We Remade TRON in One Day

so we did a recent episode on tron for visual effects artists react now the original tron from 1982 is one of the first movies to have heavy cg in it other movies have had cg in them like for example in the original star wars a new hope there's the blueprint of the death star they show in a little tiny corner of a screen whereas tron took it to a whole nother level this light cycle scene it's super super basic it's super approachable now with the tools we have we were watching this and reveling at all the immense work they had to do back then they didn't have you know ways to model they didn't have ways to animate get this they didn't have a way to get the rendering from the computer to the film i mean they had to film off the screen for some of this stuff it's pretty crazy so we thought it'd be cool to go back and recreate a scene from a major motion picture in 1982 and we will do it in one day and we'll make it exactly the same now we're not gonna go to the point where it's like we have to somehow print each frame to film and then like do a 65 millimeter showing in an imax theater two days from now to see if it turned out we're not gonna do that part what we are gonna do is we're gonna try to recreate this scene using some of the same techniques by using modern tools to do so to learn how they did it to respect how they did it and also to like totally dunk on them with how good technology is these days take that 40 year old movie swoosh what is this caveman times you know what the steaks aren't even high enough yet let's do this i don't know how to use blender yet let's crank it up even further i'm gonna go from not having used this 3d program blender to rendering a scene in one afternoon i have faith in nico if you know any 3d software it's pretty easy to switch between them so i'd like to think so so when the light cycles appear here they appear to have wireframes but i gotta assume and this is something they said that this is hand painted and a lot of the 3d stuff and 3d stuff in this movie it's just people using airbrushing to make it look like a 3d model yeah it totally is you can see on the wheel on the rim of the wheel right there the lines are completely straight so that grid appears and then we finally see the light cycle now i think we should start from this frame where the light cycles take off as our first shot we'll skip the stuff with the actors things like that we're just focusing the cg so the first thing that stands out to me all the motorcycles are exactly the same model with just a color shift also supposedly all of this is modeled with primitives a primitive is just a basic shape like a sphere or a cube or a taurus i mean at least i can see some pretty clear primitives here we have a sphere and we have like a cutout which is probably just another sphere cutting that out we have another tinier sphere in the inside there's a monkey primitive in blender well there's a t-box primitive in 3ds max the hell is that the teapot was one of the first real world objects to have all of its coordinates written out by hand and then put into a computer for the very first object to be brought into a computer was a hand they took a model of a hand and then plotted out where all the points were and they made a rendering of it here it is the first ever 3d model that looks pretty good it looks really good i can model that in an hour anyways oh they took off okay now we have to think about these trails so there's a gradient here and the trail kind of curves and you know what's weird so i look at it right here where it starts you can see the trail kind of appearing i'm led to believe that the trail is already there and it's just being revealed from like a bully it's two objects right you can see the little gradient and where it cuts off and that is just attached to the bike itself and then the trail seems like a separate object if you look closely at this frame side now just out of revelation if those trails were attached to the motorcycle the motorcycles tilted when they turned the trail would tilt too and that's probably why the motorcycles don't tilt because later on when the motorcycles escape they do in fact tilt so they clearly knew to animate them like that but the trails probably prevented them from doing so so so far i haven't seen any shots that are particularly hard it's it's quite a few shots so this is all standard animation camera angles there's no motion blur there's no camera shake really it looks like you could literally keyframe it by hand or use a spline follow for the animation which is not how they did it if you want to do it like they did it would make we'd save a file for each frame oh my god that sounds awful up to where what is that we're working on unit three so that way we can actually have a studio floor for filming and another space for computers where it can be quiet and we can focus on our work like this all day yesterday and i'll probably like that all day tomorrow too all right so here's the last thing that's unique about this scene that we're gonna do i think we're gonna end it is when the guy crashes into the wall and puts a hole in the wall boom so looking at this frame by frame it looks pretty straightforward we have a spiky 3d model that just scales up and disappears we have rings that just scale up and then disappear the motorcycle is literally split into all of its primitive shapes and they don't even rotate they just fly out and so how do you think they did that do you think it's just a bunch of primitives definitely just stacked primitives so here's what we have to do to make this shot we have to make the objects we have to make the light cycles and to make the trails which make the environment so that's basically the grid ground and the background wall we'll deal with the little extra special bits when we get there then we have to animate it and then we have to render it let's make it we have to make it look like this so it's a very simple rendering it should be straightforward to do but at this point it's almost hard to go back and like find the old style rendering systems honestly that might be the most challenging part of this is making it look like it did in this because now we have all these fancy renderers that simulate light and reflections and everything and we gotta dumb it down to have it be just shapes and colors and gradients and that's it and then don't forget peter's gonna teach me how to do all this in blender at the same time corridor is officially switching to blender no we love cinema 4d we love 740. and octane render sam and and ren and nico told me in private that's not true right now that's fine google it i will give you a concession a little bit i did say in private off camera that i should probably learn blender and that it has a lot of great features did i say it was better never said that so i guess we'll fire up blender and won't you just show me how to do it all right computer all right peter we want to make a light cycle we're going to make it with primitives i have no idea how to use blender all right let's do it so the first thing you want to do to bring any objects into blender any primitive or basically any element you want to bring into blender you do shift a that brings up a little menu for you go through here got cameras got curves you got force fields go up to mesh and what kind of primitive would you like to add well the front tire on the bicycle looks like it was a sphere without a spirit cut out of it yeah this is i mean this is looking just like 3ds max cinema 4d it's just the way you create an object is different now every time you create primitive you also create a soul so you have to have a container where all the souls go and you don't have to worry about them do you have that container all set in this computer yeah um i installed the plugin so we should be good to go okay great well what would you like to do next well so you know the way they operated is they had the primitives and they would boolean them with other primitives so let's create a second sphere and show me how you bully in one from the other all right let's do it you keep saying this and i assume you're not making a soup broth what does that mean yeah that's right so buoy eating is it's a mathematical term but in this case we're using it for addition or subtraction uh with objects we want to have a sphere and we want to cut a hole out of that sphere using another sphere as the object that makes the cutting wait were those numbers that were changing i saw a bunch of numbers changing while you moved it around these numbers up here i'm guessing are the numbers they had to punch in every single frame for the old run your three rotation numbers and your three axes in terms of your position and to write those down frame by frame for every object if they want to animate something totally and you can actually bring those values up here you can see this is how they are like exactly what they would be looking at so we got two objects intersecting with each other yeah two balls we add modifier they lane object eye dropper and i dropped this little sphere right here you can see nothing happened nothing happened but actually something did happen below the surface if we go to wireframe view and uh toggle this on and off so then we can delete that sphere and boom we got a little hole cut out of this sphere yeah so it's just a regular sphere oh you're right with a sphere bleed out of it it looks like i'm just another boolean sphere inside of there to give you the black shape so peter's not trying to teach me how to use blender he's trying to teach me how to do 80s vfx inside blender so knowing primitives and knowing booleans that's technically all we should need to make this motorcycle would you like me to you know what peter i feel like i think you're ready you want me to take over all right time to add a middle sphere i hit shift a to go back to the 80s and then i create a sphere in the 80s he's learning so good he's doing so good and i want to be scooted outwards just a little bit hey is this a light side nico is that tron not only is this tron this is also a new industrial design for a speaker so all speaker companies can now pay me for the rights to use the shape dang niko's getting the hang of this real quick i'm impressed so these guys have finished recreating tron and it wasn't as easy as they thought it was gonna be what was the biggest challenge trying to concentrate this loud work environment peter and i started working on the shots yesterday like got the motorcycles built and kind of built the world the looks kind of fallen into place it's like okay it's time to start animating this will be easy this will be easy it'll take no time at all uh yes so today we're going to present to you the light cycle sequence remastered and reapproached in modern times took many people many many days of time peter and i went out and just did it in one day okay but it should be stated that niko learned blender for this video like start to finish which is really impressive the shots you're gonna see here the three shots i did are my first three renders i've ever done in blender i saw two shots and i didn't realize that they were not the original tron shots oh thank you [Music] so i think you're trying to bamboozle me right now this is the original tron we're watching the original tron first everybody has a point of reference before we show them our version you're not being ghastly you're not wait a second wait a second you didn't see anything i just saw a little glitch what did you see i know what i saw i just saw one of the background shapes bleed through into the foreground i did too wait but this is the original because there's the insert of the tron man the tron man's in there all right you guys got us we tricked you that was that was our version that we watched first [Music] watching bran and nick figured it out like three shots in it was not very obvious like so now i don't really have context for what you have recreated now i actually legitimately do need to see the original [Music] versions [Music] that explosion looks really solid dude like you matched the aesthetic so this is where it's most obvious by like a huge margin that they're not the same shots because they don't line up at all and yet if you're just to look at them one after another you wouldn't be able to tell it's one thing to just animate some stuff driving it around in a grid it's another thing to try to make it look like somebody's work from 40 years ago yeah i mean those turns were just ridiculous nice we could have just had it animated along the path but they didn't have that technology back in the day but yeah we were guessing that for the corners they just had two separate bike models and two separate trail models they were just bullying out of existence one motorcycle and leaning into existence another one at least it makes me really appreciate just the amount of like foresight and planning and like knowing that you sit down and do this math it's like it should work out it's kind of like the same thing as shooting a rocket into this like hitting the moon it's like i did the math it should work if any of the original tron artists are watching this video we'd love to have you break down how you actually approach this that'd be super cool hit us up please yeah what if he went through and just updated all the textures and threw in a modern rendering engine so it's the exact same shot as the original tron but looks more modern yeah i mean we could totally do that we would literally just be like pressing buttons and changing sliders and stuff like that to just up it to the next level [Music] uh well let us know what you think of our tron sequence did it match the original was it a complete disrespect to the artists we just spit on their work and just grind our heel into it this ended up being really fun i think it'd be really cool to do this again with other famous vfx shots they have to be achievable so i could just go and redo the avengers one take i kind of feel like we could do the matrix bullet dodge that would be a fun one it's one thing to react to it's another thing to live it whoa i hope you learned something today hope you enjoyed the video yeah that's it consider going to our website corridor digital.com if you enjoyed watching us retrace the footsteps of early cgi pioneers and you might enjoy the upcoming functional filmmaking series we've taken all the crazy knowledge we've gained from the 10 years of making videos on youtube and we packed them into this series exclusive for corridor digital.com subscribers head on over if you want to take part in that and see the other crazy shows that have been greenlit as well thanks for watching i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 1,831,625

Rating: 4.9224 out of 5

Keywords: vfx artists, react, cgi, experiment, makeover, TRON, Jeff Bridges, hollywood, new, Blender, Cinema4D, tutorial, how to, shot breakdown

Id: T2-yhFTCCzY

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Soundwave1157]

Thank corridor crew

[u/Ericbazinga]

I appreciate that they did both a 1:1 recreation and then upgraded the textures for a modern version

[u/Frog21]

I really really hope that some of the original artists see this. Does anyone know their socials?

[u/XSTech]

I wish they weren't so flippant about it in the beginning. They just sent disrespectful about the VFX work that took months upon months with the "we'll do it in an afternoon and not know the software to start with."