How to get ahead in CGI

We used this scene in Last Zombie Standing but during the 48 hour period I only managed a low resolution fluid sim. Here's what it should have looked like:

As I'm trying to get faster at these techniques, I always look at what the time constraints were for any particular shot. For this one they included researching tutorials and examples (this can often be the most time consuming part!), finding a decent freeware spine model; fine-tuning the position of the alpha mask; trying out different variations of the fluid flow; baking at a half-decent fluid resolution. Rendering was surprisingly quick but there aren't many objects in the scene apart from the spine and the fluid mesh.

For any composite effect to work you need to have some kind of interaction between the live action and virtual elements. Examples include lighting, shadows, foreground objects, reflections or physical interactions - in this shot the fluid is partially obstructed by some of the leaves on the ground.

They Lurk

The Sci-Fi Gene blog will be 1 year old on the 23rd October. It's been a good year. I'm also currently gathering a crew for an entry in the Movieum's zombie-themed 48 Hour Film Challenge next weekend - more on that story later.

For now, here's the result of slightly too much time with Blender and Voodoo:

Baked Water

Blender has a built in fluid simulation engine. Conveniently there are options to simulate oil and honey as well as water; alternatively you can change the properties of the fluid directly, change the way that it sticks to or flows along obstacles, or cheat by accelerating or decelerating the sim. Whichever way there's a lot of trial and error involved in setting up a scene and even at a low resolution, "baking" the fluid can take a while. Oh - and you'll need some serious hard drive space to try this.

Here I'm trying to add a fluid simulation into some mini-DV footage, tracked painlessly in Voodoo and then mapped in Blender with some (non-simulated) elbow grease.

The Blender interface reminds me of the flight deck of a 747 - too many buttons. Trying to get a particular effect to work as expected often descends into a hunt for the one tiny, unlabelled button that I've forgotten I pressed earlier - for me the worst culprits are the row of portraits on the far right that exclude objects from the final render.

camera view

side view

Now to sort out the materials and lighting...