Asking an Expert to Rate my Blender Animation

if you've ever used a camera in 3D you know getting good results isn't easy but I believe great cinematography can turn a project from kind of bad to really good so in this video I'll be taking a 3D scene and transforming it to look as cinematic as possible using only the camera and compositing but here's the catch by the end I'll be showing this to a real cinematographer who actually went to school for this and ask him what would you rate this I think I would uh I'm a big fan of movies and shows and have probably watched thousands in my life so I feel I've managed to build up a decent eye for a good-looking shot so I created a scene researched tons of different cinematic techniques and effects and even interviewed my judge on his ideas on cinematography but even with all that I'm still unsure that I have the knoow to get a good grade but if I do I'll have managed to not only impress an actual cinematographer but also learned a few things to take my cinematography skills to a higher [Music] level how this thing looks before adding in a camera though is actually quite important because a bad looking scene will probably not help me make something cinematic no matter what I do as I said I've watched more movies than I can count but my all-time favorite to this day is Interstellar specifically I love the part on Midler's planet where a huge wave is coming for the main characters so I got this asset from sketchfab which is one of the astronauts gave it some very basic animation of it looking back and forward creating an ocean simulation using the ocean modifier on a plane and added a water material which is mostly just a dark reflective material with the proper I and the foam attribute data from the ocean modifier to create some white wash on the waves next I added one of the amazing pure sky hdri from poly Haven and then I put the water simulation in a collection instance death collection to get a performance perance boost and started duplicating it tons of times to create the entire ocean surface I then created a huge wide Cube and moved that all the way back gave it some subdivisions added displacement and added the same water Shader to it to act as the Giant Wave in the background finally I added in some volumetrics but I mostly did this to hide the obvious seam of where the ocean ended and to create some dep this is now the basis for our project it's nothing fancy but I feel like it's a good base point to really showcase how cinematography can improve a scene and hopefully get a passing grade from our judge before being able to think about things like compositing we'll need a camera in the scene blender's camera is extremely versatile and it can do things an actual camera can like having an extremely small or large focal length or aperture and when it comes to focal lengths I just tend to use whatever looks good but I as polyer what his thoughts were on this matter and this is what he said I think the focal lengths that we currently have they come from primarily technical limitation so I think that as the technology is improving we might see different real life lenses but I definitely think that we have to remember when we are 3D artist that we can't really go crazy if we want to recreate a real life experience of watching a movie we're going to have to stick to the rules now I looked it up and camera lenses for movies range anywhere from 18 to 100 mm with 28 to 35 being most common and this is also true for Interstellar where most shots were done with an anamorphic 24 to 55 mm lens so I'll be using a 35 mm focal length for this scene to capture a pretty wide angle shot because I want to capture as much of the wave as possible now with the camera Ed I need to decide on where to place it and how to move it this is something cinematographers like to call purposeful camera motion and polyur actually gave a full talk on this during last year's blender conference which was one of the main Inspirations for me to learn more about cinematography too and besides that he also had to say the on like you have to really consider has this camera operator experienced this before because if you're a 3D artist and you're trying to make something look cinematic you have to be aware that at some point the technical skill of the camera operator comes into the picture is this rehearsed or is this happening for the first time when you have decided that that just gives you so much strength to plan your scenes I feel like that's the number one principle I would like to highlight when we're talking about like intentional camera movement now before we continue being a self-employed creative really puts on the pressure at times and I've seen from personal experience with my own family what depression and burnout can do to a person regularly talking to a professional through better help can help prevent these issues better help is this video's paid partnership one of the things I like best is that I can contact a credential 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still a major stigma for us men to not talk about our feelings there's no shame in talking to someone about your struggles and I believe that's why over 4 million people have used better help to live a healthier happier life for this project the story is that my character here is standing in awe of this giant wave coming towards him but he he's also aware of his surroundings turning around so as the Director my idea is to First reveal where we are then show the character since he's important and finally hint towards the Giant Wave looming in the background and to do that I'll point the camera down to begin with first revealing this ocean landscape then we can slowly pan upwards and at the same time move towards our character at this point it's also important to think about the composition of the shot when I asked poer about this he said I think there are like two schools when it comes to composition you have the one part is people that are using the grids on their phones you know they're lining it up they're using the theoretical principles like as a very strict guide and then you have the other type of people who are sort of just going with a gut feeling every single time yeah I think both ways are fine for me I always just go with a gut feeling until it works and then I I never use like a grid or stuff like that but I can definitely see the value for those to do and I agree that doing this by ey is an option once you've developed the feeling for shots if you're still working on this technique though or maybe you just want perfect composition no matter your skill blender offers built-in composition guides for cameras just select the camera go to viewport display composition guides and choose whichever you want the most common options are thirds and the golden ratio but both serve the same goal balancing your image the rule of thirds is quite simple to use you basically just align the subject to the left or right third of your camera and leave the other two thirds open this almost always results in a compelling wellc composed shot and it's what I want to use for this scene with our camera Now set up for a properly balanced composition we can fly past the character using a simple key frame animation so we can shift the focus to the way and speaking about Focus this might be a good moment to add some depth field on actual cameras depth of field occurs naturally as a side effect of the technical capabilities of the lens in blender however we're able to use an insanely large or small depth of field commonly called f stops and although I recently learned that getting the right depth of field comes down to using the right skill in your blender scenes hord has something else to say it's interesting how we when you're doing the aperture in blender I was always under depression that you have to really specifically match the exact aperture and you have to match the sensor size and you have to be very strict about it but to a certain degree the blurry aspect of a render is kind of artistic actually I just don't think you need to be exactly precise I think you can just eyeball it and it will look great yeah the only time I really tried to be strict on scale was when I made the mechanical creature kit my asset pack it was challenged to try and be strict about it when I hadn't really done it before because then you really feel the aperture limitations in blunder in my case I already made the scene using proper skill so using real world f-stop values is probably possible in the beginning of this shot I want the focal point for the depth of field to continuously be the character because we want to highlight the character and once the camera flies in front of our character I think it's cool to shift the depth of field point or the focal point for further out basically emphasizing the wave in the distance but if we use blender's Focus object Target you'll notice we can switch it later on there's no way to animate this we could however animate this distance value below it but it's tedious unintuitive and generally just not a great tool to use so instead I want to use an empty and use that as the depth of field Target now it's just a matter of animating the position of this empty which is really quite simple it just needs to stay in the same place until the camera is almost past our character and then it just shoots forwards a bunch with that done we can set our f-stop to a nice low value like for example 1.7 which would still technically be possible with an actual camera and create this nice depth of field effect for the shot so as I mentioned before Interstellar was shot on an anamorphic lens just like tons of other movies now just like me you might not be familiar with what an anamorphic lens is I'm actually still unsure as to how it works but from what I do understand though an anamorphic lens creates a wider image common in cinematic Productions with a shallower depth of field and things like stretched bokeh it also results in the typical movie aspect ratio with those famous black bars and is used to add that dramatic depth and dimension often seen in movies in blender however we don't really have a lens so creating these effects requires some additional steps the first one is to work with a resolution that movies commonly use I found a handy list of common formats and for this project I'll be working with the cinema PCP 2K scope format I use scope because this is the aspect ratio that anamorphic lenses output so let's set our resolution in blender to 2048 to 858 and that should be a good start but it won't create the stretched white look of an anamorphic lens to do that we need to do something kind of weird because we need to set the aspect y here to two this will turn your camera in viewport to somewhat of a square and if you then render it doesn't look like a square at all but instead is just all squashed down so to now compensate this squash we can go into compositing add a skill node and skill the image by two on the Y AIS let's also add in a lens Distortion note here and add in some minimal Distortion and dispersion now this will generate the anamorphic look compressing more pixels vertically on the camera and then scaling those back up to fit the shot making the shot immediately look that much more cinematic for comparison here's the same frame but without an anamorphic lens set up so our camera is now all set up but before we show this to poly there's still a few more things we can do to make the project all the more cinemon you can do incredibly intricate things using compositing and if you want to you can spend hours tweaking your shots just like it's done for movies however even with some basic changes we can already add so much to our images the first thing we're going to add is pretty simple and comes down to using the proper color management blender 4.0 just introduced The agx View UT transform as the replacement for the older filmic look in this scene using agx over filmic looks slightly different but in brighter scenes with more light agx creates way better highlights with proper exposure and saturation now some people like to use filmic log which creates a disaturated log image just like a camera recording in raw log footage would and then do all the correction and Grading in post however when I as polyer about this he said the following the purpose of log is basically just to circumvent some compression artifact so the compression won't be as mean to the details that you want to preserve it's just a simple hack basically to circumvent some compression artifacts so in blender we won't need that since we can export you know unlimited dynamic range uncompressed exr if you're working in exr you shouldn't have to use log so since we're using agx let's set the look to Punchy for a sharper contrast this also darkens the image somewhat but we can fix that using the next step in this process for which we need to move over to the compositing tab color grading color grading is the process of taking an image and altering the color data for a certain look straight out of the render the colors in the image are fine but in this case I want to alter them slightly for a more washed out and neutral look obviously inspired by the actual scene in the movie to do that I'll use a color balance note and make sure to plug that in before doing things like Distortion or skill so the image first gets graded before it gets altered the color balance note has two options but I usually use the offset power slope version as I like results better now we can use the color wheels and gray skill sliders to change the look of the image and while doing this I like to have a facial reminder open of what look I'm trying to achieve I'm not super experienced in color grading whatsoever so mimicking a look is usually easier for me than trying to figure out things on my own now I think the final result is aad strong so I'll decrease this Factor slider here to have the original image come through a little more great things are coming along nicely and there's only two more things I want to add in the first of which is venting venting is a darkening of the edges of an image to draw interest to the center of it we can create this in the compositor by adding in a box or ellipse mask by selecting the node we can see the size of the Mask shown in this white line here so let's just skill that up to be slightly smaller than the image and combine it with the original image through an alpha over node this will add the mask on top of the image but as you can see it's very sharp so to finalize this let's add in a blur note in between and give it a big X y value something like 250 now we get a smooth vignette look which I think adds a nice touch to this image the final thing I want to add is grain why well with the real cameras this comes naturally there's two types of cameras in the real world film and digital digital cameras are the ones we all know and I'm recording this video on a digital camera for example your phone also has a digital camera it stores the data directly on a digital format film cameras on the other hand still use actual film to record or two creating another type of grain you probably recognize from older movies although these film cameras have been on the eyes again and Christopher Nolan the director of interstellar uses them in most of his films besides rendering noise which we're going to set aside for this blender will if using enough samples produce an infinitely clean image and this is not very cinematic since real cameras don't do that so I'm going to add in some grain using some 35 mm grain footage I found online for free it's really cool and I've been using it in my videos for a while now to add some texture to use it in blender though is really simple just add in an image node in the compositor open up the grain footage set the frame length and start frame I usually just use the project frame length here and finally make sure to enable cyclick so it auto repeats and auto refresh so blender refreshes the image per frame finally since we don't want to add in additional color let's set this to non-color and use a mix color node set to Overlay to combine the noise with the image now when I I asked polyer if he uses grain he had a very different and interesting technique to show okay so here we have an image that has highlights and it has Shadows so the trick is to use this thing called the uh texture just make a new texture and you set it to clouds for example and now in the compositor here now you have the texture you can just add it here so now you get the textures in the compositor which are like procedural and then the whole point is to adjust the scale you get the correct noise size and then eventually you can just type # frame for the offset and then every frame you will get a new noise trick is to use the color mix node for example you can use lighten yeah now you can see that the the noise is in the dark here if you set it to Overlay now you can see you have primarily noise in the highlights here the Shadows doesn't really have that much noise but if you set it to linear light then you can see we have a little bit less noise in the highlights and more noise in the shadows all right so that's our final setup and this is how the final animation straight from blender with all the compositing [Music] looks I'm kind of scared it feels like I'm back in school now and somebody's going to review my stuff and rightfully so because polyur actually had a lot of feedback if you're filming someone in real life they are not going to be like low poly you know the ocean is um is a pattern so we can see that like I'm struggling to understand what's the reason to why there's like the Horizon is a little bit off I think the the tilting might be too fast for what you're what is comfortable to look at an ocean that is this calm would have that much white water on it and so it all came down to this one final question what would you rate this I think I would uh I think I'm giving it an eight out of 10 oh so I passed yeah that's a pass yeah I definitely think that their professional compos compositors that don't know half the stuff that you've been talking about today so yeah you you could have been yeah this I think this looks really good and so even though he could tell this scene was thrown together quite rapidly he did really like all the cinematographic changes that I did to really transform the scene now if you want to see the full 45-minute interview that I did with poly make sure to become a patron or YouTube member to get exclusive access to that video and although you now know some great cinematographic tips and tricks there's a few more learn in this video [Music] here

Channel: Kaizen

Views: 95,332

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Id: QMfjyrMIIsw

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024