You know in online chess, if you get
a pawn all the way across the board, and you promote it to a queen, the
transformation happens instantly. [Ding!] And if you play a game over the
board, you have to manually pick up a queen, and swap the pieces yourself. But a few months ago, someone
commented on one of my videos, that I should make an animation where
a pawn transforms into a queen. And I've just been thinking
so much about that. What if you can actually have this
pawn, that is from the Staunton No. 5, it is the Polish variant I think. What if this can
transform into this queen? Look at the size difference. There are just so many interesting
challenges, where the pawn is probably going to have to have a lot of panels
expanding like a transformer, and then eventually turning into a queen. So to start out, I think I'm going to
just take this pawn and model it as precisely as I possibly can in Blender. I'll take some pictures with my phone,
so in Blender I can trace the outline with a curve, and use the screw modifier
to turn this curve into a 3D shape. And what I really like about this process
is that in principle, it's quite similar to throwing clay on a potter's wheel. And since I'm using a vector curve
with a non-destructive modifier, I only have to trace this once. Because at any stage in this process,
I can adjust the resolution of the mesh to be as high or as low as I want. So now we got the 3D models of
both the queen and the pawn. And we're looking at the
fundamental problem of this project. The queen is bigger than the pawn. And not only is it nearly
twice as tall, it also has a significantly larger diameter. And I don't want to deform,
squish, or bend anything. I want this transformation to consist
of real parts that need to reorganize. Like a transformer from the movies. So, to increase the pawn's height. I think the solution is simple. We can just break it up into segments
and animate it like a telescope. But to increase the pawn's diameter
without deforming is a lot more difficult. So after some research, I found this. A Fletcher Capstan Table. It's a design where the diameter
of a round table can be increased by reorganizing hidden parts. And I just love this design so much, so
I'm going to use this as an inspiration. I'm starting to realize that this
is probably a little bit more work than I initially anticipated, but,
uh, hopefully it will be worth it. Okay, so my workflow for this project
so far is that I'll be splitting the pawn into multiple horizontal
slices, and then each horizontal slice will be separated into these
smaller components and to prevent the components from floating in midair. I'll be adding a lot of internal
support structure. So I'm trying to treat every design choice as if I'm making a
functional real life robot. And I think this mindset makes it a lot easier to
quickly make design decisions because the same logical framework can be
applied at every step in the process. So I can sort of turn my brain off and
just go and model for hours and hours. And yeah, [chuckles] this is, this
is gonna take a while. I want to give a big thanks to
Storyblocks for sponsoring this video. Storyblocks is a curated stock
library with over a million high quality 4k and HD footage, templates,
music, sound effects, and images. It's a great resource for making
any video project come to life. And since I use DaVinci Resolve, I really
appreciate that Storyblocks has these powerful templates where you can easily
add motion graphics like title animations, overlays, logo reveals, and other
stuff that will speed up your workflow. And the quality on some of the
stock videos I found on Storyblocks is actually pretty crazy. Look at this 4K footage for example,
which is available in ProRes. Look at that, that is just amazing. And I really like that you can specify
the frame rate and that a lot of the videos come with music recommendations. And that music is also
available in your subscription. That's pretty nice, actually. And best of all, anything
you download with Storyblocks is 100 percent royalty free. So you can focus on making stuff
that looks great, instead of worrying about the legal rights of a video
clip you found on a random website. So, to get started with unlimited
stock media downloads at one set price, head to storyblocks. com slash polyfjord, or check
out the link in the description. Now, let's get back to the video. Okay, so I've sped up the animation
a little bit so it's more snappy, because I think that fits the
small scale of the pawn better. And to fill in this open area
in the middle here, I tried some cross like figures that
rotates like some sort of armor. But, just when I was about to
start animating this expanding telescope segment, the entire
project ground to a halt. For some reason, my brain just
became completely unable to figure out a way to fill all these gaps. I just got a massive creative block,
which is super difficult to explain, but I simply could not figure
out a solution to this problem. I was looking for inspiration
everywhere, but then I found it in a place that I didn't expect. So, we were playing Apex Legends,
and this one weapon had this really intriguing animation. Look at that. That is just so satisfying. And I got so distracted by this
animation that we lost immediately, but this animation combined with the
expanding table design from earlier - I don't know, something just clicked and I
immediately knew what I wanted to make. And the reason I'm telling you all
this is because inspiration can come to you in the weirdest way when you least
expect it, and you should not give up. Okay, so we got roughly two thirds
of the pawn transition complete. And we're approaching what's been worrying
me the most for this entire project. The queen's head has like this crown
shape that goes outwards, like this, while the pawn is just a round head. So I think there's gonna be a lot of
moving parts, a lot of keyframes, but I do have an idea that I think might work,
and I think it could be the coolest part of this entire transformation effect. So, there's our new queen. It feels a bit majestic in a way, almost
a bit medieval, which I really like, since chess is an old and beautiful game. So, for textures, I'm going to be using
some high quality public domain wood textures from AmbientCG, and I think
I'm going to turn some of these details on the side here into gold, to really
lean into that majestic medieval look. So, these are pretty much the
materials we'll have for the final render, and now I want to try and
place this on a real chessboard, just to see what this transforming pawn
animation could look like in real life. So, to place our virtual pawn on this real
chessboard, we are going to need a camera. So today we'll be using my new camera,
it is the Panasonic Lumix S5IIX with the Sigma 20mm f1.4 We'll be shooting in 6K high
dynamic range with HLG HDR. I just love this so much yeah, and
then we also need the chess pieces. So these pieces have a king height of 96
millimeters and the boards square are 55 millimeters. It's nice to have some
measurements when doing visual effects. It's not necessary, but it's--
You know, it's nice to have. Okay, so we have our camera, we have our
chessboard, we have our pawns that we can use for reference and get inspired by. But there are some things that we also
can do to make things a little bit more easy for us when doing visual effects. So the first thing I got is this. It is a color checker that
will allow us to make sure that this is properly calibrated. So that just takes a couple of seconds
to shoot and it can be really helpful. I might not end up using it, but it's
really handy to just have done the shot. And then to make sure that we know
all the light in all directions here. We are going to use a 360 camera. This is the Rico Theta Z1. We are going to do a multi bracket
exposure of 19 different exposures. So we get all the levels from
the darkness to the brightness. It's such a nice asset to
have once we start adding the lights and stuff in Blender. Okay, and then I have one more thing. So this is the Godox LC500R, and
I think it's really nice to have this shape that is relatively
easy to reconstruct in Blender. So I'm going to try and just
light it from up here like this. And we get this beautiful
soft light on the pieces. So let me just show you
how this looks in camera. So here we have our pieces. And now if you get this light
in from above here, look at that beautiful soft lighting. This is looking so beautiful already. Let me just show you, you can do this
rack focusing between the pieces. Now the problem with this lens is
that it's so wide angle that you can't really isolate any pieces
easily, and it's also not that macro. So I want to try out
some other focal lengths. I do have a hundred millimeter macro,
which I am really excited about. Yes. I think this is my favorite lens. I've had this for so many years. It's the Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens. It's been with me my entire life
basically. But it's a Canon lens, so I'm going to need an adapter for it. Look at this lens. That is amazing. Okay, let's see what it looks like. That is-- I mean, you really-- look at that. Uh-- [chuckles] yeah, I'm going to have
to put this on a tripod. I mean, the stabilizer is really working
hard here, but-- I think another nice use of this macro lens is to just inspect
the pawn a little bit, to learn a little bit more about this wooden texture on it. So now I'm going to rearrange all these
chess pieces into an endgame that I've planned, and I'm going to shoot it, and
then I'm going to import the footage to Blender, so, uh, I'll see you there. So here we are in Blender version 4.0, and we're finally ready to combine all
the different elements for this project. And first, I want to just
make something very clear. You don't need all that
hardware I just showed you. It is very much possible to do
visual effects with just a camera on a tripod using free software. So just to prove that, I'm not
gonna use any of those things. I'm gonna show you how you can
get all the light you need. Just from the video file
for the final render. So let's make a camera and let's import
our footage as a background image. And we know this is going to be a
100mm lens on a full frame sensor. So let's line this up. And to make things easier,
I'm going to make a grid and align it with the chessboard. So now let's add our light
and let's place it where we think we remember where it was. And now, to add the shadow, we're just
gonna make a plane that gives us a smooth backdrop like this, and then we're
gonna turn it into a shadow catcher. So now when we set the film to
transparent, we can hit render, and we can use the compositor to put
the render on top of the background. And this is a pretty general node
setup, so you can definitely screenshot this and use it in your own project. But this still doesn't look realistic. So now it's time for the big brain move. Let's take our shadow catcher, and
let's set the video as the material. And use the texture
coordinate node set to window. So now the indirect lighting that hits
the pawn will no longer be just white. It will be the same color as the ground. And then finally we can use the
RGB curves to tweak the colors. I like to view and adjust
each color channel separately, which makes this a lot easier. And then as a cherry on top, you can
add some procedural noise that matches the sensor noise of your camera. So the render looks a
little bit more alive. And that's it! Now I'm going to challenge my friend to
a game of chess, and I'll try my best to get my pawn promoted to a queen.
