Let's get Animated! (A VFX and Chill Holiday Animation Special)

[Music] so [Music] woof [Music] ashy how you doing today i'm doing well just moving along staying warm out here in my lovely shirt hey a plot device device's shirt action it's the law absolutely it is if you're in hollywood and someone says action you got to do it you're required by law absolutely by law hey uh this is a very very special week is it not it's a very special week this is our last show of the year and i really couldn't be more excited for it um it's the holidays it's lovely it's snowing it's a it's a vfx and chill miracle it is a vfx and chill miracle and this snow it looks like it was ripped straight out of the charlie brown special charlie brown uh charlie brown christmas which uh fun fact it was this is actually a sprite that i made from the snowflakes from the show and it came out incredibly cool looking um it's not gonna lie it's it's beautiful i'm gonna use it everywhere now no effects animators everywhere uh rejoice this is uh they do rejoice oh by the way everyone i'm i'm seth this is hashi in case you're tuning in for the first time uh welcome to vfx and chill the show where we try to break open hollywood vfx and put them back together again live with no preparation whatsoever except for our overly complicated obs scenes exactly so yes uh today we are really excited because we are here to discuss animation it's something that comes up a lot on our show it came up in our lovely episode with uh penny needlander and it came up a bit with zach dixon and just realized that there's a that a lot of people are interested in compositing for animation it seems to be uh there's an awareness that animation doesn't just uh come together because you want it to so um so seth you have made something it's it's useful not just for doing like oh michael hold on we can't hear you we can't hear you over here hold on let's head over there let's head over there here we go go into my go go into michael go into hey michael hello how are you oh i'm do i'm doing well i was just i was just saying that uh doing animation compositing is not only useful if you're doing uh animation for like a story but also even just things like explainer videos which many motion graphics people have to work with a few little compositing tricks to help make your explainer videos look better can go a long way to boosting uh the quality of your work which is good for not just your clients but also for you and you're real that's true you know i just saw somebody some advice worth five cents absolutely i just saw a great uh comment in the chat that said i just easy ease everything you know what we're actually going to be not going to be talking much about animation actually we're going to be talking a lot about i mean maybe you might hush but i think we're talking mostly about the kind of the compositing side of animation and the yeah the extra little details that really seal the deal so yeah we've been remiss to not mention that the actual art of animation taking a pencil or mouse or whatever to your medium of choice and creating life out of still images played in the sequence is a lifelong pursuit to master and and we are not going to be able to cover any of that because i am not qualified to teach the advice of oh you're a party animator good lord neither am i except i mean unless you look at this particular animation hey dude i don't know that it's pretty decent it worked for the yeah parker and stone right so oh hi i love you merry christmas oh that's so sweet i love you too pal hey now seth has worked on several quite successful animated shorts on youtube sorry hang on says the guy who's worked on several very successful animated feature films uh hollywood feature films uh all right we'll call it fair sure sure so yeah so you did you did a couple of uh viral vids i worked at dreamworks animation for a decade and made a made a very goofy pilot for disney xd once uh i'm sorry he's just like you made a couple of slightly viral things i worked at disney and dreamworks right yeah that's that's what i heard earlier that's exactly what i heard earlier and the thing is the humility it's hashi so the humility is real it's real and genuine and michael and i are over here like you don't know what you're saying anything you work on like a true artist can never be satisfied with their stuff and again and again that was real that's like the least humble thing i've said all day is knocking myself in with real artists but um yes we are going to be talking not computer animation today we are talking specifically about 2d animation and more than that how to take 2d animation which as most people know is usually some combination of a background that has been painted by a by a very talented background artist and a character or subject that has been animated and overlaid on top of it but it's not quite that simple and so we're gonna be talking about all the different ways that animation has been brought to life and um made to look yeah stylized or artistically better or whatever the artist's whims are because when you're in an animated world you design everything about it and i find this is like the least talked about side of this like art form like and not that it's not talked about 100 is but because you think of animation you think of you know either like artist drawing at vertical sketch boards or you imagine you know people sitting and animating keyframes um or you know moving around in front of mirrors but like there's the side of it of like integrating everything together that the history of it is like the way people have done it in the past up until now even up until now is all incredibly fascinating and like always remarkably fascinating to learn about and and maybe not even learn about but like realize because i feel like a lot of times we'll you'll see we'll watch behind the scenes or these days it's a lot of artists on twitter they're like posting their like process shots or their work and you're like wow like i didn't even even realize that like this thing had such intricate lighting and shading and like rim light and all this stuff that you were using to integrate this thing in it didn't just get drawn that way uh yeah i'm just repeating i feel bad because there was a there was a tweet not too long ago that i feel like encapsulated a lot of what you're saying which is just basically it was oh shoot shoot shoot uh the one you retweeted um i i think i did and i thought that i could find my retweets quickly because you referenced you referenced your uh your some dreamworks stuff some kung fu panda stuff i think you did in that was it the guy who posted that never mind i'm gonna shut up yes i'm just i'm completely forgetting who uh posted it so i feel terrible but uh yeah i'm gonna scroll through and look for that in the meantime but yeah uh overall i think seth that we are neither of us are covering 3d animation we're both talking about 2d or 2 and a half d yeah animation compositing yes yeah i think so um you had a clip you kind of wanted to start off with right is this an appropriate time to go to i'm sure yeah we can go ahead and play that um and so long as people can hear this let's head over to the screen here oh who's that i know that guy oh that is tom hanks tom thanks god star force gum beloved actor uh here he is showing his plans for uh the for the keyboard and big he no people don't know he actually designed it before dancing on it with robert lozia precisely now this is actually walt disney demonstrating a really really cool uh piece of equipment that if you have not seen in person you should just go let yourself into the uh the disney animation building over on uh in uh in burbank and uh you can see it hanging out in the lobby there but uh basically this little special here was wonderful it's walt disney talking about how the the process of animation is based on having a background and a photographed cell and in these days you have to do everything manually so for example you would swap out and register each of these cells take a a film photograph of each of these which is why a lot of these characters have a slight drop shadow which is a really cool retro look now and so this art form is a little bit lost because a lot of it is accomplished digitally nowadays and can you clarify something for me though that i've never really understood or known because i didn't go to school for animation how are the color fills like so solid like how why are there no brush strokes in the color fills well one of the complicated things about doing animation like this is you're painting on a piece of celluloid as you could see them swapping in and out and usually they go to an ink and paint artist first and that's a very underrated uh part of the process um usually an animation is sketched out frame by frame um in something uh that ends up being called a pencil test when you shoot it so you can kind of get an idea of the full animation but then it goes to an incan paint artist uh also the name of the the lovely club from uh roger rabbit yeah roger rabbit we'll get to that absolutely and yeah yeah the uh the ink and paint artist is responsible for doing a clean version of all the lines being interpreted by the pencil sketch and then those are translated to the celluloid where everything is then painted behind the uh the incan paint lines and so then once you photograph everything over an opaque surface at least you should have a really nice solid character but there are many examples of uh being able to slightly see through that paint or whatever and uh yeah i i i'm i'm just babbling at this point but no no no no i i threw you off sorry we had a reason to talk about that clip though and i totally forgot what it was oh the reason is um when um disney made bambi in what was that fifties yeah yeah 57-ish or something they they really wanted to uh they really went for it with this opening shot um this beautiful multi-plane uh pan through a forest which i think they play with later in the clip um i'll tell you what i'll do i'm gonna i'll pull it up right here in my after effects we'll just we'll hack this one um 42 by the way what was that 42. baby came out in 42. oh you know what why i am looking at the the the air date of that clip from the wonderful world of disney i should have known better um anyway later in this clip demonstrate how if you take a piece of artwork and you want to demonstrate perspective for this i think also your desktop's on screen just so you don't have make sure you don't have anything oh yeah so uh so yeah just uh diving through here um so yeah we've got this lovely zoom in this is a sample of a non-multi-planed image i believe um and the artist in just a second will uh show how you can how this is just a single painting and it has no depth as he spins it back and forth you could just kind of scrub through this all the way down i love it he holds it up see there's no like i want him to like run him back he's surprised well he does he like he turns it back and forth and says the problem is when you when the hell is the side you get you get no perspective but what if you were to uh here we go look at it break this image into a bunch of different pieces that's a good infographic you could now start kind of doing some effects that are a little bit more what we would expect to see if a camera were to translate so look at this amazing camera that they built right here it's ginormous and look what you can do now as you have all the pieces of the painting broken apart this is one of the fundamental uh basics it seems very very simple now and everyone's like yeah i get it i know doesn't matter that's why it's so cool this was crazy they had to figure out how to shoot down for this down shooting film camera and also try to film it in a way that you weren't that you're keeping as much of that in focus and properly lit from frame to frame as you go through cells right because this this is lit like because you're actually shooting it yes and there has to be a lot of light that's without getting reflections from the glass holy cow and there's got to be a ton of light too if you know things about lenses like there has to be a lot of light in order for the all of those planes to be in focus at the same time as well it is a remarkable price and this is shot without traveling mats right they just shot it all they shot all this all the layers at once uh later on in the clip if you scroll to the end they do a little demonstration of how um oh look at that look at this so and they all these guys look exactly like i would expect them to they all look like fred from from i love lucy yes and like but yeah this is amazing they show how the rollers operate each of the different levels separately and you can see through the camera the way you can just adjust the foreground background layer i would say if you have no you know rhyme or reason behind it but if you are an animator you meticulously plan out every bit of rotation on those knobs and what they represent in terms of translation and you end up with something that looks like moving in parallax i immediately imagine what this guy getting the shot all set right like winding up the things like all right good to go and and then the camera comes loose from its joints and just plows through every single layer of glass [Laughter] my goodness i i love imagining that now oh and here's a little play through of that i think it'll be absurd yeah watch the opening shot of bambi it is this long wandering through the beautiful woods to get us to the opening scene anyway that's a long discussion uh just to explain that yeah you can make 2d animation based on artwork look 3d by kind of breaking it up into different pieces so uh that's one of the very first things that i wanted to go over um so to uh to bring us to a halt one more time let me summarize what i think that i i am ambitious that we'll be able to cover today from my end i would love to talk about how to take flat pieces of artwork and do the digital version of what we were just looking at which is multi-planing and creating some fake perspective or parallax out of paintings and then after that i would like to show how you can re-light or add atmosphere to these kinds of sets to make them look a little bit different sometimes you have one master painting but you have a bunch of storyboards that take place and have a different layout and it would be valuable if you didn't have to paint every every single background or piece of art but if you could have a wide shot that covered everything it would be nice to be able to frame within it or be able to make that painting go a long ways and then after that we'll talk about inserting some characters into there and how to integrate them and make them look good from the animation perspective and seth i believe that you were going to do something similar but uh but even more exciting no not even more exciting equality what's great is we have a nice finn diagram of what you're covering what i'm covering from both of our different worlds so you are going to cover it from the actual like all animation side all like digital not what's the right word not digital illustrated whatever the right word would be there whereas i really want to talk about integration of live action and 2d animation or illustration um because it allows me to talk about roger rabbit something and mary poppins even um so uh where do you want to start um well seth why don't you give a little backstory of the history of roger rabbit and how how what uh what you're talking about when you say you know mary poppins or roger rabbit style yeah um which is the official you know hollywood term is roger rabbit or mary poppins style uh which is also mary poppin lock is also a dance move people refer to regularly i imagine i don't know why my mouth needed to say it it didn't need to happen and i regret it here we go so um so just to give some example like some of the uh clips that are in projects i'm gonna be referring to um you know i did and i've done several animated shorts with my kids um in the past the most recent one being dino feast my daughter ava wrote and illustrated and narrated um my pal tony hale cameoed in it's a very very fun piece with a really fun behind the scenes that's on our youtube channel uh do go check it out it's one of my favorite things that i've done in a while um one of my favorite tony hale uh it's great it's such an extensive role with so many lines um and uh so i'm gonna talk about you know this is illustration um illustrated uh elements that have been animated on uh integrated into like environments created from live action photography um and so i'm going to show kind of some of the ways that i uh methods i use to integrate this stuff to make it feel physical and lived and even though it's clearly you know 2d animated um another project that i worked on fairly recently my pal joey ellis who's an illustrator an artist and uh hilarious dude he has this property he created called leaky timbers um about wolfie monster and uh his two brothers and uh several years back he invited me to direct a pitch piece for a tv show version of of this uh property it never got picked up it's a very funny pitch piece i think you can watch it online somewhere how did you guys land george clooney that he is a good sport oh incredible uh he was very very malleable as a performer um the uh what's fun about that is uh uh yeah there's some what's fun about it is it was the reverse of dino feast or roger rabbit and that it was live action elements integrated into an illustrated world um which actually tripped me up at first for a little while because i uh which reasons i'll you know get into um a little bit of autobiographical setup i wanna we're gonna talk about two of my absolute favorite movies in the entire world today one of which is mary poppins um uh mary poppins says this extensive scene sequence that takes place in a uh uh in an animated you know fully all animated world and if you watch that movie again by the way it's like so seamless the integration in that scene like they fully exist in that world and it's incredibly cool and what's even cooler is this is a little off topic but i have to just talk about it just in case there's one person out there who doesn't know about this process they did not shoot this on blue screen or green screen they used um what's called a uh the it's a sodium vapor process i believe pitch petrol vlahos was is that the right one no man you don't know okay i do not know all right somebody genius uh created the sodium vapor process which instead of shooting in front of a green screen you film the actors lit in front of uh a like white backdrop lit by sodium vapor lights and these are the same lights that you'll find in like a you know grocery store parking lot it's those orange uh ratty like uh lights and the reason they shoot with those lights on the background is because sodium vapor emits light at a very specific wavelength like a very small wavelength and when and uh the camera is shooting through a uh prism this like coated prism um into a three strip technicolor camera and it sends out basically that prism is able to separate that sodium vapor light from the rest of the light being captured and so you get insanity separates it onto two strips of film actually it's technicolor so i think that's three so it's now going to four strips of film i believe but for volunteer purposes we'll just say two today so you get one strip that is just the sodium vapor and you there have a track mat or a um a traveling mat or you know like a luma mat that's um it's aligned perfectly with the footage of dick van dyke and uh and uh i almost said julia roberts and we're just gonna go with that dick and julia roberts um julie andrews uh and uh and on the other on the other you know strip of film you get the two of them with on a black background it's unbelievably insane uh and so today i do actually real quick want to try and try this in my office today i'm just kidding i i can't do that um the sodium vapor camera there i believe there's only one prism ever made and walt disney owned it owns it so that ain't gonna happen it probably won't let you back and then and then someone dropped it right yes yes so well if i if i was allowed to use it yes it would have been dropped immediately day one um all right for mary poppins then we go to roger rabbit which uh this is the thing i think of the movie i think of when like this is the the goat of uh of live action animated animation integrated together and it was this special this this making of special that i saw on tv when i was four or five that was like this is maybe i talk about jurassic park a lot but i think this making of doc specifically this sequence here this this uh this segment about the weasels the scene with the weasels raid valiants office this is like probably the most seminal moment of my like whole life in terms of my career where like i was like like grown-ups do this for a living and this is absolutely what i want to do um it was the microwave popcorn moment when it started making lots of noise in that brain you know like just yeah that it's it let's just roll with that it was a good it was a good metaphor it's uh it's it's uh it's great because you look at how hard they made it for themselves they like they're already putting animated characters into live-action in the live-action scene but to really sell it they are having these animated weasels carry live-action guns uh like like splashing live-action water roger comes out in a second spits out live-action water um bob hoskins giving the most under-celebrated uh underrated performance in the history of cinema like the guy is acting almost always to nobody and nothing and having to like not only that but and but like move this stiff pair of handcuffs on his wrist uh anyway i'm talking too much about roger abbott though having watched uh pete's dragon last night the uh the original yeah disney pizza dragon the which does some of the same kinds of things it's remarkable to see how much the performance uh connects you with the character and both the animators and boboskins did an incredible job in roger rabbit that i absolutely believed the eye line of every single character and i mean it's a bit it's a study just for visual effects in general um that they are they sell every shot in that yes looking at each other and it's remarkable absolutely and pete's dragon it's very clear that the animators had less reference than they wished they had and the actors had less reference than they probably wish they had but it was a great learning experience yeah i will that so like in fact i would probably add that right there to the list of things that i'm about to show which like are so really there'd be four things that i kind of watching roger rabbit have always taken away from taken away as like the like main things to so let's say aside from performance i would say the big you know performance in eye line these are the three things from like a production aesthetic standpoint i feel like really cell live action animation integration um from the production side and that's first off is uh cam what i call like camera confidence is this idea of shooting uh shooting all of your plates as if they're not plates and i this is how i approach this is how this is how i firmly believe you should shoot visual effects plates in general like i uh you know i might get flack for saying this but like i think you should always prioritize making it's making it difficult for yourself if it means shooting it shooting a plate in the same way you would have shot it if it weren't a plate um uh move the camera if the you're all if the rest of your movie is moving the camera move the camera on your vfx shots [Music] put tracking markers up whatever you need to get as much data as you can but move the camera that already is going to make the audience feel like uh something is real here um the other big one this is a big one on roger rabbit is lighting and shading and this is one i think we're going to talk about a lot today um like the shading on these characters in roger abbott like is so smart look at that like the swinging light in that one scene and like as they're driving in out of shadows the way that it matches so well is so great and then the third one is mixing mediums which is this is my favorite one of all of them you know like that weasel scene i'm just like don't just slap a 2d layer into a 3d background like make it hard for yourself integrate this stuff somehow um so yeah that's that's i'm going to be geeking out a little bit about that kind of stuff today but i've talked a lot so maybe we'll go back to you hush what do you want to talk about absolutely um well i would love to uh jump into it um i'm going to yeah like i said try to discuss breaking um artwork into a usable environment in after effects integrating characters with them using a handful of the most basic tools for making animation look decent and then if we have time i would love to cover creating some organic elements from scratch in animation things like smoke fire water splashes uh things like that um because that sounds fantastic i've got some of that in mind too but uh well from a live action point so what are you doing first are you doing this multi-planing stuff or so yeah the first thing um i would love to acknowledge andrew embry and shonda pugh who gave me access to some wonderful footage so look at this they sent some wonderful animated pieces which like i said the animation part of this is ridiculously hard and that's something that i couldn't possibly cover um and so i reached out to the community and these two gentlemen swooped in with some lovely uh bits of animation and uh so we've got all of these from andrew we've got this lovely uh example scene uh basically from sean which is um the most straightforward simple way you could put something together would be you'd have you know a background you'd then have uh your characters which you could sort of uh whoops that's the wrong layer there you know you could place your characters around and this is a nice clean look you know modern look for something like your your kids watch this on their ipad kind of uh animation and uh but what i want to do is i want to try pushing all of these looks to a much more cinematic look so the first thing i'm going to start with is creating an environment and what i was able to find online was this uh let me see if i can open up the initial one uh here we are um i downloaded this eps file from istock which is lovely and having it as an illustrator file basically whoops i forget i'm half screen here huh so i could maybe make it full screen let me see what i can let me get now my illustr i can snap my illustrator to it i'm just uh don't know why it's not auto all right there we go uh so now you can see um it comes in and it looks like one little layer up here but actually because it's the vector file it has all of this uh information in it and so if i go through i can turn off props and things like that and then get all the way down to the background and one of the very first things you have to do um is often an artist will provide you a piece of artwork that is based on a specific moment or is a really nice wide shot of the environment you're going to be working in and one of the amazing things about their paintings is that they'll usually have a lot of informed lighting and they'll be set up for a specific dynamic moment or something like that but when you're the animation compositor you may be tasked with trying to turn what they have painted into something that works with what a storyboard artist has laid out and storyboarding is getting ignored in the things that i've said so far storyboarding is the it's so so so essential to [Music] to creating a great successful any kind of film i think actually but especially an animation where you know you have to create everything it's a really great great way to plan out how your characters will play and how the framing will inform the storytelling and being able the luxury of painting every single background to match the storyboards would be difficult so uh one of the things that i was used to doing was breaking apart uh these very talented artists images and trying to go in and remove little aspects of their image that had to do more with um shadows and lighting within them so let me try to guess which layers are in here there's like this lighting path right here which i can disable or move out of screen until uh you can see i've actually already completed this task which is removing all of the lighting from this until i get a nice flat uh piece to start working with because i would love to add back in the kind of lighting informed by this later and on top of that i want to try to push this from looking cartoony to looking dramatic uh over the course of this uh what do you got going on over there seth um well so talking about uh lighting and integration let's talk about that a little bit like one of the things that one of the references joey gave one of joe's favorite references for when we were sitting on leaky timbers was the world of gumball which is such a great and an awesome looking show um oh and the writing on it is excellent too by the way but absolutely the look and feel is just gorgeous absolutely unique i in it it's the kind of thing where it's like this is clearly made with love and uh and an intent an intent to be interesting and you and like to make something special and unique and i so this was his you know big his his like main reference for like what he wanted the leaky timbers to feel like the thing is we were working with uh uh like i said it was the inverse it was like it was um live action puppets on uh integrated into joey's illustrated environments that he created and i got really bumped up on this because like i know i i had tricks for how to like light and integrate and shade like a 2d element and comp it into a live action like setting that i knew how to do really really well well as i felt like i knew really well compared to like dropping character into an illustrated background it always ends up just looking like they're on how do you do it without making it look like they're on just like a cardboard set um first off we realized there's nothing wrong with there being the cardboard set of it all but the big thing that i found that really helped was first finding lighting like first just figuring out how to like make it feel actually like lit like the make the light any light in it real and so um here's some you know processed shots of me taking joey's illustrated backgrounds and like figuring out where's the light source where the light sources in the shot how can i add some bloom to that light uh using various kinds of glow or trap coat shine to try and like have some of that light lingering in the air and then using uh and then obviously cutting the thing up into pieces and doing like a two and a half d uh stuff wherever i could and creating shadows and using masks to create uh you know gradients throughout and light throughout um and and then i would also go in and put in like stock uh footage uh like smoke and fog and things um into the scene where wherever needed um there's also uh give you a good example we also uh talking about mixed mediums you know from roger rabbit leaky timbers joey had made this giant car like he had this before i even came to the project he was like oh also i have a car i was like what and he pulls me into this room and he shows me this giant car that uh uh that he had uh made based on his art and so we shot the puppets behind this car on a green screen and then and then he he was like i also made the street like i made the city i printed them all out and i made them all these flats on a table and he shows me in this table it's like this christmas village um uh from like a trailer park and it's like like it's he kept calling us this is sesame this is the trailer park part of sesame street is what this show is and so he's like he he shows me i put the camera on a slider and we just like get these background plates sliding across these shots of this like flat so there's like so much practical stuff in these shots um with uh things like smoke and sparks added throughout and then uh you know various like illustrated backgrounds filling in wherever uh they needed to um ended up being a whole lot of fun so like uh i forgot my point of this oh so yeah talking about dyna feast i used a lot of the similar shading techniques in that and so i figure what i might do while you're doing your side is um i might you know go about compositing um one of my dino feast shots kind of the way that i did it before um [Music] and uh and then show you some of the ways i like made that process a little more efficient um over the course of it so anyway that's that's what i might do over here i love it all right doing well so i'm gonna uh try breaking apart this very simple uh piece of artwork and turning it into an environment that i can kind of move around a bit so i'm just going to walk through of the most basic of two and a half d setups so i would like first of all to as i just isolated the the wall bit of it it's very toony um but i would like to turn it into a looping wall uh scooby-doo flintstones style and so yeah i love those walls are just like 80 miles long in those movies in the show so they really are like that's some that's a neat neat house to have like a nice 60 foot hallway and uh one of the the most straightforward ways to do this is you take any layer like this if it's flatly lit and go to the your filter other and then offset and once i'm in offset i can offset it just some amount let's offset it to right here and you can see on screen that i've got a really clear seam and granted these are graphics and it's really possible from the vector standpoint i could have created a much more simple uh way to seam these up but you may not have that luxury so i'm going to show you my very favorite tool to use when you need to personally modify somebody else's art work and that is the smudge tool a really underrated and incredibly useful tool because you can see as i take the smudge tool i can turn its strength up to 100 and then i can basically paint with any of the colors of the original image just by stretching them out like that so if i look at some ugly seam like this first of all there's clearly some color disparity but if i i can combat that by turning the strength of it down and turning the hardness down and you can start to just sweep things back and forth smooshing colors together and get a nice blend until you've convinced yourself and your audience that it is not as loopy as you originally thought so this is a very uh you know this is the most uh artistic and in their way you could do it it's just diving in and normally i would do this with my other computer where i have uh cintiq uh so i could actually hold a pen and do this all but uh honestly just going to take is your assistant right cintiq is your invention my unpaid assistant that uh that does all of my uh snoopy [Laughter] what was that i i i muted on the show you guys can hear it but i'm muting it for the show so i apologize to you guys oh yeah we're hearing uh seth get attacked by a dog yes fully attacked all right so i'm going to do a lousy job right there but the idea is the smudge tool is a really great way to extend backgrounds and in the event that i had something being obscured now this is relatively seamless and i can just rename this layer to the wall or something like that and then trick number two um because i love working with pixels in after effects i try to prep everything so i can use that in that fashion so i'm just going to copy and paste or you know just make a little duplicate of the floor layer and i'm going to do a little transform on it i'm going to hold down i think control alt and shift which will allow me to perspective transform the floor a little bit like this and you can kind of see how how cheated the perspective uh technically is in terms of any of these actually lining up but uh if i were to uh just resize this a little bit maybe to something like this now i can turn this into a little ground plane i'll just clip this little section out like that let's do a little ctrl shift j and then toss the scrap from the side and let's make this the full size of the screen so we can start doing our little offset trick again with it let's say it looks somewhat like this and let's do some clone stamping why not clone stamping can work but when you're working with animation or art you can't do that soft feathered thing you could do with a photo you really need it to be committed to these lines so let's uh let's just duplicate a little bit of uh stone floor over here this is going to be the worst job of this i just but i really want you all to see that uh it's it's all possible so there's a question in the chat about your short films do you do the color grading on say dino feast yourself or do you have someone go behind you and get the color grading completed great question um it's i've color graded all of them i believe except for darker colors that's just talking short films all my commercials are created by somebody else but um several very very talented excuse me some very talented colorists um who i'm very fortunate to work with including um darker colors uh but all the other shorts like dino feast i graded um myself excuse me sorry incredible that was so that was so dismissive no no no no no no no this you're you're sounding like i normally do on the show where i'm like so focused and i realize oh wait hashi just said something really interesting and i just say something half uh committed um let me see how this is coming incredible there you did it incredible well done valuable so all i'm doing is i'm just i just wanted some kind of flourish thing that fills the screen i'm going to crop it down so it doesn't have that extra slop on the sides and then i'm going to do that offset trick again to this layer so let's say filter offset it's under other offset and uh yeah i've offset it like that so there's a really clear seam that i don't like but just using this smudge brush i can go in and like smudge brush make that a little bit more round i could erase that and uh yeah let's make this a little bit more of a stone here and hopefully because i've offset it the ends will tile perfectly but the uh middle is kind of up to you artistically to kind of make loopable like that so now i can call this the floor and then i can go back to my illustrator file and often this is actually a photoshop situation if you're working at most studios which is one of the reasons why i love after effects for doing two and a half d work so let me find uh it may take me a second over here just to find the props from this original image let me just close everything and reopen it because uh i do not know what the nine slice scaling means all right so everybody knows what nine slice scaling means let's turn off the background here uh let's look at this column uh the way they do the shadows is really simple it's just a big uh big solid like that but it it's pretty cool but if i can turn off the shadow then i get a much more uninterrupted column like this and you know i'm just going to take this whole thing i'm going to export it as a png file here and let's say export and then hopefully this will give me some uh options here let's call this props whoops props and uh resolution let's crank that up to a high resolution with optimized uh anti-aliasing with a transparent background i'll say okay there and then hop back over to photoshop where i will say let's import that png and hope that it did what i think it did great here are all my props which i'll just i'll just grab and copy everything and put them into this file which i haven't saved yet another important step let's save this as a photoshop file we'll call this the uh tomb i don't know so now we've got a wall a floor and now these exciting props so i left this uh shadowed column in here just for a little reference for myself because i just want to remember how they shade it in the very flat way but i'm going to select all these pieces and break them out so let's grab these if anyone knows what these are called uh just let me know in the chat so you have a chat cody is wondering what you did at dreamworks they they they are we're all wondering what you really do oh everyone wants to know so at dreamworks i worked on any sequence that required some kind of 2d intervention and so um the main things that i'm very proud of working on at dreamworks um and seth we could uh could we maybe pull some of these up yeah let's start with kung fu panda two that's the thing that i think i am the most proud of so kung fu panda two uh here's a sequence that i did uh whenever they flash back or poe is trying to imagine something inside of poe's head is basically a samurai jack aesthetic world kind of 2d beautiful art moving around and this is a wonderful sequence that is a flashback of what really happened to his parents um obviously his dad in the movie is a duck which goes unacknowledged for the most part in the first film these flames are all created with uh trap code particular and so hopefully at the end of the episode oh i don't there might be there's at least an article where i talk about it a little bit um all the snow is trap code particular but all of this emotion is pure real trap code particularly oh sorry and the the difficult thing about this is that dreamworks we were doing these 2d sequences but 3d cinema was all the rage so a lot of the cheats that you would do in compositing needed to somehow be created in after effects in true stereoscopic 3d so you could render a left and right channel of all these oh look at look at the little guy moments so uh one of the fun parts about working on this sequence um uh actually let's pull up um can you switch to uh the tigress secrets from a tv special um this is a little sequence that uh directed by rudolph ganaden i believe and it was a wonderful little practice session that all the artists in the after effects department of dreamworks got to work on primary function at dreamworks to go back to that one question was i just campaigned really hard that they should have after effects at uh the studio and eventually by the time we were doing um these kung fu panda bits uh which uh yes were uh the characters were all lit in uh toon boom yeah i saw that question i think toon boom is still like one of the go-to tools at these houses but the compositing we wanted it to be we wanted to integrate all that animation with these real uh pieces of artwork uh so the challenge of this sequence was we knew what we wanted like the water to look like or what we wanted these forests to look like but doing a simple background painting that could represent all of that stuff was very complicated and so uh we worked really carefully with the art directors and production designers to create elements that could be arranged into forests or into uh water planes just based on their aesthetic input and recreate them with either trap code particular or a ton ton of layers and uh so that was i believe let's see rich ramozynski eric tillman's and um jason brubaker and last but not least claire williams daughter of famous animator and creator of roger rabbit's actual design richard yeah seriously so that's incredible so yeah so she was wonderful and had of course this in i'll just walk stand warm there oh i'm listening sorry i'm just cold that's all love it and uh yeah so so claire williams went on to do some incredible ink and paint work and um after effects work uh following in their father's footsteps doing incredible stuff the late richard williams who uh everyone watching should be familiar with the animator survival kit if you're not um in which uh good reference very candidly like gives away all of the all of his absurd levels of knowledge about animation so anyway uh that's what i did when i was at dreamworks and uh so i was amazed at your ability to remember all of these names of people yeah because i am trying so hard i am so terrible with names and unless and except for the fact that i was like stuck in a you know in an office with all of them for i i skipped jason stovall and yeah paralama says you have a mind like a steel trap code steel trap code i'm a big fan of i think i'm made of trap code particular was that julian can okay the everything is trap code particular i think i made a drop code particular i went and you said uh that's our new marketing tagline i would like for that whole comment to be the marketing tagline please i absolutely love that so i'm doing exactly what we did with the paintings on those shows um i've also i should give a shout out to uh the equivalent of our michael even though michael has no actual equivalent but on that michael does not convert to other currencies he is only michael but the your production staff on an animated film are can be very unsung heroes of keeping the entire operation running ryan garish was mine and i could have done none of what i did without him being my brain and memory for like three years in a row of everything going on so uh yeah shout out to production staff as well because uh this all this is a lot of work it takes a lot of organization um boom stuff uh for how do you get the stuff from harmony into after effects is it just different layers from harmony as ping sequences important after effects or something like that that's basically it i think we did exi or something like that and one of the fun things about toon boom and we'll somewhat cover it when we get to character shading is that uh usually in 2d animation you have palettes so every different scene has a palette every different character has their own palette and then the scene informs what the characters look like in that scene so like obviously in a night scene a character will look way different than they do in a daytime scene or an indoor scene assuming your your budget supports it and one of the cool things about toon boom and harmony is that you can assign these palettes as you're doing the ink and paint stage and you can say like the production designer wants the shadows of the blue in the sequence to look like this and the highlights of the blue look like this and so they would output a lit version of a character completely lit and a shadowed version of the character completely shadowed and sometimes on top of that when there was the manpower um an additional shadow pass which was basically just a big black and white mat showing where the characters would have shadows on their faces or falling off around the characters and about half the time on that last sequence we just showed the uh lighting was done entirely in after effects um as a process the shadow pass just kind of a balance and masking between the shadows and or the shadow export and the highlight export for every single sequence seth what have you got going on over there i'm just going to rename these layers so they're memorable when the next spot that's all i'm doing so i was messing around with some super comp um here's my like let me turn off this fog that i've got so the big thing that i kind of want to talk about was the the thing that really really brought these uh shots together in dino feast for me was i went years until before you and we talked about this on the show but before you were like try cc light sweep and i was like what the hell who the hell are you to recommend light sweep to me why would i ever put light sweep on something oh my god lightsweep is so useful um so if you're not familiar for anybody here it literally it's such a useful tool here i'm so i was used to for bringing like a flat layer into to make it feel integrated into like a 3d environment a lot of times what i would just do is apply cc vignette and because if i didn't want to mess with 3d lights or anything and i would just fake some like lighting fall off on this uh on the characters by doing a little vignette focused in the right area obviously don't want to be too dark um but then you showed me light sweep it immediately became it replaced vignette almost like entirely um and what it does you know it adds a light sweep stuff right um but it's not just adding this like this you know swoosh this line through uh through the t-rex here it's also applying that rim light that backlight on the edge at the top of that layer wherever the sweep is so like my go-to would be to smooth out the shape increase the width and i would do i would just turn sweep intensity to zero and leave the edge intensity on so then i can i have this uh backlight that looks really really awesome and realistic and immediately like like here it is without here it is with and but the problem with light sweep on its own is that a lot of times i don't want like a lot of times if i do want to include the sweep itself um it's it's an additive effect it's not what i want is i want to darken everything but the sweep rather than uh illuminate rather than you know like increase the brightness where the sweep is so before i show my solution to that i do want to find out if there was an easy an immediate way to do this in just the effect i don't think there was you can composite the sweep on which will just drop this light color sweep right on it or do a cutout which will do like it'll basically use the light sweep as your alpha channel as an alpha matte right and put it on top of the layer which is cool that creates kind of a predator type effect i think you use this uh hush on your uh when you do this kind of stuff are you muted you're talking i see you talking i muted myself at some point yeah all my all my valuable comments no um so yeah while you're on the subject let's keep it on this you muted yourself again what is uh what have i done oh somehow there we go all right here is a beautiful looped sequence that i got from andrew embry and i think that this is what i'm going to work on making a scene out of today but to keep us on topic let me show you real quick a lot of the time the way that kind of lighting rim that you have is done is people will do the classic duplicate this layer and then they'll maybe fill it with you know whatever color you want yeah white is an obvious one and then if you duplicate that layer again invert the alpha fill exactly so just you know add this as an alpha matte or an inverted alpha matte and then drag down your matte and now you have a perfectly offset rim which is yeah the very classic look for animation we covered this in the zac dixon episode um but seth i don't want to break your heart just yet well actually i kind of do i don't know shall we we'll do it because then i can show you my super convoluted rig that i created for doing it okay so there are many ways to shade characters but i want to share one that i just love and that is a very lovely effect called cc glass yeah i was going here seth so look at that so it's perfect done i love it actually no you've got to do some prep first um in glass if you apply glass to a layer like this uh you want to turn the displacement back down to zero because you don't want it displaced but what's kind of cool is now i actually have a little bit of this volumetric thing going on uh with this character and right now the property it's using is its lightness which i really kind of like because if i use i can use the alpha as well and that makes it look like a big cookie you know like everything is kind of the same layer but when you use the luminance value you actually get these interesting highlights in different spots because there is some slight you know separation of the lightness in these elements so this doesn't look very good but watch this if i go to the shading right now you can see there's some specular which doesn't isn't you typically a look that you would have so i'm going to turn the specular pretty much all the way down and right here you can see in the lighting it's using this effect lighting where you can kind of change the like the height of this light and do some stuff like that but in on top of that instead of an effect light you could use after effects lights and now this is where it gets crazy because as soon as i want i could add like let's add a red or an orangish light here i want to pull it more red you're not breaking my heart i'll tell you why in a second but i just i just immediately want to defeat you and tell you you've not broken my heart ah dang it so now [Music] i can bring in after effects lights and this is it remains a 2d layer you have nothing it remains a 2d layer and i can just do some stuff like let's see it's under light him with this red all the same all the standard properties of a light you know you can increase the feather and scale and stuff like that on him and then let's add another light let's add like a key light or whatever um i don't want it to be that color though i would like it to be just white to reveal the original colors and you can have whoops yeah like a little bit of light that's just highlighting what he looks like up here and then you could add a new and add a new light i'm overconfident seth no no bring his bring his definition back now so you like he's he's a little flat and fluffy give him some contrast again um if you can so yeah let's uh let's uh pull up the position and scale of this thing a rim is always really great to help separate them from the background so let's push this light way back here somewhere angled forward and let's see let's turn its angle up and it's intensity up and let's bring its anchor point forward oops where are we i really want kind of a remish light based on this thing to do all right so you're welcome to start talking about so you've already landed on you've kind of landed on why that doesn't break my heart this is actually what i want to avoid um because because this is the kind of thing that happens i'm not a trained cinematographer like i've never had really an eye for light um i i can and so and i definitely don't know how to achieve the look that i want like that's just that's a skill that i never honed and i have just worked with much more talented people in that regard um when working on projects and so being able to set up lights in a 3d space is not like what i want when i'm what that's not going to get me to a good look it's going to get me a whole lot of heart a lot i'm going to spend a whole lot of time tinkering until i find the look that i really want just groping around in the dark no pun intended um and so uh i'm looking for like super like 2d flat ways to be able to simulate lighting on these things in a way where i can instantly kind of see i can kind of find a look really quickly uh and and simulate it that way which is why you know i like light sweeps so much um was because i didn't have to position any lights i didn't have to like do any three point lighting thinking or anything i literally am just like i can create a rim light and uh uh and a sweep of light across this character and i can change the angle of it or the width of it and not have to work and not you know i think not have to be positioning lights in any 3d space there's the less things i have to break the better now with that said like i said before the problem was light sweep is an additive effect it's not actually uh i wanted to actually i want to keep everything within the sweep at the levels that the layer is already at and i want to darken everything where the light sweep is not so uh the way that i figured out how to do it um is well let me start by just using this is uh an animated animation preset i made called dino shader during while working on dino feast i made this i dropped this on and you can see immediately i am now creating a shadow in the same way that you showed um the way that you showed of doing an offset like layer but i'm doing it all on one layer using the using uh the little trick of the transform like so let me walk through step by step what's all what else going on here so um let me see if i can select all and compress here we go so we start by having this uh fill fill applied uh black then i have a cc light sweep that is an actually an option so i'll ignore that one right there i have a transform uh for opacity that lets me that is controlled by this shadow darkness control that lets me turn on and off the opacity of that fill um and then i after that transform that i have cc reptile that is there for uh some edge issues that i'll show you in a second so oh clever reptile can slide in there to save a lot of edge issues fast blur to be able to create shadow diffusion if i want but here's where the magic happens is that um i set the matte to itself to its original shape and then i have a cc composite which i've named multiply cc composite on to multiply everything that i just did on top of the original layer so now i have created this this shadow that's on that's on him that's it's set at an offset on this that's also what this transform layer is doing by the way too it's offsetting that that fill and then i have a light sweep inside here so check this out if because i have let me show you with the light sweep on if i turn on i now have this light sweep on top of the fill effect like uh after the fill effect and because that fill effect is ultimately going to be multiplied on top of the the dinosaur on top of the original layer it's going to that white is going to become basically transparent so it's going to create this like hole in the fill in the shape of that light sweep um meaning this is what it ends up looking like is instead of having an additive light sweep i now have a light sweep that is i don't have a shadow that i've applied to the dinosaur and then the light sweep is just cutting out the the part of that shadow that i want where i want there to be a light sweep does that make sense clever i love that and you can get some like he's nicely negatively filled just like the the tree and everything else in there yeah and then on top of that i could just apply another instance of light sweep for uh a rim light that actually follows the shadow angle if i wanted to and so uh all of that wrapped up into an animation preset i called uh dino dino shader and i would just drop this in and use this uh on layers to create this really dynamic super stylized lighting on on each of my characters in their scenes and then on top of that lighting i would then apply uh i would then comp everything in with super comp i also have this fog layer that i have unmolded and applied a tint to but um this fall this live action fog layer i put this stuff is all over dino feast and it's like it's such a great way to create this volumetric atmosphere that's so cool and it gives there's a bit of uh it feels like uh what's the word i'm thinking of um subsurface scattering like the way like it they feel a little bit like paper yeah by by the way the uh probably the haze is interacting with them so they have this hint of transparent going on but uh not entirely absolutely so really really cool stuff um i've i just did one extra step over here which was uh i kind of liked the way that this lighting was looking on this character and then uh i just duplicated the layer and just did the old school trick of uh turning down the brightness and contrast of them and then making another duplicate uh that was an alpha matte uh using the original zombie you can tell that or the mummy here same thing zombies mummies and vampires i don't know uh but yeah you can offset this a little bit and get kind of a cool uh interior shadow look and one additional thing you can do instead of blurring this uh using like a box blur you could also use a radial blur and that's so smart my very favorite looks because and zack talked about that on the uh on zach in the iv week didn't he oh perfect that's so smart because then you create yeah sorry i'll shut up no no yeah you get it it's it's blurring that let me see if i can uh showing just this what happens is you can get um you get a really nice directional sweep from wherever the light is coming from and like that and if you're using this shape to mat the shadow in then you get cool things like look at this it looks like his teeth are casting shadows across the inside of his mouth and stuff right there that's so sweet and i i've made this offset a bit much but um since the sweep is coming from over here it should actually maybe be over here um but yeah these are some wonderful fake ways to kind of do lighting on a character so so put a pin in that for now because we need somewhere to put this mummy oh so although i do want to say before you get started i jc i see you in the chat and i'm gonna i want to try your solution as well while hashi works oh cool jc welcome who's in the house jc a few of you will get the reference michael did i am one of those few laughs oh i've not thought about that in a very long time michael brian beam and i have been doing nothing but that to poor jc for the entire like ever since he first started coming to nab is just saying who's in the house and jc just quietly says jc and he hates us they won't talk to him until he says it it's true became official do you ever hey do you guys ever use layer styles for shading in africa no i do yeah i i don't either because it breaks a lot of things well i do so deal with it you can it's actually yes you can use them in a pre comp and then throw it into something else but they they break stuff so i'm gonna just i'm just gonna say this out loud so i can be doing it in the background i'm going to jump in and import my uh tomb and i always recommend making sure that you import something as a composition and retain the layer sizes for goodness sake you don't need all those extra empty pixels so i'll just say okay and now i'm going to start building and you can and you can talk seth oh i got nothing to say let's see well i'll just walk this so jc what did you like five or six years now yeah it's true jc so um you were saying do sweep only so that's cutout mode i'm guessing and then fill and then cc composite um and all i'm going to be doing in the background is i'm dragging i'm individually dragging layers in so i can just by by sight and by you know by switching you know f11 f12 between my two views i can just dive in and like position the wall to be back here somewhere and you know bring it up like that just figure out where everything kind of intersects so they can be nicely aligned what did i do wrong i don't think this worked like like uh we thought it might if you think i was paying attention to what that suggestion was what you're trying to do oh you know no here's what might work let's uh jc says uh that should have been solid composite not phil oh solid component so over on my screen i'm going to do something that's a little ill-advised but uh in since i've created these 3d layers a floor and a wall and i want to scooby-doo them i could technically just add the effect repetile on repeat and do like an expand left and expand right and get a longer piece of footage like look at this now i have this nice long hallway and because after effects has become better out of this than it used to be this used to really really uh upset it but uh i can just copy and paste this repetile to both pieces point out that if you were in the beta version and you toggled draft 3d you could see you know what outside the comp bounds if you all haven't seen that you really should so what have we got boom i'm gonna open that up in the meantime michael you are a treasure all right oh what if sorry i'm just thinking to myself so let me uh reset my camera yeah sorry i'm like sitting here like trying to understand jc's thing i'm like oh maybe it needs to be this and i just turned it back into what i had it before in my head i can't figure you out jc sweep only solid composite matte cc composite i do light sweep i he's sweep only and by the way just shut me up posh if i'm manipulating this with jc solid composite oh i do have video copilot effects console by the way i use all time but i also teach a class to a bunch i teach an introductory vfx class to folks after x class in which i try to use no 3d no uh third-party plug-ins so i've actually gotten myself unused to fx console this semester actually demonstrate are you demonstrating this real quick with the ring thing are you jumping right into i'm gonna dive into the this uh let's see if i saved it properly all right so we are in uh whoops all right yeah we're in uh after effects uh beta which if you have creative cloud you should absolutely do because they i like i haven't updated it today but they release a beta version of after effects every day i cannot believe that they do this but one of the coolest features in beta this is typically what uh something looks like let's see if we are in our 3d view are we all right uh [Music] let's see what am i doing wrong turn on the floor there all right there we go so normally this is what after effects looks like but look right down here uh next to uh this pull down under the is this where it is under renderer options oh wait no uh just what am i looking all right so yeah i'll click on draft 3d and then i will click to enable the extended viewport and what that does is let's switch back to uh am i on the right camera [Music] oh is wrath 3d not picking up these effects oh there we go right so look at this viewport oh yeah that's so useful so this viewport allows you to see your whole stuff even when it's up here above above screen look at that this is incredible now in this case uh if i were using because i'm using draft 3d it's not trying to render out the uh um those effects but because these are tileable i really could just duplicate and paste them out like this as many times as i wanted to and what what a cool feature everyone you should definitely jump on and try using this uh unlike me in this episode because i'm just going to close this right now and then go back to here and uh i'm going to add in some 3d columns let's uh put their anchor point down at the bottom so they're easy to scale up and down i always suggest putting your anchor point in a clever spot if you can and uh i know this is just the same column but let's go to a top view and do some uh duplicating let's move the egyptians were very specific as far as i remember uh with their design uh they had they had a good knack for for that as it were so let's just put some columns in here like that and let's uh throw some posters on the wall i think they call these posters back in the day papyrus uh posters is it paparazz or papyrus papyrus papyrus pepperoni sounds paparas sounds like a like like a feminine like like yeah sounds like a regular no finish finish yeah no it sounds like a routine medical thing for anyway i'll be i i'm not i'm i'm a man i don't know what those words actually mean a man surrounded by a wife and daughters uh yeah i yeah i'm scared anyways like myself a little little vocabulary get out i placed all these layers in 3d it's remarkable so this is a two and a half d set everyone uh i'll click back to uh my scene camera and you can see i have this uh nice little 3d kind of setup like this would be totally adequate for you know name your you know pbs integrated app uh like animation style right here and i do not mean to disparage any form of animation because animation is hard everyone so hard right so let's uh do a little camera i'll just do a really generic uh multi-plane move this is about as simple as you could get in a setup like this uh let's uh the floor i'm not in love with how much detail i'm getting on it so i'm actually going to slide the whole thing back so i'm kind of cutting off more of that and you get some of that stone detail in there michael you were right the extended viewport would have made this make a lot more sense the ability to hit one two three and drag around for your camera controls is good julian it's great and to jason murphy the render time thing in the new ae is awesome yes it is being able to toggle oscar on and see what specific effect is taking so long or expression is taking so long in your comp is delightful it is and it's a turtle it is oscar the snail that was that this stream or was that another stream i don't remember i think that that could have been asked the trainer but uh i think it's been on our show before uh oscar the oh well speaking of christmas by the way we have a on my other podcast i brought up what we didn't have to talk about this on on mike either on the other one we talked about this on a rehearsal or a tech check or something michael michael pointed out how rudolph the red knows reindeer is a problematic story because uh only only when your disability proves useful or does it have worth uh do you have worth in that story which is not great it's a terrible message to tell kids yeah go ahead and make fun of the disabled kid unless this facility proves useful otherwise it's fine and there's no consequences so uh anyway we talk about that on the writers room game show next week on our special christmas episode i know i don't like to hype my shows on my other shows but because it is christmas you all should go just just go into another tab right now and type writer's room game show and then later on when you're closing tabs and you're like what was that oh yeah this was that thing uh you can treat yourself to any episode of that and it is it's a real delight if you've ever been like man seth's too loud on the show but you know what i could turn them up louder i could take more of them then have we got another podcast for you and that's the writer's room game show yes all right so i've got i did what was very silly which is uh come up with a camera move before i've actually tried blocking in my character um i'd forgotten the zombie guy was a loop so i did go into and go to interpret his footage and make him more of a loop uh let me just turn off his effects for a second so i can see him very cleanly uh in here whenever you have a looped walk cycle or something like that you have to uh if you want to bring it as a 3d sequence you've got to be conscious of how they move through the scene so i've brought in the zombie and he's hanging out right in the ground there i'll go adjust anchor point so and i'm assuming a he uh but uh you know i haven't asked him let's see all right so i'll put that anchor point right there at the foot contact point and that's important because it's nice to be able to scale a character from the ground uh if you want to be able to scale your character from a couple of places you can always add a second 3d null down here that the mummy is parented to for example uh but let me uh make this mommy a little bit closer to the camera and let's determine uh what the walk speed of said mummy is there's a couple ways we could do it uh the easiest is just to add two key frames to this mummy i'll create one there and then just go grab his little uh ex gizmo and slide him straight along through this 3d set and then go back and play through it and see how good my guess was so let's see all right so basically what you start looking for is sliding it either looks like they are moving too fast or they are walking on ice in this case he's sliding backwards a little bit um you can tell that because you just watch wherever his uh foot contacts down and you can see that like uh the heel lands there with a little bit of space between this is the hardest thing part for me or walk cycles and getting them yeah yeah so usually you can also just like frame up so you can't see their feet and then everything um yeah you can see that his heel slides back toward that pretty quickly which means that the overall animation is not moving fast enough so i'm just going to grab the position keyframe over here and slide it back a little bit and let's see how this contact feels someone just had a really fun idea which is what is that what was that well if you could make make it to where we can see a little more of your the scene what i can do here is let me see if i can make you up here with the mummy hey oh my gosh and i can make you run from the mummy let's see transform flip horizontal run run ah [Music] moving too fast now you're bigger stomp stomps increase the increase the mummy uh the camera speed let's see there we go i like that you're so much bigger than the mummy now well it's it's like an elephant it's like an elephant fleeing a mouse it's i also like that it's nature i also like the people to be to me tuning in for like advanced animation techniques vfx and chill and they come into that well we got 60 oh we had 69 people watching now it's down to 68. thanks thanks for that i was gonna say nice but now it's not nice so so obviously yeah this is this is the most straightforward composite of this possible it's the it's the 2d character animated in front of some 2d artwork it's it's fine but it doesn't have a lot of mood and i would like to start adding some more mood to this piece so uh i can talk through what i'm doing or seth if you want uh we can uh oh i just want to i'm not sure i just realized i have access to uh that mummy don't i is that shawn's or andrews this is andrews okay oh andrew you know what's great is i have another uh i have something else andrew of anders too um andrew and i worked together a long time ago at my my uh yeah very pivotal moment of my career andrew many of you may remember this scene from plot device the short film that got me my job at red giant um at the the post post-credits scene he ben breaks the plot device button and then a little animated bird flies up and will not shut up and stop talking to him and he realizes he's now stuck in an animated world andrew uh we found him on twitter and dude animated this uh little bird and uh some other stuff other elements and a shot that followed it um what the heck and andrew too much talent yeah man and so uh what i wanted to do today and i'll do it in a second is um back then i just dropped this bird into the scene and did nothing else like some kind of idiot and so today i want to comp this i'm going to comp this bird in the way that i uh do this some justice yeah the way that i would now which is like you know overkill overkill i'm going to overkill this bird i'm going to overcook this bird perfect i'll just do it now why not all right i am going to place some uh lights into my scene and this does not always work out great um but i'm gonna try anyway so let's uh let's add some spotlights into this uh setup here i'll just move them around a little bit i want to kind of do this thing where the uh let's have the spotlight cast some shadows in this i think it looks like you and mr uh on rabinowitz had a child oh we did have a child but no one will ever meet that child um ben uh actually we did have a child and that child is plot device and here what you're watching is that show um uh uh so fun fact about ben and shia labeouf uh when plot device came out one of my favorite and i'm sorry to interrupt the teaching hashi um the one one of our favorite comments ever one plot device was it might have been an av club or somewhere where someone said well one of the one on av club said um the the guy from eraserhead had a baby and i thought that was funny but then someone else said uh shia junior sucks that that's it there was no there was nothing i was just shia junior sucks and ben thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever read in his life and so for christmas uh got him a shirt uh printed uh michael lanier who designed the plot device logo um hang on a second i'm gonna find it uh did uh created a uh uh chaya junior socks t-shirt for christmas for ben um and you can see him wearing it in the red giant tutorial uh as a sandstorm i believe we initially called it dubai hard but then changed the name of that um creating a sandstorm effect and uh i can't find that tutorial does that tutorial exist uh michael it does i saw it not too long ago all right i'm gonna try to make a scary shadow over here is all i'm doing so this effect seth do you mean the uh mission of possible sandstorm tutorial because it red giant just put it in the chat oh yes thank you that's that's the one i'm looking for if you if you look at that ben is wearing the uh cheyenne jr sucks anyway you should keep teaching i'm so sorry no i i all i've done is actually something that i didn't think was going to work this well usually when you add after effects lights to a scene like this you get a very paper cut out vibe because it really reveals that everything is pretty flat but if you do have uh you know some perspective for things like uh the floor or the columns on the ceiling or something you can get kind of a cool effect i actually didn't think these 3d lights were going to do what they're doing but it's uh that's pretty this is a way cooler shot i'm sorry that's like you're you're you're indiana jones like shine a flashlight through a tomb that's pretty amazing let's see look at that that's cool you'll just see this shadow of him on the wall first i love let's see what he is and the shadow goes through and then see i wish you couldn't see that little flash of him beforehand but uh here he is and then let's see once he gets to here look at this this is really cool and then on top of this what if we went in and went to the camera setting and let's uh i'm going to add a new null object and i'm going to attach this null to my zombie and then i'll switch it to 3d after that and what that'll do is it'll make sure that it's pretty near the zombie anyway i'll move it over here i'll move it to where the zombie's face is so now i have a null that is wherever the zombie's face is it's called a zombie even though i should be i feel like i should be saying mummy but yeah andrew come on learn the difference so mummies are only here for an amount of time granted them by their you know their mummy's curse or gift right it's temporary a zombie is a new newly reanimated uh thing and a vampire is what a vampire needs vampires and zombies that's that's that's a tricky one uh but seth i learned this trick from you i'm gonna select this 3d null object and the camera and then i'll just write i'll select these two and then i'll right click and say uh camera uh link focus distance to layer and that means that from now on the focus distance of this camera is going to be locked to where that null is which is perfect because now i can go ahead and turn the aperture up a little bit until i can see some blurring in the background there gosh i feel like i'm having to turn this up too much oh did i not do i not have it on depth of field is off yeah all right and then let's uh start dialing up the aperture there we go just a little bit of uh coming in here so now we can put the camera milk is right uh where the zombie will resolution for a second so you all can see it yeah that's pretty cool and the background is a little bit out of focus and you can always uh play around with everything in a scenario like this so i could instead of manually or instead of using the camera's actual depth of field which could be maybe intense for the computer to do you could also just blur the background and blur out the columns or something like that and leave him in focus which would be kind of fun to do so i'm just going to be playing with some more lighting and stuff in here my goodness a lot of time got eaten up there are yeah so many more things i want to share everybody i'm so sorry because i wouldn't shut up about shy junior sucks no no shy junior's all right let me duplicate this zombie and i'm going to um create a copy of him by pressing uh duplicating him and then i'm going to double i can go disable uh the expense of lights and uh then on this copy i can do some specific shading kind of stuff because these guys are right on top of each other i'm going to get some three garbage but uh i'm going to try avoiding that by doing a simple cheat of just uh moving him a teeny forward this is not recommended whoops dude do not try this at home do not this is silly and it's probably happening because i'm a half res is that true yeah in full it's not happening whatever all right so i have a lit scene light uh mummy and then uh not acknowledging the scene light mummy and let me see what happens if i add a cct glass to this one and do the same stuff i did earlier let's turn off the displacement down to zero let's let me see what happens if i say use the after effects lights i don't know how this will react do you react to the after effects lights as you pass through probably not it's it's probably used because it's on a 3d sprite now oh i'm just going to use the uh effect lights in here so that right around here i can add a disk thinking kind of a blue light here that will and i'm gonna make the source a point light so i can drag it around using the glass and then i'll turn off his specular down it shouldn't be receiving any ambient right great yeah just a little bit of volumetric mount from the in the back there i like i can uh for his whole blending mode i'll switch it to screen and now i think i'll get a combination of these two ah they're too close to each other i could always jump up here and add an adjustment layer between these two so that'll automatically pop them apart like this but it'll break some of the other 3d stuff going on oh now he's a ghost that was a ghost mummy ghost mummy transparent when he walks through columns but yeah now he's got these blue shadows which i kind of like though actually what would have happened if i didn't do that whole glass thing what if i just added um some ambient light to this all what if i added some ambient blue light i've gone completely off track of my of my prepare teaching materials because i just really i really love this the way this mummy's looking all right i'm going to turn up the ambient to like a low amount there is that coming across in the stream i can't tell how dark it is on my screen versus where it is there's sunlight shining on my monitor right now which is oh gosh i'm sorry we can kind of see him yes yeah so there you go now he has some definition in and out of the shadows which is kind of cool um but let's dive into his pre-comp and add some stuff that'll come through a little bit more cleanly so uh what if i put in that negative fill on him again what does that look like when i'm back in this tomb ooh now he looks kind of every time you say negative fail i just think of your content aware phil character being all sad he's certainly i know so negative come on hill stop it [Music] how did this break all right let's see we're just going to adjust the radial shadow a little bit like that until we have an angle that i like and then i'm going to turn down the amount of filled in shadow there and then i'll pass it along oops i'm so used to my copying over there let's rename it let's call it the tomb all right okay so now we've gone from a very pbs look i don't why am i throwing shade on the amazing yeah wow just going for it so so yeah you can take very flat looking things and very quickly in after effects start to give them a lot of mood and atmosphere and if i were doing this for real i would do a lot of the same kind of tricks with these columns that i would do with any of the other artwork where you could add you know a negative infill and things like that so one thing one way i could do that is uh let's see can we do this all within the effect let's do a let's fill it with black and then let's add some fast box blur and then turn that up a little bit like this let's blur the column out and then let's use uh what is it called is it utility uh no composite cc composite and let's put it behind and uncheck the rgb only there we go so what that does is it fills it black and then blurs it and then if you put cc composite behind it puts the original artwork behind like that and if i wanted to let's see if i turn down the opacity yeah of that fill i can do this and now the column's got a little bit of a rounded edge and instead of a fast box blur i should have done my radial blur trick [Music] let's put that above the cc composite let's turn it to zoom mode put it over here screen space y is like that let's turn up the amount i'm not getting what i want seth i don't like when i don't get what i want oh welcome to welcome to me almost every week on vfx and chill yeah it's it's uh all right let's just use the thing is we tend to get effects that look really cool on this show at about 1 15 and then we just spend the next 45 minutes ruining them sometimes i had so much more to teach you all all right so i guess we'll just have to do this again in the new year what we're coming back we've been renewed another season heck of a teaser for the new season there hoshi gosh i have so much to teach you wish i had more time oh my goodness i mean i really want to lousy fire i wanted the fire and the water stuff like that that was what i really wanted i think we need a whole episode on fire oh 100 all right so actually because i really wanted fire i wanted to get to fire water and organic effects let's do in the new year seth part two of our animated series where we just did that from i love it a whole like a whole series of like fire water wind even what's what is what is your what's your theme there what uh uh james cameron founder yes we are scp-x that we're getting a second scene oh excellent question it's like he works for us um so what you do here is there's a little effect called rg shadow and it comes with red giant vfx suite or what giant complete whatever the hell we call it now and that's some terrible marketer sorry uh michael it comes with red giant complete correct that's the only way to get it now no you can still buy perpetual license of vfx suite but the professional license is 1.5 so you don't get bang or anything new you just get the old but you do still get shadow which can do this so if you're like the person who's like i hate subscriptions for no for no reason um or subscriptions because the internet tells me i should um yeah i like spending lots of money all at once you can still get a perpetual license for lots of money instead of a subscription for very little money anyway uh yeah you can still get vfx 1.5 uh which has shadow in it anyway a shadow it's not metal accelerated or uh it will not work on your m1 chip either whereas the new one will i'm excited because i got an m1 coming so uh i line up these uh ground planes here these thingy doodads and then i can position my my shadow let me turn up the darkness of this shadow so you can really tell that it's there in fact let me go back and do this on the dinosaur that might be a little more because this is a thin mummy as you know thin mummies can be thin uh shadow nice i'm gonna call it on this one over here and when we come back i have ignored a huge part of what i wanted to talk about which is texturing which is adding more than just the cartoon shading to these things because these cartoon shadings they're going a long way i really love what's happening i love the way this mommy gets to look here and all that but there is a whole like new level you can reach by being able to overlay textures on top of your animation and next episode i don't know what date that will be probably the uh what january some what is it michael january's january 14th or something 7th or something or i guess maybe 14th 14th is my birthday happy birthday so i'll i'll get to that wait wait wait wait wait wait what sorry hashi just said happy birthday haji's birthday is before that if i'm not mistaken so we actually do owe him a happy birthday as well and for you i got snow yay happy birthday it's snowing i mean i don't know what i'm displaying populated hands next to my head i'm like uh what character is like that it has a float in our calendar it says our first episode back is the seventh okay beautiful we'll see you all on the seventh night no no i'm not saying goodbye i'm just saying that we will see you then so mark it now ignore schools appointments everything but i did promise one thing on social that i was going to show people so i should probably pull that business probably should and earlier when we were looking at this uh you know this image here we went into illustrator and we we grabbed little bits and then in photoshop we re-scaled them and we kind of jiggled them so we could have layers of depth now assuming you had just a flat image one of the ways you could do that would be going through and you know you'd kind of assume if this were flat you could go through and use like selection brush and grab pieces and cut them out you know duplicate them out have different things like this and then you'd then have to go back in and grab your background you could use that trick i was telling you earlier with this with a smudge brush of like just real quick just erase the column like this something i don't know there we go flawless i think you know and then you'd have a couple layers you'd have your column and you'd have a clean background and that's neat and stuff um but the other day i was thinking that there's some there could be some fun to be had utilizing some of photoshop's new features so let me open up um some fun artwork i think i don't remember what this is this is from something so we got this this beautiful concept painting of this uh desert scene um and it's a painting it's not not a photo in case it fooled you but um one thing i realized that photoshop has is under filters they have neural filters and we started to kind of touch on this in our episode uh with penny needle ender and look at this one of them down here i can turn it on it's called the depth blur now what's crazy is the way this is supposed to work is you click on what you want to be a focal point and then you turn up uh this blur level and look at what that did yeah it did this artificial blur so say i wanted the this tower to be in focus i could click on the tower and now that's in focus it threw her out of focus and the background is even more out of focus now how is it doing that it's using a neural filter where it has to estimate the depth of everything based on what an ai a trained ai does now one beautiful thing that i did not know last week is that you don't have to use a focal point and all this stuff right here there's a lovely check box that says output depth matte only map only and look at this so i'm going to check that box and i'm going to say ok and look at this beautiful thing that we get and if you remember from last week you can use a displacement layer or you can use a depth mat as a great way to displace your image and uh let me save these two out let's save a copy of this as depth boom and then jump into uh after effects let's import those two images while you import real quick jason or uh just wanted to finish out uh in our giant shadow at the bottom there's a displacement section you just select your plate as your displacement map and it uses the luminance to then uh displace your shadow according to the luminance of the plate and that's how you can displace your shadow uh you'll see the end by insanity all right so once you have this depth you can just like we did the other episode drag it in here it can be invisible it doesn't matter anymore you go to your artwork and then you say displacement map and now if you go in and uh it's a little bit small but you just go to a displacement map layer and select depth right there and i always switch this to luminance just because i like that and now i can use the displacement values back and forth to do this oh that's like the headlop thing we did with her last week yeah or yeah totally and if you use the uh effects and masks you'd do stuff like on the depth layer itself you could do a fast box blur and if that's turned up it'll kind of uh smooth the displacement a little bit as it were so let me reset the uh values of this now you can see it's made everything a little bit rounder and stretchier i mean there's a point that it breaks of course but this part right here is pretty cool but that's only like left right up and down kind of displacement and i had the thought that if you're provided with this lovely depth mat um dude this is so cool i saw this on twitter and i want to murder you for it yes what if you were to like take selections of the different like shades you're getting but use those selections to grab pieces of the original and then i thought that seems really repetitive and annoying and so what would actually be easier is uh let me just close this whole file down again and just reopen the jpeg it's got a jpeg flat jpeg of this thing but i have made a couple of actions which are my christmas present to you all or just a holiday present it's this set it has two stages right here the first is two minutes two stages boom let's run this one the depth matte creation where you just run that and it applies that neural filter thinks about it for a second and creates a new layer and it's automatically renamed these two things the painting and depth you don't have to do with a painting but i just love that it does work for those now while you're at this stage one thing you can do is you can kind of just gauge whether or not its guess was good at the depth and one of the things you'll maybe find is that there are some really fine details that that neural filter is not really quite getting um but that's okay so the once this is done you i've created this second thing called multi-plane and multi-plane it's really just the same like eight steps over and over again where i'm using a color range to select all the values between 0 and 32 and then 32 and 64. blah blah blah blah blah blah blah through the image and then after it's selected that it grabs that selection from the painting runs content-aware fill on it and well let's just play it uh let's go right here press play oh seth seth you gotta come over here check this out check this out look up so over here in the right next to michael all these layers are being created as you run this i don't gotta do nothing i can just press that button and say okay and these layers get generated in the background and once it's done which i think it's close to done i can't remember if it's 9 or 10 layers it creates you could technically do infinite divisions of this up to the number of luminance values i guess so it looks like nothing's happened and you're and everything is back but check this out layer one is this foreground layer and the character and that little dune layer two is sort of the front half of that thing and so on and so forth each one has gone in and run content aware fill on its previous self and there are some sloppy errors i could have made the content aware feel thing bigger i'll make it a little bit better before i send it out to you all but check this out let's save this as a photoshop file uh desert thing and then if i bring this into after effects let's oh my gosh we're past time but i love you all and it's a christmas holidays we're hanging out it is let's bring in the composition let's open it up and i'm going to do something silly which is grab all of these i'll parent them to the painting and i'll because i just want this to be an hd complex like this 20 by 10 80ish and then since they're all parented to this one let's scale them down so they fit the width there and then i'll unparent everything again that part's kind of unnecessary i just i just want to for preview purposes um let's turn on all of our layers and so we have this beautiful scene back i'll select all of my layers and then i am going to cheat here i'm going to use pt multiplane and what pt multiplane does is it takes all of your selected layers and you can say auto arrange these on the z-axis from zero to a point that you want and i will just say apply multi-plane i've also elected to create a two-node camera because i like the two node cameras so it looks like nothing is happening to you but uh oh but something's happening let's f11 switch to the side it has auto arranged all of these layers why god y out in z and the wonderful thing about this is on top of that uh they each have a controller null on them so as i push things away from camera the controller null is scaling up the layer so if i went to a view like this in pt multi-plane i could kind of decide well there shouldn't be you know this stuff should all actually be kind of close to each other so let's just grab the nulls and sort of move like the the lady and the um the side of that little temple thing there and move it a little bit closer because these should be kind of closer not so separated in z depth maybe something like this just by their nulls or whatever and then uh just find the point where this uh this little thing is no longer there and then uh if i switch back to my front view nothing will look like it's changed but look at this it if i add some keyframes to the camera i can now start you're a or away from this artwork oh i forget that after effects now i don't like this dolly toward cursor thing i want i don't like to wear point of interest so look at this my god artwork in 3d zoom zoom zoom i can orbit around to some degree and all of that i got pretty much for free people asking how can we get the photoshop actions you made well guess the hell what guess what i am going to upload them i wanted to share them in the chat but what we're going to do is i'm going to save them as a zip give them to the the powers that be so it can be in the description for this the powers of br michael um uh i'm going yes a pt multiplane is a script that you have to buy you can build your own version of it because if you move an object away from the screen and i think stu mashwitz is in this in the chat yeah he he died and you killed him he said he said yeah you killed him his blood is on your hands now so i believe if you add an expression i will i'll get this wrong if i tried but if you add an expression to the scale of an object and you add in a the distance between the camera and your object and you uh multiply its scale by the well see the problem is it depends on the focal length of your camera yeah it's the focal length over the uh just get the script it's easy just get this just get the scripts research and replace bundle also very handy oh hey amy emoto's in the chat hi yeah hey come be on the show dude please come be on the show shy for live stream stuff but uh we'll figure it out we'll i mean if we can do this this lot these amazing visual effects live we can have you on the show absolutely so please find uh seth and me on the twitters we will probably share these actions uh in the next however many minutes it takes me to we will red giant in the nude on twitter and that's uh that's where you'll find us guys hashi this is hashi michael this is the end of uh 2021 this is the end of season one of vfx and chill and seriously thank you all for tuning in each week this is our favorite thing that we do at our job in our life uh don't tell our kids or our wives this or our husbands this is absolutely uh has been a such a blessing and treat to be on the show and hang out with you guys each week please join us for season two uh on the date that michael said earlier and we'll say again and uh we will see we were gonna throw what are we to do are we singing are we singing our way out of this oh [Music] we'll just talk that sounds good uh i think think though if we could just pray we're half real hard for some snow uh snow yeah snow okay there it is oh man hey look at these credits la la this is a song i'm singing things on christmas and stuff thanks [Music] you

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 1,672

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, premiere pro, final cut pro, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, pluraleyes, particular, mir, movies, video, training, ilm, vlog, content, youtube, creator, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, maxon, maxon one

Id: NsYbz3dJLlg

Length: 123min 11sec (7391 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021