Taxi flip demo done for the die hard 5 previs

[joconnell]

Heya Folks,

Here's a quick breakdown of a test shot I did during previs work done at Screenscene vfx in Dublin. A few weeks work with a single nuke compositor - http://andreas-cronstrom.com/ and an fx artist who did the rigid body work with rayfire and thinking particles, and the smoke trails in fume. There was some keyframe animation done by Hubert Montag with a lot of dynamics of the crash using rayfire and then myself on materials and lighting in vray.

https://vimeo.com/60025338

And then the breakdown itself:

https://vimeo.com/60025339

[vlado]

Thanks a lot for posting! It's amazing what can be done with CG

Best regards,
Vlado

[joconnell]

Yeah it's getting really interesting how agile we can be with a small team and some really solid software. I think the end result of this doesn't look 100% real but for the time and amount of people on it I'm quite happy.

One of your fellow country men was involved Vlado! I was trying to see if he had a website but Martin Naydenski - http://vimeo.com/user2159539 was responsible for all of the FX stuff. He's worked with us on a few jobs now and he's the main FX artist on the feature we're currently doing, lovely guy and doing some impressively large stuff considering he's only one person!

Edit. Actually turns out he does have a site - http://martinium.com/martinium/ and http://ie.linkedin.com/in/martinium if you ever need any kind of destruction work done.

[prateekvishwa]

OMG!!! m hypnotized......... so amazing!

[deflix]

Really good work there! It is a sign of changing times that the large facilities are not doing all the work anymore. There seemed to be a fair bit of lens distortion in the film plates (judging by the breakdown), what was it shot in?

[Morne]

Hey John this looks awesome! Well done to you and fellow workers on this!

What kind of hardware did you have for this and what kind of timeframe did you have for this?

[AJ Jefferies]

That looks excellent John! Love the breakdown too, I could watch them all day

[simmsimaging]

Looks amazing John. Your work is always impressive.

/b

[jacksc02]

Good stuff John.
It always makes me laugh watching breakdowns as to how little of the original plates are used in the final shots.
You would think it would be easy these days just to do it all in CG

[lukx]

cool gig John !!!

[jonnybefree]

absolutely stunning! Interesting to see how important the last grading step is. would love to know how your workflow is. cause when we're doing postwork here for commercials, first step is to cut and grade the spot, and integrate the 3d stuff after the client gave his go into the graded spot. does it make more sense to finalize (grading) the spot after 3d integration?

[joconnell]

Cheers for the kind words folks.

Deflix > It was only shot on a canon 5d mkII, I think on the 24 - 105 lens, not exactly sure but you're right about the amount of bend on it. In terms of big versus small the capabilities have changed a lot for sure, our standards have all risen in recent times. If you consider what Bertrand Benoit or Peter Guthrie produce in stills they're only missing render power to allow them to do the exact same thing in motion. The nice thing is that there's such a great global community of artists sharing techniques both on forums and in commercial tutorials that it's easier to get to a really high standard quickly. People are happily giving away their secrets or things they've spent time learning for free and it's really upped everyone's standards.

Morne - It was about 6 weeks in calendar time with likely 2 weeks on the edit, track and car animation, 3 weeks for the environment build, lighting and materials, 3 weeks on the fx animation and 2 weeks on the comp. We all used hp workstations at the time with 10 render nodes with 12 gigs of ram - nothing insanely powerful or special. There were a lot of problems with vray motion blur at the time which were down to 3dsmax / rig issues (a lot of which were nitrous driver problems in max 2010) and bad information being fed by thinking particles - thinkbox xmesh sorted a lot of those issues. Render times were probably about 45 minutes a frame at hd.

Aj and Brett, much appreciated from both of you - the attention to detail in your own personal work far outstrips the level I work at. If NDAs were less important I'd have loved to post it wip in the forums and get impressions from the likes of yourselves about what could have made it more realistic.

Chris - you're totally right. One of the things I don't like about this is actually the pretty ugly background plate that was shot for the demo and I think it could have been far better with improved photography and as you say the only thing that was really used was the road layout and the camera animation!

Luke much appreciated - your own recent work is looking great too, must keep in touch about future jobs.

Johnny - When I worked in commercials I used to nearly always work to graded plates but I've found on film stuff this doesn't happen. Since the grade takes such a long time to do on a film it's generally done far later in the process and thus isn't available for the vfx work. Also in hindsight it makes way more sense to light to neutral plates and make them fit the environment first and then apply a "look" afterwards. The client could decide that the look is wrong later on in the process and it means a full re-render for little reason. Also since we collect a lot of hdr and reference material on the day in more or less the same lighting as the plate shoot it makes it easier to integrate CG to an untreated plate. What happens in my current setup is that the compositors are given a totally ungraded plate and a rough "look" for the footage as a lut or look up table. This takes the raw, boring flat negative and applies a temporary colour correction to it in their nuke viewer, much like our SRGB button but it doesn't touch the actual colour values of the footage. This is generally only a black and white balance of the plate and not a grade / style. We have a look at the same footage with the temp look applied while we're working on our lighting and try to grade our hdris to something similar colour and brightness wise to the plate with the temporary lut. We render something that looks "normal" and send these files to the comper. They then take our normal renders and colour match them in to the boring, flat looking plate's values first and use their temporary look / lut to see how it'd look normally. They make everything sit into this world correctly, and then pass the final comp on to our colourist who does all sorts of weird and strange things to the pictures to make the final result.

Benefit wise it makes more sense to light to the original plates for us as we couldn't wait around for a final edit on the film to be graded before we started vfx work. Also if they were grading sequences bit by bit, the grades might need adjusting when they're all seen together so it'd mean throwing out some of the lighting work, rendering again and comping again for no reason. Lastly I think it's very difficult to actually light to some of the looks that get applied - the colour and light response would be hard to mimic with vray's preference of behaving in a real world way. I think I can give the compers a nicer raw render to work with if I make it fit with the lighting that the plate was shot with so that their life is easier. Likewise it always helps to join things together if they're put through a progress together such as blurs / glows / lens optics and finally the grade.

[stevesideas]

Looking really good. The breakdown is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[jonnybefree]

thanks for the explanation man. makes totaly sense. i recently finished a job where lots of stuff has to be posted into final graded footage, where i had lots of problems to nicely integrade them. adding lensflares, and glows destroyd all the grading.. i'am not an comp freak but i think it would helped a lot to work with raw footage as you said.

[Morbid Angel]

Great work!