We Remake the FIRST EVER CGi Character to see if it’s Gotten any Easier.

thanks to state farm for sponsoring a portion of today's video this was the first cg animated character in film history and it paved the way for the entire vfx industry with a few notable inventions we're gonna try to basically recreate this we'll make a cool character here and then we'll shoot a short film as an homage to the original [Music] we tend to mark the history of cgi over the last several decades by the groundbreaking characters that the technology makes possible you know you've got like the iconic ones you know gollum i mean obviously we got the jurassic park dinosaurs like you know the abyss we got terminator 2 but if we go back even further there are even earlier renditions of digital characters now the very first digital character ever made was for the movie future world in future world they actually like built this like 3d model of peter fonda's face in a super rudimentary there was no way to like composite that into live-action footage so they're literally pointing a camera at the computer screen like someone's pirating transformers 4. so fast-forwarding a few more years there's a couple other movies obviously there's tron we did a whole video about that but none of those were real characters until young sherlock holmes i love how it just like animates in just like all of this feels so much more advanced than the year yeah no kidding i mean in many respects it holds up you know what i mean yeah totally this was the first fully photorealistic cg animated character in film history it is and it's crazy because you know when you're doing when you're the first of anything you are in open territory and you have to navigate problems that have never been navigated john lasseter was the one who headed this up with the lucasfilm computer graphic division which was under ilm at the time and under his leadership they executed this to perfection and just a year later in 1986 were purchased by steve jobs and became pixar [Music] you're talking about ilm in conjunction with pixar forging the way for computer animated cg characters in film i mean i honestly coming into this had no idea of the significance of this shot i think there are nine visual effects shots in this entire sequence and they were revolutionary it took them nine months nine months for 30 seconds of on-screen action that is wild and it paved the way for the entire vfx industry with a few notable like inventions that they made beyond just having a cgi character so back in the day when they wanted to animate something you had all of these sort of like polygons and vertices on the corners of each of those polygons that they had to manually move like one by one right it completely circumnavigates any sort of like artistic vision so they invented this new way of animation which we know today as just a character rig the idea of a hierarchical character rig i mean the way they described it was like the branches of a tree you know you got the body as like the trunk you can move the whole trunk and all the branches move with it and then the branches start breaking off you can move the arm and then you can move the rest of the arm and the fingers one by one you can animate the fingers independently but it'll always be tracked to where my arm is which will always be tracked where the rest of my arm and my body is and that gives you a lot of power when you're animated because i want to move the hips here the whole body moves now i just move the upper leg now just adjust adjust adjust instead of having to go uh vertex by vertex which sounds like there were like 82 different unique pieces forming the entirety of the stained glass man and if they had to like animate the position or rotation of each of those pieces it would have taken like 10 times longer this shot is the first cg rap focus shot in cinema history john lasseter and his team found a way to render out depth of field specifically for this shot for this shot with like the focus distance actually changing going from the hands to his face that would be a really hard shot to do optically because you got the matted lines being blurred at different amounts at different points yeah but they did something very new at the time which was actually rendering out the background plate digitally with the actual render itself so this is like essentially a fully cg shot but it's not the background is technically a real plate another crazy innovation here is that this shot has camera match moving camera tracking they literally invented camera tracking it was like not a thing but they had this camera moving through 3d space it's not just static it's not just like pivoting around it's literally translating through 3d space and they had to straight up recreate that camera motion in post but there were no tools there was no after effects camera tracker there was no synth eyes but john lasseter was there in the church measuring every square inch of the cathedral so they could remodel it just to track that one shot yeah like you press a button now and it like figures out where the camera is in real space heck our phones do it in real time i didn't know this but in 1985 they actually had motion blur capabilities and this is one thing that dennis mirren the visual effects supervisor was very very adamant about because again these were the days of stop motion you know and the big hold up with stop motion is the lack of motion blur it makes it look like it's not a part of the image so having an accurate motion blur is very important when creating realism and the idea behind this approach was to create the first photo realistic animated cg model so that motion blur played a huge factor in this but of course it came at a massive computational cost and for you artists out there you already know it's still a pain in the butt to have motion blur and depth of field so imagine 1985 trying to run that stuff for all these shots it must have been a nightmare dude i saw that for the abyss which was like what 1988 or so the entire computer graphics department at lucasfilm had 900 megabytes of storage not even a gig and that was the entire department and like our server space here is now like what 200 terabytes yeah another thing that they did here which i find actually really fascinating is the idea of like selectively adding highlights to the armor and so what they did which seems very very logical john lasseter took measurements and took note of exactly where every single light source was the color temperature of that light source and the intensity and they replicated that in 3d space for the rendering of this thing and they took a look at it it was like it's not working yeah this isn't good didn't feel right didn't feel right exactly and so they ended up going through and adding a whole bunch of specific lights so that they could get the correct glints it's not exactly how it should have been in the actual footage but it looks better it looks more right and that's a challenge that you faced with cg characters right is the the dp on set would light for the character if the character was there and that might change depending on what the character looks like they might completely re-light the scene if the character was actually there so when you get into the post side doing it literally is a great starting point but it's not always the best solution for a good looking finish it's still just nuts to me that they were literally doing all this almost 40 years ago is that four it is 40 years ago well not quite it was like i mean no it's close 84 it was like 38 years ago dude and i think this marks like a really interesting sort of like pivot point in the film industry because they are able to take all these super complicated mathematical equations and algorithms and all this stuff that they had to use for like say tron remember tron's cgi was all made with like freaking spreadsheets but for this they finally figured out a way to optimize the use and execution of these things so that an artist without any sort of mathematical background can use it easily yeah which is nuts yeah it's almost like this is the first time we're seeing the artist's mind prioritized in the execution of visual effects yeah it's just really fascinating to see all the challenges they face and how those challenges are still relevant today we have far better tools far shorter turnaround times because the ability just to make this stuff and turn around is so much faster but a lot of those same sort of problems will exist today so we're gonna try to basically recreate this we'll make a cool character here and then we'll shoot a short film as an homage to the original let's see if we can use our modern tools to see if we can actually do this quicker and also make it more photorealistic okay okay plan of attack yes we need a stained glass man first i would suggest one of us dress up in like some armor we take a photo and then we just have griffin artistically interpret that as a stained glass thing i like that hey griffin yo griffin griffin hey buddy hey what's up dude so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put jordan in some armor and i'm gonna take a photo of him and i'd love if you could just like trace over it and turn him into like a stained glass character just just press the stained glass filter actually i do have one of those wait for real i don't know how good it's gonna be but i'll do a version with that for sure dude we're in the costume room you remember this from when jake disappeared on us because he was being batman i recognize this i'm going to be called laurie [Laughter] so we don't really have any sort of like armor let's see if we can make some sort of like costume that is armor-esque dude already baseball pads those are going on yeah fantastic yeah these are your leg armor oh dude this is from our mad max film something like that you know like have that on your shoulder i like that i dig that just be iron man just be iron man dude stained glass iron man is that is that a saddle saddle we got to get you a helmet oh i know what we're doing oh yeah so this is from like the main orc captain from our shadow of mordor short film this thing is made out of pure resin so it weighs like 10 pounds but it looks super sweet wait do you have a big head i'd like to think so i have awoken come on baby if i show up in a war like this oh which way am i going wait should we look at the picture with reference like no we're not getting nervous he's getting nervous at the creative freedom here look let the creativity flow i'm ready for war [Laughter] what went wrong here try the sword no no i'm not feeling i'm not feeling that sword this sword's a little bit lighter kind of fits my vibe oh my gosh what is this made out of metal appropriate i mean i think this could be a good like stained glass man type sword good luck holding it in t pose as long as it's okay that i'm openly weeping in the post i feel perfectly safe in my gear andrill the sword of aragorn son of aerothorn [Music] thank you my lord do you want like a shard blade we got like this thing here oh that's dope that's so big look at the size of this sword well the original stained glass man was seven and a half feet tall so it only feels right that's a pretty legit sword too yeah i like this i like this sword let's go with this one this is like an actual shard blade oh is it really i mean it's not actually but it's like the size of a shard blade dude it's pretty sweet yeah all right i'm gonna go grab griffin to see if he can take these photos real quick [Music] i love it we got our knight in shining armor he looks great i just need you to take some photos of him real quick hey jordan come on out oh dude you just broke it the armor just broke [Music] down what just happened this is a tail that will be uh immortalized in stained glass for all time i'm excited okay all right good so yesterday uh we took this photo of our uh that's what i look like i literally have not seen it to this point i was able to make that's awesome that is awesome wow dude that's great oh my gosh i see a little bit of my soul in there this is hilarious thank you dude this is so killer okay so i guess the next fit here is to basically take this and turn that into a 3d model which essentially just means taking it and getting an outline of it and extruding that in 3d space so we'll probably want to like break out your your hand into a few different pieces your arm into a few different pieces because they're all just going to be basically flat 2d cutouts moving in 3d space separately i'll start trying to do that while you really figure out the new deep motion thing dude it worked are you kidding this is literally oh dude freaking work dude yeah this is not what i expected look at this oh my gosh off just a video so i did this animation test with this program called deep motion that basically just takes a video of your motion and then generates 3d animation from it and you can put in like any video too like you can pull like dance moves from step up or something into this and it'll like get the animation of those dance moves that's amazing dude yeah this is great this is great so in theory we should be able to actually upload our own sort of rigged model to this and we'll just apply that animation data to it automatically which would be very ideal okay i believe we have all of the building blocks necessary now to proceed let's go ahead and shoot this short film i really want to film this on my iphone because there's this app i've been using called by play camera and it tracks the footage in real time and it also allows me to actually use a 3d character as a stand-in for me to compose the shot properly and at the end of it all it'll even spit out a cinema 4d file with everything ready to go then after that we'll shoot your mocap and submit that to deepmotion to get a ready to go animation [Music] all right so i finished the edit here i've assembled everything that we shot it's jordan acting across from jordan here man jordan's dancing if you want to actually see more about jordan's dancing we did an entire crew cuts episode on quarterdigital.com check it out we deep dive into what it means to dance in front of people like no one's watching i might need to see the worm done in person right here right now if you're up to it so i edited this whole thing traditionally like i normally would but normally the next step of the process i would kick this out to after effects and then camera track it lay out the ground plane the walls and all of this stuff to kind of build out the geometry but no this time around that's already been done for me while i recorded the footage the phone was able to essentially scan the environment here and as you can see here's a cg camera moving through the environment here the exact same way i was in real life and on top of that is projecting the footage on to this geometry here everything is already set up at real world scale i should be able to just drop in the animation which i made to be seven feet tall and it'll just fit automating all of those processes allowed me to kind of spend a lot of my creative energy on dialing in the materials i was able to build out the actual textures and the look of stained glass right you know glass it's see-through but one of the things dennis mirren said was that everything seemed very flat and they ended up adding something like six or seven layers of sort of like scratches and and little bubbles and whatnot just to add extra detail to the actual textures and i've done that here too you can see all the scratches i've added to the glass and the glass is also slightly transparent so you can see through it but one of the things i discovered when doing this was that it wasn't looking how i needed it to look until i actually added that color channel into the emission channel so technically the glass is emitting a little bit of light just a little bit just enough to kind of like boost the color values just a little bit i don't know if adding an emissive channel like that to this is technically realistic but you know what it looks better this way and so you know what i don't feel so bad i think because it looks good it works that's what i learned from dennis mir so there's still a lot of work left to do here i've actually got to set up each scene render him out and once i've done that i'm excited to show jordan because he had to move on to busting an eyeball and that's great but he's going to love this [Music] i'm very i'm very tired today i'm very tired but you know what the video's done this ended up being more work than i expected but hey that's the theme of this channel i gotta say i honestly feel pretty guilty ren shouldered so much of this and i have not seen the final product and i'm incredibly excited i'll talk about what happened with this process once we've watched it but for now i'm gonna hit play [Music] wait [Music] [Music] that's correct that's great that's awesome nice work man that was a lot of shots there's like 12 that was 12 shots that was 12 volts oh and the entire thing was filmed on my phone so i ended up doing a little bit more like manual tweaking of the animation than i expected to need to do the deep motion animation ended up working very well to get something but it's not exactly like high fidelity you know it's not going to be as good as a motion capture suit or hand animating something but it is so much faster and then of course i kept refining the actual glass texture so that ended up being a bit of a challenge so one piece of inspiration i took from the original movie was the fact that they have a shot in there that was entirely rendered out of the computer even though they're using the play photography they didn't like have to like recombine it with track mats with the footage like they did for the other shots they're just like well it's gonna be out of focus let's just render it out and that's the final image and we're looking at another one right here this is entirely cg and i love i remember i saw you working on this one in particular it's awesome because you're able to dial in the depth of field here in a way that we couldn't do in camera because all the textures that we see are projection from a camera onto the planes in your cgc correct and what's cool is you're actually getting the light playing through the glass and casting red into the shadow and that's what i was hoping for but i wasn't sure if it was going to work out and it did i was so happy i mean it's not clear it's very subtle you can see that there's like some red glow you can clearly subtly see that there's some red glow the fact that two of us were able to make this in a week is the fact that this is possible at all yeah is incredible to me there was no precedent for any of that stuff that they were doing for the original movie like the ideas they had were the first time these ideas were had it's it's hard to even wrap your mind around that because i i'm of the mindset that if i don't have a help page online or a youtube tutorial that answers my problems i just assume it's impossible and that was like their calling card they're like well no we'll just make it we'll make it from scratch there's a special type of person that can do that and to have like a small little house full of these guys that would go on to do such great things and like this was the birth like at the top of all the characters we know and love throughout history there is the stained glass man we gotta dive in we gotta take a look we gotta unlock the the secrets of all these amazing techniques that were developed just for this and put our own little spin on it i feel like we excavated the shoes from these ancient artists and put them on our feet and walked along the same path somehow but like we were able to put insoles in the excavated shoes this is like modern shoelaces this is my top 10 favorite metaphors i really enjoy doing these sort of like historical deep dives because i take for granted this sort of access to technology and just the general vastness of knowledge that we have today i'd love to do it more yeah oh same exactly there are so many movies out there that i do not know enough about leave a comment down below what should we dive into next i personally was very satisfied to see you dancing for this video and to get that out there and if you want to actually know more about that whole sort of dancing my dancing origin story the video is on quarter digital.com there's a two week free trial just yeah gekko do it come on

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 1,243,400

Keywords: vfx, react, cgi, visual effects, experiment, test, learn, how to, history, make, made, new, pixar, disney, ilm, hollywood, movies, young sherlock, vfx makeover, Budget, State Farm, Surprisingly Great Rates, Surprisingly Great Rate, Insurance, Car Insurance, Auto Insurance, Insurance Rates, Options, Rates

Id: mnhS36GdM9s

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022