Moving Heaven And Earth

This August, I’ve been working at Sehsucht Hamburg on a commercial for Dodge Ram. It’s online now so watch it in all its glory:

Amongst other things, I was responsible for compositing the shot of the car bursting through the dust cloud, wire removal work on the eagle shots and the night-time “pack shot” at the end.

Software used: Nuke, Mocha
Full credit list available here.

Here’s a small breakdown video:

Rolling Shutter Update

I’ve just updated my rolling shutter removal Fuse for Fusion. It implements the technique used by Syntheyes, where the center scanline is assumed to have been taken at the current frame (instead of the topmost scanline).

Here’s a white paper that explains the technique, but most of it isn’t applicable to my Fuse. In fact, the author of Syntheyes advises against messing with your footage in order to remove the effects of rolling shutter. My Fuse isn’t intended to be used on raw footage (pre match moving). Instead, it’s a finishing tool to reduce/remove distorting in case your shot exhibits unwanted wobbling due to the rolling shutter issue.

VFX/Nuke Blog

I’ve just discovered that Jan Burda, a very talented compositing artist I’ve worked with in the past, has opened up his own blog. He has written some Nuke tutorials, so head over to his place and have a look!

Object Removal Video Tutorial

My next video tutorial for Fusion is online. It’s about removing objects (a shadow in this case) from a shot using a 3D matchmove, some scene geometry and automated white-balance matching. You can download the complete project and footage as well. Yeah, it’s a home video of mine but the technique has proven valuable on various shows already.

It can also be easily transferred to Nuke.

Related to this: freezing cameras for projection setups just got a whole lot easier with this script.

Also slightly related to this: on some other blog I’ve found a link to these vintage VFX educational videos. The whole thing has an 80s air to it but the names of the presenters should ring a bell 🙂 Well-known gurus like Ron Brinkmann and Stu Maschwitz are among them.

Object Removal Teaser

This is an old post. Head over to the final version of this tutorial.

I’m in the process of recording another video tutorial about camera projections. This time, I’ll demonstrate a real-life example of how to remove objects (a shadow on the ground in this case) from a shot. Ok, it’s a home video of mine, not a real shot from one of my projects. But I have employed this technique on actual shows and this shaky video of mine is much more challenging than a perfect film scan.

Here’s a preview:

Resident Evil WTF?!

Hier ist der Trailer zur neuesten Inkarnation der anscheinend niemals endenden Resident Evil-Reihe. Nicht dass ich überhaupt wüsste, bei welchem Teil wir inzwischen angelangt sind. Die Macher wollen auch gar nicht, dass man mitzählt. Stattdessen konkurrieren sie mit “Underworld” um Beiworte: Retribution. Revolution. Re… was auch immer.

Ich will auch gar nicht darüber spekulieren, was für ein Crap der Film vielleicht wird – der Trailer spricht für sich und die YouTube-Kommentare zeigen, dass es dennoch genug Zuschauer gibt, die das ganze aufsaugen, um weitere Teile zu rechtfertigen. That’s business, und wo soll die gute Milla denn sonst mitspielen, wenn nicht in Filmen, die ihr Ehegatte für sie schreibt und produziert.

Aber wo ich mich vor Lachen weggeschmissen habe, waren die unglaublich schlechten VFX in einer Szene. Ich kann nur hoffen, dass das Zeug noch work in progress ist (nicht unüblich für frühe Trailer), und dass ich keinen Arbeitskollegen unwissentlich auf die Füße trete 🙂 Denn diese Shots sehen sowas von billig aus, das kriegen Leute auf YouTube mit AfterEffects besser hin.

Man beachte die stumpfe halbtransparente Explosion im 2. Bild, überhaupt die ganze seltsame inkonsistente Lichtstimmung aus Studiolicht-Greenscreen-Menschen und einem Wolkenfoto im Hintergrund, das sämtliche Perspektive vermissen lässt.

Das dritte Bild: keinerlei Tiefeneindruck, die hintersten Flugzeuge so crisp wie die vorderen… Dazu die heutzutage obligatorischen horizontalen Star-Trek-Lensflares auf jeder Scheißlampe, die aber im Gegensatz zu anderen Trash-Filmen wie BattleShip ein Schritt zurück in die 90er-Jahre sind. Im letzten Bild kommt der überbelichtete Himmel dagegen sehr gut, auch wenn die Explosionen einen kitschigen Glow drauf haben. Ich verweise nur auf einen früheren Blogeintrag zum Thema “realistische Explosion“.

Fusion Script and Macro Collection

I’ve noticed quite a few Google hits for Fusion on my blog, so I thought I’d write a short summary of various scripts and macros I have created over the years.

Note: Since Fusion was aquired by Blackmagic Design, vfxpedia has been turned off and thus many links no longer work. Besides that, Fusion 7 introduced a new LUA interpreter that requires changes to some scripts. If a script no longer works in Fusion 7.x or you need a Fuse or Macro that was hosted on vfxpedia, drop me a line or visit the forum at steakunderwater.com/wesuckless where I might have already posted an updated version.

Scripts

• A huge improvement to the Add Tool script.
• Exporting keyframe data to After Effects
• Importing keyframe data from Nuke
• Saver Checker Script that creates missing output directories and lists enabled savers (useful if there are a lot of them).
• Loader From Saver creates or updates a loader from a selected saver.
• 3-Point-ImagePlane, a script that automatically aligns 3D planes to vertices in a point cloud.
• Freeze Cam, a helper script for projections that duplicates a camera and removes its animation.
• Tool Color Labels to easily tag your flow.
• Invert Animation Curve, a script that swaps time and value of an animation spline.
• An improved version of Fusion’s “Change Paths” to do search&replace operations on your loaders and savers.
• An improved version of “Destabilize Transform” to connect trackers to almost anything that has a center, size and angle slider.
• An improved Python implementation of the Bake Animation script, that processes multiple properties at the same time.
• Un-Modify, a tool script to remove modifiers from a stack without killing the whole animation.
• A converter to use Syntheyes lens distortion values with Fusion’s LensDistort tool.
• A suite of scripts to exchange shots between Fusion and Syntheyes.

More scripts and script-related snippets can be found on Vfxpedia, by the way.

Macros

• A 3D Colorspace Keyer implementation.
• ExponentialGlow, a glow with a nice photorealistic falloff.
• Image Mixer to help with applying scanned grain from gray cards.
• Macros to apply Lustre(R) merry grades, Josh Pine’s log2lin math and Nuke-inspired TMI color balance.
• An implementation of Nuke’s Ramp tool for gradients.
• A Color Picker that can be placed on top of an image to serve as a persistent color readout which has since been improved by Gregory Chalenko.
• SoftClip, a macro to gently compress overbright values below 1.0.
• SigmoidalContrast creates an S-shaped contrast curve.
• SpillMerge, an advanced keying solution for smoke or reflections.
• “Toe”,  a macro to gently raise an image’s black level (inspired by Nuke’s tool of the same name)
• “Turn” for rotating an image (including its canvas) in steps of 90 degrees.

Fuses

• Open-Source Plugins to create Lightning Bolts, Lens Flares or Lines
• GPU-accelerated Rolling Shutter correction based on motion vectors from eyeon’s Dimension plugin.
• A Smoothcam-inspired Fuse to automatically stabilize or smooth a shaky camera move.
• CubeToLatLong turns a cube map into (part of) an equirectangular panorama.
• SparseColor draws gradients or fills an image using multiple spots of color.
• A Nuke-like color correction Fuse whose contrast slider works well on linear images.
• A GPU-accelerated CornerPin, an improvement over Fusion’s native tool.
• A Switch Fuse as found in Shake or Nuke.
• A Fuse to manage auxiliary channels (like depth or vectors).
• A clone of Nuke’s Reformat tool to fit an image into another image format.
• A modifier for averaging two or four point positions (e.g. trackers)
• PositionHelper, a modifier to easily smooth a tracker path or change its reference frame.
• XfChroma, a transform tool that leaves a colorful trail.

All scripts and Fuses are open-source (mostly BSD-style) and commented extensively to serve as scripting tutorials 🙂 Feedback is always welcome.