making movies often requires models of real things, props of props if you will. as an example. you may require a vehicle for a scene. which is fine, you may own a car or depending on your age have access to your parents or a friends, whatever. but the scene calls for the car to be Wrecked/flipped/burned out or abducted by evil metal eating whales from the planet Znargol. Now, I don't know about you guys, but i think my Mum would be pretty pissed if I torched her car or returned it covered in whale slime, which is where we come in with our digital awesomeness. Using a 3D facsimile of our prop we can integrate impossible scenes into the most mundane clips. an example of this i took some footage of my bosses car on my mobile phone and caused it to explode, which was fun, but not great the clip could use a bit more work, well a lot more work but it was OK for a first time! take a look at the clip and I'll run through how it was done and point out some of the flaws
Ok, so i was using Blender version 2.64 for this clip and ran the movie clip through the movie clip editor. and tracked it as normal. blurry poor quality footage was a bit of an issue but by manually tracking frame by frame in a lot of cases i manages a reasonable track, though i have still no idea what the focal length of my phone is! any way after setting up the tracking scene, i simply modelled a body around the car, i didn't need it to be an exact model as 1, it only needed to contain the fire Sim and 2, it wasn't going to be rendered. so with the box in place i inserted a fire Sim and set the box to be a collision object and added a turbulence force to give the flames a bit of life. i then set the box to be a mask layer and rendered out the crap you just watched, Hurrah! well almost! first there are issues with the clip itself. i used the raw movies clip and as you can see there are some parts where the clip "twitches" due to caching errors, blender works better with image sequences rather than movie files so it is always a good idea to pre render your clips into png sequences. also the track wasn't great, the flames float about slightly near the end of the shot and if you look closely when the pickup drives by, you can see the mask object showing faintly through the paintwork. i have no idea why this happened, except that something in the compositing sucked. and my choice of sound effect was a bit poor and i could have spent some time fixing it in Audacity... but i didn't. lol.
well, poor as that was, i think i can do a bit better today, so how would i go about it now? first i would make sure i had a clean plate for the background. i could achieve this by cloning out the car on one frame using gimp and mask out the car in blender and composite the clips together, or i would use projection painting to clone out the car in blender using a mesh plane which i think would work better. then i would replace the car with a complete 3D model, I'm sure there are some similar models available on places like Blendswap.com
or if not i would have to try and model it myself. i would then be able to use the 3D model to create debris from flying glass and shrapnel and stuff as well as getting a more realistic interaction between the smoke and the vehicle. and give the car some interaction with the explosion, perhaps lifting it of the ground a little and causing wheels to bounce off down the road in the traditional wheel bouncing down the road cliche!#so with all that in mind i am currently working on a new model which i will be using to cover:
Rigging, this will include rotating and steering wheels working doors mirrors sunroof etc.
Integration, which will be about placing the model into a scene
And,
Exploding, which will include shapekey destruction, particles, modifiers and rigid bodies! so keep your eyes open for that, its going to be cool!
also i have some plans to look at prosthetic and digital makeup, so think Terminator and zombies and evil metal eating whales from the planet Znargol which will be a lot of fun, but I'm still learning this so you'll just have to be a bit patient! so for now i have a car to finish and i want to cover the explode modifier as a tutorial on its own ( i know its been done to death already but i should really include it as its quite useful.
OK I'm done now go find something interesting to do, i have work to get on with!
bye
