Hasta La Motion!

India’s VFX scene has scaled up and how. Over the last number of years, we have seen VFX go through multiple evolutions. The landscape of storytelling has drastically expanded with VFX artists becoming more and more capable of breathing life into imaginations. When we speak of India’s VFX scene, movies like 2.0 and Bahubali automatically spring to mind. While Bahubali franchise captured the hearts of the India audiences with unprecedented visual illustrations, 2.0 wowed the audiences with stunning visuals that demonstrated the strides Indian storytelling has taken. AnimationXpress spoke to the man behind the VFX of these aforementioned masterpieces over a cuppa at the India Joy festival 2019. 

VFX veteran Srinivas Mohan

Expounding on the difficulties of Indian VFX scenario and the way he managed to create imagery on a tight budget for several movies, VFX veteran Srinivas Mohan spoke candidly about his journey and observations.

His take on the Indian VFX trajectory

When I first came to the industry, tools were not very user-friendly whereas now VFX technology has gone through an evolution and they are much more easier to operate on. We have passed the tool section. Now we need creativity! That is one of the major things that we don’t see much these days.

Being a visual effects supervisor

Now-a-days students are more task-oriented and they walk in with the narrow mindset that they have to finish a particular task but previz is more like journalism. If you ask me an example..

One day a student said to me, “‘Sir I want to become a visual effects supervisor”. I asked him as to what he thought is the role of the VFX supervisor and he answered that it is about going to the location and putting up the green screens and arranging everything. I think a lot of people are fundamentally unaware of the role of a visual effects supervisor.

If we say visual effects supervisor, we should know about the film in its entirety right from what director needs, what he thinks of the movie and how a major motion film is made. Most importantly, how the DOP approaches it…

VFX supervisor needs to know all the elements of the craft of filmmaking including the sound because sometimes even sound plays a crucial role in filmmkaing. Of Course all the green screen arrangement etc is there, but the fundamental role of supervisor is to communicate with the team.

Team as in the director, DOP and all the other departments including the actors because when an actor acts, he has to do it accordingly so that kind of communication skill is needed in order to operate as a VFX supervisor. You should also have a thorough knowledge of the visual effects tools.

Importance of previz (Previsualisation)

First thing will be that the director will be narrating the entire story which takes about 4 or 5 hours. For example:- for Bahubali itself SS Rajamouli narrated the story for three and a half hours. 

So we hear the script and then we select from the script as to which portions have vfx-heavy sequences. So the first role is to get the director’s vision from paper into a some kind of a visual form. The script is entirely in writing so the director will say that he wants a waterfall. A huge waterfall that touches the sky but we need to know what kind of waterfall, how big it is and what are the details that need to be infused so even if he says we need a huge waterfall, we need to know the scale and there are many variations. Sometimes we used to get references and other times we had to improvise.

If its an action sequence, we need to animate that, we need to do the rough previsualisation. All the departments should be in synch in order to execute the director’s vision. So the production guys will help, the DOP will help us.. All departments that are involved in that stage give their inputs until we arrive at an understanding. This is what we are going to show. After the final output, we know what you want. The second role is that we need to specify which portion we need to shoot live and which sequence will be computer generated. So that’s how the VFX breakdown happens. That’s how it flows down to the final stages of the project

His VFX experiences 

For me, one of the other challenge is; I play two roles. I play the role of VFX supervisor and the other one is of the VFX producer. VFX supervisor’s role is easier because we have a lot of people in the creative team so we get sufficient help but being the VFX producer is one of the toughest jobs in India. Because people are exposed to world cinema and they expect the Hollywood kind of quality because they have seen the big films. They expect the Hollywood quality within our Indian budget. So the main challenge is that when you take a hollywood project which like a 1500-2000 crores project. If you take the first part, Enthiran, the budget was only 125 crores in which vfx allocation in the film was only 14 crore rupees. Bahubali’s first part when I did it, the budget was around 150 crores in which I got only 20 crores for VFX but they expect something on part with our western counterparts. For me the first project that I started with was Enthiran
and I had also done Shivaji where I did the skin grafting, all of that I sat personally in my office and completed that. 

Evolving newer ways to create images

For the first part of Robot, Enthiran, I needed to step out and observe things. I told the director that I want to travel all around the world to see things. He obliged and I visited a lot of countries. I went to Ireland.. I basically visited many leading studios of Hollywood. The skin grafting I had done for Shivaji actually attracted many eyeballs and gave me recognition. That project become my visiting card. They told me about their plans and I understood that process we were going to undertake is completely different than the Hollywood ones. I realised that we can’t work with that kind of budget. I depended on technology but if the existing technology would be very expensive. I took up that challenge and visited the SIGGRAPH exhibitions, I found one suitable tool for Enthiran. We used the Lightstage technology. It’s not in the very popular Hollywood expensive bracket. Above all, I got a lot of support from that. We also used whitepaper. So that was one of the simple way in which we could get good quality content despite low budgets. 

Explaining limitations to directors

Second thing I did was limiting certain things with the director. If you see the robot in the first part, he’d wear a simple clothing, he has short hair and he would always wear glasses. For me, creating the eyes is one of the toughest part and creating the flowing hair is another challenging task. Those three decisions actually whittled down around 30 percent of the budget. Directors also understood the limitations. These days directors are aware of the technology and they understand the limitations when we approach them about it. The war scene in Bahubali, my idea was to go to the actual location like huge mountains and land. So that’s why we had to take help of the green-screen by shooting it on a fifty feet land. But I made it clear as to what was possible and he understood and did the elements within the possibilities that I had discussed with him. These are the two things; one is the emerging technologies that can be explored and understanding the director’s vision.

Upcoming project RRR

That’s what is happening. Now for all the pre-visualisation that we carry out, I started using the gammage. For me, the important thing is the technology. If you bring the latest and the emerging technology, I can reduce the budget and work with it. Even for RRR, there are big big companies that are tying up with us only because we are doing something new.

The post Exclusive: VFX veteran Srinivas Mohan speaks about his journey appeared first on AnimationXpress.

After watching Zachary Corzine’s Procedural Systems training series, Nick shows you how he learned to create a stitching effect in Cinema 4D.

In this quick tutorial, you’ll learn how to make a stitched look Nick learned while watching the Procedural Systems training series in Greyscalegorilla Plus.

He also shows you how he lit and textured the scene in Redshift using the Everyday Material Collection (also included with a Greyscalegorilla Plus membership.)

Procedural Systems with Zachary Corzine

Interested in streaming Zach’s popular training series? It’s only available inside of Greyscalegorilla Plus. Join today and start streaming over 200 hours of professional training and access over 1200 downloadable materials. Learn more about Greyscalegorilla Plus.

Tutorial Transcript

Todd Blankenship: 00:00 Hey, what’s up? I’m Todd. And in this video we’re going to show you how to do some procedural stitching type effects in Cinema 4D kind of like this. So these renders come from Zachary Corzine who did a full training series about creating procedural looks that we have over on Greyscalegorilla Plus. And if you don’t know what plus is, it’s our subscription platform where you pay one time a year and you get access to all of our training, a lot of great material downloads and plenty of other downloads as well. And so on Plus we also have a quick tips page where we’re constantly adding new content. And Nick did a shorter version of one of the techniques from this training for the quick tips page and we wanted to go ahead and share that quick tip with you guys. So what you’re watching right now is a YouTube video. It’s based on a quick tip that’s based on some training in Greyscalegorilla Plus. So before I confuse myself any further, this Rosa video,

Nick Campbell: 00:56 Hey, it’s Nick here with another quick tip for Greyscalegorilla Plus. Today we’ll be making this beautiful stitching technique using built in Cinema 4D tools. Now I learned this technique by watching the procedural systems with Zachary Corzine training here also on Greyscalegorilla Plus if you haven’t checked this out, it is packed full of really beautiful ways that he uses simple Cinema 4D tools to create some really beautiful renders here. Um, if you haven’t checked it out, definitely go watch it. Uh, what I wanted to do with this quick tip is just bring out one of the really simple but beautiful things that I learned in this training out into a quick tip. So without further ado, let’s get started. Let’s open up a new scene file and let’s go ahead and grab a plane. Now we’re gonna have to shrink this down a little bit.

Nick Campbell: 01:43 Let’s go to 200 by 200 and then also reduce the segments of the plane. Now we’ll light this thing up in just a moment. So let’s turn off our Redshift render view. And by the way, you can follow along with any um, uh, version of Cinema 4D or any render and just light it and add materials, uh, with your own render. Uh, okay, so what do we do? First thing we need to do is add an atom array, A. T. O. M. I hit shift C to bring up our little search bar, hit Atom array and just drag your plane inside of your atom array and you get the basic atom array look. Well, how do we start to get all those nice little bevels? Well, we use a bevel. So go ahead and hit shift C again and go B E V, E L.

Nick Campbell: 02:24 there it is. And when you find it in your little finder here and shifts, you just click it or hit enter and it will come into your scene. Now you just want to make the bevel a, a child of the plane. So just drag it in hierarchy under the plane. The next thing we’re going to want to do is head on over here to your options inside of your bevel and go to point mode instead of edge mode. And start to turn up your offset until we get this nice little pattern, something along the lines of this. Okay, so where do we go from here? Well, all we have to do now is just duplicate our bevels. So select your bevel. I want you to copy paste and just control C control V under keyboard of course, and then bring this under the plane again.

Nick Campbell: 03:07 Now don’t make it a child of the bevel. Make it a, a child of the plane just like this. And now when you go into that second bevel, head on over here to your component mode and go back to edge mode and shrink this offset down quite a lot. You want it a little bit closer, uh, to make this type of pattern. You don’t want to go too far, too big or too small. You start to get some weird patterns. Again, if that’s the look you’re going for it, go ahead. But to build this one, we’re going to go somewhere around here and again, let’s copy and paste that bevel and bring it under our plane. One more time. We’re going to have three total bevels. And let’s shrink this one way, way down. Okay. So that’s somewhat likely like it, but we’re not getting all that nice little detail.

Nick Campbell: 03:51 So first thing we need to do is go up to our atom array, shrink down our cylinder radius. Let’s go to something like 0.7 0.8 maybe and also go to our um, sphere radius and make it something like to, okay, now we’re getting a little bit more of that beautiful thin stitching, but how do we get all this other extra detail? Well, this is where we’re going to go into our second bevel and go to our subdivision and turn it up to one can already. We’re getting more detail. And again, w w you know, as you follow along, experiment with this effect, experiment with it, with other geometry, we could do that as well. Um, so let’s set that first, the second bevel, two subdivision one and then our third bevel. We want to crank this up even higher. So this is where we’re getting in these nice little stitching dots.

Nick Campbell: 04:38 So maybe something like two or even three is going to give us these nice little patterns in here and give us this really beautiful intricate effect using just atom array and bevel. They had no clue you could do this stuff. Okay, so the last thing we need to do now is head on into our deformer menu here. Go to our displacer, and again, just add it in the hierarchy, uh, with all the bevels. Now this is uh, how we’re going to add a little bit of cushion, a little bit of push up in the middle of this thing. Go to your display, sir, and head on over to shading and open up the shader and add a gradient. Now by default it’s kinda tilting it sideways because our gradient is just going from black to white left to right. Instead go ahead and click into your gradient, go to type and go to radial.

Nick Campbell: 05:24 Well, I’m sorry, not radial, circular. There we go. And now we’re getting that push up effect. In fact, right now it’s a push down effect. Now we could reverse the gradient if you want, but you could also just go into the displacer, go to object and just reverse the cushion here, the the height. Okay. So now we have this nice push up effect. We have all this nice stitching and you can actually go in and start adding other bevels, other patterns and other pieces of geometry even to see what this looks like. In fact, let’s quickly go ahead and do that. Let’s just go grab a cube and a set this whole thing up with a cube as well. So I just duplicated our atom array. I’m just gonna turn all that stuff off and I’m going to replace the, uh, plane with a cube.

Nick Campbell: 06:09 So all I did was replace that cube. Go delete our plane. And now we have a completely unique look all on a different piece of geometry. In this case, we may have to, uh, shrink our cube down a little bit just to get a little bit more detail. But again, look at it totally, drastically different. Look, we may have to play around a little bit more with this to get something that we want, but again, experiment with this and see what it could bring to some of your work. Now let’s go ahead and go back to this one. Promised you that we would come light this thing. I’m going to go copy and paste this into, uh, the Redshift starters scene. Now this is where the tutorial started. Let’s go ahead and fire up our Redshift render view. And if you don’t have the Redshift starters scene, uh, this and also the materials we’re going to use are also included in Greyscalegorilla Plus.

Nick Campbell: 07:01 So, uh, you may want to stop and just download all the materials and uh, just so you have them for future, uh, quick tips as well. All right, so here we are. Um, this is, uh, let’s turn off the example and let’s paste in our brand new one that we just made. It’s a little bit low in the scene. So let me leave this other one on just so I can match it. I’m gonna bring it up in the scene. Just so it is close enough to it for depth of field reasons. Let’s turn off that original one. And here we are with some basic lighting. It’s a basic stuff all set up, ready to go and Redshift. And so let’s add a material well over in your content browser. Once you have everything installed from Greyscalegorilla Plus you’ll have access to, let’s go find it, the Everyday Material Collection.

Nick Campbell: 07:43 Now if you haven’t played around with this, there’s tons of materials in here, uh, and there’s some really beautiful cloth as well. So let’s go, uh, first of all find it has so much stuff here and we’ll want to make sure we have it there. It is Everyday Material Collection and uh, I want the one for Redshift. So let’s open up that. Let’s go to fabrics. Open up that one. And you can see we have all these fabrics. Let’s just use this bed sheet white as a start. Let’s drag that onto our atom array. And when we go back to our attributes, um, you’re going to see, uh, we got a nice little cloth effect. We probably UV mapping might be a little, um, little too tight knit on this thing. So I’m just going to go to cubic mapping and do a little zoom in here to kind of see what this looks like and our depth.

Nick Campbell: 08:31 The field’s a little tight and it looks like our cloth is a little bit too large. So let’s do something like 50% that might shrink our cloth down a little bit more. If dad’s looking better, let’s zoom back out. So we get our depth of field all set up looking good and man, that’s looking pretty nice to me. Now. Um, if you, uh, have the Redshift starter scene, um, and uh, you, you have all this extra stuff and you have the content browser, experiment with different fabrics, with different shapes. And like I said, definitely go check out Zach’s course. Little tips like this. Uh, and the way that he uses MoGraph is just mind blowing to me. I learned so much by watching it. Uh, like I said, I had to come out and make a little, a quick tip just for you guys. So that’s it for today. Let me know your thoughts and thank you as always for watching. I’ll see you in another quick tip really soon.

Todd Blankenship: 09:20 So I hope you enjoyed this technique. We kind of just wanted to give you a peek at the type of content that we’re uploading to Greyscalegorilla Plus, and so yeah, we’ve got a lot more of that stuff in there now and obviously tons more rolling out in the coming months. Anyways, thanks for watching and I’ll see all of you guys next time.

The post Easily Create this Complex Stitching Effect in Cinema 4D appeared first on Greyscalegorilla.

RADWIMPS has once again collaborated with Makoto Shinkai on anime film Weathering with You, which was released in cinemas around the world earlier this year, and is coming to the US in January 2020.

Shinkai’s Your Name was one of the most successful anime film releases of all time. While it was a visual and narrative delight, the musical score composed by RADWIMPS was one of the big reasons for its success. Now that the film has gone onto major success already, RADWIMPS has released its soundtrack, Weathering With You, complete version in Japan. And the main theme is in English!

Weathering With You soundtrack is now available on services such as Apple Music, Spotify, Google Play, and more, and includes both a Japanese and English language version of Is There Still Anything Love Can Do?

GKIDS will be bringing Weathering With You to theaters in North America on 17 January, but Fathom Events will be holding special preview screenings for both the English dubbed release on 15 January and the original Japanese-language release on 16 January.

The post RADWIMPS releases English version of ‘Weathering With You’ score appeared first on AnimationXpress.

Kaley Cuoco who delighted audience with her role in The Big Bang Theory, will now be voicing the titular character in the animated Harley Quinn series. The series follows Harley attempting to make it on her own as the criminal Queenpin of Gotham City, after realising that she deserves better than The Joker (Alan Tudyk).

Cuoco also serves as an executive producer on the DC Universe series through her Yes, Norman production banner, and is pretty excited to see the project coming to life. She talked about the challenges of the role in a recent interview, and mentioned the unique challenges she faced stepping into the world of voice acting.

The cast of Harley Quinn also includes Lake Bell (Wet Hot American Summer) as Poison Ivy, JB Smoove (Curb Your Enthusiasm) as Frank the Plant, Diedrich Bader (Veep) as Batman, Tony Hale (Arrested Development, Veep) as Doctor Psycho, Jason Alexander (Seinfeld) as Sy Borgman, Chris Meloni (Happy!, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) as Commissioner Gordon, Ron Funches (Powerless) as King Shark, Rahul Kohli (iZombie) as Scarecrow, Jim Rash (Mike Tyson Mysteries) as The Riddler, Wanda Sykes (Black-ish) as the Queen of Fables, and Jacob Tremblay (Room, Good Boys) as Damian Wayne/Robin.

Harley Quinn airs on DC Universe every Friday.

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Boonie Bears Adventures 2 is a brand-new 3D Animation series of 2018 production year with 52 Episodes of 13 minutes each. One Take Media Co. has all media rights across all platforms for SAARC nations. Adventurers 2 is from the well-known animation house Fantawaild Holdings Inc. 

Boonie Bears Adventurers 2 is called so for a reason. This series follows Vick, Briar and Bramble on brand-new wild adventures. Pine Tree Mountain has become a preserve that draws visitors from all around to see its natural beauty and wildlife. This wildlife now includes some new but familiar residents: Hugo and friends from the hit movie, The Big Top Secret! 

After Wolfgang’s defeat in season one, an ambitious super scientist, Rex Vector, is sent to secretly capture animals in return for funding for his experiments. Carly returns to the forest during a break from her studies to find that all is not well. Times are dire for the forest and its friends and she must once again team up with Vick, Briar and Bramble to defend the forest from the injustices of Wolfgang and Rex Vector, facing brand new challenges and greater dangers than ever before. Will they be enough to save the forest? Join the fight in an all new season of The Adventurers!

One Take Media Co. (OTMC) is a global content production and distribution house based in Mumbai, India. It is one of the leaders in providing value added services(VAS) to DTH, telecom and cable industries. Services include Hollywood movies, Hollywood movies dubbed in Hindi and regional languages , kids animation movies and series, celebrity based cooking show, Korean content and K Pop. OTMC is also successfully providing content to various OTT players in India and abroad.

One Take Media Co. (OTMC) director Shamoly Khera said “Year 2019 has been important for us in terms of acquisitions. We understand our audiences and their content needs. Boonie Bears Adventurers 2 is a fun filled exciting series which will entertain children to the fullest. Each episode has  such eye catching animation and background effects that not only children but even adults would find it difficult to get their eyes off the screen  while watching Adventurers 2!!”

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