bug - my short with lots of effects

spooker

spooker

Member
hello all,

it's been a long time since i've posted, maybe the first, but i've been reading the forums for a while now. i thought this topic would be welcome in here.

i did this short for a thesis. its pretty short, mainly because it took so long to do the effects and I had other classes to deal with. i kept an extensive online production diary because my professors didnt know the process and thats what i was being graded on. heres a link to the site with the final piece linked to at the top.

http://11thdimension.com/bug/bug.html

also, here's my production site with one other project I'm doing for fun.

http://11thdimension.com/

_grant
 
Cool vid, is the music Aphex Twin? Reminded me of Chris Cunningham, which I can tell you're probably a fan. Good job, keep up the good work, get a good grade?

EDIT: Watched it again all the way through the credits and saw the Aphex Twin credit, didn't see it the first time.
 
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hey, excellent work. I was looking at your site, you have some good explinations of the process of how to to composite 3d images, nice stuff. If you gave some tutorials that would be awesome. I have a couple questions, what compositing program do you use, 3d app program?, and what liquid dynamics programs do you use???
 
From the screenshots I saw at his site, it looked like he used Realflow for fluid dynamics, which is a great program, but takes time to get good results, and it's very scientific in it's accuracy/control.
 
right you are. I used Realflow for the liquid and brought it into Cinema 4D to render. Realflow can take a really long time to run the simulation, but once you play with it enough you can get good results pretty quickly. Cinema 4D was my main 3D app, where I did all the modeling, texturing, animating, and rendering. for compositing, I used After Effects. Shake was used to create a large background plate from multiple images. The compositing could have been done in either, I just like After Effects more.
 
What kind of settings did you use for your render? Final gather, global illum, HDRi, 3 point lighting, etc? I'm curious to learn more about C4D and it's renderers, I'm currently using Maya/Mental Ray, and it's top quality, but I might switch to C4D depending on what happens at Autodesk.
 
I used HDRI's I made of the environment for all lighting and reflections. Because most of the surfaces were reflective, global illumination wasn't always needed. to create shadows on proxy objects, I would usually use spot lights with raytraced shadows for the speed and manipulate them through compositing to get the right effect. Each rendered frame from C4d was rendered at full HD to .psd files, so keeping the render times down was a priority.

I too have used Mental Ray in Maya, and it's good for rendering fluids really fast. However, I'm not the biggest fan of Maya because its not as artist friendly as C4D. Cinema has an amazing and fast renderer, and its easy to work with.

I too worry about the Autodesk merger, as they have poor support for Macs. One nice thing about C4D is that it doesn't care what hardware it runs on, so porting and updating is fast (like the switch to intel chips on the mac).
 
I've always heard those "artist-friendly" rumors about C4D, I guess it's about time to download a demo and check it out...Maya takes a minute to wrap your head around it, but I don't find it that counterintuitive.
 
Nice, I am thinking about getting C4D soon. I have used Maya a bit, but I am really interested in C4D. I also want to get Realflow, I havent used it at all but I heard its really good, How long does it take to learn and get good results??
 
I am also about to purchase Shake, since its so cheap i figured I should just get it and learn. I have used After Effects quite a bit, how does Shake compare?? what are some of the main advantages/disadvantages, etc....
 
casey warren said:
I am also about to purchase Shake, since its so cheap i figured I should just get it and learn. I have used After Effects quite a bit, how does Shake compare?? what are some of the main advantages/disadvantages, etc....
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Compositing software is compositing software. I think the biggest difference coming over from AE is the interface and the fact that you have to add 'nodes' to do anything. I started in AE, but I spent a lot of time learning the underlying principles of compositing so Shake didn't take too long. One thing that always got me was that I have to add a node just to move something. I kept grabbing the footage trying to scale it, etc, but nothing happened, lol!
 
I didn't see it on the site, so asking now. In the bathroom scene where the oil comes BACK out of the toilet, the light is very "misty." But in the original footage, it looks lit pretty much with a bathroom light.

What did you do to it in post?
 
If you have experience with 3D, C4D is an easy app to learn. No telling how long it'll take to produce something, it really depends on the person. I learned a lot of what I know from watching Gnomon Maya training and applying it to C4D. They're all really the same, but like before, C4D is more artist fiendly. once you know the principles behind everything, they all become easier. I find I learn just by playing around with it and using video training for the more technical / specific problems I encounter.

like oneinfiniteloop said, compositing software is compositing software. shake is really really good at certain things, and pretty bad at others. it does roto superbly and is good for keying or making large background plates in place of actual footage. I tend to use it for one specific thing per shot, render that and use the newly created element in After Effects. now that shake is so cheap, its a hard app to pass up, even if you use it for only one feature. the roto alone is worth it.

desperatecomfort, all the dense atmospheric effects were created by duplicating layers in AE, turning the blending mode to screen or multiply depending on the mood of the shot and blurring it out. that works for local light bloom effects. for the really dense atmosphere, I created solids and used masks with the edges blurred as high as they would go. I would then animate the mask shape to accomidate the shot's movement.
 
spooker said:
desperatecomfort, all the dense atmospheric effects were created by duplicating layers in AE, turning the blending mode to screen or multiply depending on the mood of the shot and blurring it out. that works for local light bloom effects. for the really dense atmosphere, I created solids and used masks with the edges blurred as high as they would go. I would then animate the mask shape to accomidate the shot's movement.
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Good to hear someone using these methods rather than merely buying a plug to do it for you :thumbsup:

It really shows in the production, and congrats on your A.
 
oneinfiniteloop said:
Good to hear someone using these methods rather than merely buying a plug to do it for you :thumbsup:

It really shows in the production, and congrats on your A.
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Yeah, I've done some of the same in the past, but your stuff here was far above what I'd acheived. Going to keep playing with that stuff. Thanks.

M
 
I thought it was visually stunning. Really creepy and cool. Did you mention what school/program you were doing this thesis project for?
 
sean90291 said:
Did you mention what school/program you were doing this thesis project for?
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the school was University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). My program was Digital Design, which within the college is considered a lot like traditional graphic design, only with motion or interactivity.

heres the school's page:

http://daap.uc.edu/
 
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