Jade signature sky villa animations

[Neilg]

edit: back up !
write up to follow.

Central - https://vimeo.com/151819852

North - https://vimeo.com/151819851

[glorybound]

Beautiful work!

[Neilg]

back up !

Central - https://vimeo.com/151819852

North - https://vimeo.com/151819851

[Morne]

Very nice work!
Was this comped with Fusion?

[Neilg]

Thanks!
Yeah, entirely vray -> fusion -> premiere, but using premiere just made us look into using davinci in the future instead.

We started off trying to do the final grade in premiere but it's color tools are unbelievably shit, so we went back to doing them in fusion but a lot of minor changes at the end isnt a great workflow. lots of adding a value of 2 to the red in the midtones and reexporting to make the tiny consistency changes, then windows would tell us that file is already in use because the network takes an hour to catch up and we cant overwrite them yet... not ideal. and any minor change in premiere is garbage, it's too difficult to control what happens.

we're going to start outputting from fusion a neutral comp in 16bit and doing the final grade in davinci which I think is the only editing tool i've seen with decent color controls. Doing it the way we did didn't compromise the job at all, but it wasn't a smooth experience in the final few days.

[3LP]

Looks great.
We use davinci for our aerial shots and the grading is awesome, export speed is lightning fast and feedback response while working in amazing.
One word, go davinci if you can

Stan

[Macker]

Thanks!
Yeah, entirely vray -> fusion -> premiere, but using premiere just made us look into using davinci in the future instead.

We started off trying to do the final grade in premiere but it's color tools are unbelievably shit, so we went back to doing them in fusion but a lot of minor changes at the end isnt a great workflow. lots of adding a value of 2 to the red in the midtones and reexporting to make the tiny consistency changes, then windows would tell us that file is already in use because the network takes an hour to catch up and we cant overwrite them yet... not ideal. and any minor change in premiere is garbage, it's too difficult to control what happens.

we're going to start outputting from fusion a neutral comp in 16bit and doing the final grade in davinci which I think is the only editing tool i've seen with decent color controls. Doing it the way we did didn't compromise the job at all, but it wasn't a smooth experience in the final few days.

Premiere is more for video editing, is it not? Have you tried Adobe SpeedGrade? Magic Bullet Looks?

Also, great work. Very impressive. Care to share any wireframes? Raw renders? I always love seeing how far something is taken in 3D/post.

[AndresAhumada]

Grate JOB!!!!!!

[sduck]

Beautiful work Neil!

[Neilg]

Premiere is more for video editing, is it not? Have you tried Adobe SpeedGrade? Magic Bullet Looks?
Also, great work. Very impressive. Care to share any wireframes? Raw renders? I always love seeing how far something is taken in 3D/post.

It is, but at the end we needed to quickly add near microscopic values of colors in the highlights or shadows to get the consistency between shots that much better and it was just a massive ordeal - premiere didnt have the tools and adobe/magic bullet were too heavy handed with how far gone we were. So we did it in fusion, which when you have to re-export the entire comp every time was slow.

Here's a before/after


mostly just adding drama/grading, but there's a mask for every object to balance them individually. after that red grade was put over the pillows didnt look blue (and so on) so we had masks to correct and tweak everything. I'm only saying this because looking at it now it seems like we hardly did anything but it didn't feel like that at the time...

[Macker]

Really truly some excellent work. Not to take anything away from the raw render (which looks great) but the post work really is excellent. I see you have the background/outside in the 3D and not comped in after, is this common for you? So that it is picked up in reflections I assume?

[AJ Jefferies]

Fantastic stuff Neil.

Because I am a total ar*ehole, there was a reflection in the glass in a couple of shots that looked slightly off. Maybe a flat shot of the surrounding area? Anyway, everything else was absolutely top drawer and thanks for posting the before and after processing images, it's always lovely to see stuff like that

[glorybound]

And then the client wants something changed! I have spend hours in post just to have that happen. Also, once that change is made they expect the update to look exactly like the first one (minus the change).

It is, but at the end we needed to quickly add near microscopic values of colors in the highlights or shadows to get the consistency between shots that much better and it was just a massive ordeal - premiere didnt have the tools and adobe/magic bullet were too heavy handed with how far gone we were. So we did it in fusion, which when you have to re-export the entire comp every time was slow.

Here's a before/after


mostly just adding drama/grading, but there's a mask for every object to balance them individually. after that red grade was put over the pillows didnt look blue (and so on) so we had masks to correct and tweak everything. I'm only saying this because looking at it now it seems like we hardly did anything but it didn't feel like that at the time...

[Neilg]

Every shot in the final film is the first time it was ever rendered as a sequence - we got the client to sign off on still images and a grey movement in the edit to music before we would render a single frame. It was in the contract from day one that once they 'sign off' and we press render on a sequence, that's it.
We've only got a 7 (slow) machine render farm here so it had to be kept tight. Before we'd rendered any sequences we knew how long it would take from our single frames so we could calculate and work around our limit.
there were 2100 frames total - base render with flat gi, just sun moving done with brute force, and up to 8 layers of glass. each 'frame' (10 layers in some) had a max of 1 hour that it could take. Our limit was exactly 14 days of non stop rendering - and we came in exactly 2 hours under at 8am on a monday.

Aj - I know exactly what you're talking about Yeah the surrounding was difficult, the angled glass looking down on it gave us trouble when all we had was google maps. one of my regrets that we didn't shoot it properly.

Macker - We used to comp in, but now we tend to do our test renders, figure the sky out alongside getting the lighting approved by the client, then drop it into the scene on a plane to make sure every reflection that would catch it is correct. hard to say if it makes a difference but I like getting it out of the way early

[Neilg]

We started off with a storyboard of still images which got us the concept approved.
once that was approved i did an internal test of how the timing would work using the sheets from the pdf.
https://vimeo.com/135981534
pass: jadesig


After that we started animating cameras and did a few revisions of the grey storyboard
north - https://vimeo.com/138797130

central - https://vimeo.com/137072761
pass: jadesig

One they approved and signed off on that, we went back to still images - one frame from each camera. No camera was rendered until that single frame (and any others relating to areas we can see in it) was signed off in writing. Kept the whole process very smooth.
By and large i'm very happy with how close we stuck to the original idea. some cameras got moved but our timing and pace was the first thing to get locked down which made everything else super easy. Not one frame over the exact number we needed was rendered.