These VFX Cost Millions, but I did Them for Free.

you guys welcome to the brave new world we're living you're gonna watch this movie and you're gonna wonder how the heck peter made it because there are so many high level shots we wanna show you just what one person can do with the tools that are out there and we're gonna teach you all the secrets right here in this video ai upscale it oh that's a little spicy dude it's all right spicy good i like a tip for you yeah today's a very special day because peter's movie scooty just dropped he's working on it for over three years over three years it's it's a way past two but you know what it's done now look you're gonna watch this movie and you're gonna wonder how the heck peter made it because it's literally my opinion like marvel level visual effects i don't know about that he has a fully animated character that looks photoreal for the entire time and everybody that watches this is going to have questions about how you did these shots because there are so many high level shots so this project was originally going to be my senior thesis project in college and then the pandemic hit and then i dropped out of college and then two years later so three years total it's finally finished i was like oh to two or three hundred vfx shots i can get that done in a few months no it took much longer than that but you know what it's finally done and i'm very happy with it and i'm pumped to show you guys how i did it we want to show you just what one person can do with the tools that are out there and we're gonna teach you all the secrets right here in this video let's get into some secrets so if you're watching something with a 3d character in it a cg character here's what it entails filming on set with an imaginary thing there you have to get your eye lines right you have to get your framing right for something that is literally not there you can't screw it up then of course you have to model this thing you have to texture this thing you have to rig it where you basically put a fake skeleton inside of it and like connect everything so it moves correctly then you have to light it for each scene that it's going to be in you have to cut anything out that's going to be in front of it by hand then you have to composite it where you all take all those layers you put them together you match the colors you match the gamma and the contrast so it ideally looks like it belongs in your shot and you do that over and over and over it is so much work so how did you pull it off how did you make a cg character all by yourself okay so there were like two or three hundred vfx shots but towards the end i found a workflow that made it go pretty quickly through all of the tools that have been coming out in the past few years it's just become so accessible through motion capture through 3d scanning sets and things like that so really utilizing those tools to my advantage was the only reason i could have done this [Music] so one of the beautiful things about shooting something without any money or permits is that you get these beautiful moments of people being mad at you so there is a moment where matt is throwing a scooter on the ground and water comes from above out of nowhere and just drops on him and that was actually someone in real life who was mad that we were making a lot of noise and dropped water on us but it was so funny because matt immediately just happened to fall after that i was wondering what that was i felt like a lightheaded turned on see there's water that's what people have been saying so i need to i need to emphasize that you need a water splash yeah all right so your robot looks perfectly photoreal how did you get that step you know you have a 3d model and dirt does not exist in cgi if you leave a 3d model on your hard drive it's not going to collect dust the more you move it around it doesn't scratch the edges yeah exactly you drag the file across your desktop and it gets dirtier no so you have to add that stuff in manually because that's what makes things look realistic are the imperfections and so there's this amazing software called substance painter where you basically import your 3d model and it does some processing on it it says okay where are the contours of this where are the little crevices that dirt would get into and then you can use that information to drive textures there's a tire on scooty that's filled with a bit of mud in the in the little crevasses you can also do things like the little edges of of metal where there's paint on it but on the edge it would get scuffed off those little details at a distance add so much in the realm of like photo realism yeah i let you get away with just nice close-up shots of the head right so the eyebrows were a big thing originally the model didn't have any eyebrows and i was really struggling through the animation and the voice to really like sell the emotion of the character how do people express themselves it's through eyebrows right you know the rock is great at that so then i just threw these little handlebar or or brake pad eyebrows on there and it helped sell the emotion so much better because then you could like bring them down for anger or up for surprise or like up and slanted for sadness really helps take the animation a long way notice also for the the eyes you'd use the light pattern to like do like you know eyelids up a little bit or like eyelids down or like wide-eyed i did this one lesson a long time ago that i've never lost it it's always stuck with me it's just expressions and it's eyebrows and it's how far down on the pupil and the iris their top eyelid goes and how far up your bottom eyelid goes and the relationship of those three things is all you need for every human emotion i got so good at smiling with a mask during the pandemic it's like even with this if you just you know you go like that it's like i'm smiling you know i mean you just kind of look insane now you have to animate it and you just sit there by hand that'd be impossible to animate this for that many shots right i did that for the spider-man uh short back in the day and that was that just was hell thankfully we have motion capture now originally we tried to get motion capture data on set we had the actor riley olsen he was wearing a motion capture suit on set but he tragically sat down really hard on the hub of the motion capture suit in a car and disconnected some of the wires and so then for the entirety of production we did not have a functioning motion capture suit on set so we had to figure something else out now in these scenes if you look we actually have riley just just acting as if he's a human character in the scene no motion capture suit no cg no nothing and then we use what's called rotomation which is they they use it on spider-man a lot which is where you look at the actor you're like this is basically what they did and you match that in your animation instead but i did a bit more of like a manual approach to that where i put on the motion capture suit and i watched the footage over and over i was like okay i see you riley and then i stood up in my motion capture suit and acted it out the same way and then we got motion capture that was pretty similar to what the guy did on set and when you filmed the guy in set you would just film again without him there you didn't paint him out right no no so we do the classic it's like get the shot all right run out of the frame now we get the background so then we can put the cg over the background so how about later on we're like you know we're having dinner time you would do the shot again without riley this is just empty shots just with matt by himself yeah so at a certain point tensions were high we were stressed out and at that point we were like okay we'll just put riley in later on just don't worry let's just let's just film riley is acting behind the camera just for voice reference for matt so this whole party sequence riley was not in any of these shots we just had matt acting against nothing and we just threw the scooty in later on i love that you have like split color lighting so it really like embeds the robot in there yeah that's something i really remember we were working on anime fidget spinners back in the day and we had a shot of mike's finger getting sliced off and you guys lit it with a strong blue light coming from the side in just that little detail that specificity made the cg look so much better it helps contour the cg and root it in the scene and so having different color temperatures of lights really helps solidify the cg character in there now i also notice you have all these shadows in the chair there so yeah another great use of the polycam app on the iphone is if i have an object or a seat that scooty is interacting with and i need to get the proper shadows and reflections on that object then i can just scan it with my phone throw it in the 3d software and set it to be what's called a shadow catcher which is it's an invisible object that only displays the shadows that are being cast onto it and so then when you slap it on top of the original footage you get the correct shadows that follow the contour of the object even though scooty wasn't even in the scene so i love that you're using accessible motion capture suits to give emotion and using accessible 3d scanning tools to let you scan all the objects in the scene for catching shadows or scanning the environment for like getting correct reflections and light you are knocking out weeks and weeks of work because this took three years to make multiple pieces of software came out in that time that made all this stuff so much easier so a shot that would have taken me a few days at the beginning of the process would have taken me half a day at the end of the process it was fantastic take these these shots in the alleyway for instance how did you make it look like it was filmed on the same camera as the actual shot it's all about lighting and whenever we were on set i would scan the set and then you have a near perfect 3d recreation of the set did you do hdris also so you can't 3d scan the sky it's too far away so you 3d scan the set around you and then you throw in an hdri which is a high dynamic range image and so if you drop your cg character into that it'll light it pretty accurately and that mixed with the 3d scan of the set gives you perfect lighting how did you get your hdris there's a beautiful website called polyhaven.com hdri and it's just a community compiled library of hdris and they have every lighting condition sunny cloudy sunset and you find the one that's most accurate to your scene and just plop it in granted you lit it the same as your actual shot but it still looks like it was filmed with the same camera like it blends how did you actually do that part so you have your 3d render and you have your footage and usually if you just slap them on top of each other it doesn't look very good the contrast is going to be off the shadows and highlights are going to be different in each shot so you take your scientific eye and you use color tools like levels or curves to match the shadows match the highlights and match the saturation of each shot and that's pretty much it on top of that all cameras have a little bit of blur to them you match the blur you match the depth of field and there you go all right so this is the first time we ever see scooty he is struck by lightning why yeah get into the because he's got to be in the movie i can't help but notice you have lighting from the lightning like on the pole there and there's shadows happening on the wall so we tried to be good vfx artists and we brought a big led panel to the set and we tried to flicker it you know to make it light up the environment but it was not bright enough the day was too bright so i ended up doing a 3d reconstruction of the scene to project light from the lightning onto i just took the raw footage and i threw it into reality capture which is a 3d scanning program and then i used that very rough mesh to then block out the geometry of the scene using that i could just cast naturally the light that would be emitting from the lightning onto the scenes which goes a long way in selling the lightning effect i was pretty proud of the way this scooter formation scene took shape because i reversed my animation of scooty just getting up off of the ground and then i did a physics simulation of all the pieces falling off of it and then you reverse that footage and then it looks like all the pieces are like magnetizing to it all right so we take a look at like this shot right here where he's up against the wall traditionally you would film the background and then you'd have your cg model and you'd have to composite in the model over the background but for a shot like this it's kind of a waste of time like couldn't you just do a 3d background like can you just poly cam it at this point yeah it's like towards the end there were so many vfx shots and i had to get like 20 done every day i was like there's no more time no more time to composite things ever it's all gonna be done purely 3d and so i actually would go back to locations like this one i just drove over i scanned it i drove back home i plopped it in and then you have a perfect cg background to just drop your model into you don't have to even composite anything because it's all just straight out of the renderer we actually see this happening a lot now in like marvel films like a lot of stuff film they at least have the reference for like it was easy to just replace the entire thing if you're putting a 3d object into something that already exists it's tough to get it to interact with light in that environment whereas if you have a purely cg environment all the shadows and reflections and lighting are just natural and so you get really realistic lighting on the background just from your 3d subject being there in the first place okay so this is part where he has a box nico i don't want to talk about the box he's holding this server i'm taking this in for uh yes i'm watching this i'm like that looks like a pretty expensive prop that looks like a big piece of metal that needs to be laser cut so like looking at the rest of this film i'm not seeing a lot of expensive props for locations but that looks like an expensive prop but it also looks a little via sexy but he's holding it i'm like there's no way peter had him hold something like a copper box and just vfx in an actual box for this did he so let me let me just show you the raw footage here oh my god poor man so this was straight up a green cardboard box that this guy was carrying the thing about this cardboard box in particular is that it was falling apart it was not a rigid structure and so sometimes it would be a little bit longer or a little bit shorter and when you're 3d tracking something that really throws things off so i had to hand track a lot of this box when you say hand track you mean you just eyeballed it eyeballing would be if you literally just like rotate the box into place and like just put it there and hope it looks good what i ended up doing was i did a 3d track like a computed 3d track but i hand tracked all the points for that i would go through and have like a little tracker point and i would put it on the corner of the box i'll go to the next frame i would drag it to where that corner of the box was and i did that for every corner for like however many frames and then hit compute and it gave a pretty janky outcome usually and then it was a lot of tweaking to get it to look good oh man and he had to deal with the shadows you have to deal with his little thingies being all up over it there are so many liberties taken with this where there are some places where it's being squished and stretched in really unnatural ways if you look closely yeah this shot you can see in the beginning of this it does go from shot long air conditioner style to like more of a box that's literally because the box was falling apart part of it was like sagging so the guy who made this prop did a great job but we just used it so much that it ended up falling apart so i also noticed that you know the robot's just in a lot of footage you filmed like how did you motion track all of it you mean as opposed to like having a static background yeah supposed like a locked off camera or you know a fully 3d scene it's a mixture of a few different techniques we have the after effects automatic camera tracker which is just a godsend you basically just feed it your footage hit analyze and it spits out a perfect 3d camera that then you can bring into your scene and you plop your model in and it just sticks another one is the blender camera tracker which is built in it's a bit more manual but it's better for the tougher shots where after effects can't quite understand it so yeah it was pretty straightforward that was honestly one of the easiest parts was camera tracking all those shots come on i got places to be so these shots the of scooty in the car 100 cg car 100 cg car real background so you just got a shot looking out the window or something while you drove down the street exactly i bought a 30 like suction mounted camera rig and i just put my dslr on it and drove down that street in san francisco and old fashioned rear projection style in the shot so like this shot here like this camera motion happening like it's framing up are you actually just taking your background shot and then just cropping into an area and then back out so i'm using the ian hubert method where you have your footage in your 3d scene so then you can take another camera and kind of do your own camera move even though you already filmed the footage with a different camera that's how i did clock blockers if you 3d track your camera you take the 3d tracked camera and you project the footage from the camera it's as if you're just creating a window into reality again and now you have a stabilized window the perfect way of explaining it so yeah i use that a ton on this a lot of the footage of uh jake blading down the hills in san francisco was that we had footage of him on a green screen and we 3d tracked that and then put the cg background in there and then could animate a camera independently of the original camera so how about this that's gotta be a 3d background right there now yeah that this shot is 100 3d that's all kit bash 3d skyscrapers so this is all 3d too that looks like it's a real shot thanks yeah i'm really happy with that one i think the fabric moving and the hair moving helps sell it a lot about the background here so this is a giant large-scale satellite 3d model of san francisco that i got from 3dcadbrowser.com threw it in there it's done it was amazing the shot of uh jake holding onto the airplane i'm so proud of this is he i'm guessing he's just lying on the ground yep wait a minute those are cg legs and torso you cut them off at the shoulder i cut them off at the shoulders wow so we very strategically placed matt in his clothing on set so that we could cut just around his shoulder and replace his second half the legs are hand animated i could have made them look more realistic but i just thought it was so funny how floppy and like all over the place they were so i kind of hammed it up a bit i can't help but notice that you're dropping the exposure a little bit it looks like where the hair is motion blurring you know what i think i'm using andrew kramer's motion blur technique andrew kramer king of vfx came into the studio and let ren in on a little secret for motion blur to make it look way more accurate normally cg motion blur at least in after effects or things like that is just perfectly blurred out whereas in real life it has a little bit more shape to it it's a little bit more full so in after effects you put on uh you change your color space to 32-bit and you put on an exposure uh effect to turn the exposure all the way down then you calculate your motion blur and then you put an exposure effect turning all the way back up and then for some reason it just magically looks way better i don't know why it's like it's like an nd filter basically it changes the exposure what's behind it right exactly and so i don't know if it was like the bit depth in my camera that i was shooting at or something like that but i tried to key these shots using blue screen techniques and it just was not working very well it looked all chunky in the hair it looked like bad blue screen hair so i ended up using after effects as rota brush tool which is basically just an ai assisted rotoscoping tool where it helps you cut out something over a long period of frames and it has this amazing edge refined feature where you basically just like click over the hair and it's like all right i got you and it just like makes it look amazing it's really nice actually it's like one of the features that after effects has it's legit really good everything needs that soft refined tool yeah so this shot right here 3d model no that's a shutterstock drone okay shutterstock has so much of my money topaz labs was so amazing for this project you know you can buy stock footage at like 4k and it's like 300 or you can buy stock footage at like 720p and it's like 50 bucks but then you just use topaz labs to ai up scale it that's a little spicy good i like a tip for you guys welcome to the brave new world we live in mikko how's it how's your head feeling my head's feeling great because i feel inspired i feel like i can go out and shoot a movie and do all the effects honestly you do some incredible work here and if you haven't watched the video yet you have no idea what i'm talking about go to the channel corridor it's where we put all our short films including scooty yes this has been a lot of fun going through this with you i'm super hyped with how this movie turned out and i'm excited for everybody to see it so go watch it if you haven't and uh yeah enjoy validate me validate me i want it and push my ego to the stars let's go let's go i'm ready to blast off let's go

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 1,277,101

Keywords: vfx, cgi, visual effects, blender, scooty, scooter, how to, making of, behind the scenes, shot breakdown, tutorial, 3d, c4d, after effects, adobe, animation, movie, filmmaking, learn, new, explained, make

Id: tO6FtUzHEME

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 10 2022