The week right before Spring Break, Catherine came into our motion graphics class and informed us of a new category being put into the Spring Show, VFX Motion Graphics. Sweet, seeing as how our motion graphics class is the first and only class in the VFX department, whatever we turn in will more than likely be in the show. We have no competition. Problem is, we were only given two more weeks to work on something amazing to knock the socks off of people, with the impending deadline of April 19th. So eight of us got together and formed Team CRYPTALBAYSPLOSIONOMICRON (later split into two teams for different concepts). One of our team members, the talented Roger Apolinar, is currently VFX Supervisor at Paralux Productions. He was able to get a hold of the RED cam for a night and managed to recruit some martial arts talent to shoot in the greenscreen studio. With martial artists Isiah Flores and Michael Gonzales showing off some sick moves in the studio, we managed to get some amazing, beautiful RED footage.

Speaking of which, if there are any of you using Windows right now, REDCINE seems to be the best option to handle any R3D files you can throw at it. Actually, I'm not sure but I think it's the only option right now, at least it was the only one that I could get to work. There was a solution to open it up in AE CS4 but I couldn't get the RED settings to pop-up. If you need some place to get started, I recommend watching the tuts from Final Cut User here. They'll give you a basic overlook on the app, and give you a better insight on just how awesome RED is.

I'm currently working on doing the roto and keying right now, so nothing new for my mograph buddies, but I thought I'd post up some my prev work in progress. This first pic is to be the intro of our project, a 2.5D matte painting depicting an ancient Asian landscape.



I made it in Photoshop, and then rendered out layers to switch to After Effects and displaced along the Z axis.



A styleframe/storyboard in which our hero character hides behind a wall. 3dsmax.








More to come soon, I promise, but there's still lots and lots of work to do!

A friend of mine is currently working on a project in which there is a ball rolling on the floor and he needs to move the highlight in order to correspond to a light source in the distance. I came up with a quick solution, and I thought I'd share it in case you cross upon something similar, because I feel that this is something quite common, but I wasn't able to find anything on the net. You can download the AEP file here if needed.

Here is the result:


Basically, I created a null that acted as the fake position of our light. Then, I used this null's position to calculate the distance from the highlight on the X and Y axes and theoretically made a right triangle. Using each axis information, I plugged it all into an inverse tangent equation to give me the correct angle that I wanted. Then I just added a multiplier to increase/decrease the amount of rotation.

In this AEP file, I have 4 layers. The ground, the ball, the reflection, and the null. I animated the ball moving around in an arc that roughly imitates my friend's animation.

Want you want to do next is make sure that the Anchor Point for the highlight is in the center of the ball, that way when we rotate it, it will do so inside the ball. Then make sure to parent the highlight to the ball. Afterwards you want to Alt-Click on the Rotation stopwatch in the highlight layer to open up an expression box and type in the following code:

adjc = sub(thisComp.layer("nullLightSource").transform.position[0],thisComp.layer("ball").transform.position[0])
opp = sub(thisComp.layer("nullLightSource").transform.position[1],thisComp.layer("ball").transform.position[1])

sidesratio = div(opp,adjc)

inversetan = Math.atan(sidesratio)*25

Let's break this code down a little. The variable adjc takes the X axis info from the null called "nullLightSource" and subtracts it from the X pos of the layer called "ball". Similarly, opp takes the difference from the Y info. sidesratio then plugs these two correctly into the inverse tangent equation Math.atan().
Then I added a multiplier of 25 at the end of inversetan simply because it looked good.

And voila! You now have a highlight rotating based upon the position of a null. I'm sure somebody can come up with an even cooler application to this, maybe a giant axe blade attached to the end of a pendulum?