UNIT 5
AFTER A LOT OF THOUGHT AND RESEARCH, I DECIDED TO BASE MY ENVIRONMENT OFF OF THE MYSTERY THRILLER 'BRICK' (2005)
AFTER RECEIVING A FRANTIC PHONE CALL FROM HIS EX-GIRLFRIEND, TEENAGE LONER BRENDAN FRYE LEARNS THAT HER DEAD BODY HAS BEEN FOUND. VOWING TO SOLVE HER MURDER HIMSELF, HE MUST INFILTRATE HIGH SCHOOL CLIQUES THAT HE PREVIOUSLY AVOIDED. HIS SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH PLACES HIM BEFORE SOME OF THE SCHOOL'S ROUGHEST CHARACTERS, LEADING TO A CONFRONTATION WITH A DRUG DEALER KNOWN AS "THE PIN".
LOOKING AT ONE SPECIFIC SCENE IN THE MOVIE, IN WHICH I REALLY LIKED THE CINEMATOGRAPHY WITHIN IT, I DECIDED TO USE THIS SCENE, ALTHOUGH ATTEMPT TO CHANGE THE LIGHTING SLIGHTLY, BECAUSE AS MUCH AS I DONT WANT TO FILM MYSELF ON A GREEN SCREEN, I DO HAVE TO BE VISIBLE IN THE SHOT.
These are the specific reference images I have chosen to work from, but I am using separate references for lighting, due to the image on the right being slightly too dark to see the environment around the telephone box.
DESIGN IDEA
CONCEPT AND LIGHTING
1.
MODELLING
(USING NO PRE-MADE ASSETS)
MODELLING THE 'SIDEWALK' AND ROAD
Starting with a plane, I extruded and moved parts of the plane around until I was left with a very basic shape of a road and sidewalk, I included a drop in the sidewalk as seen in my reference photos. Although I do need to now revisit this drop down, as although it looks fine at this perspective, from any other perspective (my camera, which at the time I hadn't set up yet) the drop looks very thin. Which is correct because I did model the drop too thin compared to what it should look like.
At this point I started developing the same of the sidewalk further, adding details like the curve (which will be where the telephone box will sit eventually) as well as the small details seen between the 'bricks' in the sidewalk.
2.
THE START OF THE TELEPHONE BOX, AND HILLS
I forgot to take progress photos for a this section of the telephone box, because I was concentrating on building rather than documenting, but overall it was just a lot of extruding and sizing of cubes and planes... to put it simply...
At this point I had also added a plane in at attempt to start making the grassy hill in the background of the scene. I had attempted to make some bushes out of circles, as I had a dumb assumption that if i added leafy textures to circles, that would make a realistic bush.... stupid thought... good try thoough.
Using the Displace modifier, I made the hill in the background look slightly erratic in its highs and lows, which although it looks very odd now, I do think that this helps make my final environment look a lot more realistic.
Looking back on this, I had to create a second plane to make the hills read further across my shot, except I had this one from a flat plane, rather than one I had extruded already. Although it made my life slightly harder while trying to displace the plane 'nicely' I do feel like the plane that is closer to the focal point is much more natural looking than the one further away in the environment.
3.
MODELLING THE GRASS - PARTICLE SYSTEM SIMULATIONS AND WEIGHT PAINTING
With a lot of trial and error, I managed to finally get something that somewhat resembled grass, at this point I did come to the realisation that physics simulation do in fact completely clog up my render, as the difference in render speed between this photo and the last photo was 20x slower...
You can also notice the difference in the first and second plane in this image, where the second is a lot more curvy and round, compared to the harm, relatively flat first plane.
I have heard a lot of horror stories about weight painting, and I am inclined to agree with them, purely because while attempting to do this, no matter what and where I told blender I wanted the grass to form, it was never exactly how I wanted it to be.
Using the reference picture and a mild amount of guessing, I made sure to leave the sections of ground closest to the pavement pretty bare, as to reflect my film, but also to be environmentally accurate to life. This also creates a smoother transition to the hills behind.
4.
TEXTURING THE CURRENTLY CREATED ASSETS
Because the grass simulation was actually on the same plane as the ground, I had to tell Blender to texture them separately. In order to add depth and vibrancy to the grass, you can see on the left that I coloured the bottom of the grass darker, and the very tip brighter. I also added a Translucent BSDF to the grass, to imitate the look of real grass, where at the edges if you look really close, it can appear slightly see through.
Comparing the photo on the left to the photo on the right, you will notice that I have rotated the background HDRI, as this will end up being in my final greenscreen film, I wanted to find a more attractive angle, where it blends in better to the scenery. At this point I also lowered the strength of the background in order to get an idea of how dark I wanted the scene to be (before adding any ambient lighting to set the scene.
I knew I wanted to have a cool light reflection on the pavement, where the light from the telephone box would reflect on it. I used a noise texture, alongside bringing the roughness all the way down, to mimic an almost wet, or semi- wet floor and when the light reflects off this I feel as though it gives a lot more depth to the floor, especially as you can see the shadows and the reflections in coming off of the pavement.
Comparing this photo to the one without the emission lighting, you can see how drastic the change has been in the floor, it gives it so much more texture and depth. especially further back where there is minimal to no lighting hitting the pavement.
5.
FINALLY MODELLING (finishing) THE TELEPHONE BOX
My favourite part of the scene I chose from 'Brick' was actually the lighting, I loved the way the telephone box was lit, and how the character was lit inside the telephone box. I knew that the shot I had chose was too dark and it would need to be lighter, but I wanted to keep that intense contrast of the telephone box lighting.
Above you can see the modelling of the telephone box sign I had some issues with this, as the text I was sing was black text on a white background, whereas I needed white text on a red background. For some reason, up until the end of the project almost, I had made the lighting of the box blue (this got changed before the final render, so please imagine the blue color in the nodes screenshot is actually red, and the black is actually white)
I managed to figure out how to do this quite easily, with a bit of googling and slightly changing settings.
Much like how I added the texture to the floor, I also added a noise texture to the lighting, This scattered the emission slightly ,as well as the reflection on the box itself, this helped mimic a glass screen, whereas before adding these features, the telephone sign was very flat and way too intense as an image.
TRYING (AND FAILING) TO MAKE A TREE
RENDER TEST, FOR GREENSCREENING
This was the render version I used as a lighting and angle reference for shooting my green screen portion of the project. It wasn't a fully finished render, but I had the right type of lighting that I wanted to display, so it worked well still.
For this entire project, the part that I found most difficult was doing the green screening. Once we had paired my scene with the green screen, it was very easy to see how and where we needed to light the scene to make me fit nicely within the scene. Although my biggest issues came when recording myself, purely because I'm weird and don't like being recorded. With the other people in my filming group it felt like I was the centre of attention (which was partially true) and it threw me off everything I needed to have done during recording. We re-shot the scenes three times, in hope of getting something useable, which I definitely do. And with a bit of magic, I'll be barely visible in the scene, but matching with the lighting. Hopefully.
GREENSCREENING
This is the Greenscreen Keying I did on Blender to remove the green screen, leaving just my body and the telephone wire in the file. I had some issues when removing the green screen, for some reason the lighting that I had done while filming the shot was really incorrect (even though I had used a PNG of my environment as reference for the lighting. You can also see that the outline of my body was not very clear at all, very pixilated. I also couldn't get a middle point when keying out the green screen, where my body would be quite clear, but the telephone wire would also not get keyed out.
Another issue I came across with my green screen footage was that once I uploaded my footage into my blender file, I realised that when shooting my footage, I had actually shot at a mildly different camera angle to that my blender camera was at, meaning that (if you look at the photos above) one of my feet is half in the ground, while the other one is actually still floating mid air. I initially tried to fix this by adding a second plane into my environment, in an attempt to botch fix my foot, to make it appear a though it was touching the floor.
In theory this issue could have been solved in a significantly easier way, as we did have a chance to re-shoot our green screen footage if necessary. I decided to do this all the difficult way, as I REALLY didn't want to re-shoot my green screen footage.
In order to fix the issues I've outlined above. I took my green screen footage into After Effects. This gave me the chance to edit all of the issues I had with my footage. I started out my attempting to colour match my footage further, I did try to lighten up my trouser legs (there were shot very dark during the green screen shooting) unfortunately I couldn't lighten them up as much as I wanted, so they still appear very dark.
I also duplicated my green screen footage, in order to presence both the telephone wire and my body, without reducing the film quality of either section.
Finally, I made a third duplicate of my green screen footage, masking out my back left leg, in order to move it downwards, so both my feet would be touching the floor in the scene. I then painted the gap this left in between my lower and upper leg, to create the illusion that I never made this mistake in the first place. This footage then went back into blender, as a successful colour match to my environment.
If you compare the image in After Effects to the image I have above, from the first green screen keying in Blender, you can see the massive change in colour correction I did, this created a massive difference in the quality of my footage within the environment.
LIGHTING TESTS
(FOR THE FINAL RENDER + GREENSCREEN)
Above is a wide variety of lighting tests I did, and the issues I faced while changing small details in my scene. As you scroll through you will see me attempt to fix lighting, then losing details I previously really liked, trying to get said details back, and having to retouch the lighting again, basically going in a massive cycle of losing the features I really liked and trying to fix it, in turn ruining the lighting in my shot.
I knew with the nature of my scene, that I wanted to have some sort of effect or animation on top of myself in the scene, In order to really sell that this wasn't a green screen (even though it is). I decided I wanted to make the light flicker in the telephone box, for multiple reasons. I thought this gave a really interesting effect in the scene as a whole. But also, having the light flickering also changed the brightness in my scene slightly, which gave momentary light into additional features. In previous light tests I showed close up clips of the grass and the textures I had added to the floor. In making the light flicker, this enhanced these details slightly, from where I had previously lost them. As it is a very dark scene as well, having this light flickering also momentarily lit myself and the telephone box up more.
FINAL LIGHTING AND ENVIRONMENT
This is the final lighting I set on for my scene. Although I wish I did manage to save some details that can be seen in previous renders, with the amount of time it took me with modelling and rendering, I am very happy with the lighting and environment. From the previous renders, in the final environment, I did end up scaling the hills further upwards, along with adding the house that can be seen in the original inspiration, as well as the trees and the bushes.
One issue that I did never figure out how to solve, was that although the glass mimicked real life glass very well, for some reason I was having a harsh reflection of the far corner of the telephone box, and my arm, in the front right window, when in real life this would not happen. I believe It could be a sort of mirror effect the glass is having on itself, no matter what I tried I could not get this to fix itself. It isn't a massive issue, but it is annoying as it doesn't affect the quality of my render, especially as we were aiming for realistic environments, and me having 2 arms at certain point of the video is not exactly realistic.
In my original plan, alongside having the grass being modeled by me, I also tried very hard to model the bushes and tree myself, but unfortunately for some reason I could not get this to work properly. Unfortunately isn't really the word to use in this situation, I am disappointed that I could not figure out how to create the bushes and trees in the way I wanted to, but ultimately my rendering time was at around 2fpm and I did not need any more assets in the file as it would take too long to render. I ended up finding some bushes and trees in semi flat coloured backgrounds. I then keyed these out the same way as my green screen footage and added them into my file. Honestly I feel like this doesn't look bad at all. the tree is slightly fuzzy unfortunately, but in the final render you cant really tell.
SIKE, THE ACTUAL FINAL ENVIRONMENT DESIGN
EDITING
(in premiere pro)
PROBLEM SOLVING
I faced multiple issues trying to match my green screen footage to my Blender Environment.
The first being that I wish we had more time to experiment with green screening, speicifcally learning the techniques and camera requirements for a good green screen. Once I got my footage from the green screen session, I realised that my footage was quite grainy, and not very clear. Trying to match my footage to my blender environment in the green screen meant that it was actually quite dark, and I was missing quite a lot of details, specifically on my trousers.
I took my footage into After Effects in an attempt to lighten it up, and colour match it more, as for some reason the first time I added it into my blender file, it wasn’t colour matched at all, I assume this was due to properties in my blender file that weren’t visible while green screening.
I had to do a LOT of research for this project, mostly because I was really enthusiastic from the start and felt as though I was speeding ahead, but also because I knew this project was going to be a lot, especially with what I had planned, so I needed to be prepared and knowledgeable about what I was producing to create the best effects.
RESEARCHING
The day I got my green screen footage I began watching tutorials and playing around with my footage to see how easily I could key out the green screen, I watched this very useful (but quick) tutorial on how to key out my greenscreen.
BLENDER GREEN SCREEN TUTORIAL IN 1 MINUTE
After I realised I was having issues with my green screen I used elements of this video to help aid the quality of my green screen, I also used portions of this video later on, to create the lighting inside the telephone box.
HOW TO MAKE A REALLY REALISTIC GREEN SCREEN EFFECT
This is the tutorial I used to help create the particle simulation, that turned into the grass
MAKING REALISTIC GRASS WITH PARTICLE SYSTEM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWRLO80X4vk&authuser=0
Once I started focusing more neon the lights coming from the telephone box, I used a variety of tutorials below to help create the effect I was after. Including the flickering lights and emissions.
EASIEST WAY TO MAKE NEON SIGNS IN BLENDER
HOW TO MAKE A FLICKERING LIGHT IN BLENDER
MAKE NEON SIGNS IN BLENDER
HOW TO MAKE AN IMAGE LOOK LIKE A TV SCREEN THAT EMITS LIGHT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eNN2Ep3Rqs&authuser=0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPaYIEqDEZE&authuser=0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUwtNfsioIE&authuser=0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X06x7T_a6fc&authuser=0
Finally, this tutorial helped me to create a focal point for my shot, meaning that the grass in the background started to look a lot further away than it actually was
BOKEH EFFECT IN BLENDER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfyn6Sp-jSk&authuser=0
FINAL FOOTAGE
