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.

The Good Dinosaur - Behind The Scenes

When making The Good Dinosaur, Pixar wanted to something completely different with their landscape shots. In a normal Pixar film, there is one big "establishing shot" of the landscape in the beginning, which can take months to create. Because of the time consuming process, the rest of the film is is set inside or in a more simple location.

However, the creators of The Good Dinosaur wanted to break away from this cycle and wanted an animated film shot with the complexity of the "establishing shot." They wanted the landscape to be realistic and very detailed, but there was no way to do the number of sequences featuring big landscape shots using Pixar's traditional process. The creators simply dud not have the time to design and render that much landscape, so they had to get creative.

The creators ended up using U.S Geological Survey, which posts a huge amount of topographical date to its website, such as the height about sea level of all of the land features and lots of satellite images. So they ended up downloading a lot of that data and put into their computer and then tried to "render" the real-life landscape. And it surprisingly worked! They were actually able to point a digital "camera" anywhere in a 360-degree rotation and get an image with this data.

They ended up downloading over 65,000 square miles of USGS data. And then added more detail to the landscapes, such as trees, vegetation, and rocks. They ended up using photoreference to build these details, rather than build it from scratch. In the end, the creators made the movie very realistic, with a "painterly realism" rather than photorealism. It is still pretty realistic and very well done.

The movie also took a lot of server space, between the landscape and nature effects, The Good Dinosaur," took up 300 TB of server space, which is ten times as much as Pixars' 2013 Monsters University.

To read more click here.

The Good Dinosaur

I read a pretty cool article about the Good Dinosaur. If you have seen a trailer or know anything about the movie, the dinosaurs in it aren't your typical looking dinosaurs that you see in the textbook. A writer for the website sat down with the director and asked him why he made them the way that he did. The director said it has all to do with the theme of "What if?". So what if the dinosaurs aren't what we actually think that they look like? Yes we can tell from the bones and such but we don't know what their coloring was or what exactly they were like. This movie questions all of that. They also made the dinosaurs hillbilly type of characters. Because the dinosaurs now live among the humans, what if they became like farm animals or something like that? If you want to read more about the article you can access it here. Also here is the link to the trailer if you want to know more about the movie:

Prep for my Title Project

With lest than 2 months to the release of The Good Dinosaur, I want to make my Title sequence for this film. There's plenty of information avalible about the film online, but I wanted to try my hand at making a short Title sequence for the film. I wanted to share some of my ideas and give an Idea of the style I'm going for:

Firstly, the Two Trailers:

The Trailers give the most amount of information out there, specifically the story. As I blogged about last week, this pixar piece has alot of work put into the terrain and landscape. With all the focus on the Water especially, I wanted to use a mixture of fluid dynamics and 2D shapes to move around the names of the title sequence.

Basing alot of the style on the title sequence from Monsters, Inc.,

my plan is to use basic shapes of ovals and circles to show the characters, and keep the piece almost flat.
I also Want to try making some Text flow away as if it's in a stream:
and I'm pretty sure I found a Tutorial for how to make it work in Maya Here:

Below is a list of all the references I'd like to include in my Title Sequence:

• Fireflies
• Comet
• Arlo the Dinosaur
• Spot the Boy
• Raging Water
• Crystals
• rushing past Vast amounts of land and sky.

I'll keep you up to date on the rest of the project as I go.

The Good Dinosaur

Pixar Studio's newest feature film is arriving in theaters this Thanksgiving, and it will be the first pixar film to be released in the same year as another (ie. Inside Out) Pixar is also not slowing down. In 2016 we'll be getting Finding Dory, the sequel to Finding Nemo, followed by Toy Story 4 and the brand new property, Coco, in 2017.

Either way, Pixar is one to always push the envelope in terms of technical achievements. In Good Dinosaur, the focus was on Environmental Effects. For example:

A Look at foilage from Bug's Life (1998)

A rainy shot of procedurally placed foliage in The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Also Water has seen a whole new breath of realism, using a new algorithm to calculate fluid mechanics. Notice how in Finding Nemo the Water looks to be made more of plastic that the more real photorealistic water from The Good Dinosaur:

Marlin looks for his son in Finding Nemo (2003)

Arlo gets whisked away in photorealistic water in The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Lastly,The film's settings are unlike anything seen in a Pixar movie until this point, with a focus on large and extremely accurate open areas. The film's environments were created using terrain mapping technology to capture the actual geometry of several areas found in the American wilderness and then using that data to recreate photorealistic landscapes for huge areal shots.

The Terrain from Up (2009)

Procedurally Generated Terrain made for The Good Dinosaur (2015) 

With all the added hype surrounding this new feature, and the suggestion to work on title sequences for upcoming films I've decided to try creating a title sequence for The Good Dinosaur. I think creating a Title Sequence from scratch without having a preexisting idea of what the original looks like, I will have much more creative freedom to create my own!