creating the damned glow!

A problem i have been having has been getting the toaster to "glow" as mentioned in the footage...
Had i known it was hard i would have said it was doing something else unusual.
It would technically be easy for me to simply re record myself saying something else, as im behind the camera there would be no dubbing issues etc.
But im a glutton for punishment so i will keep at it. here is one of my terrible attempts.

I want the effect to appear as a light, not just a flashing section. so the light needs to orginate at the bottom and glow...

Some Work in progress videos

Comments are on the individual videos.
definately need an AO pass.

Lack of blog planning.

should have mentioned in the previous post (before actually). some comments on the filming process.


Going back to my philosophy of "if you cant hide it, make it a feature" when doing some initial test shots inside my kitchen, the surfaces were too reflective and both looked bad in the footage, and would have no doubt proved difficult to track. So i used a tablecloth in order to both eliminate the reflection, and to provide the software with something very good for tracking; that didnt have to be removed in post.

I also used a coiled up cable as both a visual aid for my actor, and the first attempt to have him interact with the object.

The final bit i'd like to mention is that the shots used were planned around having the same focal point, and (nearly) the same lighting, of course as i was using both natural and artificial light there would be some varience but i kept it as close as possible.

What this achieved, was allowing me to switch scenes with relative ease, as once i had set up the scene for the first shot (as mentioned in the last post) i'm able to delete the boujou import, and import the new scene's camera and locators, and by shifting and scaling, i have the scene 3/4 lit and set up for the next shot.

Lazy or genius? i think the latter.

More chrome than pimp my ride,

 ive found HDRI to be slow, limiting and a general pain. so ive decided to hook up the following solution, which looks a mess...

 what i have, is the scene exported from boujou, with a shadow plane directly under it.
level with the shadow plane i have another plane, which has a pattern on it that matches the tablecloth.

I then set up some other planes that had pictures of the corresponding sections of the kitchen on them, these were then moved and rotated into place.
these planes all had their primary visibility turned off, and only displayed in reflections.

side note, alot of the time the planes had to be placed in a place that didnt correspond with their real life place to get the correct reflection effect.

The obvious problem with making a chrome toaster is having the reflections on it. as just using chrome itself ended up with this result.

That is still a reflection rather than being transparent, but it in no way looks sufficient.
I then thought to try something completely different, and went for a may software approach to create a brushed metal, that didnt have visible reflections in it.

this is done with a blinn going through an env ball, with a noise attached to it.  but again, did not surfice.

So i went back to the drawingboard, and played about a bit more, to find a balance between reflection and distortion. and ended up with a material based off chrome, but heavily edited in the attribute editor. The result was, in my opinion, very good

(All similarities to Apple adverts are entirely coincidental)


Obvious problem with the result...im not there! but i think trying to put myself in it would be near impossible so i'll try and hide the fact.

More thinking behind the peice...

To back up my previous post, as to what im doing, and why, I wanted to add some more thoughts.

As far as im concerned, once an object has been placed into the scene, and the lighting is okay, it doesnt matter what it does, if it's just staying on the spot.

So what I want to try is to have the object interact with the actors/scene.

Try and have an object in a cupboard for example, and have an actor touch it.

So the current plan is to have the Toaster duplicate itself when touched, and eventually have loads of them, all about the room.

Contextualise this!

I guess I need to discuss the contex for my peice, and I think the best way would be to start with my original idea, i've now scrapped...

the original plan was to do something very much in vein of Robjn taylor

with the intention of making a quirky off the wall peice. But thats as far as that idea went, it seemed to be a long build up to a "meh" punchline.
The Matchmoving would consist of the toaster floating around the room, then out the door.
I felt that having an object floating about, with little visual cues to it's location would simply look "floaty" and wouldnt sell very well.

So after thinking about how I could change it, I came up with changing the idea almost completely, while being able to add more context to the peice.


So the new plan is to make a zero budget "mock buster", a mockbuster is a peice that attempts to copy a much higher budget peice both in story and visual effects.  Examples of this can be found in:

TransMorphers

Snakes on a train

Shark attack

So the plan is to make a knock-off of Cloverfield...

The reason i chose to go for cloverfield, is that it takes a "hand held" shot approach to the films, with some jarring motion. Because, as ive mentioned before ive struggled to get smooth shots that don't look hand held, I thought that if i cant hide the fact im shooting by hand, I should try and make it a feature.

This enables me to worry slightly less about the smoothness of the shots, from a cinematography standpoint...
Though obviously, I need smooth footage to enable the software to track.

Changing plans

Decided to give up on my previous idea...

combination of difficulty and effect.