Figures on a landscape
Moderator: Spectrum Strike Force
I understand the principles of the motion capture, etc. in doing the figures, but how are these CGI animations added to the scenes? I've noticed some odd 'fringing' (almost like the old blue/green screen) and wondered what the figures are animated against? I'd assumed all the rendering was done frame by frame, with all elements 'in place' but the fringing got me thinking otherwise.
I realise that matching up the lighting on the scenes to match the figures and hardware is all part of the CGI artistry, but are elements sometimes rendered separately and composited?
Also, the sets and landscapes - 'Fallen Angels' highlighted problems with 'an interactive landscape'. That is, after establishing in the first shots on the beach the Angels did leave prints in the sand, most shots after this were from the waist up, meaning the sand didn't have to be 'animated' as well. It was more obvious in the 'capture' scene, where all the characters could have been standing on a yellow, and unmarked, carpet...
-
shaqui
- Major
- Posts: 530
- Joined: Sun Nov 21, 2004 9:35 pm
- Location: UK Japan!
You're right in that some of the characters are composited into shots rather than them being rendered along with the scenery - the reasons for this are many with the number one reason being computer memory restrictions - many of the sets on NCS were so complex that it was impossible to render them with the characters without LightWave 3D (the software we used for lighting and rendering) crashing. With the advent of 64bit computers this limitation should (hopefully) become a thing of the past with computers able to utilize many gigabytes of RAM.
The other reason for rendering "passes" (background pass, foreground pass, character pass etc.) is to allow the compositor a greater degree of freedom when assembling the shot - having the characters on their own pass might allow a comper (as we call them) to add subtle effects such as blooms (the lighting kind, not the flower kind ), contrast and saturation shifts and any number of other post-effects without disturbing the background of the shot.
That all said, if you can spot fringing or halos in the shot then sadly either the lighting TD or the compositor hasn't done their job properly - we were all under a huge amount of pressure to get the show done but that's still no excuse for sloppy work - mistakes like that really shouldn't have made it through to the final cut of the episode(s)...
Andrew G. Morgan ~ CG Plumber
Cityscape 3D
Old Street, UK.
-
Aegis
- Skybase Tech
- Posts: 111
- Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 8:45 am
- Location: Skybase
Aegis wrote:It seems that NCS viewers are getting ever more discerning these days
Sorry, it's my designer's and Photoshop keen eyes... Having always wanted to know about special effects, and trying to do my own seamless montaging, you get to learn to spot these kind of things.
Aegis wrote:That all said, if you can spot fringing or halos in the shot then sadly either the lighting TD or the compositor hasn't done their job properly - we were all under a huge amount of pressure to get the show done but that's still no excuse for sloppy work - mistakes like that really shouldn't have made it through to the final cut of the episode(s)...
No quibble at all - hell, I know what it's like to have to let something go because of deadlines, and we're only human after all!
I don't know if 'fringing' is the right word - it's the term usually applied to bad colour-keying for CSO or green/blue screen. It's more... a kind of unusual sharpness to the edge of a body against a softer background. But rather than adding to depth of field, it makes the object look unusually dislocated from its setting. Does that make sense?
-
shaqui
- Major
- Posts: 530
- Joined: Sun Nov 21, 2004 9:35 pm
- Location: UK Japan!
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests