Fallen Inside - VFX Project

[momo47]

Fallen Inside

Hey Everyone,
This is a Personal Project I have been slowly working on for a long time now.
This is just the opening shot and its breakdown, sadly I had to stop there because I ran into many problems while Rendering. Hopefully I will be able to continue it in the future.
I thought I'd share it with everyone to get some feedback and also explain all the problems/mistakes I made so hopefully we could all learn from them and who knows, maybe I will get some solutions to my problems.


http://www.vimeo.com/27917109

This Project was actually shot when I was in Uni. It was my first ever green screen shoot and the main task was to add a real person in a 3D environment. There is a bit of a story going on and you can watch it here in the Animatic.


http://www.vimeo.com/27934287

I decided to revisit the project and improve on it as a way to learn DT tutorials. I learned A LOT from this project and doing all the mistakes I did only taught me more.

So now the problems!

The first thing you might notice is that the tracking is not perfect. I actually didn't touch on the tracking part since Uni. But my mistake there was that I sort of combined both the free move camera (Pan up,down,left,right, move backwards and forwards) and the rotate move (Turning the camera while you are on the same spot). It was both together and each one has a different method for tracking.

I had a very hard time with rendering. If you look closely you can notice some flickering lights on the vase at the beginning and the corners of the room as well. I really got no explanation for why the rendering calculations were all over the place.
The program kept crashing every 15 min, I thought it was maybe my laptop (can't handle it all) so I RENTED a computer that should be able to handle it. Again, it kept crashing every 15 min (I had my doubts about the computer when I first got it, it wasn't as stable as I thought it would) So finally I got the chance to try it on one of the computers in Uni. where everyone uses to render their projects and guess what?? Yes, it CRASHED aswell!!!.....the only explanation I can come up with is that the problem is not with the computers, but with the file itself :(

I would really appreciate it if someone was able to help me out with that issue, as I can't continue rendering anymore.

I honestly *not exaggerating* locked myself in the house for 2 WEEKS straight, restarting the program every 15 min when it crashed....I almost lost it....and I only managed to get those 14 sec in those 2 weeks.

And finally, the keying. This current key is WAY better than what it was before. As it was my first green screen shoot I had a lot of green spill and you can see in the breakdown all the different shades of green on there. It was a pain to properly get a good key.

The only issue though here is that sometimes in areas you will notice some white edges. This is caused by an overlap with the outer key and inner key at areas where they meet very closely (eg. between fingers and moving legs)

Programs used:
Softimage - 3D
Nuke - Compositing
Boujou - Tracking
Photoshop - Textures

Let me know what you think and if you have any questions or want me to go into more detail about a specific point then please ask!

Couldn't have done all that without DT!!
Thanks guys!
Mo

[johnny]

Hi there Mo, and welcome!

Firstly nice job! I watched the first video without reading and it all seemed to fit together nicely!

I actually thought the jumpy camera was the idea, and it was adding a spooky look and together with the music it could be like a Tim Burton love story going on there :)

On the subject of your problems...I'm afraid I can't be of much use as you're using softimage (I'm a Maya guy) but I can maybe offer helpful tips. Several months ago I posted my first complete project online that I had worked on for a very long time, see it here: http://www.digitaltutors.com/forum/showthread.php?27961-CG-Short-Bandits. I had several problems getting this finished, and like yourself I had a slow computer and during the project got a new one, but this doesn't mean my problems were instantly ironed out just that rendering was a lot quicker.

It is a pain sometimes, but part of a CG artist that you just have to test everything in your scene. At rendering several things can affect rendering and either stop misteriously, or cause artifacts, and if your doing everything in one go in batch render it is not easy to see these things. My advice would be to test maybe the more complicated things individually like the cloth simulation...cache and render it out separately and see if it works. Render out a still of the background props, and maybe a sequence and see if it works. Eventually the problems will come to light and you'll lear in that process more about troublewhooting. Also DT have so many videos on the subject of rendering as it is a tricky subject, and cover things like caching your simulations to make sure they are basically "keyed" into a file (you probably already know that) and settings like Final Gather (which I think you've used) and generally the more realistic lighting approach and problems that come with it, like flickering lights. Basically the idea to resolve that is to fine tune your FG settings (which can only be tested by rendering a sequence) and add actual lighting into the scene so that they both work together.

Hope that helps you to get the results your after!

[bravo2zero]

Looks good , It always takes a bit of tweaking with vfx to get it to look the way you want . I dont see any major issues .

Keep up the nice work .

[Iminshull]

Very nice scene you have there. I'm a Maya guy and have never had a chance to work with Softimage, but I can tell you how I would fix the problems if I was working on your scene.

First the Flickering lights. This effect has happened to me in Maya only it is not flickering lights, it is flickering shadows. I only run into the problem when I render a software render with Depth map shadows and have a moving camera. I have yet to see the problem when I do a Mental Ray render. With Depth Map shadows you want to make sure that you 'Reuse Shadow Maps'. Otherwise your shadow maps will continuously recalculate without acknowledging the previous shadow. Hence forth you get flickering shadows. They look good in a single render, but when you see them in a sequence they flicker.

For the keying, I like to mask off the area that I'm going to key. Especially if you have such a large room to fill. This way whatever key method you use it will only have to interpolate a small area. For really small areas such as the fingers maybe you can make a mask that just covers the hands, then pull the green out from the tiny area.

With your tracking, you really should fine tune the tracking manually in Softimage. Just use the corners of the room and the bed as your placement. I'm sure there is a way to make the tracking better in Boujou, but if your having problems with opening multiple programs on your comp then just use one program to fix it. If I have to do manual tracking in Maya, I setup a camera then parent a plane to the camera. The plane fills up the entire viewing area. The I drop on an image sequence to the image plane. Your image sequence will be the green screen video. Just render out a low resolution jpeg sequence so your computer can handle it. Now play your camera animation and see if it matches with the video you made. If I'm starting from scratch I usually go 10 frames then set a key.

Hope this helps and if I'm way off on everything then please let me know and I'll try to offer some other solutions.

Cheers