I Remade Star Wars VFX in 1 Week #vfx #digital #digitaleffect

Love or hate the newer Star Wars movies, I think we can all agree that this shot is epic. So let's try to recreate it, though we have a few challenges to overcome. First of all, I don't own a wire that can make me jump 20 feet in the air, so we'll have to get creative there. And second, like we discovered in my Iron Man recreation video, I don't live anywhere near a desert, so that's another problem for us to solve. And let's actually start with that one. I live in Norway, and while we don't have deserts, we do have beautiful mountains, so let's use that. I did still want a pretty flat area like the movie, but I had no luck finding something that would work. And after failing to flatten it myself, I decided to just embrace the mountains and use them as part of the video. It's not a bug, it's a feature. We obviously need lightsabers for this video, and in the past I've just held kitchen utensils and replaced them in post. But this is quite tedious and doesn't always look the best, so for this video, I've gone full nerd and gotten a real lightsaber hilt to save some time. And this turned out to be one of the hardest shoots I've ever done. It was freezing, and just as we started filming, it started snowing. Luckily, this did make the shots pretty epic, so I'd say it was worth the pain. I didn't end up bringing a trampoline, so we'll have to fix this jump in post. By the way, Emma sucked being a stuntwoman and nailing this epic landing, but then having it all covered up by smoke in the movie. However, since I'm directing this version, I'm gonna keep my epic landing in, which will also save me some time on the VFX, but that's totally not why I'm doing it. The only problem is getting an epic landing, but then I channeled my inner gymnastic and got something that sort of works, but we'll definitely have to make this look a bit more epic later on. We quickly shot everything else we needed, including some drone shots, and then filming was done. Here are the shots we ended up with. And before filming, I decided to cut down this sequence slightly, but this still leaves us with 15 shots, so we definitely have our work cut out for us. Let's start with the ship, the TIE Whisperer. Finding 3D models online of specific things like Kylo Ren's TIE Whisperer can be quite the challenge, but luckily I found this one that I think I can make work. It does need a small texture upgrade though, so I tweaked the shaders a bit. Much better. The next step is 3D tracking the first shot and roughly recreating the geometry. I then draw a curve I want the TIE Whisperer to follow, and animate some tilting for the turns. I also add a dust trail, but this doesn't really make any sense, since it wasn't dry at all when we filmed, but it does make it look a bit cooler, so who cares. I render it out, add some camera shake, and the shot is done. That wasn't too bad. Unfortunately though, we have a long way to go. The lightsaber effect is actually pretty easy to create nowadays, but it didn't always used to be this way. The first lightsaber effect was created using a rotating rod with reflective tape that would cause a nice bright flicker, though this would only work at certain angles and was quite inconsistent in general. So they switched to physically tracing the film frame by frame and shining actual light onto it to create the glow effect. From there, computers took over and the lightsaber look slowly improved over time. They've even gone back and redone the old reflective tape effect with digital effects, which is a bit of a shame, but seeing the before and afters is quite interesting. Nowadays, they're even using LED lights on set to get light onto the actors and environment, and the beams look incredible. For my video, having the physical prop is gonna make the process a whole lot easier than I'm used to. Until now, I've had to manually 3D track a lightsaber model into my hand and match the lighting so it would fit the scene, but now I'm able to do everything as a 2D effect entirely. I can just draw a lightsaber shape, make it blue, add some glow and flicker effects, and we have a lightsaber. The only thing that's a bit tedious is having to manually track the lightsaber. This would have been easier if I'd used the beam part of the lightsaber when we filmed, but in the cold I managed to forget it. But for certain shots like the backflip, it's easier to act without the physical beam and add it in after anyways. And I can also add some light onto me and the environment in post, but I don't need too much of this since it's daytime. I basically do the same process to all the shots with lightsabers, and also add in the tie whisper for the ones where we see it. And with this, we can finalize a few more shots. In order to keep being able to make these videos full-time, I reached out to a company that I've been using for years to create my videos, Artlist, and they generously agreed to sponsor the video. Pretty much all of the music and sound effects on my entire channel are from Artlist, and that is for two reasons. One, they have a crazy amount of high quality sound effects and music, and it's all easily searchable. And two, I can sleep soundly at night knowing that I won't get any copyright strikes on YouTube, and still be able to use any type of music that I want in my videos. As a VFX artist, sound effects are especially important, as they really help sell an effect. Just listen to this, compared to this. I'm always recommending Artlist to friends getting into the creator space, as the value they provide is so worth the price. Now, not only do they have this vast catalog of sound effects and music, they also have stock footage, AI voiceover, software templates, and they just released LUTs, which I'm personally so pumped about. I'm not the best at color grading, so suddenly getting access to hundreds of professionally made LUTs, included with my plan, was awesome. So I'm probably gonna use them for, like, all my future videos. Artlist is actually running their only sale of the year right now, so you can get 10% off on their max plan. And on top of that, if you use the link in my description, you also get two months for free, and support me in the process. Thank you so much to Artlist for sponsoring the video. On to the next effect. Okay, time to tackle the backflip. The main issue here is that I can't jump 20 feet in the air like Ray, so the way to fix that is with a digi-double. A digi-double is a 3D character that looks like a person, and movies use these all the time. This is a digi-double, this is a digi-double, and this is just Jackie Chan being Jackie Chan. It's kind of like a stunt person's stunt person. They're typically created with expensive scans of the actor, and a bunch of manual work to get it to look exactly like them. I don't have the time or skills for this, so I'm gonna cheat a bit. There's this awesome tool called PythUHD, or if you wish, Multilevel Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization. Maybe not the most marketable name, but luckily, the time they didn't spend towards making a good name, they spent towards creating an awesome tool which lets you turn images into 3D models, or in other words, digi-doubles. While shooting, I made sure to get this interesting video that I export an image from and run through the tool, and... Hmm. Okay, so the tool doesn't seem to work for me right now, so I'm gonna grab a model I made this way a few months ago, warp my current image so it matches the pose, and project that texture onto the model. I then grab a jacket model from online, color it to match, and we have a super cheap digi-double that should do the trick. I figured I'd just copy the jump that Ray does, and we can do this by tracking the shot and just matching a few of the poses that she does, and boom, we have a decent animation. The most unrealistic part is me being this flexible. I then add this to my shot, animate the ship, simulate my jacket, and add a 3D model of the lightsaber to my hand. I do the same process for the shot above, and also add the cut by carving a hole in the ship, adding glowing edges and sparks. For the backflip landing, I move myself higher and add in the ship. I couldn't quite get the angle of the lightsaber to look right for the landing, so I decided to just turn it off mid-air. And with this, we can finalize the shots that are arguably the hardest. For the ship tearing apart and smashing into the ground, I had an idea while filming. Tracking a camera movement this fast, and with this much motion blur, is super hard. So I decided to film it in slow motion. I'll do everything for this shot in slow motion, and speed it up at the end so it looks real-time. It's my first time trying this, so I really hope it works. Once again, I track the shot, and then simulate the ship like 50 different times until I get something that I'm happy with. I wanted to see what it would look like sped up, and luckily, it seems to be working. I then do a smoke simulation for the broken engine, and render everything out. I composite it together, add some dirt explosion elements when it hits the ground, and finally speed it up. And it's done. I noticed that some shots had almost no snow in them, so I added some snow in post to make up for this. I also realized we forgot to move our gear from this shot, so I painted it out. Now, all that's left is the sound effects, which are super important to make everything feel real. I use some from the movie, but get most from Artlist, and it's actually quite fun when I can just search for whatever I need, and get a bunch of options that all fit, like this grass impact sound. I add the rest of the sounds, plus some wind ambience, and the sound effects are done. I finished it off with a lot from Artlist too, and again, I genuinely recommend these guys, so if you're in the market, feel free to check out the link below. Anyways, the video is finally done, so let's have a look at how it turned out. And thank you so much for watching till the end. Get him down here.