[Steve Bentley]

There’s also this recent thread in which I vented my spleen on a similar issue:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1136058

Its a shame that things have gone non generalist (or as we like to call it “multi-specialist”) but in order to pump the work out at the level its at and in a timely fashion, it was a necessary evil.

One thing to keep in mind. Focus on what you like to do. Put stuff in your reel you like to do. Once you get good at something, that’s about all you will do. We had a gal who was a rotoscope genius. She could pull a stable matte off the blurriest mess. She was her own worst enemy – she was so good, that’s all she did. She ended up hating it. We had to make sure we rotated her around to different tasks and only called her in on the impossible shots.

One thing employers don’t seem to get is that if someone is really really good at something, they are probably going to be really really good at something else too. It’s not that they have a talent for that particular job, its usually more how they approach anything they do.

[Steve Bentley]

This used to be a problem in older versions (R13 ish) even in the positive areas. A restart fixed it right up.

[Steve Bentley]

That’s all the shader. (and moving lights of course). It can be tough to reverse engineer this sort of thing: what render engine did they use (Octane, Maxwell, Cycles etc) what shader (who knows).
But its going to have some anisotropic hilights for sure. So you could start with the built in Danel shader. (think: car paint). Grayscale gorilla also has some deep texture car paint shaders available (called Top Coat if memory serves).

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Oleg,
Is this really a bug? Which version? I’ve not seen this yet (to 2019PC) and we run some pretty heavy comps.

[Steve Bentley]

Hard to see with out the layer numbers but is your global “shy” button turned on? Are they beyond your timeline view (along with the playback in and out markers?) What happens if you clear all caches?

[Steve Bentley]

Many tutorials show you how sharp the chisel is, where to put the chisel, even what angle to put the chisel on. But they don’t show you what the wood is made of and why the chisel has to be put on that angle or how to use the chisel to cut against the grain. Or that you don’t need that particular chisel or what if it’s not wood you’re trying to cut.

The fact that there is a big red button that does something doesn’t tell you much about the result or how that button plays with others. Or more importantly when not to use the button.

Every shot is different. Get to know the science and you can apply that to every shot regardless whether you have a red button or a blue one.

Learn to drive and you can pretty much drive any car. All cars have the same buttons just in different places.

There’s a reason the Masters got their students to mix paints and prepare canvases for years before they were allowed to hold a brush. The brush is just the tool. The paint’s what its all about. Whether you use a brush or your fingers or a feather or newtons first law.

And yes that was a comment on your FXGuide question. Have I mixed enough metaphors yet?

[Steve Bentley]

Actually C4D is used in big movies. Anything that will fit the bill is employed. I’ve got a shot in here right now that uses Houdini to corral particles, C4D renders them and renders and animates some procedural elements, Maya does the animation and modelling, Maxwell is doing some rendering (out of C4D), Nuke is doing some of the composite elements, AE is doing some, Fusion is doing some… heck even Blender is being used for some smoke elements. Then it all goes for grading. Then it comes back and then it goes again.

The problem with big shops/movies is that all the jobs get compartmentalized. One guy does lighting, one gal does textures, one does roto, one does keying, ten build the models etc. There’s no reason you can’t learn all these skills, but… its a lot of skills.
Keep in mind too some of those shots in the example you gave have taken a team of dozens months to make less than 10 seconds of film. I’m not trying to dissuade you, I just want you to realize the size of cliff you are climbing. But climb boy climb! There’s a heck of a view at the top.

Things that make shots look real:
-Atmospherics – haze, smoke, sun flares ( I don’t mean lens flares), aerial diffusion, horizon color, shadow color (from sky color and other objects)
-Color – black levels are key, matching the shot color. Natural things are much drabber than you think.
-Lens distortion – lens length. A sure fire sign of CG is perfect lenses. No such thing in the real world. And CG guys tend to use too short of a lens for shots. What would a DP use? Get to know how film size relates to aperture size relates to lens size (and length) relates to chip size relates to 3D camera attributes.
-Exposure – what would have gone into shadow/got blown out, if shot on film
-HDRI environment/lighting maps
-High frequency vs low frequency noise: in foreground and background objects (respectively)
-Good composition to lead the eye around the scene, and distract from possible sins.
-Motion blur
-Using elements shot at or created at the correct size. (which isn’t always the final size they are in frame)
-Big comp sizes and high color depths. (otherwise there aren’t enough pixels to resolve all that detail or not enough colors to go round and you get clipping or banding – reflective highlights are very very very bright and there’s usually no true black)

[Steve Bentley]

I don’t have any quick fix tutorials at my finger tips (others might). I’ve been doing this so long I’ve learned the hard way – embarrassment!

But you could do worse than subscribe to CineFx magazine. The current volumes are fun and, in a way, informative but these days the articles are mostly about the special plug-in the number crunchers custom programmed for this-or-that particle effect, or describing software that you can neither afford, nor get your hands on even if you had the money… and the budgets…. good lord, the budgets!. So fun, for sure, but helpful?….not so much.
BUT, with a subscription you get access to all the back issues (except one if memory serves). Seeing how we used to make movies can inform in ways you can’t imagine. (and at a time when the articles showed the full monty, warts and all). The work was hard and we were proud that it was hard so even the mistakes were cause for celebration and photo-ops. And seeing all of us struggle at the beginnings of the digital crossover will give you insights into what we wanted the tools to do and what problems they finally solved (that we couldn’t back then).
The best analogy I can give is: watch someone trying to put a lawn mower together from a array of parts. Watch them fail repeatedly and then succeed. Now that you’ve seen that, when the lawn mower won’t start you’ll have a better idea what to do. You don’t have to be the engineer who designed it, but it gives you a glimpse under the hood, an appreciation of what makes it go and how the parts mesh together. Software today is all under the hood, under lock and key. But it wasn’t back then.

The best lessons are the mistakes others have made, (and yours of course). Bad shots in spite of good efforts also inform in immeasurable ways. Watch the movies the article is about, then read the article, then watch the movie again with new insight.

Physics hasn’t changed (except that crazy dark-matter thing) so the concepts we used back in the film/miniature/optical-printer days are the same concepts we use now. The only difference is the tools can sit on your desk now and you get to see results instantly. Back when, you had to know much more about composition, lenses, colorimitry and physics because you couldn’t see the results as you made things, and budgets wouldn’t let you try too many times to get it right. It had to be right the first or second time. These skills are still needed but can be fudged due to the trial and error aspect of instant feedback. (and the FX supervisor over your shoulder saying “no the gravity point is over there” – he’ll hire you more often if he doesn’t have to do that all the time – I’m… er… he’s a busy guy!)

Other than that, it depends on what interests you.
Animation? Study nature and classic animators. Look at things frame by frame. Take an acting class; as an animator you are the actor. And even if you are a digital animator, draw draw draw. For all things, use a pencil before computer. The computer will constrain your creativity. Get as close to the end product as you can.

Compositor: Get a camera and shoot shoot shoot. Then get your hands dirty. Seeing what makes a good green screen requires you to work with a few bad ones (that you thought were ok). Give yourself really hard stuff to do – water, smoke, blondes on greenscreen, fast moving blurry stuff – you don’t have to solve these perfectly, but you will invent all sorts of tricks to get around the problems: arrows in your quiver that will probably create a great composite when you are handed half decent footage. They’ll think you a wizard!

FX artist? Play! Every one is following tutorials these days so when a new “effect” comes out, it shows up everywhere. We call it “plug-in-itus”. (“Can we have the Matrix falling green rain effect?” “Sure, get in that long line over there with everyone else who wants it.”)
Design first and then collect the tools (or invent them) that you need to see your vision through – otherwise it’s just copying. The guy who gets to work on the big box or Inferno or Saber is the guy who every one stands around watching and murmuring to themselves, “Jeez I would never have thought of that” or ” how is he making that look… OMG that’s so simple but look at it!” He’s probably not any better than you, but I’ll bet he’s played more.

Finally, and after dragging you through what really should be the basics these days – but never is – here are a few shortcuts. I think the guys at Grayscale Gorilla and Andrew Kramer over at VideoCopilot go above and beyond in their videos – not only what button to push, but why. How the science behind the button and the world works.
Its never never never about the buttons you push. Its about art, and science and the world and the emotion in the shot.

I’ll stop now, my soapbox has collapsed due to bad workmanship.

[Steve Bentley]

After just a quick look: you have your circles as 3D layers. You have your beam as a 2D layer. Are they all at the same z depth? (which would have to be 0 since the beam is 2D.)
If you can’t make your beam a 3D layer (and there’s lots of reasons why that might be bad), you can use localToGlobal expressions to get the value of the circle’s anchor point as it relates to 2D space.

[Steve Bentley]

We use it a lot to check black levels and white levels – or more accurately “near” black levels and “near” white levels.
The eye is terrible at seeing differences in the shoulder and toe of a luminance curve so “almost” black can look like true black – depending on your monitor, the lighting conditions, the color space you are working etc. It used to be. back in optical effects days, the compositing work might look fine in the theater, but once it got to TV the garbage mattes and compositing in the shadows stood out like… well, bad mattes!
Its still true today but for different reasons. Everyone it seems has their monitors and their TVs tuned up to something different. Even theatre projectors are often “goosed” just to get a bit more brightness out of a cheaper projector. (’cause as every knows a brighter image is a better image right? No!) Then there’s the ever present compression on things. Any of these can bring slight differences between levels into glaring focus. If you have ever seen an FX shot and gone, “I just don’t know whats wrong with it but it just doesn’t look right“, it’s usually poorly matched black levels within the composited elements.

That button is also great for seeing possible banding. It might look fine in your 16bit comp but compress it a few times and it will look like the growth rings of a tree.

When working with raw footage you can also use that button to see just how much head room you have left before crushing the shot to get that Game of Thrones blue or Matrix green effect.