Intro
What does an FX artist do?
It is a visual effects artists job to recreate real world phenomena in a digital environment. These effects are used on multiple platforms from games to movies to virtual reailty. My main focus is going to be on VFX in films, that is the area I want to go onto in the future so it seems to be reasonable to focus my research on that. There are many different job roles within the VFX industry, compositor, concept artists, FX artists and matchmove artists, to name just a few.
What is the work flow to produce these effects?
How has innovation in hardware changed the use of effects?
What other forms of innovation are there in the industry? Glassworks – jordi bares, dneg – Clarrisa engine, photo gammatry.
Innovation – Jordi Bares creating FX that work in harmony with the environment instead of being over the top, a good combination of live action and FX where it is needed create a much more believable scene.
A relatively new innovation in the world of compositing I have found quite interesting is the art of deep compositing. Rather than layering multiple 2D images ontop of each other and using mattes and masks to manipulate them, deep comping creates a rendered image, that doesn’t just have a single Z depth for a certain point on the image, but instead it has an array of values that define the distance of each pixel relevant to a certain point in space. Basically giving the pixels of an image a position within a 3D space, thus allowing for compositors to place other assets inside the image without having to create multiple nodes or layers with separate masks.
Here is an example of deep comping being used in the ‘Orrery’ sequence in ‘Prometheus’. We can clearly see how each particle in blue has its own depth in the image as each particle passes in front and behind each other encasing the actress in the middle. This allows for a lot more realistic effect making the scene more believable for the audience.
Stuart Penn
https://www.creativereview.co.uk/author/jordi-bares/
How will the industry change in the future? Obviously VR but explain why I’m not choosing VR.
Conclusion – reflect on how I could implement this in the future and how I will protect my work
Olly Crawford 