused part on the T Rex or something ] "AAA we have to re render this and we have two weeks and it takes to months to render!"
The effects here are technically better then they were in Jurassic park, so why do people think it looks worse?
In Park, when you see the raptors, they're real animatronic costumes, so that's what they're going up against.
There's two things you get with real:
1. Motion looks a lot more realistic, because when you're animating CG by hand, it can go anywhere *waves hands around*
2. Acting. These kids are acting so much better with real pots and pans falling on them and real velociraptors chasing them VS J World which is "aight look at this man with the green tennis ball"
Because no matter how good these dinosaurs look, our eye can still register it as fake. So, we will always recognize subconsciously that the actors are never in any real danger-- and your suspension of disbelief is a little shattered.
J Park treated the dinosaurs as if they were real, they didn't make any shot last more then they need to. But because World is-- they can do whatever they want. So they're going artistic with it and creative-- but as they're being more artistic and creative, it's being less real.
There's a specific part of our brain that recognizes faces. All the checkmarks are there, that's not just a person-- that's clearly Will Smith. And it's not even the fact that he's blue. It's like his proportions. His face looks a little too small for that size of a head, his neck looks a little too thick, and I think a lot of that is driven by the actual camera focal point, length and placement, and what not.
Amazing CG body. The muscles on his back, they flex, and they move, and they indent, pull the skin with them. And from the front, the body still looks good.
But it feels like a face of a man who does not have that body was just pasted on there. It almost looks like the blue on his face doesn't match, it may be a color grading thing where they just put a mask there and brightened his face. "Oh like a power window ?" "Yeah!" But now his face should be only as bright as his left peck, but it's brighter.
This looks great, cause it's lit well and you're not showing too much. And also because of the lower angle, the proportions are specifically thrown off. He looks super huge, so it's triggering our brains a little bit less.
A big thing is the lighting. In this shot, there's a nice edgelight, and there's a clear defined keylight, and it's giving his face volume and character. Versus the other shot, which is just this ambient wash, with just like this little bit of light from the side.
See and this once again comes back to very specific directional lighting.
Notice the discoloration on his abs, almost as if it was body paint. So a lot of we know about media's reality is not actually reality, but what we've seen in special effects. So for example, when people get shot in movies, we expect there to be a pop and dust and blood, and that's not actually what happens when people get shot. When you do visual effects, you're not always going for reality, you're going for a simulated special effect. And therefore you'd have slight discolorations like this, this actually makes it look more real, like makeup, as opposed to an actual blue person.
Dogget's character blending backwards to forward
This is mostly a compositing thing. This isn't CG 3D modeling or anything, this is classic After Effects type stuff.
With this shot, ILM kind of pioneered morphing. And morphing is actually pretty simple, it's a distort while doing a cross fade.
Michael Jackson's Black or White
You're not even really able to see the crossfade of these morphs, in fact they may have kicked it up a notch where they don't actually do a crossfade but rather a pixel color change.
(Lady's hair grows from short to long) The use of practical shot to drop her hair to help the morph. They have enough of this choreographed where they know when they needed to drop her hair to help achieve the morph.
It's important to note they're not doing an overall crossfade uniformly, they're doing splotches and bits of crossfading though different intervals of time. First it was her hair coming down, then parts of her face, parts of her shoulders, it all flows consistently.
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