myblog | Minghan Lyu | Activity

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 17:31:18 +0000

Critical Practice ProcessIn […] “Critical Practice Process”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 19:19:47 +0000

FMP ‘Red Dawn’ FinalCriticl […] “FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Final”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 01:26:54 +0000

FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Process 04 Th […] “FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Process 04”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:43:07 +0000

FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Process 03 Th […] “FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Process 03”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 13:56:00 +0000

FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Process 02 Th […] “FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Process 02”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:12:38 +0000

FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Process 01 I […] “FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Process 01”

Minghan Lyu and Sakshi Bhutada are now friends

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 20:25:54 +0000

Minghan Lyu and Yi Bo Chen are now friends

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 01:17:16 +0000

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 21:07:50 +0000

Collaborative Project Process for EP 04 Final This post is about the final compositing, with a video of the last stage (It’s working very badly right now, but this is the only thing we can submit at the moment, I’ll show you the final version next semester)Our team uses GITHUB to record every time a team member makes a change to the project and uses it for important questions (within the project). Here is the link: Issues · Sturmt1ger/The-Bag-Choice (github.com) Firstly below is the final result at this stage and a snippet of my personal VFX Breakdown for the team. In this phase, I was responsible for the task of doing quality control, and as of the end of June, I had only received a video that had barely progressed, the last time I sent the team my file was the end of May, and this video was pretty much the exact same script as the one from the beginning of May (except for the effects shots part), the video below shows the video file from the end of June. So I had the final compositor make changes and wrote a proposal for changes complete with images. fix-reportDownload I have communicated with them several times but still no progress, it was explained to me that the file I sent to the team its not usable, so I redid a new NUKE file, but I found that this is not possible, please see the picture below, the left is the file that I sent (saturation is natural, and the main please look at the cloud, I don’t know what is this cloud on the right pic), and on the right side is the new (distorted, and overexposed) looks like cartoon. Specific issues I’ve raised in the Fix-Report above, which I think will greatly improve this lens once they’re resolved. Critical Reflection My personal problem in this project is that I didn’t propose more than one FX shot at the beginning, which would have enriched our final video, in fact, more than one could have appeared at the beginning when I drew the storyboard, but I didn’t make the second one at a later stage because of multiple reasons; The second point is that, for the part of the grass, I wanted to make a growing effect, but unfortunately I didn’t find any tutorials for it; The third point is the division of labour in the group, I should have explained to the others at the beginning that I want to do the final composite, because this step is very important, I’m very confident in my ability to monitor the aesthetics of this step to me to do a lot fewer problems; The fourth point is the problem of keying, our group in the beginning of the confirmation of the special effects shots is very hastyThe fourth point is the keying issue, our team was very hasty when we started to confirm the VFX shots, so I could only use semi-AI to complete the character’s keying, and this would lead to a very mediocre quality, I will figure out the compositing process before the production starts in the later stage, so I can avoid a lot of trouble, and if the characters are shot through green screen, the quality of the work can be greatly improved. Scroll down to see more of the […] “Collaborative Project Process for EP 04 Final”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 21:01:46 +0000

Progress Report on Personal Project 05 Final This post is the final documentation of a personal project, featuring a demonstration of the final result, as well as adjustments to the blood shading, and lateral shots, and a MakingOf video of the overall production process of the piece Here’s a look at the final product of the artwork and below is the VFX Breakdown. For the adjustment of the shadows, I redid all the blood in NUKE, then I divided the original video into three layers and added them in order to the main Pipeline, of course the two layers of the shadows were using the same parameters and acted on two blur nodes I then added a Roto channel to each of the shadow layers to make them both appear only on the left side and the right side. In the landscape frame, I noticed that the camera shake was now disengaging the EXR sequence of the blood, and a portion of the blood video was currently inside the frame, so I added a 2D tracking to it to match the camera shake More Process […] “Progress Report on Personal Project 05 Final”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 21:56:42 +0000

Thesis Proposal: Week 7-9's Process and Final Version for the Critical PracticeWe had an online meeting with my teacher over the past three weeks, from which I made some adjustments to the paper and documented the results of the final term 3 paper and the next steps in this post. The essay also successfully completed the Literature Review, Draft Chapter 5, and Draft Chapter 6 sections, and the Literature Cited section also documented 21 valid references in standard form. This Word file below is the document with more words than required, but given the three weeks is more than enough time, a shorter version will follow, for example, eliminating the section on the main point of conflict in the work (150 words or so) Minghan_ThesisDownload The video blow is my presentation about this research at the stage. In the following semester, I will continue to take this argument to the next level […] “Thesis Proposal: Week 7-9’s Process and Final Version for the Critical Practice”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 21:26:19 +0000

NUKE London Fall Assignment 03 Final This week I completed the entirety of the Fall of London project, successfully synthesising the flames as well as tweaking the values of the various values such as the nuke explosions, and had my assignment critiqued by Gonzalo in class, who asked me to make a few tweaks later on Here’s the full video presentation I added the nuke fallout cloud and made it appear behind the nuke mushroom cloud, here I used the built-in tools in the node to make a change in the order of the masks. Then I made smoke trails on the windows, mainly using the Grade node and the Roto node, and imported the flame material into NUKE in 3D mode I then made a Glow node for the flames, but I found a softer alternative that automatically calculates the environment around the object to generate a more realistic effect It’s a smoky wall effect. What follows are some minor corrections I made after my teacher’s critique of my work in class.Firstly the nuke explosion, Gonzalo noticed on the big screen that some of the debris ran through the mask and into other places Then there’s the flaming windows, and I’ve augmented the effect of the flames on the surroundings Then I redid the trace on the shard building, which is now jittery, and the changes will fix some of this There’s also the bright part of the bomb when the nuke explodes, and Gonzalo and I said that flame compositing is one of the most complicated steps in NUKE because we don’t know how this flame will actually look to the human eye, especially with explosions, and it’s generally hard for designers to match the brightness of the centre of the explosion. But I still think the centre of my explosion is currently too dark, and then the rest of it is too dark, so I tweaked it again I mainly used the Keyer node to draw in the brightest part of the inside, and then used the Grade node to control the brightness and colour of the brightest part. Then I found that the ColorCorrect node would cause white edges to appear on the edges of the screen, and by looking at the Blue channel of the screen, I found that it was because changing the value of the highlights would make the black part of the edges turn blue (because the original value there was not 0, so it would be very obvious when the contrast was adjusted upwards), so I cancelled the adjustments related to the ColorCorrect […] “NUKE London Fall Assignment 03 Final”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 21:14:36 +0000

Collaborative Project Process for EP 03 This post is about the creation of the mobile plant and the NUKE compositing, with a video of this stage (at the moment this clip is 100% my personal production)Our team uses GITHUB to record every time a team member makes a change to the project and uses it for important questions (within the project). Here is the link: Issues · Sturmt1ger/The-Bag-Choice (github.com) First, I converted the video to EXR format because I wanted to export it as a background and Redshift doesn’t support PNG sequences. Then I 3D tracked the camera and subtracted the character mask I created at the beginning to get an unmasked scene data. (I also masked it to expand it, since NUKE still reads the extra data. Finally I tested the 3D scene in NUKE in NUKE Then in Houdini I made a simple material because I needed to test the Redshift renderer (this was the first time I used it, the renderer is extra software in Houdini so I spent a lot of time installing and learning it) Then I found some models of flowers and grasses in Bridge, and I tested the materials in C4D first (because the models contain multiple subdivision levels) Then I integrated multiple models into Houdini. Here you’ll see that this haystack contains multiple models because I wrote a function expression when converting particles to something else, and in the expression the particles are converted to three integers, and the three integers point to three different OBJs, so we get a random haystack! Then I tried to render a frame and I can see that the first image has strange colours, this is because the Redshift render window uses OCIO colour grading.However, I didn’t find where I could adjust it, and I’ll need to keep working on it later, as I have no way of seeing what the colours actually look like on the monitor.The second image is the result after exporting to EXR compressed format, the colours are now correct Then I added an expression on the liquid emitter about the time, $FF> to indicate that it works when the number of frames is greater than X, because the environmental scene is in the second half of the shoot Then I added steps to the scene and adjusted the position (this step requires patience because you don’t know what the adjusted things look like in the render window, because these items in the picture are not rendered, they only exist as volumes (hidden) in the scene) Looks better now! Then I started to create the lawn under the character’s feet, I still used the same technique but switched an emission source and modified the viscosity values Then I adjusted the position of the various parts for a long time to get the right trajectory in the video I then put the two videos into NUKE and composited them and adjusted their colours with some depth of field and motion blur effects. I then spent a lot of time on the rendering and eventually I imported the result into NUKE Then I noticed that there was no shadow on the ground when the character was walking, so I shifted the original character mask and recoloured it This video is the current progress of this clip, all the following visual effects were done independently by me (There’s currently a bug where part of the Flood Plants fluid is supposed to flow behind the tree, not in front of it, which I’ll tweak at a […] “Collaborative Project Process for EP 03”

Minghan Lyu and Bao Ngan Luc are now friends

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 16:36:26 +0000

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sat, 25 May 2024 16:08:41 +0000

NUKE London Fall Assignment 02 This week Gonzalo suggested a few changes to my video, which I optimised and tweaked, and I created a couple of new effects, and next week I’ll start working on the near window flames and the explosions! Firstly, thanks to the development of human civilisation! the almighty AI helped me to draw a couple of broken houses as well as some flame effects, which I exported later on Then I did a Roto of last week’s ground breaking effect I then imported the picture of the house into NUKE, then did a 2D trace of the original screen to generate the Matchmove values Then I did a Rotopaint of the original frame and made it work to all frames Then I adjusted the size of the smoke in the distance as well as the colour Then in the middle of the lesson, Gonzalo said that it wasn’t enough to have this house in the picture, because now it looked out of place, so I made the house next to it a broken effect as wellAnd because the house was obscured by the foreground, I created an additional Roto. He also told me to modify the penetration level of the foreground smoke, so I continued the foreground smoke through this chimney and now it looks more layered overall Adjusted last week’s Roto, where it is now obscured by the picture of the broken house, and I Rotoed it back in the back Then I added the effect of bullets shooting towards the sky in the centre of the frame, and looked on Github for an effect that automatically adds a lens vignette I added a smoke effect to the back of the furthest house and did colour grading as well as Roto Then I added a big bang at the far end. Colour grading and screen tracking… And I’ve also tweaked the debris of the Shard Mansion, I’ve removed a lot of the extra breakage effects and modified the foreground fog so that now it doesn’t have a black edge to […] “NUKE London Fall Assignment 02”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Thu, 23 May 2024 18:17:35 +0000

Collaborative Project Process for EP 02 This post documents the individual progress of the last group project up to 23.5Our team uses GITHUB to record every time a team member makes a change to the project and uses it for important questions (within the project). Here is the link: Issues · Sturmt1ger/The-Bag-Choice (github.com) My main task this time was to complete the waterfall plant and its compositing in NUKE, I firstly used Bridge to find a model of the car and imported it into the software, then I created a liquid emission source. The technique I used was a volumetric particle transformation technique, I would use the Flip element and solved it, and then transformed each particle into a grass and a plant by replacing them with particles. Then I realised that the car model was hollow in the middle, so I imported it into C4D and changed its internal model. Because in Houdini I need to convert the FBX file to a volume file, the original car has no thickness, so I can’t generate a volume Then I changed the particle emission source to a single one (otherwise the plant would flicker) and checked the particle normals The normal must be vertically up, I changed the direction in the node Then I manually created the nodes of the Karma renderer and imported an HDRI map as the main light source. Then I made sky-specific changes to the main NUKE file. I plan to split the altered footage into two parts, with the sky being grey in the first half of the destruction scene and clear in the second half. I plan to split the altered footage into two parts, with grey skies in the first half of the destruction scene and clear skies in the second half. First I did a 2D tracking of the sky at two points to get the XYZ as well as the rotation transformation data I then used the Keyer node to get the Luminance data and added Roto to the parts other than the sky to get a mask of just the sky parts Then I put in an image to check my Alpha channel Then there was a separate Roto for the face part of the character (because the character was moving a lot and the face was so bright that the Keyer node treated my face as the sky too = =) Imported the cloudy day video file These are the node trees that replace the sky I then optimised it for edges, as there was now a white edge to the characters as well as the trees, so I found the Colour–Smear node in the NUKE Github, which makes it easy to remove the white edge Before After I then added scene fog as well as colour correction so that there would be a colour contrast between the front and back of the […] “Collaborative Project Process for EP 02”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Thu, 23 May 2024 17:51:59 +0000

Progress Report on Personal Project 04 This post chronicles the progress of my personal project this week, featuring the addition of new VFX lenses. First of all, I am going to add some effect of blood being splattered on the wall in the shot of blood pouring into the tunnel, I first used a MOV format, but it didn’t work as well as it should have, because my shot was created by simulation of mono-water, so the direct compositing would have been very fake in the scene, and if I had this shot composited by pure CGI, or HOUDINI plus MAY or UE5, it would have been possible to achieve a very good effect So I was going to try a new approach to this problem next week, and then I created a second FX shot, this one a horizontal one showing the blood rapidly catching up with the protagonist. So I was going to try a new approach to this problem next week, and then I created a second FX shot, this one a horizontal one showing the blood rapidly catching up with the main character. The difficult part in this shot was adjusting the size of the blood motion blur in proportion to the speed at which the blood was moving, and eventually I found a good state of affairs. Then I started to FX the last shot, I was going to create a first person view of blood, firstly I mediated the lens in HOUDINI Then to handle the high speed movement of the camera I did 3D tracking of the shot in NUKE, while tracking I used roto to remove the figure to keep the GPU from tracking the figure thus producing a completely wrong point cloud. Then I speeded up that video in Ae, because the final section of the video where the water is supposed to go down due to gravity and thus become faster, but the original video was at a constant […] “Progress Report on Personal Project 04”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sat, 18 May 2024 21:08:17 +0000

Collaborative Project Process for EP 01 This post began by documenting the making of the team project in the Exploration Practice course, and this post documents the first phase and some of the second phase of the production process and insights.Our team uses GITHUB to record every time a team member makes a change to the project and uses it for important questions (within the project). Here is the link: Issues · Sturmt1ger/The-Bag-Choice (github.com) Below is a summary of the core elements of our team project Project thrust:A short visual effects film about people’s choice of bags to show the importance of environmental protection and to stimulate people to rethink environmental protection. Project Tools:NUKE, HOUDINI, MAYA, UE5, PR, BRIDGE Synopsis:Two people meet in a café, A asks B why they don’t use eco-bags, B thinks it’s okay. A then tells B that it’s wrong through a series of initiatives and visual effects if the environment is destroyed. Then I drew this storyboard Next, after getting the original video, the first thing I was responsible for was the ROTO work on the VFX part of the video, as our VFX needed to be masked against the VFX with a person I first used Mocha Pro to auto-key the character, it’s as easy as Photoshop, then I found some problems with this tool, it’s hard to track when the character turns around (for example, when the character turns his head, the whole tracking plane is displaced) I think the reason is caused by the software’s problems. So I did an accurate tracing of the character in NUKE, then converted the NUKE data to MOV format and imported it into Pr, which has a plugin that allows you to take full advantage of the performance of the computer’s GPU to auto-trace the character, but you still need to manually process some colour similarities. After completing the tracking, I realised that the system wasn’t recognising the part where Mahadev walked in from outside the camera, I then manually tracked this part in NUKE, I divided him into 6 sections for accurate tracking Then I tried a simple masking in NUKE to test ROTO usability I then created a node tree for smoke synthesis in the NUKE file so that my squad members could easily make smoke through this series o […] “Collaborative Project Process for EP 01”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sat, 18 May 2024 20:29:15 +0000

NUKE London Fall Assignment 01 After three weeks of preparation, this is where I officially started to create the big term assignment that Gonzalo set at the beginning of the term. This assignment will use all the NUKE knowledge we’ve learnt so far, so I’m going to be putting a lot of effort into it too! In preparation, I would like to add smoke, flames, shattering and explosions to the picture, and I’m thinking of making a shockwave of a nuclear bomb explosion at the end Here’s a sketch of my intended effect My main reference was wanting to replicate the nuclear bomb explosion scene from the game Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, the video below is the reference At first I added a fog effect, I used ROTO and traced the scene In the fog composite, I colour-blended the fog with the original image Next I used the same technique to add a second smoke effect to the image. The original video for this effect was in MP4 format, so I first inverted the image and sucked in the LUMINANCE channel. Next I added a scene breaking effect behind a couple of houses in the mid-ground, after the ROTO I used SHUFFLE and added three GRADE nodes to colour grade the model. Then I added a fire-breathing effect on the roof chimney of the foremost house But in the process of doing the flame compositing, I want to make the flame erupt multiple times and add a MOTIONBLUE node, but I found out that after connecting the MOTIONBLUR, the flame clip can only be played once, so I’m going to ask Gonzalo next Tuesday Here’s how I staged this assignment this […] “NUKE London Fall Assignment 01”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Thu, 16 May 2024 12:15:54 +0000

NUKE Fire and Smoke Compositing This fortnight we’ve been learning about flame and smoke synthesis, and our teacher has asked us to complete part of the London Trap project next week! Fire Part Notes (VFX effects material site in the file)1 When keyer snapping the a-channel, you can do a log2lin before to make the luminance data more accurate.After compositing, if there is anything out of the frame, add a crop to cut it out.2 When doing 3d tracking, you need to customise the length of the two points, just one, and then customise it in the scene of the node.3 Add a motionblur when compositing4 Keyer can select a display model and export it to alpha.5 OFlow is used to change the video settings of the input source, such as the frame rate range and acceleration/deceleration.6 When compositing, merge a max to add luminance information to the b (to give more depth to the result).7 When doing flame compositing, the reflections on the wall are done this way, the original flame material is added to a curvetool, then reset and go! Solve for different frame data (you can see it in the toolbar), then copy the concentration data, then paste it into the place you want to deal with the grade, then paste it into the gain, then right-click and select Edit Expression, add *30. and it’s done. 5.14 email from gonzalo to see)8 Synthesise the fire first step PLUS a blur flame to form the final fire edge (this has the most detail)Step 2multiply back to density (reversed)Third step PLUS on the fire itself (add a plugin version of glow)And finally PLUS the flame itself after a glow! Smoke Part Notes When creating smoke, if there is no A-channel in the original material, use the Luminance node to draw smoke from the screen. If the clip needs to be cropped, use the Retime or OFlow node to control the number of frames in the video. Then use the Grade node to increase the Gamma value of the A-channel in Luminance, so that the result has more detail and does not suck in the background data from the original material. Then use the Copy node to make the A-channel stick to the original video, Blur the original frame, and Merge an average value to make the smoke blend into the environment. Then add some MotionBlur or Defocus to defocus it. Next is a magic operation, you need to re-UNPREMULT the original screen, then convert it to YCbCr format, and then stack it with the YCBCR data of the original screen, so that you can import the colours of the original screen into the smoke, this step is particularly important, even if it’s difficult to understand Add a Lightwrap at the end to further blend the edges of the smoke into the original […] “NUKE Fire and Smoke Compositing”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Tue, 14 May 2024 14:19:40 +0000

Thesis Proposal: Week 5-6's Course Feedback and Initial Framework for the Dissertation (research directions, preliminary report)Weeks 5 and 6 continued with the importance of multisampling the reference section of your dissertation and we also had an offline dissertation session to help us better cope with our dissertation proposal. In Nigel’s course we continued to learn how to go about analysing our dissertation topic and how to construct an argument. In offline courses, we analysed the types of research framework that can be done in our thesis and the research methodology we are going to follow to develop our topic. Types of research There are two types of research that we could use for our thesis such as: Quantitative research. This type of research provides numerical data (analysed using mathematical methods or statistics). It is an empirical research that explains trends so it is more objective. Qualitative research. This type of research produces findings without using quantitative methods and it is more subjective. It explores the perception, feelings, or ideas of people. Critical thinking process and thesis proposal structure The process to follow to analyse a topic in a critical manner is the following: Investigate a problem thoroughly Prosecute and defend an idea Cross examine witnesses (literature review) Verdict (conclusion) This process will help us to structure our thesis topic in a logical way until reaching a conclusion where we will explain our findings. Our thesis proposal structure will be as follow: Introduction Background significance Literature review Research design, methods, and schedule Suppositions and implications Conclusion Bibliography Methodology Our research targets will constitute the basis of the methodology used. In order to explain the methodology used, we will need to follow this structure: Describe thesis or research problem Explain chosen approach Clarify any uncommon methodology used Explain how the data used was collected Detail methods used to analyse collected data Topic research Brain Storm 1 Will the field of film special effects continue to move towards computerised CG compositing rather than developing techniques for realistic filming? i There are many times when real life filming will have a better display ii Pure CG filming will be false iii Which is better for film, focusing on CGI compositing or focusing on real life filming? Focus on CGI compositing Pros: Unlimited Creative Space: CGI offers unlimited creative possibilities to create any imaginable scenes and characters without the constraints of real-world physical limitations (Pearson CMG). Efficient use of resources: Scenes can be created and modified efficiently in a virtual environment, avoiding the costly and time-consuming process of actually building and dismantling sets (Filmmaking Lifestyle). Safety: for dangerous scenes or complex stunts, safety risks for actors and crew can be avoided through CGI. Disadvantages: Costly: High-quality CGI requires significant computing resources and specialised staff, resulting in high production costs (StudioBinder). Authenticity challenges: Despite advances in technology, CGI effects can sometimes lack the realism of live action, especially when combined with live action, resulting in an ‘off-kilter’ look. Audience Acceptance: Some viewers may prefer the texture and realism of live action, and believe that over-reliance on CGI can cause a film to lose its rustic and authentic appeal. Focus on live action Benefits: Strong sense of realism: Live-action filming can provide a detailed representation of natural light and shadow and real physical environments, increasing the sense of realism in the film and the audience’s sense of immersion (Filmmaking Lifestyle). Interactive performances: Actors tend to behave more naturally and realistically in real scenes, which helps to enhance the authenticity and emotional resonance of the performances. Audience Acceptance: Many audiences are more receptive to real-life filming, believing that it conveys real emotion and storytelling. Disadvantages: Limitations: Live-action filming is limited by the physical environment of the real world, making certain scenes difficult or costly to realise, such as alien worlds in sci-fi films (Pearson CMG). Costs and Time: Live-action filming requires finding suitable locations, sets, transport and crew scheduling, which adds to the cost and time of production. Weather and environmental constraints: Live action filming is highly dependent on weather and environmental conditions, which can lead to delays or changes in the filming schedule. Comprehensive Analysis Balance and Combination In modern film production, the best results are usually achieved by combining CGI with live-action shooting to complement each other’s strengths. The Avatar and Avengers film series, for example, create stunning visual spectacles through a seamless blend of live action and CGI, preserving authentic performances and environments while expanding the boundaries of visual effects through CGI (StudioBinder). The Project Requirements Determine the Choice Ultimately, the choice to focus on CGI or live action should be based on the needs of a specific project. If the film requires a lot of fantastical elements that can’t be realised in reality, CGI may be a better choice, while if the film is more realistic and emotional, live action may be more appropriate. Taken together, modern film production often takes advantage of CGI and live-action shooting through the combination of technology and art to present audiences with visual effects that are both realistic and creative. (Derive the argument above to generate the question) 2 The increasing development of visual effects has required more money to be invested in the production of a film, which must have led to fewer and fewer new companies or new directors joining the traditional film industry. What will be the future trend of this problem? How can this problem be solved? i Marvel’s films over the past few years have tended to be homogenised, with the hero genre no longer being accepted by the public ii One of the films that has invested the most in CGI compositing over the last few years has been Avatar: The Watercourse, which had an estimated budget of $400 million. It relies almost entirely on advanced CGI technology to create the visual spectacle of Pandora.iii Netflix has a growing number of short films based on CGI compositingiv Jedi: The Fast and the Furious (Bad Boys for Life, 2020): two new directors, Bilal Farah and Adil El-Abi, collaborated with several VFX companies, including Image Engine and DNEG, to complete high-quality visual effects Summary Thesis Research Topic The impact of the development of visual effects on the entry of new companies and directors into the traditional film industry and future trends Main Argument With the development of visual effects (VFX) technology, the cost of film production has risen significantly, a trend that may limit the entry of new companies and directors into the film industry. However, through the democratisation of technology, the support of streaming platforms, collaborative production models and education and training, new directors and small companies can still find opportunities and success in this high-cost environment. Abstracts. VFX, CGI, cost of film production, new ventures, democratisation of technology, collaboration, independent film, streaming platforms, etc INTRODUCTION BACKGROUND: The importance of visual effects in mod […] “Thesis Proposal: Week 5-6’s Course Feedback and Initial Framework for the Dissertation (research directions, preliminary report)”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Tue, 14 May 2024 12:33:18 +0000

Thesis Proposal & Summary of Previous 4 Weeks' LessonsIn the first few weeks, our focus was on researching our possible dissertation topics and analysing how to structure our dissertation proposal. As well as Nigel also told us how to construct a properly framed thesis, as well as giving an account of example arguments as well as the academic nature of the thesis. The structure of a thesis would be the following: Title page Abstract Acknowledgements Contents page(s) Introduction Literature review Methodology Themed topic chapters (main discussion) Results Discussion or findings Conclusions References Appendices Before starting with the actual thesis, we will be doing a thesis or research proposal this term. This research proposal’s goal is the plan a structure for research like books, questionnaires, possible interviews, etc. It needs to explain why that research is necessary for the topic like for filling a gap in the subject, proving already existing researches, adding new knowledge to the topic, etc. Also, a literature review is important in our proposal to see if the material gathered is enough and useful for our thesis. It will let us demonstrate that we understand the key information of our goals. The proposal structure would be the following: Introduction Background significance (why research is needed and how it relates to field of study) Literature review (introduction to sources we plan to use in our research) Research design, methods, and schedule (planning) Suppositions and implications (what results are we expecting and how are they going to contribute to the field of study) Conclusion Bibliography In order to develop a research topic we should be asking questions like the following: What motivates me to research and discover? How can I connect it with my previous research? Can this research impact the current knowledge of that topic and add new one? Who is going to be the audience? What is the reader going to learn from this research? Will my topic meet the assignment’s requirements? Will it be connected to my FMP? Thesis objectives and structure Before starting to write a thesis, it is important to set the targets, audience, and structure of it: Determine audience Determine what hit is the audience is going to learn Break down thesis into main questions Put questions in an order that makes sense Develop sub-questions Plan investigation two find answers In order to build my thesis argument, I will need to use my own voice, meaning to express in a formal way but following my own style of writing. I could build my own views on its but not using my own opinions into it without any evidence to prove it. I should not use ‘I’, ‘my’, ‘mine’, only to be used when citing my own research. Before starting to write the thesis, it is good practice to try and sum the argument in a few words, so I can have it as reference to go back to check if I am still following this initial argument while writing the thesis. In the chapters, it would be interesting to add counterarguments to our arguments that could at the same time argued again. This would prove that the analysis is not biased and it is taking in consideration all perspectives. The conclusion should summarise the main points discussed on each chapter and should answer the question asked originally. The methodology followed to research and gather information could be by researching peer reviewed sources, surveys, interviews, experiments, etc. Literature review This will help to orient ourselves and the reader towards what we want to cover in our thesis. A literature review is developed by: Communicating relevant research methodology. Showing theoretical framework we could establish. Detailing where our work fits into the bigger picture. When structuring a literature review we need to state our research question and explain how we tackled it. Then a body of paragraphs will explain the research in detail. Lastly, a conclusion section will reiterate the research question while summarising the insides. Within our body sources, we will need to identify themes, patterns, and gaps. Once we have read and understood our sources, we will need to organise a strategy for writing about how we have used them in our research. We can organise them chronologically, by themes, or according to methods used by their author. Once this outline is done, we can […] “Thesis Proposal & Summary of Previous 4 Weeks’ Lessons”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 13 May 2024 13:57:36 +0000

Progress Report on Personal Project 03 This chapter is the third report on the individual project Blood Flood. It consists of three main sections: 1 Further simulation of blood. 2 Ambient light sources. 3 NUKE synthesis I’ve continued to import more accurate camera data into Houdini. Checking the rendered result Here’s the original video, you can see that there are five main light sources in the frame, which I then added to Houdini’s tunnel scene Here the project files are all ready, I have increased the accuracy of the blood simulation by a factor of 10 here, and you can see that the result is now very much like the real scene (the simulation cache is also very large) This is the particle effect of the model just now, you can find that the particles are super, just look at the effect of the particles is already perfect! This is what the rendering looks like at this point! Then I started the rendering and imported the result into NUKE, where I tracked the light source of the original video in 2D and transferred the data to the blood video Then I added a Lightwrap attribute, a node that allows the high brightness of the edges of the blood to blend more with the original tunnel video. I then used a trick taught by Gonzalo to check exposure as well as saturated frames to check if the blood video was too bright? Or is it too saturated? If so, go ahead and add a Grade or ColourCorrect node to adjust it. I ended up rendering the NUKE and editing the video in Pr Here are the results of my video […] “Progress Report on Personal Project 03”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Wed, 01 May 2024 19:27:51 +0000

Progress Report on Personal Project 02 This post is about 1: more fluid details and tweaking of renderer settings. 2: confirmation of final storyboards. 3: filming of the artwork and preliminary editing (including sound) In terms of fluid detail, I continued to tweak the emissive source density, fluid viscosity, and surface tension of the water body; I still don’t actually have specific tunneling parameters at this point, but the tweaks to these nodes are permanent, and I can import them directly for use in a new model. And I added two data saving nodes after solving, so I don’t need to ask the computer to recalculate every time, which saves a lot of time! After I learnt about the KARMA renderer, I did an initial render of the scene, I added a darker EXR sky file to the background to for the dimness of the tunnel. Then I thought the result was still good at this point! But I realised later that I was too happy too soon, and every time I solved one problem, two new ones popped up! Doesn’t the right side look good! Actually, the big trouble is yet to come! What comes next is the most important thing, imagine if you had to blend a Houdini render with a formal scene? 1: Use the Karma renderer to render the parts of the body of water and mask out the tunnels, as it’s very cumbersome and ineffective to deal with in NUKE.2: Export the water as a separate ABC file then import it into Maya for rendering3: Direct rendering, not shooting the real scene later, using green screen to shoot the characters and composite them into the CG scene. After thinking about it and trying it out, the only possible ways to handle it were 1 and 3, but at this point I had already finished drawing the storyboards as well as preparing for the shoot, so I ruled 3 out.But there is a big problem in option 1, if I exclude the wall of the tunnel from the rendering, with the same time I have to not show the water behind the wall? The most likely solution I tried was to split the water (blood), the wall and the emission source into three different Geo’s with different render numbers for them, but it still failed! Then I asked Alwin (so reliable!) , he didn’t know either at first, but he started out by saying that Houdini’s default Mantra renderer could separate the two layers and render them very quickly, which I found out it could be done, but by this time I had already prepared the render in Karma and Alwin was happy to help, so he called to a friend of his from a VFX company and he finally found a solution with it! (It’s really hard to solve, you can’t even find examples in the official answer site) Here’s what it looks like when it’s all settled, it’s so convenient! And you only need to add one node and write a command! YEAHHHHHHHHHHH!!! Here are the solutions I also completed all the shoots this time and here are some images from the shoot. And since I needed to make a model of the tunnel exactly like the scene, I shot an extra video for 3D tracking. I have to say that the Canon 6D MARK II performs really well in dark environments, and there is no excessive noise at all. This video below is my initial edited work, and it’s already just under a […] “Progress Report on Personal Project 02”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Wed, 01 May 2024 18:37:00 +0000

Progress Report on Personal Project 01 Basic Information of this projectProject name: Blood FloodPurpose: The work uses exaggeration and association to present a series of states of human beings after taking drugs, and the purpose of the work is to exhort human beings not to take drugs.Critical Thinking: Reflection on contemporary human and some national policy attitudes towards drug use by people of all ages; reflection on the place of “opioids” and “secondary drugs” in society and their relationship to human society. The name of this project is Blood Flood, a short public service film, or advert, about drug rehabilitation. At the beginning when I decided on the theme, I was going to create 4 short stories to express the theme, but Klaus said it would be too long and the audience wouldn’t know the point you are trying to make, so I shortened the story to one clip, here is the storyboard of my initial design. Too complex split-screen design Since I’m going to create this project through Houdini’s fluids, I’ve collected a lot of related tutorials as well as effect videos. My favourite is the following one I think the water works well in this clip In terms of workflow, I still use Figma for integration, including my mind map, part of my workflow, and some reference images. And this time I will also record some of the difficulties I encountered in the project in Figma, so that my work will be completely based on this software, which will have a great effect on the speed of work! Here’s some of my progress in Figma so far (5.1) Here are some reference images I found in the pre-production for the visual effects Those four images are the most important reference images for me when I create a body of water in the later stages of the process In making it, I first tested the particle simulation using the nodes on the Houdini tool rack, and added some 3D model to test the buoyancy (although it wasn’t used later) Next, after testing, I attempted to make a 3D model of the tunnel myself (at this point I hadn’t decided on the details of the shot, so I made a small tunnel to test the fluid first) Next, I imported the model into Houdini and added it as a collision body and converted it to a smaller model (which makes the calculations faster), then I added the emission source at the end of the tunnel But I had problems with the water getting squeezed by the container (tunnel) and thus flowing out of the model, I have since upgraded my tunnel model After updating my tunnel model the water flowed properly, I omitted a lot of parameters on this side, in fact I spent a lot of time on tweaking them, all parameters need to be adjusted one by one. For example, the particle emission density and the gravity (if gravity is not added to the x-axis, it is difficult for the water to flow from the back into the […] “Progress Report on Personal Project 01”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Wed, 01 May 2024 18:03:29 +0000

Progress on Cooperation Project 03 This post documents the progress of individual and, in part, team projects from 16 February to 29 February. Post Summary (Personal):1: Boss character design (including costumes)2: BOSS weapon design3: BOSS’s accessory design4: Skill effects design (part of) Post Summary (Personal):1: Design of main character attack animation (COMBO1)2: Integration of characters and models in the UNITY engine.3: Scripting and implementation of the lock-on function4: Scripting of COMBO PART I: PERSONAL After the group meeting in this fortnight, my task is also determined, I am responsible for designing all the things of BOSS, but the first thing I have to complete is the production of the model as well as the rendering of the effect, which sounds simple, but in fact, it also needs to work in collaboration with more than one software, the following is the production process, I will be batch by batch for the step by step introduction. Firstly, is about the character design. 1. The above pictures are my reference for making the BOSS, which comes from the game Elden Ring. Our BOSS is a female mage. In the shoulder design, I plan to add the elements in Figure 3 and 4, of course, we will replace the material with bones, and the characters will be Asian. 2. The first step of making the boss was to use the Character Designer to make a female model, and by using the adjustment function in this software, I combined some male features, such as a little double chin and bigger shoulders, and these adjustments would make her look bigger. 3. Next I exported the character model as an fbx model, imported it into MD, and resized the model. 4. The next thing I do first is the innermost layer of the robe, which I make very long to show the layers of the garment. 5. Then I adjusted the physical properties of the fabric, I adjusted the inner fabric to have a more leathery texture. 6. Next I made the second layer of fabric, which is a half-hung cloak, and in positioning, I used a needle tool to hold part of the cloak in place, otherwise it really kept falling off. 7. Make long scarves to hang on your clothes. 8. Freeze the lower garment and add a needle tool to continue fixing loose parts. 9. […] “Progress on Cooperation Project 03”

Minghan Lyu and Moonju Youn are now friends

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 02:09:56 +0000

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:30:43 +0000

Progress on Cooperation Project 02 This post documents the progress of individual and, in part, team projects from 1 February to 15 February. Post Summary (Personal):1: The design of the protagonist’s weapon2: Design of the main character’s body jewellery Post Summary (Team):1: Main character model design2: UNITY engine’s script for the basic movement logic of the protagonist.3：Engine for the implementation of the boss skills4: Basic movements of the protagonist (standing and dodging) PART I: PERSONAL The task assigned to me by the group this fortnight was to complete the design of the protagonist’s weapon, including a high-precision model, as well as to create an accessory for the protagonist to wear around his neck. Through my research, I found that a gourd-like kettle was popular in Loulan in ancient times, and later on, this kind of item was also used in a lot of modern TV dramas as well as film and TV productions, so I used the shape of the gourd in the design of the necklace. Production Process:1: First of all, use C4D’s solid fabric simulation to create a chain, so that the chain can absolutely fit on the character’s body, and there will be no bugs!2: Import the model into ZB, then sculpt the gourd shape and add details3: Combine the model with the chain and add bulging physical details at the joints Next up was the sword section, after discussing it in our two group meetings we decided to have the protagonist use a greatsword as his weapon, our first few versions were a tanged sword as well as a fighting sword, but because of our theme of Loulan, both of these weapons were eliminated. So I started to investigate the information and I found out that in ancient Loulan there were a lot of legends about bones as well as relics, so I added some eye patterns on the hilt as well as a shattering effect. Production process:1: Create the basic model of the knife in C4D and adjust the scale with the character model.2: Import into ZB, carve the knife parts in ZB and reduce the surface.3：After the sculpture is finished, send the low face model to the animation team, and prepare the high face model to replace the animation model. PART II: GAME DESIGN GROUP Firstly, there was the UNITY prep work, where my group completed the basic scripting of the game and designed the dynamic scripting and basic logic for character attacks. Then they finished the character’s hook lock animation. For the boss design, they finished the script for the particle tracking of the magic attacks. Then we designed a complete set of COMBO for the main character’s attack through another group meeting, we have two sets of combos for the main character’s attack, which are A-A-B as well as A-A-A-B, A stands for light attack and B stands for heavy attack, of course, different combos will be animated differently (here I need to do the special effect for the swinging of the sword as well as the soot effect for the feet). Later on, after I communicated with the animation team, we decided to make the last hit of COMBO1 (A-A-B) a jumping strike, so I need to make a downward slash effect PART III: ANIMATION GROUP The animation team (which is really only one person) was tasked this time with completing all the designs for the main characters as well as baking them so that they could be smoothly animated. Then she also designed the main character’s stop motion animation as well as the dodging animation (the dodging animation was supposed to be a roll, but roll is too demanding on the model and buggy, so it was changed to dodging to the left and right sides) Incidentally, on previous discussions, we decided to remove the protagonist’s prosthetic limbs and replace them with bone armour on the arms, the reason for this change was that the prosthetic limbs would have made it difficult to create the clothes, because of the need to go for a lot of breakage effects, so it was changed to the current version, and in the later stages of the colouring process we decided to design a red (or purple) glowing effect on thi […] “Progress on Cooperation Project 02”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 01:29:41 +0000

NUKE 2 Weeks Learning Summary and Assignment Progress This fortnight we learnt more about compositing techniques and green screen keying. PART I: LEARNING The above picture is about Gizmo node, he and Keylight are different, Gizmo can solve more colour resources, and Keylight is more comprehensive. The first thing to learn is about luminance, the core of green screen synthesis lies in the use of several nodes in the NUKE, these nodes have a unique role, each play a different speciality, I will explain in detail the special role of these nodes, they and AE’s removal of the green screen of the workflow is not the same at all, the NUKE is more powerful, but also to retain the original image of the movement NUKE is more powerful and can also retain the motion blur of the original image. The HueColor node is an old friend from our last lesson! In the last assignment, this node worked well with the generic colours of the screen, making objects blend into the environment. And in the greenscreen workflow, it’s a piece of junk, as can be seen in the character’s hair attachment, with all the residue attached to it In this section, we find that in the green screen processing or colour correction process, it is necessary to DENOISE the picture first, because the noise in the picture can make the solution very inaccurate, because the noise usually carries a triad of primary colours. Reasonable use of Shuffle for channel separation and re-Merge, you can make a part of the colour transformation, and you can see the picture, ROTO plus multi-channel composite, you can make a part of the colour transformation Using the Luminance key and adjusting the values to show different colour levels, the EdgeDetact node produces a similar effect (for this concrete wall). A combination of the above techniques makes the sunlight in the middle of this image huge and magical! IMPORTANT： 1: IBK stands for Image Based Keyer. It operate with a subtractive or difference methodology. It is one of the best keyers in NUKE for getting detail out of fine hair and severely motion blurred edges. 2: The chromKeyer tends to work better with more evenly lit screens that are more of a saturated color. NUKE’s CHROMA KEYER is that it takes full advantage of any GPU device you have in your system. 3: Keylight: It is a really great keyer over all and does color spill! 4: Primatte is what is called a 3D keyer. It uses a special algorithm that puts the colors into 3D color space and creates a 3d geometric shape to select colors from that space. 5: Utimatte: The advantage is you can get phenomenal keys that can get really fine detail and pull shadows and transparency from the same image. Keylight is everything! When absorbing the green screen, you can simply set the green colour to 1, so that the system automatically absorbs all the green colour in the screen, and then process the different parts of the original screen RGBA through a Merge node, which will result in this funny image! The IBK node is a bit more complicated, it requires manual setting of the node content and a step-by-step process to blend the character into the green and then the removal step, which is tedious but the result is ok Then the real operation, you need to screen for three parts of the processing, so that the result is the most perfect, but also the most controllable, because many times the green screen is not pure green, green screen will also produce shadows, then we need to divide the screen into ALPHA, BG and DISPILL MATTE. PART II: BASEMENT HOMEWORK PROCESS Finally learned MAYA’s multi-channel rendering skills, so hard ah, asked three people to learn! But now I’ll be able to make some interesting stuff! Perfect ROTO Work with different channels of Shuffle, each Shuffle is processed only a little bit, step by step, don’t rush Added two LightWrap nodes so that I could make my tank blend in more with the background, and I set it up with a couple of keyframes, otherwise the edges of the tank at the beginning of the video would be a […] “NUKE 2 Weeks Learning Summary and Assignment Progress”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 22:55:58 +0000

NUKE Compositing and Progress of Work This week we had a refresher on multichannel compositing and put the results in the basement homework, as well as learning some new techniques such as light matching and shadow compositing in what was a very big and difficult lesson! PART I: LEARNING light matching 1: Do not change the distortion of the original video when solving using the Distortion node, keep a separate file and name all the videos. Distortion before solve the marks 3: In multi-channel compositing, don’t create multiple colour nodes to process a single image (e.g. reflections), just use merge through a single grade or other colour processing node. 4: Grade node in the whitepoint value by absorbing the colour of the screen to make that colour data to zero (that is, to absorb a more average brightness of the region, pay attention to do not let the screen change too much) use gain to absorb the colour A can make the overall picture plus colour A (that is, so that the grades of the screen fused into the background) blackppint to absorb the deepest color of the object, lift to absorb the background of the deepest color, lift to absorb the background of the deepest color of the object. blackppint picks up the darkest colour of the object, lift picks up the darker colour of the background, multiply picks up a colour in the background that you want to blend in. 5: ctrl+shift selects the average rgb value in the frame.6: Merge (divide) is the B channel divided by the A channel rgb value of each7: After shuffle(id) and connecting to keylight, you can select a 3d part by changing screen colour HueCorrect 8: It’s easy to change the colour in HueCorrect, select the one you want to change and then hold down ctrl and alt to add a dot on the yellow line.9: Toe node is to match the original screen melanin, lift to absorb the original screen is darker, you can make the image instantly into the screen (the shadow will not be too bright or black) 10: Exposure node can be used to adjust the exposure of the screen11: Use the Specular node to connect to the glow node and select the colour A can make the colour A produce glow PART II: PERSONAL WORK I tried to use C4D for rendering at first, and the two images above are what went through the OCTANE renderer, don’t they look good! But alas, after my 3 hour long gruelling struggle, I failed! Because I found that the OCTANE renderer, no matter how it is set up, cannot render the multi-channel composite EXR file correctly. Sometimes there is no RGBA image, sometimes there is no ALPHA channel, and there are not many colour channel files such as SSS as well as Metallicity in the OCTANE Renderer, and many of the channel names don’t match NUKE. The above is an example of what I’m talking about, and it’s not hard to see that there are many channels of files missing from the image on the left, many of which are black. But this is not the most important thing, the most important thing is that if I put the left file into the scene, the scene will contain the bottom and back of the tank’s “ground”, which is not what I want, I want to have the shadow of the tank, but without the “ground”. Despite the failure, I was able to fruitfully import the wall shattering file I made in HOUDINI for the tank firing into NUKE, yay! I then imported the tank’s ABC file directly into the SCENE node to complete this week’s stage […] “NUKE Compositing and Progress of Work”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 01:01:43 +0000

This two weeks we have learnt about this powerful 3D tracking software, which unlike NUKE, allows all tracking to be customised according to the user’s needs, and has a huge advantage when it comes to tracking […]

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 01:40:42 +0000

NUKE Multichannel Compound & Model This week we’ve been learning about NUKE’s multi-channel compositing for processing EXR images, and I’ve been doing some preparation work for modelling the underground scene PART1 The main adjustments I made were to the sports car’s reflection layer as well as the metal layer, which are the two attributes I think are the most important ones in this night image. And in this photo there is a lot of water on the ground, which reflects the green light source on the left side of the image, so I added green to the Metallicity node to ensure realism. I tried lowering the brightness of the sports car overall as well as some contrast, but this makes the car very dark in colour, although it would make it look like it blends in with the background nicely. In the last step, I wanted to have the car’s lights on and add some fog in the foreground and have the light shine through the fog to create a God light, so I tried to create a God light line. Here’s my final render, I think it still needs a lot of improvement, for example the right side of the car near the camera needs to have more shadows, and then the overall lower end of the car doesn’t feel like it matches the ground, both of which are in dire need of improvement, I’ll be addressing these in the next session.But overall I am happy with the colour of the car. PART II I still want to make something that interests me, and I think this model is more difficult than a steam engine, or some industrial model, and I’ve found that out in the process of making it, there are a lot of difficulties in making caterpillar […] “NUKE Multichannel Compound & Model”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:18:49 +0000

Progress on Cooperation Project 01 Before I start the introduction, I want to make it clear that I found a group of people who were interested in the first week of school in January, and because the project we’re working on is very interesting, I’m actually including three weeks of progress in this posting (two weeks to be exact, because in the first week we were working on defining the worldview as well as the theme’s concept, which is complicated because we need to take into account a lot of factors, and all four of us designers want to use this project as a cornerstone for the future, so we’re all very serious about getting it done). We are going to make a third-person perspective fighting game based on the UNITY engine, the game is based on a variety of hardcore beat ’em up games, I’ve put up 3 videos of reference games below, each of which can be viewed for just a few of the core elements (movement, gameplay, and special effects) especially the first one which is the most informative (since it’s based on the same engine). Our game is set in the ancient Central Asian region of Loulan, and the main focus of the game is to control the protagonist, an ancient prince of Loulan, to kill a boss in order to achieve victory. We currently have a full backstory in place, and we’ll be embodying a part of the story (maybe a weapon?) in the game as well. Maybe an enemy? Maybe a scene?) Everything will be designed with elements of Central Asia and the Loulan region in mind. Our team is now close to completing the design of the main character, and I’ll be introducing the main character in detail in the next post, here’s some of the brainstorming we’ve been doing in FIGMA, and some of the sources of the ideas (there’s a bit of Chinese in there that we haven’t translated at the moment, but we’ll be doing so later on). Here are some games as sample This is the attack model we designed01 also the attack way and the special combo way The above is the progress that our group has been discussing together in our regular twice-weekly meetings, and some of the pictures in it are sketches that we have made. Here is some of my progress during recent weeks. Charecter design monster mask draw the eye’s detail sorry, this should place above! first is to make a BIG hole Trimming the contours I didn’t have a suitable brush, so I made my own pair of ram’s horns Final is not bad i think Before next week’s group presentation, I was tasked with completing the design of the accessories on the main character as well as the design of the weapons, and assisting another 3D designer with the design of the costumes and the binding of the […] “Progress on Cooperation Project 01”

Minghan Lyu changed their profile picture

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 23:39:42 +0000

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 21:55:36 +0000

NUKE 3D Matchmove Homework T […] “NUKE 3D Matchmove Homework”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 16:12:25 +0000

LONG LIVE THE QING DYNASTY P […] “LONG LIVE THE QING DYNASTY”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 14:39:04 +0000

The final process of the making of the final project This post is about to present the final progress report for this project, which will focus on the model conversion of the weapons as well as the colouring process, the creation of more footage, and the process of creating the project title. Of course, the overall performance of the project can be seen in the thread at the top of this BLOG, which details all aspects. First of all, I modified the model of the weapon, which was too complicated to paint or import, so I reduced the number of surfaces of each part of the weapon to 300,000 or less. (300,000 is an estimate, depending on computer） The handle will have a little fewer facets because it’s so small. I then imported the model into SUBSTANCE PAINTER and prepared to make the dragon part first In the second step, I made a fine sculpture of the dragon’s head, dealing with the eyes as well as the teeth, and I also did some dust effects on the scales (the picture is not very clear) Then I started making the rest of the different materials (not including the blade) The final step was the colouring of the knife, my first idea was to create a more monolithic knife, but I realised that I had too little detail on the blade during the carving process, there was no layering so I couldn’t make the knife and the dragon feel like they were in the same series, I’ll look out for this in the future, so I went with my second idea from earlier, a gold blade Next I modified the flaw that my teacher said in the critique that the female dancer in the scene was moving too fast, so I modified the speed in UE’s character editor I had some problems exporting the model to UE5, I found that UE5 doesn’t recognise the obj file format and if you import the original fbx weapon model it doesn’t accurately import the texture into it as it will be expanded once when it’s coloured.So I exported the weapon model in OBJ format directly from SP, imported this file (with the correct textures) into C4D, and exported it as FBX, so that all the features of the weapon are displayed correctly in UE5. Finally I used the lens guide in UE5 with film footage to create a close-up of the weapon Finally, in the title section, I designed a title, and the Chinese font was designed by a designer I w […] “The final process of the making of the final project”

Minghan Lyu and Yifang Liu are now friends

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 15:02:24 +0000

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 01:54:04 +0000

Minghan Lyu's Presentation On Week11 Purpose of the project The theme of my work is about the Qing Dynasty in China. As we all know, the Qing Dynasty of China fell into disrepute during the late Qing Dynasty for various reasons, but the truth is that if the Qing Dynasty had not been a monarchy, China would have been a superpower in the world that was more developed than the European countries. In my artwork, I want to show the scene that the Qing Dynasty did not fall. On the technical side, I’m hoping to use a variety of software that I’ve been taught on the course to make them, but of course as it stands, I’ve used all sorts of 3D software now except for NUKE, which is so difficult that I really don’t think of how to use it. How I have planned my project? At the beginning of the course, I have a weekly task plan for the big project, my plan is basically based on the content of the weekly class. But of course, there are also a week or two I’m lazy, I will be rushed to the content of the class a day or two before the class to do it, for example, today in a while I’m going to play this video, I am all in yesterday’s day finished. Of course, I will be the future of the project before Deadline to do the project, the specific process of the weekly process is on my Blog, if you are interested in it you can also see! What research I have done? I’ve mainly done research into the armour of the Qing Dynasty and the history as well as the design of weapons during this period. The research will be shown in my final product, including video and possibly typography. Most of the research comes from my life, because I am a very interested in history, so I might make a production on a certain period of history, a lot of the research comes from what I learnt in my daily life, and this project is also What I have learned so far? Everything taught in class！ (but don’t ask, asking means I might forget) Video Presentation This video is the progress I’ve made so far, the next major task is to create a close-up shot of the weapon in the Emperor’s hand as well as a close-up shot of the Emperor, other than that I need to create a title sequence, and I plan to create a stereoscopic title in the opening sky using NUKE. Hardest Part Part I: When using ZBrush to make weapons, I couldn’t use it at all because I hadn’t used it for so long, and I watched a lot of tutorials to learn how to do it. This is what I want in my head! This is what I made at the beginning! (Like a tongue) The final product The final product Part II: Just started using UE, originally felt that this software is very simple, and then found that I want to do what, what can not be done, and then only one by one to see the tutorials to learn, but I now find that the blueprints are really difficult, especially the blueprints of the characters, simply and other software is not a difficulty! Solid smoke generated by the Nigara s […] “Minghan Lyu’s Presentation”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:58:24 +0000

Final Project：Progress towards completion of the final week In the last week, I finished creating 80 per cent of the content, including characters, models, footage, and video. The last thing I still need is a close-up shot of the main character and a close-up shot of the weapons At the beginning, I designed a stage with the king’s seat and some decorations, these steps were done in C4d and ZBrush, I didn’t do too much with the texture because the lights in the scene wouldn’t focus on it. Create the outline in C4D first And then some minor sculpting via ZBrush (I have special brushes, so the production step was omitted) The stairs were the same steps, and since I had some previous models, they were quick to make! How it looks when placed in a scene Next, I designed the flags in the scene, I used a variety of UE plug-ins to make the flags produce wind effects and some broken effects, and broken effects can be manipulated through the material editor, very conducive to the later changes. Creating maps The scene also requires a lot of Place it behind the main character to show off his dominance The next step, is the hardest one, I need to place multiple characters within the scene to make the shot look storytelling, so I found some character material on some 3D resources online (to save time) then I created the movement of these models on Mixamo by myself and imported the FBX files into UE, and then I did the texture connection, and finally I designed the position of the characters in the scene. female dancer Pious Soldiers A guard with a machete Reporting soldiers Watched some tutorials and tried to create this walking animation in UE A Qing Dynasty Imperial Guard Saluting the Emperor Finally in the rendering section, I reviewed the MRQ renderer that was taught in last week’s UE class, as I found that UE’s default renderer was rendering moving shots incorrectly (I initially thought that it was due to the global antialiasing settings, but I was still getting tearing when I replaced the FXAA with TAA, which is still not resolved at the moment) After using the MRQ renderer, this problem was resolved, great! What the MRQ renderer looks like when it’s working The process of making a video In the next steps I will continue to finish the rest of the video, the main unfinished parts are the design of the weapons, and a close-up shot of the Emperor, and I will use NUKE to make a special effect with the name of the project […] “Final Project：Progress towards completion of the final week”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 23:31:11 +0000

Progress on term-time assignments 23/11 In the past two weeks, I’ve modelled and coloured the main characters as well as the larger scenes, and I’ve now progressed to the stage of making the secondary characters, but of course, some of the other elements will need to be changed next! The effect of the big scene (not yet finished) The first step to create the head The roughly finished state, still need to add the headdress or face details Having watched some instructional videos, I will now make the reduction in the number of ‘faces’ according to the model Some details of the shoulder In some small places, I used multiple objects combined together in ZBrush so that I could create more detail In the process of making the character, I encountered a lot of difficulties, such as how to create a three-dimensional sense of the armour, I used multiple software to solve this problem, I first created a nude model of the character, and then go to create the upper body of the character’s armour, and then I use the upper body of the armour imported into the Marvelous Designer for the armour to set a layer of cloth, as a cape, and then exported the cape as an OBJ model into ZBrush, so that I can directly import the whole character into Mixamo for the animation process, but also can be layered for the Substance Painter PBR process. Here is the exact process. Making a few simple moves with Mixamo Importing low face count models into SP and colouring them in (I coloured my face first for fear of bad results) Here’s a dynamic display of the character and how it looks without a renderer after the colouring is done three views Then later on it was the process of integrating into the UE engine, all the small objects I had in this scene were integrated from some of Bridge’s existing public models, and I carried out the integration as well as the design of the scene. I also taught myself some flame and smoke techniques in the Nigara system, you can see the details of these scenes in the images below. smoke(via Nigara) fire(via Nigara) Mimics some of the dungeon scenes from the game Dark Souls 3, which I think makes it look a bit more oppressive Start placing the characters in the scene Overall effect These are some of my recent developments in that work, recently I’ve been lying at home not wanting to move because I’ve had a cold, a fever for 4 or 5 days, and really not feeling too well, probably because the weather in London has been so awful, cold and rainy all the time. I’m completely fine now though! The next step I’m working on in this scene is to make some simple figures to place in front of (or around) the main character, and to make a super tall stone chair behind the main character with a Qing Dynasty flag han […] “Progress on term-time assignments 23/11”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 03:23:40 +0000

NUKE Autotracking Point and Ballon Project PART I In class this week, I learnt how to use special nodes to quickly replace something in a video, and I learnt how to remove an occlusion in front of an identifier. And I taught myself some Mocha Pro, which is a pretty handy tool, but I’m still exploring it and haven’t quite mastered it, as I’ll have a video to show below this is the planar tracker project As you can see, in the video I have framed a particular piece of content, this is so that at a later stage I can integrate all the learning more easily, and also so that in the future I may be able to put it in a portfolio. Creating stop motion animation with AE The node tree on the right is the replacement process for the billboard in the middle concrete steps using Pin to track the animation PART II For the balloon assignment I used Mocha Pro for more work, I added a cute little aeroplane to the scene but I still had some problems with the Alpha channel Modelling hot air balloons using C4D, I’m much better at that! Using PS to create a decal for a balloon Creating moving animations More detail on the movement of the background text knot diagram Fully automated Roto of aircraft in Mocha Pro in the process of fine-tuning Flip and check the […] “NUKE Autotracking Point and Ballon Project”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:59:11 +0000

UE5 Integrated Scene Modelling This week in class I learnt how to create comprehensive scenarios and gained a deeper understanding of resource management, here are my assignments for the week The effect of light sources in the house Fog, grass, terrain, water Details of the river Combination and interaction of multiple light sources Mimic the effect of the yellow light at the entrance of the boss room in Elden Ring the door is like this […] “UE5 Integrated Scene Modelling”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:19 +0000

Modelling and Previewing of 3D Scenes Before we begin, there’s a song over here that I mentioned in an earlier week’s paper that contains the song of the Qiang flute from ancient China as well as the sounds of various instruments. I used this song for the first part of the final assignment Demo In the unrendered parts, I also worked on more detailed sculpting of the main character’s weapon, this time I worked on the blade as well as the hilt part of the weapon The bottom of the hilt also incorporates a dragon element, implying that the user has slain dragons in the past The hilt is engraved with many signs of battle damage. A variety of carving tools are used to sharpen the blade section Lots of patterns The next step was the modelling of the scene, I used a variety of 3D software for the model collection assignments of the scene and finally chose to use UE for rendering as I wanted to learn the workflow of UE. Model of Qing Dynasty style roof The effect of a single model of a house in a scene I used PS to optimise the material of the lanterns on the house to better show the effect of the internal flame Here’s the willow I generated using C4D’s tree plugin, then I imported it into UE The purple part is the focus point of the film lens Using a boom camera to simulate the operation of a real lens Using Bézier curves to make an impact on the value of the lens aperture This is the first time I’ve used UE’s rendering module for an assignment, and it’s a little difficult to get started the first […] “Modelling and Previewing of 3D Scenes”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:48:20 +0000

References to the Main Character's item This is the kind of artistry I wanted to show, full of money and status, and with a sense of majesty, and of course, this kind of clothing can only be made with ZBrush. The two above are Qing Dynasty court imperial outfitting for combat, I personally like this style very much, it’s very handsome, and at a later stage I’d like to have the figure seated in the centre wearing this type of clothing as well. The full body colth is like that. More references to weapons City […] “References to the Main Character’s item”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:32:53 +0000

Weapon Making, Dragon Head Model This week I’ve created the weapons section, I’ve mainly used ZBrush to model and sculpt the various parts of the weapon, I’ve completed the dragon head section so far, and plan to complete the full weapon next week as well as the textures, and will produce my sketches the following week. dragon head on the weapon I spent a lot of eforts on learning how to make a realistic dragon model for my weapon because the last time I use ZBrush was on 2021 maybe, so I take few days learning the skill on Youtube or other media platform. those are the first steps Although this is a homework, but I still found that the process on the modeling part is very interesting, especially when I learn a new trick. scupturling the teeth the dragon head on the big machete 🙁 This is the begining when I start this model, I forgot the most of the skills of ZBrush at that moment, but now I can model something […] “Weapon Making, Dragon Head Model”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 17:00:10 +0000

More Referances with the Project Week 5 In discussions with Manos this week, we further finalized the idea for the final big assignment, in terms of the artwork I wanted to show the ambition of the late Qing dynasty to dominate the world, so I wanted to show a kind of scene of the every dynasties paying tribute in the creative idea, which is also a scene from the later part of the period. very similar feeling i want to demonstrate this kind of BIG scene, some kind of magnificent, majestic I’d also like to do a close-up shot of the super-giant weapon in the monarch’s hand, which will be done in ZBrush as well as Substance […] “More Referances with the Project”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 16:51:30 +0000

Nuke: Roto and Mountain This […] “Nuke: Roto and Mountain”

Minghan Lyu wrote a new post on the site Minghan's Blog

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 16:57:56 +0000

Week4 Maya and UE5 Practice I […] “Week4 Maya and UE5 Practice”

Minghan Lyu's profile was updated

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:36:37 +0000