VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 48

look at how good this animation is this is all cgi every square inch of them every feature of their anatomy is used as a weapon of some sort dude that explosion was so fast it was just like flame for like 10 frames and that was it did you think that horse stunt was real or was that like a cg horse i know the answer to that whole bunch of details about that horse stunt thanks to hbo max for sponsoring this video hey what's up everyone welcome back to another episode of visual effects artist react we are joined by alex laurent here today he is a visual effects art director and so he's going to have some pretty cool insights on some of the decision making that goes into the visuals that you see on your screen i am super excited for this episode because hbo max approached us and asked us to do a react in this series on their streaming platform the shows on hbo max they have the best visual effects for series period in the in the history of entertainment there's a couple huge standouts that just come to mind you know game of thrones chernobyl watchmen the list goes on i mean i'm a big fan of watchmen and my favorite thing from watchmen is the mirror dude and we already looked at that check it out i'm a huge watchman fan as well i like the visual design of westworld a lot the effect so many beautiful moments there and you just keep on going down the list well we're gonna be looking at a few things today it's gonna be a great episode nico what are we looking at first in my opinion the best battle scene to ever have been put on film is the battle of the bastards wow that is quite a statement but you know hey in my humble opinion right let's take a look and we'll see yes oh it's been a long time since i've watched this they managed to nail the feeling that oh he's actually going to make it out of this yeah and then you know right through the heart yeah what a way to start a fight dude what a shot there though just like the hooves going the best way to set up production value and quality in your visual effects is when you have it in your cinematography and in your costumes the production quality goes throughout you're not relying on the visual effects to elevate all the other craft that is an hbo quality solid horse stunt did you think that horse stunt was real or was that like a cg horse i know the answer to that i actually know a whole bunch of details about that horse stunt so this shot's actually really interesting cause they have a rope and they're just pulling the head of the horse to get it to do the effect the stunt man taking the hit and they just are putting jon snow's actual face onto the stuntman and down it goes when i see that they did really interestingly there though is they didn't just take an image or a 3d model of his head they shot him practically rotating the correct amount and he's just wearing like a t-shirt yeah because they don't need anything they're literally just going to grab this part here and they got just enough of the rotation to cover them and we're into the chaos man so crazy yeah it looks so good dude that's just so many horses going down this winter is so well done oh this is a wonder yeah that's right the cinematography and the editorial style of this whole scene is also helping a lot and it's not by accident there's this documentary i'm in the middle of it and that lends realism to the whole thing you don't get this super slick polished quote-unquote hollywood look that sometimes can make things feel less realistic it's interesting to point out because that's actually something the director specifically said he was trying to do in this episode that's why they keep the camera with jon snow because a battle can be very overwhelming in how you convey the brutality of it it's like let's just stay with one man yeah so what do you guys think is vfx in this shot okay i think all the arrows are vfx or most of the arrows are vfx i'm willing to bet some of the horses are not actually there i would agree they are one of the things that's hardest to control in terms of perfect choreography and if there's one thing that stands out about this whole shot is the accidental perfection a horse running through frame someone falling and that is very hard stuff to choreograph the question though is which horses are cg because i can't tell the difference the only real things in this shot is jon snow and that one soldier to his left and the ground dang so there's just like there's dudes dying in there just not there those are perfect cg humans they knew their strengths they could have a person look pretty realistic when all you see is their armor let me hit you one more time right here what is real and what is faking okay so now i feel like you're gonna you're gonna try to trick me so my first instinct was to say none of this is real yeah but now i've come around to be like is it all real well you know he wants you to think that right i mean i'm looking at that dude's face on the right there and it's like that's a pretty realistic looking face and the whole body could be pretty much a stunt guy but i'm also looking at blood splatter which obviously can't possibly there's a there's a stake sticking out of that horse that is obviously not a real horse i love how you guys go down these rabbit holes okay nico what is it all right tell us dude and that horse on the right are all 100 fake they are completely computer generated and the dude in the horse on the left is 100 real i think you'll be surprised to discover just how much this scene is cgi there are some real things but the vast majority of it is actually not real and it's just a testament to some of the flawless visual effects that are in this episode look at how good this animation is this is all cgi there's like two horses in the shot for real you know that's just beautiful painstaking keyframe animation talk about observing reality those animators need to observe horses up close and personal the thing that betrays cgi in like 99 of the cases is the animation right that's right and you're getting to a situation here you can't do motion capture but in this case it's all hand animation and to get the hand animation that dialed in is just pure artistry and dedication and talent one of the things that is really really helping them here is they have a bunch of physics simulations happening around the animation so the horse's hair is a physics simulation the bridle the cloth hanging off the back of the guy's armor all that dirt and mud they did a procedural houdini system so as the animated horses whose hit the ground they would do dirt ejected from the ground actually like a consequence even if you don't notice it consciously that's the kind of thing that registers as naturalistic yeah it's one of those things that you would notice if it wasn't there 100 and the lighting's not an easy lighting environment to replicate either the soft ambient lighting getting that to look good is very difficult but they matched it perfectly they are indistinguishable from the real horses and soldiers around them also shout out to the unsung heroes the mash movers and rotoscopers on the shot you guys match move the heck out of it and rotoscopers okay we managed to rotoscope blurry swords and all that kind of stuff like look at his rotoscope on his arm right there this cgi is in my opinion some of the most flawless cgi i've ever seen and of course when we say cgi we're not talking about just a photo realistically rendered thing it is all of these elements brought together it's the compositing the paint and roto work the match moving and the tracking if any of those things fails it drops the whole thing it's like everybody needs to come bring their a game so you see us critique vfx all the time but how about we put our money where our mouth is and do a little vfx challenge well tomorrow we are going to try to follow a bob ross tutorial but we have to do it in real time and we have to do it in 3d on the computer so keep your eyes on this channel tomorrow for that video to see if we are able to maintain that bob ross chill factor while under pressure i'm glad you could join me today you ready to do a fantastic little painting the reason i'm back home my father just gone missing so lovecraft country is a fantastic show i'm really enjoying it and there's some incredible vfx work here especially when they start like changing bodies and shedding their skin it's really gory but also very realistic looking this show also has a lot of creature work and they have like cthulhu oh yeah we have cthulhu in here the show goths yeah the shogos i didn't know this this show was this like absurd it's film quality stuff the effort and the detail they put in my own perspective from the design and concept stage those show goths went through a fantastic process and they are incredibly original designs and it was just really beautifully executed when you're doing design for a creature do you have to worry about the plausibility of its physicality very much oh absolutely that's where we're walking the line of believability is in the design that's the skill of it and the art of it is pushing the extremes but always grounding it in some sort of anatomical reality every square inch of them every feature of their anatomy is used as a weapon of some sort is useful it has a practical purpose the tail has this blade that they use to pierce those little arms under there have spikes that they used to gut and it's all gross awesome covered with eyes yeah the dozens of eyes on its back and they went to great lengths to design those eyes so that they would read really well a lot of attention to detail in this creature design and the teeth the mouth alone it's just like this massive shark mouth on steroids there's rows and rows of teeth it's an actual model prop they built in the shape of his head and so he's actually resting his hand on that so it gives the actors a reference for where to look at it gives him an actual physical thing to put his hand against and because it's white they're able to extract the shadows from it to really get like that ambient occlusion and shadow from it even though they're replacing some of the shadow there below but like the contact content is there so this woman hippolyta basically fell into like this weird inner dimension and ended up in the future and now she's in like this white room and then this character comes into the room wow look at that hair that is some serious hair so apparently what they did was the makeup artist actually specifically had to buy the biggest afro wig he could find and he cut it into shape so that that shape is very intentional but it all ended up being replaced in cg basically they already had a really big afro but they wanted a bigger afro and that shot it's such a needless thing to do it is completely unnecessary because it's only for the vfx breakdown and that is my favorite thing about vfx breakdowns what we're seeing is the hair is not actually growing from her head it's growing from this shape with this floppy soft body physics but it's also important to note that the hair is still being used specifically around her face because that hair interaction with her face we're talking the shadows the lighting the actual hairs that are kind of sticking out that is still coming through from the real plate it's everything kind of surrounding that that is then replaced and it also serves as excellent reference they know exactly what it should look like in that lighting so one last thing from lovecraft country i wanted to take a look at the mansion that they're in collapse oh yes this shot here though pretty sweet i mean man yeah that smoke though is it just a little too perfectly wispy it was like i could tell the the resolution of the the sim really you can see like pixelated chatter in there well it's not so much pixelation as much as just like overly smoothing like not enough resolution and other times where it's like some of the wispiness is too directional it's tricky because we're talking about voxels volumetric pixels they're basically cubes right one cube's affecting another cube affecting another cube so it's propagating from cube to cube to cube which causes the propagation to kind of follow the directions of cubes when you stack cubes together you know it's left right forwards backwards upside down cubes aren't diagonally going out right and so as the smoke is moving through a lower red simulation is you can see those steps in those cubes but it doesn't transfer diagonally as smooth as it say transfers from side to side you can kind of see the corners and the way the fire kind of ends up making these little right angles and corners oh i'm looking for them everywhere look right there look at that wisp oh you see what i'm looking at it almost looks like a rib cage yep you can see there's all the individual voxels right there effectively pixelization voxelization yeah the studio is probably incredibly aware of these drawbacks but they're also just like we have no choice we have to get the shot out we have to collapse an entire mansion it's like the fire is fine and you know what if i was doing this shot my fire would probably look even worse because i'd be like it's good effects supervisors and effects art directors and effects artists everywhere have to make hard choices you're up against that deadline and you've got to make some hard choices and the things that matter most are the things you focus on and that is not where our eye is right there our eye is on the character running towards us yeah guys we are so close to 5 million subscribers get your friends hide your kids and wife to subscribe what hide your kids and your wife guys we are so close to 5 million subscribers please subscribe to get us to this milestone and be so cool all right let's go a little darker now let's take a look at chernobyl which in my opinion is one of the best mini series i've ever seen chernobyl is a prime example of invisible effects that set the stage and just some really cool phenomenon effects i was going to say oh like radiation poisoning but then he said cool and i was like oh sorry cool is maybe not the right word chenko looks down on the enormous steel lid of the reactor and sees the impossible obviously we know about chernobyl from history and this is a dramatic recreation of the events at long last we have arrived 123 45 explosion dude that explosion was so fast it was just like flame for like 10 frames and that was it which honestly is kind of how explosions work you never really see an explosion nicely expand it's always just like here one frame and the next frame it's all the way out here it's like watching glass break in slow-mo it's too fast really interesting approach to this explosion here too so it's a nuclear reactor meltdown no one's ever seen the nuclear fuel on fire we've seen the smoke you know there's pictures of that stuff but no one's looked at the fuel that's actually on fire anybody that has is dead that means you're getting a direct blast of radiation at such an intensity that you literally will probably die before the day is over dneg did a bunch of effects work on the show and they did a bunch of research to try to be accurate to the physics of the situation so like in real explosion you basically like in the special effects world of hollywood you use a black powder charge it kicks up a bunch of gasoline into the air and the base of the embers that burning black powder ignite the gasoline which has been vaporized or atomized and you get a big fireball in this case the fuel of the fire is the melted down radioactive material it's a fuel that doesn't just go into the air and burn it's a fuel that stays on the ground and continues to burn constantly it'd be very hard and difficult and expensive to do that in special effects it's a situation where you can use the most modern of physics simulations fluid dynamics to simulate and emulate this explosion and continue with the motion that this explosion would have that you can't get through special effects so it's a really interesting use of capturing a natural phenomena you might be wondering wow it's crazy they had to rebuild an entire power plant there's actually a twin of the chernobyl power plant in lithuania and it was built at the exact same time very similar blueprint it's actually the same type of reactor it's an rbmk reactor they're able to film there and have it look like chernobyl there's in fact there's wide shots where all he did was like add in a couple extra things in the background but it's like the exact same building the exact same power line structure that kind of thoroughness and respect for historical accuracy is really commendable and all the more so because it's something that i don't think they quote unquote had to do they could have faked in something that was a plausible equivalent it wouldn't have diminished the story but they wanted that extra level of accuracy so the thing about that power plant though is that the city it's in is a lot bigger than pripyat usually you're adding in buildings and cool things like that when doing visual effects in this case they're adding in forests and removing buildings that's the contrast they removed that one building off in the distance and it's like 99.9 of people watching this would have never noticed that those buildings in the background shouldn't have been there they kept the sky they liked the sky they did as a vfx art director you're usually tasked with creating the style and the visual sort of aesthetic of a movie and here all of the reference that normally a concept artist would be creating they just have photographs yeah and i bet they had troves and tropes of fantastic photography and reference but it still comes down to making a dramatic composition that works well within the story and conveys the story points and the mood that the director wants the thing that i question or i think about as a filmmaker is is this something where you are paying respect to what happened it's a form of entertainment but it's also a form of like tribute tribute and reflection on what happened then where's the line yeah where's the line it's a tough one and there's no clean answer to it when we are dealing with recreating something terrible that truly did happen it absolutely demands respect from everybody but the line between representation and exploitation is something we always have to be mindful of and i think this is a great example of recreating an event respectfully i think this speaks to the human need to put narrative to things it's just how we approach the world but real life doesn't have a narrative things just happen they don't follow the plotline of a movie things aren't always motivated what i always respect though is when a show like chernobyl attempts to put a narrative onto history having that restraint or that understanding of letting history be messy i always really appreciate that and i feel like that's something that ends up making something a classic rather than just a momentary piece of entertainment chernobyl the show is special in how much effort they put into historically recreating the event it gets just close enough where you can feel some of that history yeah yeah and that's that's wonderful thanks again to hbo max for sponsoring this video it was very easy to be able to just look at only their content and make an entire episode about it that was a joy to do there's a bunch of amazing series on hbo max if you guys have not watched any of them definitely go check them out they actually have a new more affordable subscription option it does have ads but they are minimal ads for 9.99 a month and then there's a regular subscription for 15 a month go check it out there's a link in the description below you probably can't find any other series out there that have as much dedication to things like the quality visual effects you see in hbo max that goes through the casting and the directing talent and the writing talent they hire the production value is consistent throughout the visual effects rise to that bar every time if we're to do another hbo max episode we need to look at some more stuff so if you have any sort of hb originals that you'd like us to take a look at leave a comment down below and we'll check it out thanks so much for watching everyone we'll be here next week alex thanks for being on the show with us today thank you so much my pleasure it's been so fun

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 1,767,647

Keywords: vfx, vfx artists react, cgi, visual effects, hollywood, hbo, hbomax, game of thrones, john snow, lovecraft country, shot breakdown, explained, new, chernobyl, kit harington, monsters, creatures, battle of the bastards, behind the scenes

Id: K8-yCHHNjZY

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021