FMP stuff

FMP writeup

• Section 1: inserting myself into blender using green screen/ camera trickery (compositing)

• Section 2: creating within blender (modelling)

• Section 3: technical stuff (lighting. light matching, physically based lighting / eevee vs cycles)

• Section 4: sound design

• Section 5: conclusion / evaluation

Section 1: inserting myself into blender using green screen

to start off with my FMP, i needed to get the process of green screen down so i knew it was possible long term. I decided to green screen myself inside different 3D environments I've created using blender. i took myself into the green screen room and recorded all the footage I wanted to use the different environments I had in mind. i was inspired by ian huberts workflow, incorporating green screen footage into 3d environments, which is useful for low to no budget filming.

after recording my footage, i transfer it into after effects to begin keying and masking. i will use my good friend gabriel as an example.i recorded about 6 scenes in the green screen room, all in different poses and movements. a lot is relying on the footage quality as well as the key in order to get a good green screen sure is powerful and can look great within the right hands, it does come with its limits which i learned when making the scenes, a lot of which depends on the setup of the green screen. one of the main limitations of green screen is the fact that im essentially a 2d plane in a 3d environment. this could limit certain shots and scenes. due to time and equipment restraints, most of the scenes i created for the fmp are pretty basic and unfortunately, the best i can do with what is available. there is no room for any crazy camera movement or unusual shots, something in which i would’ve enjoyed trying out. another thing which bugged me a lot in making this was the fact i simply looked too clean or looked out of place in some scenes. even though i did this in after effects for a more efficient workflow, keying can also be done in blender with compositing nodes, which i tried, with similar results but it is a slower method.

with the power of after effects this video with gabe, who i want to add to blender, will be nice and transparent. we will start with removing everything else except gabe. 

• insert the video clip into after effects, and on the right hand side in effects and presets, search for 'Keylight (1.2)' and insert it onto the clip.

• then, select a screen colour, and adjust the settings to get a better key, its honestly up to you, depending on your green screen setup, i would recommend clicking the screen matte dropdown and adjusting the clip black and clip white values.

• when you have finished with that, we want to cut everything else, with the clip selected press G to select the pen tool, and cut out what u want to remove. now export the clip, enabling rgb + alpha. this is very important, as without an alpha channel, gabe wont be transparent.

section 2: creating within blender

modelling took up a decently large part of this fmp. mainly for blocking out/scene creation. this was one of the more harder creative challenges, i had to take into account many things. i had to model my environments based off the green screen footage i obtained. you had to really think about light matching too.

to create the long hallways within my scene, i created a cube and scaled it up. then deleted 2 of its faces. i added a plane and gave it an emission shader.

and use an array modifier. a tip for building environments, its very helpful to add a camera and position it where you need, so you know where to place your meshes in frame. the environments i created were rather blocky and careless, this was to save time and spend time creating detail that the camera would see. the majority of the buildings and textures you see are on planes, loop cut and extruded out, to create depth. the good thing about creating scenes and models which wont be used in a game engine, is that you can go crazy with poly counts, you have more time to focus making it good instead of optimization. a lot of textures in my work were either procedural using blenders shader editor, or real life scans. The Shader Editor is used to edit materials which are used for rendering. Materials used by Cycles and Eevee are defined using a node tree system (https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/shader_editor.html). this is a rather versatile tool, being able to create procedural textures within blender. this websites provides real world pictures and scans of a wide range of objects and buildings. the free plan provides 15 credits to spend on textures free which are to be used for personal and commercial use. within the video summary, i mention textures.com briefly. 

video summary:

section 3: technical stuff (eevee vs cycles, rendering)

now for the technical stuff, lighting and rendering. i used cycles for almost all of this. cycles offers a lot of benefits, especially if you strive for realism. the difference between eevee and cycles is that they use two completely different lighting methods. eevee is real-time lighting and cycles is physically based or ray tracing. Ray tracing is a rendering technique that can realistically simulate the lighting of a scene and its objects, this you could imagine, is very computationally expensive, which is why cycles can be a big pain on older PCs. to render my scenes, i used a render farm. A render farm is a high-performance computer system, e.g. a group of colors, built to render CGI, typically for film and television visual effects. to export your render, you must save it as pngs. pngs are superior to video codecs because the detail on the imagery is higher quality. several computers rendered out parts of the render equally, then sent all the images to a folder on my PC. After everything was exported, I moved onto Premiere Pro, where I imported the image sequence. Premiere Pro automatically turns an image sequence into a video which is a very useful feature. now i am within the software I have my scenes exported and ready for editing 

section 4: editing and sound design

to start off with I found these cool transitions and digital glitch effects which I thought would be a good choice for this project. sound editing was pretty minimal too. I found wendigo sound effects I liked on YouTube, downloaded them, and put them into FL Studio which is a digital audio workstation (or a DAW). i then modulated the pitch and reverb, also turning distortion up a little bit and then exporting from FL back into Premiere Pro. the fmp project video was pretty short so it didn't take a lot of my  time and energy.

section 5: conclusion and evaluation

In conclusion, this project was great fun and also its great difficulty kept me on my toes. I'm really happy I got to try something completely new and out of my field and it turned out great for the most part. I really enjoyed creating worlds that my green screen self could almost live in. I learnt a lot about blender and how it works regarding green screen and I learnt a little bit more about the whole technical process behind good renders and producing something that of you would deem realistic. I'm confident in saying if I recreated this in the future it would be a better quality and higher standards. I also had to learn quite a lot about the shader editor in blender and I believe I'm semi competent in producing shaders using the shader nodes by myself without tutorial or without guidance.in the future if I could do this again, I would definitely do it with a better green screen setup and a bit more time on my hands; more of a passion project than anything.  I would also better plan out my work better and decide what would need to be done on the green screen early.  I also I'm really sad that I can't include some of my older scenes I spend a lot of time on due to narrowing my scope and get the fmp video done in time if I had more time I would find a way to include those scenes and more. My big goal in a long time has been to make a blender short film so maybe someday I can implement some of the techniques and methods I learn in this fmp which I think will be very beneficial.