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Remember T2? How to do the liquid-person deal?
Remember in Terminator 2, how the T-1000 robot was all liquid and stuff? There was that part where he grabs onto the back of the car, and then his “hands” break off, and then he walks up to them and melds them into his foot. That’s the effect I want to do, do any of you guys have any tips on that? Also, I wanted to do the part where he cuts off the skin on his arm (Arnold). For that I figured I’d just model a simplistic robot arm, and then mask out the person’s arm, and composite the robot arm onto it? Unless you guys have a better way? Do you think it would look cheap if I just had the actor drop his arm so that his elbow was out of the shot, and imply that it was bent by having the robot arm in the foreground? Then I wouldn’t have to worry about lining up the joints…
Thanks for the help,
-Robert Storm -
4 Replies
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All of the Terminator liquid metal was done via 3D apps like Maya. Good luck getting this effect without extreme 3D and visual effects skills.
You could cheat it by shooting the person on greenscreen and apply effects to them that simulate metallic skin or something, but it won’t look like T2…
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Regarding the chrome, you’d need 3D modelling, animation and surfacing skills with an app like Maya, as beenyweenies wrote. Once you create the model, animate it, surface it with reflections of footage, render various passes, THEN you might bring it into AE to composite those rendered passes along with the background footage. But create the T2? Nope.
Regarding Arnie’s arm, I’d do it practically, with a robot arm with peelable “skin”, with the actor’s arm hanging and hidden by the rolled-up sleeve. No computers needed.
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Ah. I have a copy of poser 7/vue 6, think I could get away with some face/body morphs for the character? I’m not very good at modeling, so I’m not sure how well I could get it to work.
I’d call myself an intermediate Vue user, since I picked up the book for beginners and already knew how to do all of the stuff, but I’m not sure what you mean by rendering multiple passes? I’ve never really played with those settings, does it just render out a different channel for alpha/depth/color?Hmm… where could I get/make one of these robot arms with flesh?
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Multiple passes are multiple 3D renders with, for example, shadows, reflections, specular highlights, and so on each rendered one at a time, not combined. If you render this way, you can drag those renders into AE as layers, and do a final tweaking of opacity and blur (for example) to get the look you want. It can make the difference between ‘real” and “not quite right”. Every app does it slightly differently. This is compositing.
I can’t speak for Poser — I’ve found it very limited in its interaction with other apps.If you don’t have a lot of time to work on it, you should hire someone. If you want it to look convincing, this sin’t an effect where you can “get away with” something.
As for the arm, find someone who builds props in your town, or find a book on makeup, or learn how to cast your own arm in rubber then stick some mechanical geek’s contraption inside.
Bottom line: unless you’re handy with fabricating, I think you should get some help.
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