IanHubert

Digital Extension Experiments

Diving into a couple digital extensions! Basically any time I'm on set I'm my own VFX supervisor, and these are the types of compositing techniques I'm thinking about when I'm framing up the shot to hopefully avoid signing myself up for a big headache later in post :P

The one bit I gloss over is the initial 3d tracking and projection, mostly because I've already covered it quite a bit and I think I'll be covering it again really soon, but if you want to see me get into it:  
2024-01-27 13:22:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Animating a Bowl Man and Other Details

This sums up a lot of what I've been up to the last couple weeks! I had the shot blocked in pretty fast, but now I'm going through slowly updating stuff that I don't think holds up as well. Definitely a "the last 5% of the polish is 90% of the work" situation, but that's when it gets fun.

Although I'm particularly happy with the laundry! I've got a BTS I'll try to upload tomorrow. 

Asset: More Mechanical Scans!

So Lux and I drove back over the mountains to the tractor museum, and used our new scanning knowledge* to get a bunch more stuff! I've already been using these for everything for the past few months, and I'm excited to share them: 53 new mechanical scans!

As always, I feel like I'm simultaneously over optimizing and not optimizing enough (I feel like texture resolution bogs down my renders way more than geometry bogs down the viewport), so my only real benchmark is how much I enjoy us...

Rigid Body Stuff

Whole bunch of stuff. Ooofff this was a bigger video than I expected! I kept thinking of information I forgot to add! For example: A collision object can affect cloth sims and particles, but not rigid bodies-  and a force field can affect everything! But I really just need to post this video and move on to other things, so here we go!!

Also realizing I should experiment more with using the "Connect - Point" type constraint instead of just relying on having everything just explode...

Making a Distant City

Going a bit fast and loose, but we cover some good ground in this one! Putting together a digital matte painting of a city from (nearly) scratch.

If anyone wants the buildings I made in the video for anything, here's a project file with them and the geonodes setup here. I didn't clean things too much, but it should be fairly self explanatory.  
2023-11-30 10:52:19 +0000 UTC View Post

Tutorial/Asset: Quick Basic Flares

Just a quick experiment in trying to get the CG to match the live action a bit closer! Also a good reminder for me of the usefulness of render layers. It'd be fun to actually dive a bit deeper into lens flares at some point.

Here's the assets I'm talking about in the video (quick flares/spotlights/haze ball for blender). You just have to target the constraint t...

Last Minute Halloween Decoration

Just a silly one, but I've been meaning to make this video for years now, but I always forget until it's too late! And it's probably too late for this year! Or perhaps it's just fantastically early for next year.   

Also- I guess I didn't mention in the video, but ideally you'd be using real pumpkins. Or whatever you wanted. 

As long as we have a projector hooked up to blender, it'd be fun to mess around more with projection stuff in the near future!

Transparent Shaders and Experiments

With special guest Nathan Vegdahl!

Here's a link to the shimmering harbor assets I was using.

Also related: Refractions and Heat Shimmers

And the OSL series from CG Matter! It was absolutely fantastic (ev...

Driving Through a Market pt 2: Modeling Market Stalls

Continued from Part One! Using projection mapping to put together a market stall- plus I blab about a bunch of other stuff.

FSPY download:
The Program
The Blender Import Addon 

Driving Through a Market pt 1: Layout/Blocking

Didn't realize this was going to be a series until I got into it! Fairly casual, but this one goes into blocking out a shot, and how that shot should fit into the edit. Hopefully in the next few days I'll have the one about modeling all the market stalls (I'm excited for that one!)

Here's the RBC physics rigging addon. So impressed with the work he's put into this thing!

Asset: 130 Old Signs

I'm doing a chase scene through the Oldtown environment, so I needed a bunch of signs! At first they were pretty monochromatic, but the scene kept becoming more colorful (it's wild- I always think I'm adding so much color, but stuff tends to get so muddy-greyed out so quick- especially the night scenes) , so the signs hopefully have a bit more pop in there too, now.

Also- I highly recommend doing something like this every now and then (making, say, 50+ bumper stickers, or band posters...

Modeling that Greenhouse Environment

Sort of a sister video to the recent Boat Modeling video.

Mostly uploading this because it could be the first in a sort of series, putting this whole environment together, and some of the world-building planning and all that (also some folks asked for me to upload it last month, so here we go!)

Oh! And here's the 2023-08-30 20:41:15 +0000 UTC View Post

Asset: Cyber Guard (with mocap data)

Here's the Download Folder for both the soldiers and the mocap data (approx 30 seconds per motion)! I made them as a little mercenary force for Dynamo Dream.

Finally time to start uploading some of these assets! Let me know if you have problems with linking up the mocap to the models; I think it should just work right...

Another Greenscreen Tutorial (working on the Taxi Scene)

This one covers a lot of random ground, but I think it's a good catch-up for how I'm working with greenscreen these days.

I give a quick intro to keying in Resolve/Fusion at the end of the video, but to get really good results you probably want to give the edges a bit of a cleanup- this is the tutorial I used for all the stuff in A Single Point in Space. Seems to give really good results

He...

Asset: Translucent Plastic Scans

More things to add a bit more life to a scene! Designed specifically to work well with light. As usual, they're more for background stuff than a hero close-up asset (I tried to keep each one to around 15,000 polygons).

Already marked as assets, so if you put them in your asset browser folder, they'll be ready to go!

I included the FBX version against my better judgement, since they're not particularly useful without the shaders, but they still do sort of read as draped plastic,...

Let's Model a Boat!

A longer-form deal, for folks who enjoy those! And we only get a *little* bit bogged down in cloth sims. I have a scene with a lot of boats coming up- time to start modeling them. 

I'm really into playing with translucent materials, lately. They're not that intense from a rendering perspective, and they can add so much life to a scene.   

Here's the Randomness Generator tutoria<...

One of the Biggest Compositing Basics

Maybe not flashy, but important! We're talking proper footage linearization again, and how to easily do it in Blender!

Nathan's put a bunch of work into the color tools since we last talked about them a couple years ago. I use them basically every day, so I wanted to dive into them again!

I've got a lot of compositing to do in the next month or two, and I want to talk about a few new techniques, and this is the foundation for most all of them.   

Download the tool...

Tall Blowing Grass Asset & Breakdown

Really fun to play with! But also hot damn- what a rabbit hole. I'm curious to know everyone's thoughts, both using the asset, and if they've tried other methods of getting a similar result (there are lots of ways to go about it).

A full breakdown on how to use the asset in the video- I highly recommend getting in there and experimenting with stuff!

DOWNLOAD
2023-06-30 23:46:20 +0000 UTC View Post

Useful Techniques for Modeling a Scooter

Not the full process, but some handy techniques!

Modeling a Slot Machine

The machine turned out out better than I expected! Also cover some good ground with this one, imo.

Also features some half-baked hot takes for gambling and AI art! The fun doesn't stop!

Here's the link to the Flicker Controller image.

RELATED:
2023-06-02 05:51:40 +0000 UTC View Post

Asset: Windows

Some window assets I made for some scenes I've been working on; I tried to make them generic but they got a little stylized- but I'm okay with that!

Ideally there's enough extra stuff on there to keep them from feeling too copy-and-pastey.


DOWNLOAD
Blend File (recommended!)
2023-06-01 04:52:34 +0000 UTC View Post

Tutorial/Asset: Blowing Straps/Plastic

At some point I'll remember that setting up a cloth sim can literally only take 10 seconds.

Here's the blend file, if you want the strap/sheet asset pack! (very basic) instructions are at the start of the video.  Also- let me know if the file doesn't seem to work the way it should! I mean. It should. But I always get nervous with physics stuff.

Now...

Asset: Construction Equipment Elements

From a scanning trip I did a couple weeks ago with Thom! Actually- I only scanned a very small part of what I could have, and once I got home I realized certain techniques would have worked better, so I want to go back out there and get higher-quality stuff more suited to a proper greeble library... 

But in the meantime: they're sloppy, they're not particularly optimized, but I've been using them like crazy!


They're designed to operate at what I thin...

Modeling a Desert Hangar

Big long one for anyone who likes that sort of thing! But we go most of the way from start to finish in making a shot, and cover quite a bit of ground! Mostly just straightforward cube modeling, though :D


Related:
Making an Environment from Scavenged Elements 

"A Pete Episode" High Res Download

[Also updated the Single Point in Space page to link to video files with the correct color! Really sorry that took me so long to figure out what you all were talking about; it works great on my machine, but it looks like Resolve doesn't always encode video files with the necessary metadata, and occasionally video players have to make their best (somet...