This 30-Year-Old Terminator VFX BLEW OUR MINDS!

[Music] what's up sam are you shooting something or [Music] oh my god get down [Music] you shot me sam what are you doing you actually shot me hey no i'm i'm real like i'm real sorry i was just getting really into it come on man i promise i did not even know this was loaded i thought this was like an airsoft thing feeling like a real gun oh geez i i thought this was like a t2 thing like look look what you made me do wait have you actually really never seen terminator 2 i have never seen terminator 2. i know the la river scene i know so many scenes just because it's like so in the zeitgeist it's one of the best written films ever my favorite scene from terminator 2 is when arnold schwarzenegger tries to smile maybe you could practice in front of a mirror or something this movie came out july 3rd 1991 in a couple months this movie will turn 30. this was a very revolutionary visual effects film i know ilm was hot off the heels of the abyss just before going into jurassic park this was a testing ground for a lot of new technology a few months ago you guys tackled tron that was 40 years ago right and i would say like the challenge they faced back in the day 40 years ago was just just rendering that stuff out and so by today's standards everything can render at this point and so now we're going to a film that's 30 years ago theoretically you're like oh well this is going to be kind of easy all of the t-1000 shots where he's just like hanging out and chrome looking that's kind of a piece of cake i don't see that as a challenge at all the challenging stuff in this film are the complexity of the animations now it's no longer just like a rendering thing we have liquid we have like morphing we have shape shifting we have these really complicated animation sequences that make this something that just having a better computer doesn't necessarily make this easier to do so the shot that really sticks out to me is the moment when the t-1000 approaches the jail bars and like it's nothing just slips through them [Music] that little touch of just having his gun stuck really drives home that he went through these bars but that's not normal you know yeah grounds it in reality exactly there's a couple things going on one he approaches it in the previous shot and gets right up next to the bars and then it cuts away then it cuts back to him in this static shot where i think there's a few different elements one we have the background behind the bars two we have robert patrick playing t-1000 right here behind three the jail bars and i think they're three separate elements here i'd be willing to bet that this is projection maps onto a 3d model of the actor yeah you know what i bet you're right when we say camera mapping what that is is basically taking the image from the camera and then projecting it onto a 3d model replica of patrick stewart that's not his name patrick robert patrick this is hard this is hard to do i bet we can probably do this oh i we can totally do this i want to see if we can recreate exactly how they did this using modern methods so what if you were to do this fully cg and i was to do it with camera mapping let's do it and so that way we can sit down and actually compare the pros and cons of each effect because these days they would just do your method they've abandoned the old ways doing 3d scanning is going to be faster i'd be willing to bet that i'm going to finish this before you but which one will look more real in the end guess we'll have to find out you know thinking about how they did all this stuff like way back in the day it's like it had to have taken forever but these days not only do we have more modern software we also have modern efficient hardware like this loop deck ct and i'm going to tell you about it because it's our sponsor for the day if you're creative and you want to get more into improving your workflow whether you're a colorist an editor a sound designer a musician all of those apply with the loop deck so this is actually specifically designed to work with pretty much any software it has api integration so the programs actually work directly with the hardware it's nice it's aluminum it feels rugged and built like i feel like i could throw this in a backpack without ever breaking it's got this very satisfying dial we have a whole bunch of buttons up here they're touch buttons and we have a bunch of physical buttons down below now what's actually cool about this is you also have these dials but these buttons here you can program to be different pages so you can literally map every single possible action in a program to one of these touch buttons their intention i think is to replace the entirety of your keyboard with just this and when i first heard about that honestly i was pretty skeptical i was like nah not gonna replace my keyboard but now that i've actually gotten used to it and i've been using it a little bit i can see it so it works very well with any adobe product premiere pro after effects rotate rotate scale up scale down oh press the button to reset press the button to reset the rotate as well so over here in cinema 4d i actually added some of my own custom hotkeys to it normally it's a little cumbersome to have to press four keys to do an action well it's not cumbersome to program those four keys and map them to a single button and that's what i've done for all of these octane settings i have my octane settings pulled up oh i'm using some materials and i want to use the node workflow boom note editor right there that makes me happier than you realize it's saving me precious seconds that will add up over a day meaning i get more done you get more done your client is happy so if you're creative and you're looking to you know improve your workflow here we got links in the description check it out this thing is actually going to make my life way easier and i'm definitely going to be using this for the foreseeable future so we have been researching how they did not just this shot but the whole movie there's an incredibly in-depth article around the entire effects process of this movie from beforesandafters.com i highly recommend it it's linked down below and the author ian talks about this shot where the dude goes to the jail bar cells they had to use the software that they made called make sticky that's what they called it the software was originally called make me sticky but i guess people didn't like that so they changed the name to mick sticky make sticky not mcsticky that's an item at mcdonald's you can only get after 2 a.m basically when you have a 3d model you have a bunch of different points they're called vertices a cube has eight vertices one two three four five six seven eight so he's describing this process of basically taking the vertices of a model and gluing it to a texture so as that vertex moves the texture moves with it he's literally describing uvw mapping before that was even a thing this technology didn't even exist they were literally like oh yeah we had to code that from scratch the artists were also developers at that time there was no separation between them in fact t2 was the first movie at ilm they specifically hired a coder a developer to make the tools full time so that the artists could just focus on the art rather than also developing the tools it's complex stuff you know there aren't tools that are directly built for this exact effect you know because it's such a strange and niche effect so we're trying to actually replicate the shot and with that we wanted to replicate the field of view of the camera so i basically fed an image of the original shot into this program called f spy which is super cool basically you give it some straight lines in your scene and then it calculates the focal length of the shot and then you can bring that information into a 3d package like blender which i did here and use that to model things within the scene to match the shot and so i used that to make the jail bars we are not going to build the bars practically because what this shot is missing in the original is proper reflections and lighting from him actually passing through it so technically our shot should be more realistic in that regard the goal is to kind of recreate the original shot as close as we can obviously we don't have the same location we're not gonna have the windows with the greats and the light coming through that uh obviously i'm not as handsome as sir patrick stewart but we're gonna try to recreate the lighting so the edge light and the key light are gonna be in the same spot we're gonna recreate the camera angle we're gonna digitally recreate the jail bars so for that to really all work there's two other things we gotta do for the vfx side of things one we're gonna get a nice custom hdri so this is the old school method the way they would have done it back then you can just take a picture of a chrome ball and extract the 360 image from it and it became standard kit at ilm for decades to come yeah and we don't really do that anymore i'm just taking manual pictures at different exposures so i took one at negative four stops i just took one at negative 3.5 i'm gonna take another at negative three i'm just going to keep doing that until i've got like a dozen different photos at different exposures and in photoshop i'll combine them together into a single hdri so for my version which is the full cgi version we have to get a intensely high resolution 3d scan of ren's noggin and that's going to entail just having ren super still while i go around him with the dslr taking hundreds of pictures of every little nook and cranny and pour and pimple he's got and then i'm going to feed that to a computer algorithm which uses it to reconstruct the 3d object that you're taking a picture of since you're doing the full scan you can make me do whatever you want oh yeah exactly i can make you do whatever i want i think peter is chewing off a very big bite here biting off a big bite to chew whatever analogy works best here insert that peter is a big bite to chew you are going to try to keep the entire part of me cg and that comes with all of the uphill battles the entire industry has faced for decades and trying to render a photorealistic face here's the thing though many of those challenges come from trying to move the face stretch the skin animate the expressions but if you just have a still expression like in this shot you only need to get the reflections in the sub surf and the hair looking right and then the computer does the rest of the work whereas the way i intend to do this shot is going to have all of that baked in he has to do all of the work to catch up to that point you're going to have to do more manual tweaking than i am i feel like i'm sidestepping all that manual work and just letting the computer do everything and i think that's exactly why most terminator movies since then have just gone that route like the last couple terminator movies that came out pretty much anytime you see any sort of like transformation or whatever everything about that person or that character is computer generated including like basically the final finished person but if you have a low budget or really old you would do it with the method i'm trying if you're really old i mean think about it the people working on like t2 are like ancient now they're like grandfathers i am genuinely curious how this is going to go down this is a real actual investigation between us right now into the old ways of the old guard and the new ways of the new guard so step one was to get the plate of us actually trying to mimic the original t2 jailbar scene film the plates looked all good i imported all that in cinema 4d used it as a background layer but also we need a photo scan of me for the 3d model interaction they did that back in the day they had an actual laser scan of his entire head that they used to actually do all the morphing with and i'm basically going to be doing the same thing today except i'll be using peter's photo scan of me but i'm only going to be using the geometry and not the textures because i will be using my own textures from the footage so that the 3d model matches the real world version of me and that's where this next step comes in called camera mapping i essentially just map up the camera here line up the model and then i just take this image and project it onto the geometry but the problem is that when the geometry moves the projection doesn't move with it so we need a way to basically stick it to it and this is the part that has eluded me for a very long time and it's embarrassingly simple all you do is right click on your material tag go down to generate uvw coordinates boom done now that i've done that i can actually move this guy around it's me but it's textured with the actual texture from the background image the moment i start whipping it around to the other side it doesn't look real anymore look it's because it's actually duplicating the texture on the back side of this now that i literally know it was as simple as hitting generate uvw coordinates i can literally open my customized commands and i'm going to label that as generate new dvws i have now mapped that to my loop deck as easy as that so now anytime i want to do a projection thing i can literally like hit the button and i'm good to go yeah so the effect i've actually been trying to get to is how do i distort this mesh here i can use the grab tool and literally just grab my nose here oh man i can now back this through the poles here you notice how the jail bars are actually interacting with my face exactly how it would with real geometry that's the magic of this method but the challenge i have now is correctly deforming the model as i go through the bars here because i actually gotta do the distortion of it frame by frame and then it's a matter of rendering it out and then recompositing it so that it meshes with the original footage flawlessly i'm not gonna lie this has been a little on the stressful side and i needed some inspiration i was i was about to give up that is until [Music] [Music] now [Music] i literally made a macro on this thing that opens a url launches it in a new browser and then waits a moment and then double clicks on the mouse to maximize it to full screen i could have rick rolled you but i didn't because i needed the inspiration to not give up here i'm hoping to have a finished shot by the end of the day that's that's my goal for today i might have to hit that button a few more times so working with this photo scan has been a bit troublesome progress has been slow but we're working through it 3d scans have just inherent problems that come with them like when you try to scan hair it doesn't really work it comes in a solid object and when you try to render that out it just looks like somebody has a lump of sculpted clay that's painted to look like hair and so what you have to do is i took the scan of wren and i smoothed it out a little bit with a sculpting brush and then i actually had to smooth over his hair completely and then pat it down into the form of a head and so now i have this really weird looking model of ren where he has a smooth overhead that's definitely not his head shape anyways for the hair i used blender's hair system and i actually grew out the hair so it looks like one big straight afro and then i had to ask ren how he styles his hair because i have to take this hair pointing in all directions and actually style it to look like ren's hair and so in blender i had to go through with the comb tool literally and give him a little haircut once i was done with the big hair on the top of his head i had to add the little tiny hairs some stubble on his lip and his jawline i added back in some eyebrows because you know any hair you scan in just is not usable you got to create new hair for your skin and then after that i added some skin texture because there are certain properties in cgi that make it look realistic and you use what are called bump maps and reflection maps in 3d models which are basically images that tell the computer which parts of the bottle should be shiny and which parts the model should be bumpy and with a 3d scan you don't get any of that inherently so you have to make that stuff from scratch and so basically i had to kind of like paint where the oil would be on his face a little bit and i had to add some micro bumps for the skin and that helped a little bit catching the light and making the skin look a little bit more real and the last element that is the cherry on top is subsurface scattering that's the thing where you take a flashlight and you shine it through your hands or the back of your ear and you see the red and the light coming through it's basically just light entering a surface and scattering around and coming out the other side and so that's what i added to the face so the skin doesn't look just like complete plastic you know you get some of the light bleeding it as for the actual distortion of the face going through the bars i tried something different which i've never actually tried before i used a lattice object it's basically a giant cage which you bind to your mesh which is inside of it and then when you move a part of the cage it moves the part of the mesh that's closest to that part of the cage i just went through the sequence animating these having it bounce back and jiggle a little bit that was animated manually the cool thing about doing it in cg is that you really get the accurate look of the light penetrating the hair and the hair bending around the bars the downside to this is getting a likeness of a person is very difficult and i would be staring at my computer screen and i'd be like yeah this looks pretty good and then i would look over a red and be like god damn it this doesn't look like him at all and so i just spent a lot of time dialing in that look but besides that i'm very happy with how it turned out and i think it looks pretty sweet okay we have finished our visual effects shots here we have finished our pieces to varying levels of quality yeah it was surprisingly challenging you'd think that having all this modern tech it would make it really straightforward but i guess that's never still very hard yeah all right so let's go ahead and look at the actual morph shot that i made last night at 2am damn dude this is the way to do it you think so yeah so what are your first thoughts when you see this this looks amazing i mean it's obviously you a big problem i had with mine was that it it looks like a weird uncanny valley version of ren i don't think if i was watching this as a viewer and it was part of a movie i don't think it would faze me uh the only thing that's kind of bugging me is the you were saying like the key framed stretching and stuff it could be animated a little bit smoother but it totally works i have not seen what you've made yet and i'm very intrigued yeah this one i'm like i'm like simultaneously really happy with this and also it's like kind of really weird whoa oh my god this has your classic style written all over it so i'm really happy with everything in this except your likeness for starters it's really hard to create an exact 3d replica of somebody like freaking star wars couldn't even do it it's really tough yeah and the problem i was having was that this mesh that i got of your head was so incredibly high resolution that it was i couldn't even work with it i had to down res it a little bit and that caused some artifacts around your eyes it looks like there's a bit of like a geometry bump right over my right bottom eyelid there so there's a few things that you've done here that really elevated the shot from the original that i didn't do first you added some camera motion uh the camera's actually pushing in a little bit over the course of the shot uh you added some character movement to me like my eyes are moving my head's moving a little bit and on top of that the actual distortion has ripples to it that was tough it definitely came down to a lot of fidgeting with the animation and the key frames it's it's all keyframed the fact that you literally made the hair from scratch is like so high level and you can really see it there as the hair like literally like bends around like parting of the winds that is something neither i or ilm were able to do totally and it's like this method is far from perfect but i think that's one aspect that would play into the perfect way to do this what would we do differently to combine our powers in my opinion i think we would do it full cg except for the face for the face we would use your method which is the projection mapping onto the face so then you don't have any weird likeness issues but you can still get the hair and the simulation and all the nice new technology that we have to use so has this given you a bigger appreciation for what they did back in the day definitely i still have no idea how they did the liquid moving around the bar and reforming ours just like stretches back out it doesn't reform into a mesh i feel like the tools they had when doing this shot were specifically capable of doing it the way they did and the software we use today is very broad it's supposed to be able to do everything and anything as opposed to being really good at just this one thing freaking shout out to all the original artists who work on this shot and pioneered software just to make this and yeah it was very groundbreaking and kudos to all of y'all who figured it out so for this video i tried to get in touch with doug smythe i think is his name he worked on this shot if you are seeing this doug and you want to chat with us we would love to have you do a segment about this on visual effects artists react hit us up well guys if you liked this video and you want to see more deep dives into older vfx to see how they can be remade with modern technology leave a comment down below if you think there's a movie that we can recreate an effect from and maybe improve upon it or maybe discover that hey they were geniuses back then yeah that's kind of what happened today [Applause] okay like now look at him look at him he's not coming back look look what you made me do don't see that every day oh my god

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 6,358,539

Keywords: Terminator, Terminator 2, Judgement Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Patrick, T-1000, VFX, Breakdown, Behind The Scenes, DIY, How to, VFX Artists React, Visual Effects, Hollywood, Movies

Id: YXehBx0Yc_w

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Broadnerd]

It’s amazing that they couldn’t get it looking as good 30 years later but also amazing they could come close without being a Hollywood production. I’m sure they have some expensive tools and maybe a lot of it is the same tuff Hollywood uses but still.

[u/Chunkcheesehunkbread]

Great watch. Thanks for sharing.

[u/NemWan]

Just a minute in and I'm cracking up at the guy playing "John".

[u/Zero_Life_Left]

Never seen this channel. Theyre very professional.

[u/antdude]

T1 & T2 still blow my mind.