That's so dumb! A movie that set the bar for pretty much all CG in today's modern era Ahh I've got to re-render this we have two weeks! So here's the genius There's a bunch of other react videos online with various professionals in their field talking about cool works of Whatever it is that they do and we wanted to try doing that ourselves here So this is the second video we've made. We had an amazing response to the first video Thank you to all of you who subscribe to the channel If you think of a video you want us to react to, visual effects you want us to break down. Please leave a comment Alright what's the first video? Harry is still alive. Case closed I did really like that fur, they made that fur look really good I know dude, it looks warm and soft. Ah, like a cat, see look a cat! When we were analyzing Sonic I mentioned how the green of his eyes was more saturated than the green in the background Sure Like if Sonic was actually there and you actually filmed him with the camera Your camera wouldn't suddenly be able to arbitrarily capture more saturation on him than the other stuff that's green in the scene it needs to obey The rules of your camera and this scene no colors are more saturated the other like the green on the Bulbasaur's back Is the exact same green saturation as the background. The eyes are pushing a little bit but even then not that much. My first reaction to seeing a lot of these shots is that They they added fur to a lot of Pokemon that in through the cartoons. You can't really be fur I never really considered a lot of these Pokemon to even have fur Think about the artists who would just sit there and think like okay, which direction do the hairs go? Like your hairs go a direction. There's like there's an evolutional direction, right? There's hair brushes, like digital CG hair brushes that you can actually shape the hair with and then it kind of stays there and then It kind of reacts to the motion. Well it clumps up it's like in tufts. Yeah, I know It's not just like all hairs individually spaced apart from each other like, your hairs kind of clump up and we're doing that Where do you see that? Armpits. Yeah, like right in there. Yeah, there's slight tonality differences to the hair But to be fair, hair is something that we've been able to do for over 15 years pretty well Monsters Inc was like the first time I remember seeing hair Monsters Inc was the first time hair was actually a thing But you could see how much fewer hairs there are here look like I'm specifically look at his left shoulder there You can see individual hairs Yeah, and if you're to do that today There'd be probably ten to a hundred times more hairs per square inch you might remember in the last video We talked about ambient occlusion. Hair has a lot of ambient occlusion. Underneath your hair near the roots Most of the hair above is locking a lot of light and that's how you get the kind You can kind of see the layers of hair on top of themselves Subsurface scattering on his face there. Look at the dodge ball shoulders, dude! It is a dodgeball! Oh my god! He straight up has dodge ball shoulders. Hair is not a hundred percent opaque. It's actually slightly translucent And so the fringes of the hair on Pikachu's tail They're catching the light in front of Pikachu and that's that You know a little edge and it looks like a stroke around the so those are the little tips of the hair catching light But then the light actual enters the hair then passes through it after being diffused a little bit. Now that's something that Monsters Inc was missing and that's what makes fur look very realistic in these scenes They did a really good job of setting up the lighting to work really well with these CG characters It looks like a one or two point kind of light setup. You have the light the far back blasting it, right? And that's causing the shadow down here in the foreground. And then you have like an overhead kind of fill. For me, some scenes are easier to light in CG if it's like a one-point light Yeah, it just looks better. Very specific directional lighting helps a lot for creating CG scenes. So here's the genius about this scene One of the things that makes stuff look real is something called radiosity or global illumination. It goes by a lot different names so basically it's the way light bounces. I'm shining the flashlight on my hand and it's lighting up the side of his face. In CG, to get that you have to simulate the ray coming out the light hitting a surface and scattering and bouncing off but you have to do it many many many many times to get all the scatters and get your Sampling of the environment and that's a lot of math. They can't do bounce sliding back then. There's no option to do bounce lighting So, what do they do? They set their scene at night with a single source of light and that's it. Notice how the dark parts in the scene Where the headlights aren't hitting the T-Rex It's just pitch black so you don't have to worry about bounce light. Great, problem one solved. Good job everybody You're geniuses. Number two, by making it rain. They can have specular lighting all over the T-Rex, make it feel like it's reflective But all they have to reflect is a white spot. Notice you can see the specular on his legs, on his toes, on the side of his thigh He's just shiny as a whole, just shiny But all you're trying all you're showing for a reflection is basically a blob of white. Pretty much here onwards all of this right here Is a real T-Rex. They have the perfect reference. There's an animatronic T-Rex head effect They have actual footage of that that they can match the CG one to. If they didn't have that They'd be like, how dark do we make it? How reflective do we make it? So good. It's so scary Jeff Goldblum you madman. You hero. Also. I think this is the first shot where the camera's actually moving through 3D space Oh yeah, 3D tracking That was a very challenging shot right there. This shot in particular. This was the hardest shot in the whole movie I talked about this in my TED talk, there's a single frame What are we gonna see! So the T-Rex obviously grabs the Velociraptor but for one single frame that is in the final movie. I'm waiting for this. I'm on the edge of my seat. For one frame the Velociraptor is completely missing. I think what happened is that the 3D models, the actual files they sent to the cache To be rendered, for whatever reason on that one frame the Velociraptor model disappeared. They got so lucky. It happened then Yes, if it would have happened anywhere other, dude, it would have been so bad Dude, they're so lucky it wasn't the t-rex model they were missing. I know! Like ahh I've got to re-render this, we have two weeks and it takes two months to render I would love to find out more information about why that Velociraptor is missing. If you search this up in any YouTube clip It's gonna be there. Unlike the Starbucks cup, which is going to be gone forever more from Game of Thrones. How did that get through? Okay so now we're talking about Jurassic World. The end of the first Jurassic World movie and at a technical level, the effects here are certainly better than they were in Jurassic Park So why do people think that the effects are worse. In Jurassic Park, these Raptors were real mm-hmm, when you see them walking too - they were real, so that's what they're going up against. I think growing up this was like the scariest moment of any movie I'd ever seen. so that's real. Yes. Oh There's two things that you get with real. One is motion looks a lot more realistic So when you animate stuff by hand and CGA go anyway The second one is acting those kids are acting so much better with real pots and pans falling on them and real Velociraptors sticking their heads out of things like it's so much easier to like get in the space when you have an actual Dinosaur on set, versus like: "Alright, look at this man with the green ball" So you wanna imagine it's where my fist is. It's dinosaur it's like even if you're Chris Pratt, it's still tough to do If he actually like pause on any of these frames, they all look really good. What's he doing? Is he trying to be friends with the dinosaur? Yes Have you not seen it?
No. For so much of this you can just tell that it's computer generated regardless of whether or not it's technically good, and because you can tell that it's fake you can tell that the people that you're watching are not actually in any real danger and Your suspension of disbelief is a little shattered. Yep It's very interesting with it with a smaller budget Jurassic Park was crunched into choosing their VFX shots Very very wisely and they didn't hold shots for longer than they needed to - uh-huh. It was, it was real They treated it as if it was real. And it looks more real because of that exactly whereas this is they can do whatever they want So they're going artistic with it and creative. Yes by as I go artistic and creative that's becoming less real.
Correct. Remember that remember that moment from Jurassic Park 3 when the Velociraptor was sitting on the airplane is like: "Hey Alan". Wait, this, I thought you guys were kidding.
I mean, this is a real thing? I need to see this. This is good, just let this play.
Is this a reference to the Twilight Zone? I've had that dream before I know I know Was he just whispering "Hey Alan"? Yeah. That's so dumb. Well it´s because someone's trying to wake him up and he's like: "Hey Alan, wake up". They do you like the mouth like move from both syllables You really don't know who I am? Genie, wishes, lamp, none of that ringing a bell? That right there Everyone had a problem with that shot for one very specific reason cuz it's obviously Will Smith But everything about it looks wrong. He looks like no one can exactly tell why he looks like a Minotaur like oh why he's walk. He's floating. Look He looks like a Minotaur. Why is he walking? Why's he taking steps? He's not walking. He's floating it Looks like he's like hey, it's me. He's just floating along. We just can't see the bottom half of them because my brain Puts him as a Minotaur like he's a Minotaur right there Can you figure out why it feels wrong Wren? What it comes down to is that it looks unnatural and it's triggering a very specific part of our brain that identifies Faces and humans all like all the checkmarks are listed as like that's obviously not just a person but Will Smith And it's not just the fact that he's blue. It's his kind of proportions his face Kinda looks a little too small for that size of a head His neck looks a little too thick and I think a lot of that is mostly driven by the actual camera Focal length and placement and whatnot. Amazing CG body. They're like CG body for the Body the muscles on his back like they flex and they move the indent they pull the skin with he's yeah Yeah, it's that's incredible artistry. It's great. It's amazing then for the front his CG body still looks good. Yeah, but it's like There's a change from a man who does not have that body Kind of like just pasted in the center's almost feels like the blue doesn't match and this might be a color grading thing Where they just put a mask here and brighten his face. No, it's the CG face 100% of that face is CG Okay, but like his face is actually a little bright compared to the rest of him It's like, oh the way maybe we'll see his face here So I'll just draw a mask here and brighten it out like a power window. Yeah, the grating thing of power into this It's actually throwing off the lighting now because she's face should be in shadow like his Left pec is. His face should be about as bright as that pec in the shadows, but it's a little bit brighter Everyone reacted super negatively to this specific shot, myself included, but then they released a follow-up trailer a few weeks later See, this looks great, cuz it's lit well, you're not going to much you know, so it the proportions are specifically thrown off He looks super huge. So it's triggering our brains a little bit less than if he was trying to fool us completely. Obviously he can't trick me the genie can't trick me a big thing is the lighting like in that shot There's a nice like edge light and there's a clear defined key light and it's giving a space volume And like character versus the other shot isn't it's just ambient wash like a little bit of wet outside. This looks too, silly Nothing really just goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the very specific Directional lighting. Yeah like this That looks really good. This is a lighting issue? I think it's a lighting issue. I mean, it's a little bit of CG monkey though It looks great. See he looks fine right there something I notice here says abs, right There's actually a little bit of discoloration there almost as if it was body paint and this is actually a tricky thing of visual effects There's a lot of what we understand about reality and movies. It's not actual reality but what we've seen in special effects So I could example when people get shot in movies we expected to be a pop and dusts in blood and that's not what happens when people actually get shot. When you're doing visual effects, you're not always going for reality You're going for a simulated special effect. And therefore you'd have slight discolorations and things like that You end up making it look more real because it actually looks like real makeup as opposed to an actual blue person. Terminator 2 a classic the movie that set the bar for Jurassic Park and pretty much all CG in today's modern era Yeah, not a wasted minute. Literally not a wasted minute. Yep. There it is Say if you do that's so this is actually mostly compositing thing Yes, isn't this isn't like a computer generated 3d model or anything. This is straight-up classic after thanks tech stuff Yeah, that one it there like yeah, it's pretty incredible Honestly the fact there's a little bit of the effects history lesson They give you guys here with this shot ILM kind of pioneered morphing and morphing is actually a pretty simple thing Basically, you're doing a distort and as you're distorting you're doing a crossfade and after this people went crazy for morphing. It was like morphing was the hot new thing for a couple years for visual effects shops now The reason I bring this up is because there is a sequence of morphs in Michael Jackson's Black-and-white music video that a are the best morphs I have ever seen in my entire life. You're not even really able to really see the crossfade of these more So, in fact, I've taken up a notch where it's not crossed any would actually be like a pixel color change there That was a practical shot. Did you see that really car drivers? Yeah, so they have like they have you know, this choreographed note. They need a dropper here. It's like help cheat the morph whoa It's also important to note that they're not doing an overall philosophy uniformly they're doing splotches and bits of CrossFitting at different intervals through time first It was the hair coming down in parts of her face parts of her shoulders, etc. It all goes Inconsistently that ponytail. Whoa, they're really using the choreography to their own good here. Yeah, but that's just straight morph right there Yeah, and that one too and that hair is flawless how they transferred from that hair is nuts Yeah that supposedly the ones they hide with actual motion like turning their head like that turns out is all practical is just one person And thanks for watching if you want to see us review any other sort of movies or TV shows leave a comment suggesting what we should see next but In the meantime. Try clicking that subscribe button. Just restock our store with some of our most popular classic designs So those of you know, what's up? You can look good while hitting that subscribe button this free returns. So it doesn't fit you whatever send it right back. We'll take it
