Friday 9/10/20 - VFX Part 1

A few days before I started the actual VFX process with my footage I needed to create the animation that I would actually be using in my film. For this I used the program Blender because it's a relatively well known software and I had been recommended to use it as it was fairly user friendly. Until now I had zero experiences using this so I was going in blind. Beforehand I did some research using video tutorials on youtube (shown in my research post) however, they didn't cover using Blender. I used the site CGTrader to find a model I could use for the robotic arm, I didn't feel ready to make my own due to both time limitations and the lack of any experience. I wanted to make things easier for my first attempt. This was the model I found, the benefit was it also came fully textured and rigged (Rigged meaning it can move fingers and other parts like an arm should).

Initially I opened up the file simply to play around and try and figure out some controls on my own, I found this useful for basic tasks such as moving the joints and looking around the object. To actually get to work on animating I needed the help from a Youtube video. It helped me to set up a camera from which the animation would be viewed from and learn how to place in my footage so I could place the arm in the correct postion / angle.

I alligned the arm with the footage as best as I could in terms of angles, I realised that the actual pose of the hand didn't matter as I would be animating that anyhow. When it came to animating the video no longer helped as it wasn't meant to be used with movement such as hands. I couldn't find many videos explaining what I wanted to do so I realised I had to figure it out myself. That's when I discovered keyframes were a thing, I've used these before when creating short films or videos. They work as markers, telling the program at what point you want a certain value to be changed (In this case the position and rotation of the fingers).

Using my footage as a guide, I placed keyframes at each point where the hand started and stopped moving. I had to mark the specific frame in the video where a movement happened so that this would move in time to the original footage. In the end this was the result:

I tried to render the animation without the help of a video but came across two problems, it saved every frame with a background and the render was too dark to see anything. First off I did some research to figure out which lighting object would be best and found this site explaining all of the different types avaliable in Blender. I ended up using the one called Sun as the only light source in my footage came from the sun. I looked at the angles of shadows in the original video and used that to angle the light source so it would be accurate. When it came to rendering the footage I found a video explaining how to remove the background and how to import it into premiere pro.

This is a still from the finished render