The hard knock life of an American VFX slave
The animation guild has published an anonymous e-mail, allegedly from a 40-year old vfx artist:
I had two heart attacks by the age of 37 in this business. I got caught working 100 hour weeks on some summer blockbuster. On the 75th straight day of work (mandatory 7 day weeks/17 hour days) I fell asleep at the wheel and did two 360’s on the 10 freeway hitting 3 people. That was my only day off. I didn’t mind at the time I was making like $1000 a day.
(…) I’m a 40-year-old, shit-kicking VFX artist, who has no health care in a job that is literally killing me……I’m the lowest you can go……….I have nothing to lose.
No, my friend, you’re not the lowest you can go. Earning fricking ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS a day and NOT GETTING HEALTH INSURANCE makes you the BIGGEST MORON you can be. I don’t care if you almost died twice or almost killed three people on the freeway. There’s a certain threshold where you forfeit the right to whine and are responsible for your own life. If not with a 30,000 dollar check at the end of the month, then when?
Lensflares… Again!
Most lens flare plugins are just layering bitmaps and sprites on top of each other. There’s even an iPhone app that basically mimics Video Copilot’s Optical Flares for 0,79 cent…
If you’re sneaky you can just grab these images. I’ve spent a few minutes to draw some basic flare images in Photoshop though. Just some repeated radial or directional blur on a few bright pixels. Then you can add these on top of your image in linear color space. The plugins all have simple mechanisms to move the flares around, but you can do that in Fusion as well. If you use the Lens flare Fuses I’ve written, they provide a published position output to connect those shapes to. Also, you can use expressions that move a bitmap on the same X position but mirrored on the Y axis.
I have made an example comp along with all the images. Of course these would need some more fine-tuning to make sure there’s no banding and the gradients look right in linear color space. But it’s a start 🙂 The comp also includes a technique to create an edge flare that briefly appears when the light source touches the image borders. You can modify this to define any area you like where flares are hidden/shown.
Download lensflare_images_v02.zip
Nuke Crashes on File Open
Just a quick note for everybody googling for this. If Nuke crashes, whenever you open the file dialog, open uistate.ini (found in your .nuke directory) and check if the “directory = ” entry contains a huge string (probably also of useless or invalid characters). Remove that entry and you’re done.
Stereoscopy for Giants
Why didn’t I think of this before? Did anyone ever try this? Would it even work?
source: xkcd
Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions
Seeed’s cover of “Wonderful Life” isn’t really that catchy, but it’s a perfect reference footage for the massive light spill that happens when the picture is exposed for the main talent while all hell breaks loose.
So next time, don’t just add a dodgy glow or tiny light wrap. Spend some more time on getting the integration right, even if it means fogging and overexposing the whole picture. The dynamic range of an explosion is too large to allow details inside such a big fireball to be visible while the foreground is exposed normally.
If you’re working in linear color space, the reddish light that scatters all across the lens is easy to create. Simply add a red slate on top (or lift the blacks).
