CINEFEX Magazine

CINEFEX Magazine is a bimonthly magazine devoted to motion Picture Visual Effects, and it is awesome! If you ever wanted to know how they make those amazing visual effects in motion pictures, this is the place to stop by. This Magazine is a beautiful rendition of who did what, and how it's made. It happens to be in the library (Thanks to Arturo's convincing words), and I have been drooling over the pages.

The Magazine covers almost any major film. Films like Oblivion, Elysium, Man of Steel, Gravity, Carrie, Maleficent, Godzilla, Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar, and Ant-Man are talked about in depth is some of the more recent issues. Overall, the articles go to great length to describe the process and what the team learned along the way.

This magazine is a great investment for all of those motion graphics lovers who find themselves asking "how did they do that?" Their Subscription cost is a bit steep, but for $50 a year, you can get all the access to specific and exact information to how they did specific things in some of your favorite films.

*Another added bonus for those looking to get in to the Visual Effects Industry:*
*Studios looking for interns or other help advertise in this magazine too!!*

I Would definitely recommend taking a look through next time your in the library!

Comets, fireflies and The Good Dinosaur

I've been doing research into how to make a good comet effect for my title sequence, and I wanted to share some of the videos and Links I've come across in my research.




Video Copilot Blog about Comets There isn't too much there, but it does reference some video examples and make a few suggestions I'd like to try.


I've thought about the option to instead of using particles, maybe it would make more sense to use some kind of shatter, especially if I want the comet trail to morph into the fireflies that are scene in the trailer.

The Shatterize Effect
The Disintegration Effect

In my experience, none of the Native Particle Simulators in After Effects allow me to use custom particles, but I believe I can shatter something in a custom way.

Ultimately, If I can't find a way to create the fire fly shape from the comet, I will end up just doing shaded spheres. I wonder if I can find a way to have them follow some Path.
Maybe, I can find a way to make the particle emitter make only one particle and move that layer around.

Either way my idea needs some more work.

Deep Compositing

Have You Seen Those Amazing Composited Images In The Movies?
For a long time, the movie industry would hire visual effect houses to create these beautiful Scenes and add in elements to a movies story. Things like set extensions, overlays, masks and other sisual effects were often done by major names like Weta Digital, Animal Logic, MPC, ILM, FUEL VFX and others.


But what happens when after a shot is considered finished and now it's time to get the directors opinion? Often, when a shot is delivered to the main production studio, the directer with "I like the shot, but it would be better if..." "that character's face wasn't so dark?", or "if I could see through that dust cloud a little bit easier" or " if the camera were a little more to the left?" yadayadayada.....
Usually, these minor changes are the major headache for Visual Effect Compositors because they would make the small change. and have to render the entire scene to see if it was any better. (Just imagine how much time that would take on a major battle scene where hundreds of characters are fighting, and we need to just move one of the characters to the left!)

In 2010 a group of compositors reviled a remedy to this headache. After researching for a number of years, their solution is today known as Deep Compositing. In a Deep Composited image, every pixel in an image has not only a Red Green Blue and Transparency value, but also a depth value in the scene. This minor change makes the entire work flow unbelievably faster. The video below describes the concept:


Using Deep Compositing, making and update to a little part of the scene was now faster than ever before.
This Semester, I am taking an experimental Course in Maya Animation, and a majority of the curriculum is based on what technical achievement by some group of people made a program like Maya function the way it does today. In the same way I see that there are compositing techniques that are still being developed and seeing that research is still being done inspires me to continue my pursuits as an Emerging Media degree.