VFX New Zealand Videos

Syntheyes Tutorials

admin — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 06:30:04 +0000

Syntheyes is the 3d tracker I tend to use if i need something better than Nukes inbuilt camera tracker in my comps. Below are some links to tutorials that might help.

The official Syntheyes Tutorial Area of their website has a number of good tutorials covering all aspects of the software. If you are new to the app, this should probably be your first port of call (click here to go there)

Matthew Merkovich has done a number of syntheyes tutorials.

He has been a match over for eons so to show the sorts of things he has worked in I’ll pop his Minority Report and Dr Doolittle demos below (which are an interesting behind th scenes anyway)

Now to the syntheyes stuff. First up a basic intro to syntheyes interface.

Rubiks Cube tracking

If you want to do head/face object tracking in syntheyes, have a look at the below series. The first ones cover a basic head track, his second series shows how to track ad forming face (to get a deforming mesh).

Next is his head tracking series:

Tracking Face Deformations (soft tracking)

Here is another intro tutorial by Fenix Motion Graphics

Samuel Fuller also has done a two part intro tutorial

Pixel bump also have a gory face track using syntheyes, realflow, maya and after effects

Rotoscoping tutorial videos and articles

admin — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 11:55:49 +0000

Rotoscoping is one of the fundamental skills of compositing so thought I’d collect together a few good videos and articles on it.

Some of these are over a decade old and though the tools used have changed since then, the techniques still remain the same for the most part. The things that have changed are generally ways we can track these roto shapes onto moving objects in the frame (examples of which are using a planar tracker like mocha, or smart vectors, or projection on a 3d tracked card).

The Art Of Rotocoping

This is a great fxguide article outlining the history, applications, software and basic tips.

Scott Squires Rotoscoping

Great videos showing a good rundown of rotoscoping techniques for beginners.

0:41 Rotoscoping Basics and Examples

2:50 Tracing for animation

6:42 Matting with GreenScreen

8:02 Garbage Matting

9:55 Mid Ground Roto

12:08 Compositing Mid Ground

14:54 Creating Twins

19:10 Colorizing

20:36 Animated Wipe

Here is his article on rotoing hair.

Silhouette Roto tutorial video

Mocha Pro Rotoscoping Basics

Nuke Rotoscoping Basics

An Oral History of Morphing in Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 10:10:38 +0000

25 years ago Michael Jackson’s music video for the song ‘Black and White’ ushered in the morphing technique.

The process which in 2D terms is a combination of warping and dissolving similar features of two different plates, had been used previously in the likes of the film ‘Willow’, but this music video took things to the next level and inspired over-use of what can be a very useful technique (especially if invisibly used for making different takes join together as one).

Here is a great article by CartoonBrew that talks to those who made the music video and the whole process.

Below is the video

Disneys New Keyer

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 10:46:25 +0000

Disneys research arm have come up with a new way to key that they say gives a quicker, better result than traditional keying and despill tools.

They have rolled it into a Nuke node but as of yet it is purely an in house tool (quite possibly will never be released to the public but they have released the research paper so odds are some boffin might cobble together their own version).

Check out this video for an overview.

They have published the paper in PDF form which you can get here.

Smartvector (STMap) To Tracker in Nuke

admin — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 13:48:57 +0000

The new smart vector tool in nukex v10 is brilliant but sometimes you just want to extract some good old fashioned 2d trackers from the stmap it can produce.

You could just attach a tracker directly to the stmap it generates but even with a small target box size it may get confused by pixel values in your target box, distorting locally. What you need is a way to pick one pixel colour in the stmap and track it around the image as it moves. Magno Borgo has come up with a way to do this and has rolled it up into a simple nuke group you can use (note you can always swap out the second node, which auto tracks the max luma, for a tracker node if you prefer what it offers you, but I kind of like the way he does it. Here is the link to the nuke group and below is his video discussing it.

Stock FX footage – free and paid sites

admin — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 12:50:31 +0000

Thought I’d do a quick rundown of a few sites where you can get fx elements.

There are actually a fairly large number of places offering clips now but I’ll just share a few I know below that have free or reasonable priced clips of decent quality, useful, effects elements. What I like about a number of them is that you can purchase a particular pack for a specific job, cheaply, when needed (rather than just take a punt on a large collection and find you only use a couple of clips).

Action Essentials 2 (Video Copilot)

This is a paid set but extremely useful. I have used this on a number of TV series and the price paid for the large variety of shots was more than reasonable (a well thought out useful collection). Highly recommended.

Action VFX

This is a relatively new site (started with help from a Kickstarter fundraising drive that raised a lot more than their original target) but seems to have a good range of clips. Has a fairly sizeable collection of free clips you can try out (some useful elements such as bullet casings and bullet holes in there too).

FX Elements

This is another good quality fx collection similar to those above with some freebies (get them here) as well as paid fx.

Vidmuze 4K Damage Pack

A large-ish collection of pyro type fx (it’s one pack not individual smaller collections like some of the other sites)

Detonation Films
These guys have been around a long time, I used some of their old standard def footage in some kids shows over a decade ago (still can find some of those low res shots for free here). They are very reasonably priced, just buy the pack you need in the resolution required (the 1080 clips are very cheap). Below are the links to the HD (1080) and 4K sites.

DetfilmsHD

Detfilms4k