- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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Been wanting to post this for a minute.
Started this in December of last year. This one was really close to me - I pitched and directed it, and did about 80% of the CG.
The development was pretty early on - the interior designer was still in the mood board phase, just pulling references of textures and details they'd like to incorporate. Really loose ideas. Client came to us and asked if there's anything we can produce for them to use as a teaser, some way of presenting the project in a way that announces it, but doesnt commit too hard to showing what's going on. Initially, we said probably not, but we'd have a think.
Then we took a closer look at the mood boards from the interior designer, and I started to see how many of the details and objects could incorporate movement - so we put together a pitch within a few days for the client based around doing a piece that exclusively focuses on the details, using placeholder music.
A big part of the pitch was that we'd follow the same order of a traditional arch film - location/architecture, lobby, amenities, residences, then the brand story. We will eventually turn each 10-second segment of movement into the title cards of a longer film, so we incorporate wider shots showing the full design once we've done the stills. That was a big draw for the client - that it would tie back into the materials beyond being a one-off teaser.
Then they loved the pitch, and I had a major panic attack wondering how the gently caress we'd pull it off.... now we had to build scenes from scratch just to test ideas to get them in an edit to see if they work to then build the scenes for real. it's not often we start with such a blank canvas, even though we had a lot of mood boards to pull from.
The music was a loving dream - I reached out to AEPH who does a lot of the music for ash thorps projects, pitched it to him, and the timing worked out where he could take it on. We spent the whole time working super closely together - us sending rough max viewport previews over, him doing some sound design experiments, us using those as inspiration to refine things further. The whole process was really exciting and a lot of fun!
Anyway here it is. 10 weeks total from 'oh poo poo we have an idea we can pitch' to delivery.
https://vimeo.com/dboxglobal/fairmontphoenix?share=copy
I got lots more videos I could share too - every single client meeting was done via a rough edit, so I have videos showing weekly progress all the way from the initial pitch to the final. I think we even met twice a week in mid-December just to make sure we could queue up a ton of rendering over Christmas.
Veryyyy nice! Always love a process montage so you got my vote for that
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Nov 17, 2023 20:58
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May 15, 2024 11:25
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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Thanks! i'm going to skip a bunch as some only had very minor changes between exports.
This was 2 weeks in - 11th of november
https://vimeo.com/794955613/dc4bae1863?share=copy
That's got the 'pitch edit' at the start, which we did in a couple days at the start of November. That's the interior design mood boards cut to placeholder music. This video contains that to remind them what was approved, then after that it's got the 2 weeks worth of motion studies. some brickwork studies that got cut, the chandelier studies which got locked, lobby ceiling stuff that got cut, some unrefined fabric & wood wall studies, a rough look at the ballroom ceiling, etc. Looking again there's a surprising amount of this that got locked early and moved into refinement.
22nd of nov - getting motion into the edit, still using placeholder music
https://vimeo.com/794955468/fa29f175f0?share=copy
30th of nov - first draft of the music and a cut to it
https://vimeo.com/776718076/c1fdb011b3?share=copy
Skipping a few, but here's where we were mid-December, 6 weeks in.
https://vimeo.com/781883602/5abfd37ce4?share=copy
And early January, 8 weeks in. At this point, it's feature complete but a lot of shots need another render, and the whisky shot near the end still hadnt been cut. we got the request to switch it to poolside champagne after this meeting, then it was a straight shot to final.
https://vimeo.com/785847872/eb3aedb3ca?share=copy
Final was delivered to them on the 19th, but the week after I tweaked the color grading a ton and updated it again.
Awesome thanks for sharing! I gotta say I love the white button tile recess animation in the earlier draft that didn't make it to the finish! Hate that it got cut yeah overally great work.
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Nov 20, 2023 21:14
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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Bxnfksjfirksuavsvxjvgkmf sbah jmf f sjajajc g fjwjqh.
goddamnit y'all done released the kraken
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Nov 22, 2023 15:41
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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I use C4D and Sage's method is likely how'd I'd do it.
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Nov 27, 2023 20:40
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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Here's how I'd do it in under 2 minutes in C4D. Sorry for the crappy audio... recording in my office and only have a webcam.
https://www.loom.com/share/f99e9ab7299a4c9fa243f412ea3ec602?sid=563218e7-4fb6-432a-a735-bd148220a9a8
BonoMan fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Nov 27, 2023
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Nov 27, 2023 22:19
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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Looks good! What's your process for bringing in the Google tile? I thought they had newer high res versions available
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Nov 28, 2023 14:43
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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The VFX industry is just a cruel cruel mistress. It's insane how many talented people can have a hard time there. I know you're not fishing for compliments but your work is seriously top notch and jealousy inducing. And you clearly have a fantastic eye for just aesthetics in general. That video is AAA work. Getting ghosted was probably a blessing rather than getting ground into dirt in the poo poo world of VFX!
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Dec 7, 2023 13:08
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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Yeah everyone has been passing this around internally. Imma be honest that's pretty frightening. Things are moving so fast and getting good so quickly that at this point I really don't feel comfortable making predictions. We are truly in "who the duck knows" territory. There will always be a place for human made art, but when I see the paper craft sea horse thing... I do really think there is going to be a lot of replacement on the lower to mid level video creation. I mean driven by a smaller team of humans but still.
And these companies rely on bringing these to market so I think it's not apples to apples with SIGGRAPH white papers.
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Feb 16, 2024 01:31
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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This is a convincing argument about why its not the end of the world, but i don't actually know if its right. Because AI is a black box to me and unless you're an AI researcher who isn't up themselves with their own hype, it's hard to know what the AI is actually doing.
I'm not sure that quote is saying much of anything. Yes we all know they're trained on models and that limits spontaneous results, but I don't think that's the threat.
First the quality of temporal stability here is the "oh poo poo" moment for me. That's huge. After that I think what you're going to end up seeing, eventually, as the end use-case is sort of a guided content creation. You give it rough shapes, or a rough phone-shot sequence and use that to guide your AI output. Then that *will* allow you to start getting exactly what you want. Sort of a Wonder Studio style approach. "Shoot your sequence on a phone and then we can replace the elements with the click of a button." Like... this C4D renderer Airen4D.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q64ATr8mfzU
Text prompts + visually guided approach.
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Feb 16, 2024 02:55
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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I think there are largely 2 differing reasons why someone wants to hire/work with a 3d artist - they're either buying the end result, or the process.
With a movie, the director is buying the process - the ability to say, I dont like that bit, can you do this or that to it. There is no possible result you could spit out of AI and have them say 'that's it!', because the entire purpose of the process is to be able to control it down to the finest level of nuance and they will always be exercising that right to have control.
It's the same with real estate marketing - the client is a developer getting to do a dry run of something that's about to cost them $250m+, it's the first time they're getting to see how the stone looks up against that much wood, how light bounces around, or how the $35k sofa really feels in the space. The process is what they're buying, the final images are almost a byproduct.
Architectural competition work, however - the details are unimportant, not figured out yet, and the purpose is to take these volumes and forms and make them look nice oh and you've got about 12 hours to do it.
There are absolutely some areas of being an artist that will get swallowed up - and the best thing I think anyone can do to protect themselves from it is remind themselves they're in a service industry, not a product-based one, and ensure every move they make and how they present themselves is focused on the service aspect.
Related to this that happened this week, we have a client on a project that wanted a full winter snow version of a dusk image. I had someone on my team who is in pretty deep with stable diffusion try to get a mockup from AI that we could use to get the client's approval, he spent 2 full days on it and the results were poo poo. I had a crack and used SD and midjourney, got absolute garbage. Cool looking images but they simply didnt work, the details were too loose and gestural, not something we could point to and commit to rolling into the 3d model, and not something we could even use elements of in a matte painting because it was all quite vague once you zoomed in.
I ended up pulling some elements from google image search and knocking up a matte painting in 90 minutes that was exactly what we needed, really razor-focused on what each element was to talk about what we'd do to the image, and while I was working on it I thought about how fast a good matte painter can work, how there's no loving way anyone banging out endless variants of prompts can dial into a mood someone else is attempting to describe faster than a good concept artist.
Right now AI inserted into production can at best hope to replace the 'rough mood paintover' stage, if that, and it's slower and worse at it than any human who's done it before. How advanced it is really is very surface level when you try to work with it in a meaningful way.
AI is a very useful tool for a lot of things (turning poo poo 3d rendered people into ones that look sort of human), but for someone even vaguely visual, it just can't and will never get what's in your head out better than rolling up your sleeves. It's a bunch of people who arent creative or visual that think it's going to truly take over and decimate creative fields.
Yeah this is why I specifically mentioned mid to lower level videos. I'm in a spot to be able to see high end projects all the way to low end projects (and deal with all the respective client levels) and the mid to low level absolutely will be game with just having 1 or 2 internal people just churning out "close enough" AI stuff. But the higher end folks will always want too much control to probably rely on it.
That said, with how fast things move, I have learned never to say "never." It's getting crazy. And it's going to be the user driven AI (meaning someone giving it a bit of a visual push in the right direction with composition/camera/etc) that is going to be the real threat later on.
In respect to your specific problem, this seems exactly what Photoshop's generative AI is for vs SD/DallE/MJ/etc. Did y'all try that?
edit: oh totally forgot to mention that a former employee that now works at a VERY LARGE computer company just said they have been given the directive to reduce costs as much as possible through the use of generative AI and that vendors who tout those capabilities will be bumped up the priority list. So it's 100% having an actual tangible effect. (that's not in response to anything you said, just a note in general that happened to be mentioned two days ago)
edit 2: oh and this is another interesting thing (that falls firmly in "using AI as a cool tool for human artists") but this guy created a splat from just 9 seconds of one of those clips. OpenAI says they can create 60 second clips. This falls into rougher "SIGGRAPH whitepaper" category, but still very cool.
https://radiancefields.com/openai-launches-sora-and-the-world/
BonoMan fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Feb 16, 2024
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Feb 16, 2024 15:49
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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And some tangental musings, we find it hard to hire anyway, so many CG artists in our industry these days have worse portfolios than we were seeing a decade ago. The images present very well, but I mean worse like you can take a closer look and see much lower attention to detail, less genuine craft used in making them. it's drag-and-drop assets with a LUT and framebuffer preset, images knocked together in a day. Maybe this will force people to step up their game a bit and light a fire under them.
And NOBODY KNOWS HOW TO UNWRAP UVs anymore. People just tri-planar mapping everything.
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Feb 16, 2024 17:07
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May 15, 2024 11:25
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- BonoMan
- Feb 20, 2002
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Jade Ear Joe
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Yeah the slight change of white balance each frame was the chefs kiss. Great job!
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Apr 22, 2024 16:48
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Nov 17, 2023 20:58
