VFX Vs Practical Filmmaking #vfx #digital #digitaleffect

A few months ago, five artists received the same challenge, and we all got to work right away. Because soon, we'd all meet up and reveal our work in the most epic competition I've ever been a part of. The challenge from the creators Skogs and Bex was as follows. Create an art piece representing your country and present it in front of the other contestants in Mexico City in two months. This is Creator Odyssey World Stage. I first had to figure out how to incorporate my country, Norway. I'm gonna be showing off Norway's beautiful nature by splitting a whole mountain in half. And I may have ended up going a bit overboard with this effect. But since Lenovo and Intel are sponsoring this video and sent over the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Aura Edition imagined with Intel, I just had to push it to its limits. You might have heard of the paradox of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Well, I'm gonna turn a football into an unstoppable force and make everything in its path split to make way for it. And I'm gonna do it with a 3D tool called a boolean. A boolean operation simply lets you take two objects and cut a hole in one of them where they intersect. A simple concept, but it's the backbone of CGI and it's used in everything from destruction effects to creating your favorite video games. But we're gonna be using it to win this competition by splitting things you've never seen split in half before. So now, we're on our way to film Erik's video. I headed out with my wife, Maria, to film. And here's another twist, she's actually competing in this challenge too. Jox and Vex had picked us both for this Creator Odyssey world stage competition. And Maria is a super talented VFX artist, so let's just say I was feeling quite nervous about competing with her. But luckily, she was kind enough to help me film still. The only problem was that when I got home, I realized she had spent most of the time just filming stuff she thought was pretty. Or her mom. So this is gonna be one of the final shots where the football just shoots over the water, creating a giant splash before parting that mountain. And I think it's gonna look super cool. I filmed the rest of the video, which was an awkward experience to say the least. I filmed the rest of the video at several different locations and eventually ended up with these shots. And let's start with the hardest of them all, splitting a mountain in half. It's not that hard to split a mountain in 3D, but what's harder is getting this real mountain into 3D. But I came up with something so stupid, it might just work. I use Google Maps 3D view and screen record every angle of the mountain. I then import this video into a photogrammetry software, and it actually worked. Next, I line it up with my footage and animate the football shooting towards it. I then use a boolean to split it and write some code to animate the crack going through the mountain. And it was at this point I started getting seriously impressed with the Lenovo laptop that I'm using for this project. Even splitting a mountain is no task for it. Next, I do a smoke simulation to make the split feel more real. The original plan was to have the football create a giant splash in the water, but then we arrived to film. So it turns out the water is just frozen. This makes my job a lot harder, but it could look super cool if it goes well. I create the ice by lining up a grid with the real ice and shatter it into thousands of pieces using, you guessed it, a boolean. To get the ice to move, I actually create a water simulation and use the velocity of the water to push the ice around, like this. I can then re-simulate the water, now using the ice as a collider, and we get this really nice interaction between the water and the ice. Lastly, I simulate some smoke from the ball to make it feel even faster. In compositing, I start by adding the mountain render and use some smoke puffs and fog layers to blend it in even more. For the ice and water, I do some color grading and clean up the edges a bit. Lastly, I add the football, smoke puff, and some camera shake to tie it all together. But before you get to see how it turned out, let's split a car in half. I start by 3D tracking my footage to be able to work with it in 3D space, and then start to search for a car model to use. Most 3D car models don't come with an interior, as it's only meant to be seen from the outside and they don't want to waste time modeling the inside, but I was lucky enough to find one with a beautiful interior ready to be cut in half. I import the car into Houdini and add materials to it. Next, I line up a grid with the middle of the car and use a boolean modifier for the cut. Nice! Next, I model a football, take some pictures of the real ball with my phone, and use SmartShare Tap to launch to transfer them to my Lenovo laptop. So handy! I then use these images to add texture to the ball. Animating a ball can be surprisingly tricky. The rotation is easy to animate, and so is the position. But getting them to match up perfectly is not so simple, leading to either under-rotation or over-rotation. To fix this, I can link the position to the rotation and finally get some use out of the math I learned in school to automatically roll the ball the perfect amount as I animate its position. With this in place, I animate the ball rolling through the car and then animate the car splitting in half. I simulate it falling into itself and combine this with the manual animation which gives me this. Lastly, I simulate the windows of the car shattering and add some sparks where the car splits for a bit more realism. Now it's time to render this out, which thanks to the Intel Core Ultra processor goes super quickly. I import my render to my compositing software, match the colors of the car to the footage and add a shadow. I then add the sparks and make the cut glow hot red. Lastly, I notice the lens flare from the sun is covered up by our render, so I add a new one to blend everything together. And with this, it's done! But I still have to split this tree, destroy this house and add a whole stadium to the background of this shot. And with only two weeks left before we head to Mexico and represent Norway, I was feeling the nerves. So I decided to talk to someone who's had to deal with a lot more pressure while representing their country on the actual field. And I asked her what that felt like. I think representing your country is both incredible and full of a lot of pressure. My first start for the national team, I remember walking down the tunnel and, you know, instead of people chanting your name, they're chanting USA, USA. And I was running out and I stopped running and I just looked around and took it all in. For my younger self, it was cool to look back and be like, wow, she would have been so proud. And that's when I wondered, what would my younger self think of me and where I am today? It's not at all where I thought I would end up. Being from Norway, I, of course, started skiing at two years old and grew up in a very active household. I love trying new activities and if it had wheels on it, I was giving it a go. Organized activities like football were also a big part of my early years. But slowly, my passion for sports turned into a passion to create. I started creating edits of our winter and summer vacations. And this slowly led to me experimenting more and more with 3D and visual effects until suddenly I was doing it for a living. I think the same passion that drives an athlete is very similar to what drives an artist. And I wanted to see if Carson agreed. I think that's what's cool about sports and arts and things like that. It's that you have a lot of different things that you love, but you're all doing it because you love it. So it's like, yeah, they're different, but the whole reason that we're all doing what we're doing is because we love it and we're passionate about it. With this trip down memory lane and newfound motivation, I was ready to tackle the final shots. To get the ball to split and roll through this tree, I start by modeling a rough version of it. I then project the footage onto it and use a grid with some noise to split it in half. I do a smoke sim and add some splinters falling from the tree and finally animate the ball rolling through it. In compositing, I add the tree, but we have a problem. We still see the original tree in the background. Before, this would have been a time-consuming task to fix. But with this laptop's focus on AI acceleration, I can use AI to remove the tree in just a few seconds. With my newfound time, I add the CG ball here and rotoscope out the real ball for a seamless switch. During filming, I came up with the genius idea of eliminating my competition by having the ball split Maria. But obviously, Lenovo said no. So instead, she's gonna step away at the last second, which took a few tries, but eventually she nailed it. That was smooth. The only VFX needed here was to remove me. Destroying this house was done in a similar way to splitting the tree. But instead of using a boolean, I did a destruction simulation by having this block attached to the ball and crash through the house. And since it worked so well last time, I used AI to remove the house here too. With this laptop's fast AI features, I can really push the boundaries of my creativity and focus more on the story than tedious tasks like paint-outs. The final job was to spice up the ending shot where my friend stops the ball at the center of the field. The background is quite boring though, so I replace it with this image of a stadium and use DaVinci's magic mask to rotoscope out his feet and the ball. Lastly, I add some motion to the image by using AI and it's done. I jump into DaVinci to do some sound design and color grading to finish it off. And since the laptop has PureSight Pro and a tandem OLED display, I'm able to get the exact look I'm going for. With this, the whole video is finished. And that's a relief, because it's time to head to Mexico. Okay, so we made it to Mexico and this place is awesome. After some sightseeing, we met up with the other creators and we were all shocked to see how big this production was. Lenovo was also documenting this challenge and honestly, it was so cool to see a real crew at work since I'm so used to just Maria and I filming everything alone. The next day, it was time for the reveals. And as we sat down with 8 cameras, 10 lights and 60 eyes on us, I think we were all feeling the nerves. Isaac and Maria were up first and they nailed it. And then it was my turn to reveal what I had made. How do you even do that? Afterwards, I showed them some of the making of process and the whole thing was such a fun experience. And you get to be the judge. Check out GOX's upcoming video to vote on your favorite art piece for a chance to win this laptop. Being able to come here and meet all these incredible people is something I will cherish forever. Everyone involved had made absolutely incredible work so make sure to check out their videos to see their journey. And to find out more about the device, check out Lenovo.com slash Lenovo Aura Edition. And lastly, I want to thank Lenovo and Intel for sponsoring this video. Honestly, they've been so nice and easy to work with. See you in the next one. Erik is filming my video afterwards and if he goes through, I don't want to hear any complaining.