vfx My first Digi-Double (with breakdown)

[Chris Tempel]

Made my first Digi-Double today! I had my wife scan me with Polycam (free version). Brought the scan into Blender and cleaned up the mesh and topology. Exported an FBX and uploaded that to Mixamo where I selected a running front flip. Brought the animation back into Blender, lit the shot, and rendered it.
It comped pretty nice into my background plate, though I don't recommend shooting plates on your phone if you want motion blur on your animation. I added some sound and comp'd the shot in Resolve.

This 40 frame shot took me two hours start to finish, which isn't too bad at all. The big thing I learned was that you can really get away with a lot if you're using motion blur on your CGI. I'm looking forward to playing with this some more.

I went for a 3D effect at the end for fun

 

[James Rogers]

Very cool!
The real trick is using an actor who is replaced by the digi-double mid-shot. Hollywood films can do that, but sometimes, if you look close, you can see the transition.

There is a program called Elastic Reality. Back in the 80's it was the most amazing thing around (I think it won an Academy award.). You can see it in action in Michael Jackson's video for his song Black or White. The program allows you to warp one thing into another while at the same time dissolving from one thing to the other. You can set it up to be non-linear so that, for example, the eyes morph before the rest of the head, or the shape of the person's head changes before the nose. The transition of color information can also be controlled so that a zebra could morph into a dog yet still have the color or the zebra until you want it to change, and then you can make the change happen in any creative way you want. It's a very good program that sort of fell to the wayside over time. I still use it though. I would use it to transition from the actor to the digi-double.

 

[Chris Tempel]

Very cool!
The real trick is using an actor who is replaced by the digi-double mid-shot. Hollywood films can do that, but sometimes, if you look close, you can see the transition.

There is a program called Elastic Reality. Back in the 80's it was the most amazing thing around (I think it won an Academy award.). You can see it in action in Michael Jackson's video for his song Black or White. The program allows you to warp one thing into another while at the same time dissolving from one thing to the other. You can set it up to be non-linear so that, for example, the eyes morph before the rest of the head, or the shape of the person's head changes before the nose. The transition of color information can also be controlled so that a zebra could morph into a dog yet still have the color or the zebra until you want it to change, and then you can make the change happen in any creative way you want. It's a very good program that sort of fell to the wayside over time. I still use it though. I would use it to transition from the actor to the digi-double.

I agree, that would the ultimate way to use a digital double. Unfortunately, I'm not enough of an animator to help align the CG to the real, so I'm stuck with Mixamo and using CG for the entire length of a shot for now.

I remember in the early 2000's that I used to play with a free app called WinMorph. You could both warp and morph images, it was pretty fun to mess with. I believe Nuke has the ability to do some morphing natively too, though I haven't messed with that function in a few years.

https://www.debugmode.com/winmorph.html

 

[James Rogers]

I remember winmorph! Great little program.

Yeah, I think Nuke can do all that Elastic Reality does with the use of different nodes. What I still love about Elastic Reality is it's versatility. Nothing in the morph has to be linear, and every part of the transition you set up works independent of the other parts. I did a 2 hour tutorial around 20 years ago explaining how to use the program. Some kid on the internet asked me to, so I did...