Here’s another class I’ve been looking forward to! Visual Effects was an interesting class, certainly a tough one… A little far stretched for the rubric. However…
My only concern for the class was that I was relying heavily on google, rather than the notes I took, and there wasn’t an assigned book… If I can recall, there was one book (which I obtained outside of school) was a great reference, but some issue with the author and the school deemed it unusable for the curriculum. Bummer too, this book saved my tail in a lot of ways for this class.
Our first assignment was to create a waterfall effect using particles. Now, not knowing too much but the basics about vfx, I thought the particles would be a stupid idea… However, if you think of dynamic effects as real life effects, using particles to create water isn’t that far off. Regardless, according to the rubric, I had 4 hours to do an fx sheet and scale pre pro, 4 hours for video pre pro, 4 hours for motion test, and 4 hours to finalize, comp, and fix motion. This would be great time, if we fully knew what we were doing. We knew where things where, but not how to get a good effect for the assignment. I would’ve loved to see how our instructor would have done the assignment. After all, in a 4 hour lecture I’d rather learn how to do the assignment, and learn how each field works on my own time (they have free tutorials online and Gnomon tutorials for that) Needless to say, the end result wasn’t exactly above par, but I still got a good grade, and I’m confident I can make this so much better.
Second Practicum was a fire effect, with Maya Fluids. This was fairly simple, compositing-wise and match-moving.
Third Practicum was to create a slow-motion water drop stylized with deep blue water and red refraction, however we still hit a rut when our instructor showed us everything under the sun but how to do the project to yield good results.
The fourth and final Practicum was a group project. Utilizing rigid bodies, we had to create a boulder hitting a building wall and breaking pillars. I was granted as being the art director, compositor, and first dynamic coordinator. I was in control of Pillar 1, so I was the first to handle the file. Once I got my sequence handled, all of 20 minutes, not too shabby, I took a test render out and brought the file into Nuke. There I used the new RotoPaint tool and painted out the large cracks in each pillar so it appeared as one pillar, rather than a bunch of shards. My teammates achieved the final result of the destruction, then I rendered out the main pass, shadow pass, and Vector pass, for motion blur. I hooked it all together, keyed visibility for the RotoPaint areas, add some particle effects, and finalized. The end result I was quite satisfied, where a few areas I’d like to touch up on are a few speed issues, and the way the particles where emitted. But all in all, my team held together and did exceptionally well.
-endy