No Man's Sky sketch with VFX done in Blender

I recently finished working on a personal project based around an exciting game called ‘No Man’s Sky’. I used Blender to create all the 3D elements (Except the rocks, my friend made those in ZBrush), then composited in Blender and After Effects.
In February I switched to Blender for all my 3D work after becoming bored of Maya’s silliness. I really love the modelling tools and Cycles is a VFX artist’s dream!
I didn’t have much time to work on this film (Shot it three weeks ago haha) But I’d been modelling the ship on and off for a while. Critique is always appreciated!

Also if you have any questions, or are interested in using Blender for live action work, I’d be happy to help!

Here are some frames:



You can watch the sketch on my YouTube channel: matsfilms

-Thanks!

Attachments


Great work, Mat! The film looks outstanding and has a lot of nice details to enjoy! What would you say was the most difficult part of the project?

I’ve subscribed to your channel, perhaps in the future we could collaborate on something together!

very very goooood
I love it

Wow!!! That was absolutely amazing, and everything was spot on! I also like to use Blender for VFX, but I still have a lot to learn! I have so many questions for you because you are obviously extremely talented at using Blender for VFX!
What did you use for tracking points? Did you place some on the ground and remove them in post, or did you just use high contrast points that were already there? Tracking for me usually takes extremely long, and still has errors, but you had tracking in every scene and had no visible errors! Any insight into your process would be wonderful and greatly appreciated!
The shadows cast by 3D models in your footage blended in perfectly with the environment! Shadows are one of the trickiest parts of camera tracking for me, because they always seem to look unnatural. Specifically, I can not figure out how to control the transparency of them correctly to match the other shadows in the scene. Again, any insight in this area will be greatly appreciated!
When the people obstruct rendered objects in your video (and other videos of yours) , they are perfectly cut out. Do you do this manually frame by frame in post, or do you have some other method of doing this?
Lastly, you have colored everything red to fit the theme of your video, but the people are left untouched. Was this a difficult effect to achieve, or how did you go about doing it?

Sorry to ask so many questions! Great work with the video, and keep up the good work!

Aw thankyou! The hardest part was really just staying on track -editing alone for a couple weeks straight makes you want to start compromising on the quality of certain elements. I managed to pull through though, and I don’t think I could have done any better without more time/skills! Yeah I totally recognise your channel from somewhere, I think you may have taught me how to use IBL’s in Blender haha

Haha thankyou very much! Well its all about knowing the core principals, luckily Blender makes almost everything super convenient compared to other 3D packages.

Tracking
Ooo I forgot to mention I tracked it in Syntheyes, but from my limited experience Blender’s tracker is more than sufficient for this sorta thing. This shot was a nightmare as I hadn’t put down any markers at all, I didn’t even intend to use it but the footage from the shoot was cloudy so I had to dive into something filmed a month before!
Markers always help, and you can export their individual 2D tracks to use in the clean-up process in After Effects (I guess you could do the same thing in Blender with little grass textured planes and faded radial transparency maps!). My method of tracking is to not panic, and just go through slowly one track at a time. Eventually you’ll zoom out and have a load of good tracks.
I shoot my footage with a 180-degree shutter speed. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means, but basically its a lot of natural motion blur (Which I love, especially when there’s gonna be CG!). This makes tracking harder, but as long as you make sure the tracker’s point is in the middle of the blur streaks you’ll be fine! I also like to render with Cycles motion blur turned on as it feels way more natural than the unreliable 2D vector blurs. You don’t have to do it this arguably long-winded way, but I love the extra realism :slight_smile:
In terms of getting ‘good’ tracks, I often find myself stopping and adjusting the tracker’s size/rotation e.t.c. If you do that every 10-15 frames you can be safe in the knowledge that you are pushing the software’s tracking skills to the limit!

Shadows
If your lighting is right, you shouldn’t need to do anything with the shadow renders other than multiply them back onto the footage :slight_smile:
I always create a ground plane, and texture it to roughly match the real ground. Often this just means camera projecting (Blender Guru’s tutorial explains that well enough), and maybe cleaning up parts to get rid of actor’s feet/black boundaries caused by undistortion e.t.c.
I then use a sun lamp and environment map to match the scene’s lighting. I often adjust the environment to match the shadows, then turn the sun on and adjust that. Don’t be afraid to play with the colours/contrast but always start simple!
After I’m happy that my lighting is correct (I often use a mirror ball & grey ball for reference, you can see a bit of that right at the end of the video) I play with the material properties of the ground geometry. This allows me to get reflections in puddles, bumpy shadows e.t.c
If you do all that you should get a pretty close result. Then its just a matter of using layers, passes and division compositing to get a shadow pass against white!



The image above is the final result which I use for the shot compositing. Its just the ground’s layer rendered (so you get shadows but no ship) which is then ColourMix>Divided by the ground’s layer with the ship’s layer ‘excluded’ (Ground with no sign of the ship!).
Mathematically, you only get the pixels that were contributed by the ship! (You can take this further with 32-bit linear compositing and get the illumination in the same pass! But I use this for almost all cases)
You should also see that the shadows look like they are cast onto grass. That’s just a fur system attached to the ground! (Which you can assign as a mask layer for the ship so the grass cuts away at it’s edges!)

Rotoscoping
Your last two questions actually have the same answer :slight_smile: The actors were roto-scoped/masked/cut out for every frame they appeared. This meant I could copy the footage below them and change its colours! Luckily After effects has a load of tools to aid the process, including an automated one that can be coaxed into giving good results. If you look around the edge of the actor’s hoodie you can see weird colours bleeding through from the altered footage below. I could have painted them out but it wouldn’t have been worthwhile. This part took most of my time (bar the ship asset of course).

I hope this makes any sense! And thank-you for your kind words. When I have some time I’ll do some tutorials :slight_smile:

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply with such a detailed answer! That information is very helpful and I will definitely refer back to it when I’m using Blender for visual effects! Also if you get the time, tutorials would be fantastic! Thanks again!

I know what you mean, Mat! After all the work of filming and creating VFX shots, it can be hard not to rush the other stages just to get it over with. I’m certainly guilty of this. Good job sticking with it and polishing it before release!

Really nice job! You got some pretty cool videos on your channel
I’ve been thinking of trying other programs for VFX but maybe it’s just a good idea to work with Blender some more :slight_smile: