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Little UFO ship sketchbook


Macmangan

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So this is an early test.  Shot some footage from my truck as a dolly, was gonna get my buddies little girl on a tricycle riding and the ship was gonna follow her, but she got sick.  So this shot became temp and I added a dog I found from a youtube video just to have something to test.  the lighting isn't quite right on the ship, I was going to capture my own HDRI of the scene but didn't have time.  we got a few other shots I'm trying to add some cars into.

 

So one problem I never really thought about until this shot where it stood out, overlapping shadows from the CG on top of real shadows!  They wouldn't overlap.  I did a little  bad roto of the shadows for the first few trees, but near the dog gets messy.  So in order to do it right, I need to mask the ground shadows.  I wish there was a cool plugin for that, haha.  I have a few ideas that might help though beyond tons of roto.  Never thought I would be rotoing shadows.

 

 

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Nice result.

Looking forward how you will resolve the CG shadow issue.

I found some discussion on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/6hz1ik/any_tips_on_blending_real_shadows_with_rendered/)

with a few suggestions:

 

"Try using a min operation.

Take the shadow alpha and invert it so the shadow is black and the rest of the frame is white. Now sample the live action plate shadow value. Set the black value of the cg shadow to this plate value. Now combine the two with a min operation. This will take the minimum value between the two.

 

"use the "darken" blending mode."

 

"I use the luminance key on a copy of the original footage, push the key to remove the majority of the darker areas of the image, all the way till it removes the shadows. Use the remaining lighter areas of the image to drive where the shadows will be visible. You could always manually mask out the shadows but that will take much longer, but you will have much more control."

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21 minutes ago, dast said:

Looking forward how you will resolve the CG shadow issue.

Those are great suggestions, Will probably try all of them until I find something that works with the least amount of time, lol.  I mean worst-case mocha is a great planner tracker so theoretically masking out the shadow shouldn’t be too horrible,  but still, as a lazy person I’m always looking for a faster way.

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10 minutes ago, Macmangan said:

...Will probably try all of them until I find something that works with the least amount of time ...

Keep us posted.

I have been tackling similar things in the past, when AE was still a perpetual license. Most of this knowledge is now just distant memories.

But your project is reviving the itch of doing a personal animated short story.

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The one thing that I picked up on immediately was also the one thing you were most disappointed about - the shadows.   But there is an issue with the ship passing behind the leaves of the first tree.   That is a tough one to fix.  You could drop the ship lower so there is less to roto.  What makes the issue pop out is that there is one whole branch at the front that disappears when it goes behind the ship and then pops back as the ship passes.  That "pop" is what draws my eye to it.....but to be fair I had to view it frame by frame to really understand what was going on.  I do have a suggestion shown below:

 

 

image.png.30c79d5484775f23d7bc0b4922006044.png

 

Maybe do layers of different masks generated from frames where things are easier to isolate then parent them all together and track them to the shot 

 

Just a thought.

 

Nevertheless, really outstanding as always.   The dog is tracked really well (I did not know it was from another shot).  

 

This is a real "backyard adventure" in the making.  I keep expected James Horner music in the background and a Steven Spielberg voice over.

 

Dave

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

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On 10/31/2021 at 5:20 AM, 3D-Pangel said:

But there is an issue with the ship passing behind the leaves of the first tree. 

Haha good eye!!!   Yeah I tried to pull a luma mask fairly unsuccessful and tried some rotobrush.  
 

yeah I think that makes a ton of sense trying to pull from a better frame, I also just noticed there are 2 branches so there’s some parallax,  but that helps I can hopefully do them separately.   It was such a pain when I was doing it I decided to worry about it later after I figure out the shadows.  Haha, but this could do it.

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On 10/31/2021 at 5:20 AM, 3D-Pangel said:

This is a real "backyard adventure" in the making.  I keep expected James Horner music in the background and a Steven Spielberg voice over.

And this is the nicest thing anyone could say!  Also so inspiring for to keep pushing forward!  I just need work to ease up again, hehe.

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