VisFX Blender Project 2: Earth "Blending"

Hey everyone!

Here’s the second VisFX Blender project! This week, I decided to do earth bending…or “blending” :D…avatar style!

Everything visual was done COMPLETELY in blender (other than capturing video) from modeling to animating to compositing to putting the final video together. All sound was acquired from www.freesound.org and www.flashkit.com

You can find the 22 minute video breakdown on my VisFX blog:
http://visfxblender.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/project-2-earth-blending/

Let me know what you think! If you have any comments, questions, criticisms, or suggestions for future topics for me to cover, I’d greatly appreciate you leaving them in the comments below!

If you weren’t here for last week’s, I’ve decided that, on a weekly basis, I’m going to do a VisFX shot and then break it down! The file MAY OR MAY NOT be up later this week.

Attachments


That was absalutly awesome
!!!

That is amazing! (: Great work, keep it up!

That was GREAT!

Looks awesome. High quality and neat concept. The only thing I would criticize is that the rock hitting the guy at the end doesn’t look powerful enough. The boulder moves quickly, but I don’t think the person moves enough in accordance with the strength of the hit. Does that make sense? I know, that’s probably the hardest part to fake because it would either mean really knocking you off your feet, but maybe there is some way you can fake the effect.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

@Deltray: I definitely agree with you! I’m not the world’s best actor :o haha. I thought about ways to do it, and I just couldn’t figure out a good way to fake it other than trying to act it out (and I’m not a dedicated enough actor to actually hurt myself xD) I do appreciate the feedback, though, and I definitely agree!

Keep the comments coming, guys, and remember to check out the breakdown if you’re interested in a behind-the-scenes look!

Very cool I liked it, I think that the only thing that needs more work is the acting perforamance, ehehhe, but you done very well, and the Fx where very well done!

Gallery!!!

That’s so cool :smiley:

earth bender!!! wooow!! very awesome but the accident not good… as if not crash! but the another effect very good! thanx for your sharing!

That was sooooo awesome

lol, well done 10/10 :wink:

Awesome! And cool concept! Also thanks for the breakdown. Really nice!
But you know that you don’t need to have a viewer-node for each output, right? Just hold ctrl+shift and left click on a any node to pipe your 1 viewer node to that output. Using so many viewer-nodes only messes up your node-editor and probably also doesn’t help with RAM issues…
If you want to cycle through different outputs of 1 renderlayer-node, just keep on ctrl+shift+clicking on it. :slight_smile:

Great stuff! I thought the two ‘spikes’ coming through the ground were the most effective elements. The first lump of concrete looked a bit to clean and perfect to me (I would have expected more soil dropping off the bottom) but I’m just nit-picking as overall it’s a great little skit.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! You all are awesome!

It seems that the general consensus is that the acting needs work :o haha. I’ll get some better actors when I get back to school. In the meantime, you all might just have to deal with me as an actor for the next two weeks’ projects!

@Sebastian_K: That…is a ridiculously useful tip! Thank you! You’ve just saved me from a lot of future headaches! :slight_smile:

@Bliz: Good suggestion! I agree completely!

Keep the comments coming, everyone, they’re very helpful! Also, if you have any suggestions for future topics, let me know!

Hey Nice work. Question do you know of any Mask Tutorials? I know how to do it for a still image. What I mean is if I have a video where I am walking through some Trees and I want my 3D Creature to walk with me and to go behind the trees and not look like its in front of them. Is there a way to make a video into a Video Mask in blender? I know once I have the mask I can us that In blender to make it so as the Creature moves the trees stay in front of him. I already did it with a Single Picture where I made a Mask outside Blender using Gimp where I made it so My body and a Object in the Image would go in front of the creature yet the rest of the image the Creature would seem like he is in Front. So the main thing is can you take a video and make it into a Mask In blender? Something where I can control what objects I want to show in front of the Creature? So any Tutorial on that? Please and thanks.

Hey,
I don’t know of any tutorials that go over that specifically. However, what you can do is make mask objects in blender.

If you set the video as your background in your camera, you can use it as a reference to model very simple objects that match the objects you want your creature to go behind. Then, in the material settings for your mask objects, you can set the transparency mode to “mask”, and it’ll mask out anything that it’s in front of.

If you’d rather use the video as a mask, you can export the video as an image sequence and make masks out of it frame-by-frame. A lot of studios in the industry do this when they get bad keys. It’s called rotoscoping when you do it this way. However, that’s a lot more tedious than just using mask objects in blender.

If you need further assistance, feel free to PM me!

I’ll make sure I do some masking in a future video as well! (can’t promise when specifically, though).

Hope this helped!
-Chris

Thanks. Though I saw on the making of Tomb Raider they had a mask of her to put in front of the Robot. I wonder if there is a program that would do that. Though I found a image that showed a bunch of nodes that took a green background separate the color out and made a Mask of it. To bad I couldn’t take the color out of what I want to make the map of and just that color. Though I think the Objects with Blender and make a map out of that would work. Though I could just color the objects Black and the Back Ground white and animate it to a video format and that I use as my mask. Though That might be more work. Still it should let me get a good video thanks. I noticed you used a Blender version that is still being worked on. I hope all that extra stuff they are working on will be in the normal version not to long from now. Thanks again.

I haven’t seen the making of, but they most likely hand-painted the mask frame-by-frame or used software that let them animate bezier curves to use as masks (this is one thing that blender DOESN’T let us do that I love about Nuke and After Effects).

If you have a solid background that’s either majority green, majority blue, or majority red, it would be fairly easy to get the black and white mask by using a separate channel node and then play with the contrast of that until you get a result you want!

I wish you the best of luck with your video! :smiley:

very cool bro