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.

What's the big deal with Minecraft?

Let me just say right off the back that I find it amazing that the game Minecraft is still alive and kicking. For those of you that may not know what Minecraft is, it is game that allows players to build constructions out of textured blocks in a 3D procedurally generated world. The game is very pixelated, as you can see in the pictures below.

This is a simple grass block in Minecraft.

This is land within Minecraft.

So I am not the biggest gamer in the world, playing the occasional Mario Kart and Halo, but I do know a lot of people that play video games. Generally, the gamers I know say that they want the most realistic and high definition games ever, but they for some reason they are still in madly in love with Minecraft. My question is why, why do people love this game when it is the complete opposite of what they are looking for.

I had to do a little research of my own to find out the answer to that question. I asked multiple people why they are really into the game. It was almost an unanimous answer, they liked the simplicity of the game both the look of the game and how the game is played. In the commercial version of Minecraft players are able to play in creative mode or survival mode. Creative mode allows the player to create their own world, they have infinite resources and space to create whatever their hearts desire. There are no lives or hunger. Survival mode on the other hand is really exactly what it says. You have to survive. There are attacks that happen at night. The player has to begin building shelter and also soothe their hunger with limited supplies. So the survival mode is definitely more challenging. In both of the games everything is made of blocks allowing your everyday joe to build amazing buildings and lands. 

So if we are to take anything away from Minecraft it is that something extraordinary can be made out of something ordinary, it is really what you do with it that makes it amazing.