Compositionally Enhanced
VFX is cool
Compositing is turning out to be a lot of fun! I haven’t delved too deep into the VFX rabbithole just yet - it’s largely been simple color corrections, blurs, and glares so far - but it’s still really cool seeing how much of a difference it makes.
The image above was drawn in Krita and then given a fancy background and other VFX in Blender. The filter on the background is from MP_Comp. I can share the node setup for this image if there’s interest.
Video Progress
I’ve got two scenes of the next video rendered and composited so far. Below you can see a few select frames with extremely real context in the captions. I wanted these shots to look like they take place at the bottom of the ocean and I think I got the look down pretty well.
Depending on progress, you’ll either get more out-of-context screenshots or maybe even the finished video with the next newsletter. We’ll see.
If you want to know more about how I’m making this, let me know and I can share some more details next time.
If you want to know more about why I’m making this, it’s because I think it’s gonna be really funny. I’m hoping I get a few “What the fuck did I just watch?” sort of reactions. This may alienate some viewers who subscribed from the scorpion video, but it did have a pretty blatant warning about what was next.
Unfortunately we don’t have time to address the remaining interrogatives.
Website Updates
The Hydromecha dot Website saw a major overhaul to its overall aesthetics this past month. Several legacy assets were touched up and sent through the compositing dimension while others were newly minted just for the occasion. The new stuff was all drawn in Krita, with some of it being processed further in Blender.
Landing Page
I re-did the render for the landing page monitor and did some post-processing to make it fit the deep sea look better. There’s also a transparent grunge texture over the screen that I made in Blender. Instead of using a transparent image with a hole cut out in the center (used to show the scrolling static), I used another image as a mask. The collective filesizes of the non-transparent image and mask are much lower than the previous alpha-channel-having picture.
I was having some trouble getting a shadow to work nicely using the 2D plane/image of the monitor so I made a duplicate of it in black as a stand-in.
Homepage
The tablet frame for the main page was edited slightly in Krita and then sent into Blender for the usual VFX procedure.
I’m quite fond of how the new menu elements are all physical things, although I’m a bit iffy on the featured creation section. It’s supposed to be a display window in a store but I’m not sure if it’s clear enough. Other than that potential change I want to add some icons to the navigation buttons on the left.
Speaking of those nav buttons, they were (outside of the actual LCD screen, which was made in Blender) drawn in Krita and then VFX’d in Blender.
Most of the shadows were done using CSS box shadows. The rest have the shadows painted in, like with the button tracks above.
I ended up making a pretty nice wood texture for the magazine stand that gets almost entirely covered. If the image below gets messed up by compression, you can see the original version from the site by clicking here.
Site Button & Cursors
The site button and cursors were also touched up using the same techniques discussed ad nauseam.
I still need to upgrade the rest of the pages and I’d like to use some other styles or mediums for them. I imagine it’ll take a while.
Foodstuff (Non-VFX)
This section won’t have anything to do with compositing. Don’t worry, you’re safe here.
I recently acquired a waffle iron. More recently I acquired an electric mixer. In the interim period I had to whip egg whites by hand to make waffles. I’m very thankful for automation.
And that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll see you again next time with another newsletter.
Have a good one,
-Hydro