Animation, commercial office building in Chicago.

[Tommy L]

This is built in Max, rendered in Corona (at 4k), post in AE and some grading in Resolve. People are mostly Anima, but you'll notice some of the main (foreground) people were shot greenscreen.

This is an edit of our component of the job, which was all the CGI footage. The client (core12) shot alot of context film and produced the full piece, you can see that at therivere.com

Currently being brought into Unreal Engine 4 piece by piece for realtime. 

Any question, feedback etc is very welcome!!

Thanks,
Tom. 

 

[Chris MacDonald]

That looks absolutely fantastic! Great job!

How much camera tracking was involved?

[Tommy L]

Thanks Macker. Not much camera tracking. The context for all the lower level shots and background from the interiors is all 3d. Where we used greenscreen people we used simple camera moves in the studio or had the camera locked down. That makes for easy compositing without tracking. There were 3 drone shots that were tracked. The drone shots are the part of the job Im the least hapy with. The client needed the building to be instantly noticable in the shots, theonly way to do that was to veer away from them beng photo-real. 

[heni30]

Looks good.

A couple of comments.

At 00:35, rationally, people understand what's going on but visually those chairs have caught fire.

The dynamic split screen technique is not working.  It's jerky and distracting.

At 00:39 the bar people are not up to par (I know it's a wip).

Editing is excellent (aside from split screens).

Edited April 24, 2020 by heni30

[Karl Larsen]

Speechless.

Incredible!

[Francisco Penaloza]

This looks really good, congrats.

Getting picky really, the color difference between video and CG is noticeable, if there is time, you may want to look on that.

I also wonder if the screen split could get better, there are some part of the video that gets lost for some other vertical element in the architecture, and other parts is hard to understand what's going on.

Overall the video is fast paced so maybe that is affecting that effect too. But other than that that video looks great.

Regarding using Corona, how long those frames where running? did you setup passes or time for each one of them?

[Tommy L]

Francisco,

The grading in the drone shots was a client request. They didnt shoot the sequences very well for framing, the building got lost when it was 'realistic' so we had to do something to make the building (puke-in-mouth)...... 'pop'.

the split screen treatment (the version on my vimeo) was a quick way to build our own comp. The actual commercial video can be seen in the link (therivere.com) has a narrative, so its very long. Some of our shots dont make sense without that storyline. Not too good for us showcasing purely the 3d component, so we slapped together the parts we liked. 

The frame times were pretty long. Its 4k. Its a very heavy scene, has DOF and MB. Some were faster than others, we averaged about 30 mins on a Ryzen 2990. 2mins of footage. probably rendered all of it twice, do the math... Its worth looking at some of the deeper visual shots. The one with the fireplace, if you pause that and look at the background, it goes on forever. There's the interior, street and traffic, background buildings, looking down street to horizon. People inside and out. Just a mammoth amount of stuff. We were really happy to see those renders come off the farm. 

We're porting the whole thing to UE4, client may want a realtime package, so I'll post updates when that comes around. 

[Francisco Penaloza]

... ha the joy of client requests HA HA HA well that's what never get told when you present a video like this. Always there is a back story. any ways I get it. But you always can do a 'Director's cut' LOL

30 minutes a frame actually is not that bad, I thought it would be 40 min or 50 min but yes when you render 4K you can see a lot of details.  More in this type of project that is downtown area.

Good job congrats to the whole team.

BTW I would be very interested on what you guy get our of Unreal. it will be an mobile device interactive app or you guys are trying VR?

 

[Tommy L]

Agencies are always looking for a new angle. In these social distancing days I guess they are banking that obstacles that used to be insurmountable (asking a client to download a 5gig file) are becoming things we can do? I honstly think right now the best tool is 360 tours. And have been for about 20 years! But they are old hat and thats not enough. If the develpment had a sales center they might want an install of a UE4 scene to wander around. Thats controllable. But when delivering a UE4 file and you dont know what hardware its going to be played on?.... thats a gamble. 

I dont know how the experience will be delivered, whether its Furioos or a similar service (pixel streaming) or maybe a game platform for full download (Stadia)... we'll see. Necessity is the mother of invention after all. 

[Francisco Penaloza]

19 minutes ago, Tommy L said:

Agencies are always looking for a new angle. In these social distancing days I guess they are banking that obstacles that used to be insurmountable (asking a client to download a 5gig file) are becoming things we can do? I honstly think right now the best tool is 360 tours. And have been for about 20 years! But they are old hat and thats not enough. If the develpment had a sales center they might want an install of a UE4 scene to wander around. Thats controllable. But when delivering a UE4 file and you dont know what hardware its going to be played on?.... thats a gamble. 

I dont know how the experience will be delivered, whether its Furioos or a similar service (pixel streaming) or maybe a game platform for full download (Stadia)... we'll see. Necessity is the mother of invention after all. 

Yes, that's correct, at my office some designers and clients still ask us to make some Panoramas to be seen in IPads..... they just like to wiggle that IPad around and look at it like a 'Magic window' to their projects. Old trick, still surviving.

For other client we bought a laptop and the headset, created an Oculus account so every time we do updates they will receive a message on their device, just like any other game. With all that we are always wondering if they are doing it right, if people are getting dizzy or they haven unplug the laptop to the wall so they are still using the intel chip instead the RTX2080 LOL.

Layama is working pretty good for us, have you tried?

 

[Tommy L]

Layama! no, but its on my list. When I first saw it I was skeptical, but there's a Bernard Benoit demo that is excellent.

and the 360 tour, its not just surviving, its still the best thing out there. Because its image based. 

[Thomas Edward Allen]

The rendering quality is pretty great, but the transitions need to be simplified and smoothed out. I also have a personal pet peeve of jump cuts. Maybe less is more?

[Tommy L]

As said previously, this is just a quick edit of the footage we made for a larger 3rd party edit.... I quite like jump cuts, they are certainly useful in arch-vis, where you want to 'show more stuff' without boring the viewer with longer camera tracks.