VFX REACT EPISODE 3
EPISODE 3 - MARVEL
Thanos
Over a dozen studios worked on this movie.
They have different levels of resolution for different shots. So they have the highest resolution, the highest detailed 3D model of Thanos's face for all the hero close up shots. But farther away, all those details, mores would be gigabytes of wasted data.
He has pores and little wrinkles on his cheek, and when hey smiles, they stretch and squish. That kind of stuff, there's special technology for it, but it's such high end, such custom made technology. But it's those kinda things that make faces look real. Or the crows feet at the corner of his eyes, and his skin folding into those crows feet.
The stubble hairs on Thanos are catching the light. The stubble is probably the team needing Thanos to look real, and we don't identify faces without hair as being real, so they needed to stubble on him.
Black panther (1 on 1 fight in crystal cave)
This scene doesn't look good, but do you know why? This scene they shot in October, and the VFX team got it, it was December. They only had about six weeks to do this entire scene. "Okay, let's say they're given another six months, what do you do to make this scene better?"
First I would approach the production designer and ask "why do you have a black cave, on a black road, with two guys in black suits? Because now there's no way for me to have their silhouette read." We're in a tricky situation where I need to be able to see these figures, but they're on a black background. So I need to just artificially raise the light [ like a curves layer ] for him to pop out. And now he's kinda like grey and black.
But there's no contact shadow, under his armpit, underneath his head. And if you look at the background, the rules of the scene establish that the black levels in the background go deeper then what you're seeing on the suit. So he's just kinda artificially raised up.
If you look at his head, his head is shiny. The brightness shining on his head implies that the light shining on his head is brighter than that. But the lights in the scene around us that we're seeing with our eyes, are not that bright. It's a subtle thing, but subconsciously you can see that it's wrong, because you see light every day.
Having one single source of light, really just making a very dramatic looking image, would have improved it so much. Like Jurassic Park or Detective Pikachu. Ambient lighting is the death of realism for visual effects. Nothing IRL is ever just ambiently lit.
They probably apply a lot of motion blur to hide the flaws. There are a couple ways you can do motion blur in CG. The quick and easy way to do it is called motion vectors = Where for every pixel, you get another pixel that's a color, and that color represents a direction. Later on in post [production] you can stretch that pixel out based on that motion vector you're getting, make more of a motion blur or less. It's great for changing things. Here's the problem though, it can only describe 1 direction. So if my hand does an arc, and for that one shutter you're getting an arc of motion, When it can't describe a curve, it can only describe a direction. "So you're saying the motion blur isn't actually baked into the 3D render, it's an actual filter that's applied on top of it." "That makes sense because adding motion blur straight out of the render adds a lot of time, but it's how you get the curves in motion blur, it's more realistic that way. But, they rendered out a pass, and then they added it later." "Which is a valid thing to do, we do it all the time." "Absolutely."
This is a better shot because he's standing next to an actual light so you're getting some actual volume. But also, bear in mind, he is still blending into the background, so it goes back to the production design thing you're talking about. A good visual effects shot is more then just technical prowess, it has to have artistic vision as well. You have to have all the stuff that would make any shot look good. Just because it's technically accurate doesn't mean those things exist.
"It's interesting how such a small thing can take people out." "It's a big challenge we face as VFX artists. The more high end we go with our effect, the more any tiny little flaw stands out."
Iron man
Putting on the metal suit
Two things stand out to me:
First, the motion looks pretty decent for them putting CG on a head. The hard thing is, you have to project shadows onto a real face. You basically have to remodel the face in CG, and use it has a shadow catcher basically that from the 3D objects being there to cast a shadow onto that.
It looks really good when the mask comes down to cover his face, because the shadow looks really solid because not only is it casting a shadow, but it's removing the shine from his skin. There, that's an artist going in there and taking the time to figure out what the skin tone would look like in the shadow but also removing shine.
Second touch I really like, is the finger smudges on the helmet. That's the first thing you should learn as a texture artist, when it comes to making textures for CG objects, is surface imperfections. That will bring the realism up from "oh yeah that looks real I guess!" to "Oh that is a real thing." Like look at my chrome helmet, there's dust on here, there's fingerprints, and the fingerprints react to light in a specific way, there's scratches and wash. It's more then just a chromed-out sphere.
Iron man 2 putting on suit from suitcase
So outside here his face has a lot more light acting on it, so it's harder to fake a shadow on it, so they just get through it really fast by having the helmet close on it quickly.
It's not just the modeling, and the cool lighting and rendering, it's the animation. The animators are killing it here, like the design for all the mechanical intricacies. And that stuff-- you actually have to study mechanical design, you can't just fake it 100%.
"Like even [ the pieces of the mask fitting and locking into place ], that would take me like a week just to animate that! Shows you how many people it takes to do an entire movie."
Avengers
How much shadows are on his face are perfect. Look at those perfect shadows [ when the mask comes down over his face ]!
Anytime you see a CG thing and there's a flair over the top of that, that flair was recreated for that shot. If there's a flair over where you want to put a CG element, the problem is that you have a half transparent color circle, and somehow you need to like mask it out to put it on top of your footage-- even though its like half transparent-- it's like trying to mask out a window LOL.
The director of photography needs to choose lenses here that don't flare for the visual effects elements so they can add the flare in later.
Dr. Strange
You can actually do a lot of those particle effects while using After Effects and Trapcode Particular which is a particle plugin for After Effects.
Look at this, this is orthographic projection= doesn't have actual vanishing points ( like isometric pixel art ). Perspective projection = DOES have vanishing points.