Martian Landscape in VUE

The Inspiration and Draft


I've been watching a lot of that British comedy series by Ricky Gervais and Co. called 'An Idiot Abroad'. Particularly, the episode in which Karl Pilkington goes to New Zealand to live on a Desert Island, I believe it was the first episode of season 2. So he's on his way to an island and along the way is this aerial shot of a gorgeous hazy, martian-like landscape. Only, this was on earth. It mostly comprised of hilly terrain (a few very large bumps here and there) and a lot of haze. 


So I went into Vue and started recreating my version of it - or rather whatever I had remember from that shot, really. 

Before compositing in Nuke

So I came up with that (above) terrain and I was, as always, astonished by Vue's ability to pick up so much detail. After I had achieved this sort of edgy terrain - modifying it using the powerful function editor - I figured that for a still image it looked quite decent with an un-textured terrain. Of course, this isn't even close to the effect that I wanted to achieve so I left the latter for Nuke to handle. 


The Final Composite

After compositing in Nuke.

The above landscape shows the finished (composited) scene. The Grade node being my favorite one in Nuke, I used that to my advantage to get the orange hue. Then applied a blur to the terrain in the horizon. 

About the blur

This was the tricky part as I wasn't sure if adding a blur was worth it. It sort of doesn't change anything but on a magnified level you will be able to see some difference. Most of depth effect was due to Vue's aerial perspective, but I just couldn't help myself and had to fiddle around with Nuke's blur node. All in all, it's done!

An Artistic Evening

On Monday June 4th I had a chance to visit the National Film Board of Canada Mediatheque in downtown Toronto for a 2 hour animation seminar with Iain Gardner.



The evening, organized by Toronto Animated Image Society consisted of some of Iain's best animated short films, each followed by a behind-the-scenes talk.


This was a kind of 'Intro to Classical Animation' for me as I'm more of a 3D kinda guy (obviously...)


Iain's work was very inspirational and hearing about the ups and downs he had to face throughout his career brought forth a lot of new points that should be noted. For one thing, never hesitate to try and experiment with new ideas, raise the bar and tackle complex issues. 





Hand-drawn animation is a difficult thing to do even in this day and age and it requires a lot of focus. So if you don't know what you're up against or have no clue where to get started, you're in for a surprise. 

My favorite piece was a short film called, 'The Loch Ness Kelpie'. I went home and found it on YouTube. Apparently, it's very rare because the track was done by a famous musician. 


          

EA Games and The Angry Gamer

So my brother finally bought his copy MADDEN NFL 12. As he opened the seal, I had my fingers crossed, hoping that it will not have the ridiculous Online Pass system EA usually tortures it's gamers with. And what do you know, they gave away a 2 day trial so you can play online.


This is my favorite part: The online experience sucks! As with all EA Sports games. It lags in-game, fails to stay connected with the Internet, and it takes really long to find players to game with. Brilliant job EA. This is just fantastic! With barely anyone to play with online, and knowing that in a couple months you're going to shutdown the servers anyway, we have to PAY for an ONLINE PASS? No wonder you were top on the worst companies in the US.


Here's another anecdote: Last year, I bought a brand new copy of CRYSIS 2 for XBOX 360. Opened it. Fired it up. Doesn't run. Say hello to a pirated game. 'Hello.' After contacting EA, they gave me a window of 90 days to send the game back. And PAY for the SHIPPING! Are you nuts? You want me to pay more on top of that $67 I paid for your video game?!


You know what you can have your games. EAT THEM! Not only do you rip people off, you piss them off!