I spend a lot of time reading Cinefex and learning everything I can about the history of VFX, and I most often find myself fascinated with what was being done in the 90s. It was a time when most tools didn’t even exist, they had to be invented in order to make a filmmaker’s vision a reality. There’s something unique and special about that, as the period that followed was really just refining what was done back then.
Here are some test shots I did recreating effects from What Dreams May Come and Fight Club, after years of getting clues and answers from VFX artists of the time, and watching and reading, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do either of these effects on my own because I am not a programmer. I’ve sat on these ideas for a long time, and I’m really not proud to admit I had to take this road, but I discovered Claude and what it can do and was able to finally make these things possible in Blender. I’d like to share the scripts with everyone because of course I can’t really provide support or justify selling what I didn’t really make, but I’m not sure if I’m the only person that finds these effects useful in any way as I’ve not found anyone else even wanting to remake or know about them.
For the What Dreams May Come oil-painting/smear effect, it’s a very interesting process involving Optical Flow and Depth Map generation projected onto a proxy mesh I constructed from LiDAR data downloaded online. The man who basically programmed Optical Flow for computing made this effect possible for the movie, and I even had the pleasure of corresponding with him briefly a couple years ago about it. The work done in the film lead up to what made The Matrix bullet-time so effective, and in an even broader sense, this is the beginning of modern motion-capture, and I find that really captivating; It’d be cool if this could lead into native mo-cap skeleton generation. I’ve been repeatedly watching a single clip that shows a breakdown of how the oil-painted world and interaction was done, and what was catching me up so bad is what looked like a 3D Convex Hull meshing of Optical Flow data. I’m not even sure if that’s how advanced they did it back then, but that’s the path I took with my version, and it isn’t perfect (I had to keyframe it when it reaches the edge of the frame), but to the best of my knowledge it is accurately recreating the effect, in Blender!
Convex Hull Visualized:
As for the motion blur effect from Fight Club, it’s a deceptively simple idea that made for an unstable Blender environment: Animate one specific motion on a character’s rig, and for every frame of an animation, run that rig’s motion through the entire sequence and use that to generate an exaggerated motion blur on only the objects animated by the rig. The result is a frozen-time motion blur effect.
Ultimately these two things are for my own personal utility belt (As well as being a fascinating scientific and historical study), I have two web series and a music video that I aim to use them in, but what really thrilled me is getting to use Blender for two new things I’ve never seen it used for. The possibilities are still out there!
