Re: Shake case studies and breakdown by Andrew Shanks on Dec 21, 2006 at 5:07:43 am
Hey Brian,
surprisingly I have yet to come across any such breakdowns on the net (in regards to a commercial project, then going over the steps involved in the shake trees, ...probably more than not due to the NDA we all sign and the fact a lot of artists tend to not have much time to go into why they did things, ....we all build our trees differently, ...thats the beauty of shake, many ways to achieve the same end result). The book i have mentioned in the below thread (the visual effects encyclopaedia) does have a few breakdowns of shots (including a light sabre duel from one of the star wars prequels) showing the steps taken to achieve the looks. Basically if you do a lot of tutorials and get your head around things in shake, you will start to get an idea of "probably" how certain shots are done (as we all have a stock handfull of common techniques we use, ...combining those is probably about 90% of our day to day compositing job, ...10% is thinking outside the square to try and solve a new problem (specific to a new shot) or come up with that "new look" (which always ends up being based on an old theme anyway, ...but directors love to say "lets do something new", ...and end up coming back to a cliche more often than not ;-)
Also if you can get the oportunity to hear top vfx artists speak (conferences can be great for gleaning new techniques from those at the front line of our biz, ...plus you can get to take part in q and a's, ...we had an fx conference here in November and it was inspiring to see what Weta have been upto, and their presentations were clear enough you could see how they were doing certain things). Magazines like Digit and 3D World sometimes have some breakdowns for fx shots. Cinefex magazine is good for a bit of a general fx read (but not as informative as it once used to be (in regards to techniques)).
Re: Shake case studies and breakdown by Andrew Shanks on Dec 21, 2006 at 5:39:27 pm
If there are any particular effects shots from recent films that you might want a guess done (on how you could do it using shake, and with what elements would need to have been shot, if any cg was needed, etc), let me know and I'm sure myself and others can give you a rundown of how we would approach it.
Re: Shake case studies and breakdown by dash1969 on Dec 29, 2006 at 9:57:16 pm
Andrew,
"If there are any particular effects shots from recent films that you might want a guess done"
Ok I could pick a really cool effect shot from a film sequences but I don't want to go in over my head.So for starters what cool but useful simple effect that you know from a film that I can do just using Shake right out of the box.
And this shot would be making the use of basic mask and rotoshape but with no cg elements only real elements?
