Zap's Plugin

Master Zap (BTW you have an awsome british voice, it is reserved like you are too cool and artistic for the world ) mentioned something about a reflection plugin he has and I was wondering how useful this is to us here at fanfilms.com. Is it possible to use the plugin for things like placing a lightsaber glow on a person's face as he wields it or other such things. Just thought I might bring up a new line of technological questioning.

 

Hummm, I believe that effect would be EXTREMELY difficult to do in post production. I highly doubt there is a reasonable way to creat interactive lighting of the lightsaber onto the actors face in post-production. In our fanfilm (which the lightsaber battle will finally be shot late this month), we are using clear polycarbonite tubes for our saber "blades." These tubes will be full of glowsticks to simulate the interactive effects of the saber blades onto the actor. This will especially be useful since the final climax of the movie takes place in a (real, not CG) cave, instead of the woods.

 

Don't let him find out you said his accent was British, seeing as he's from Sweden and all.

I don't really understand the inner workings of his plugin, but in order for it to reflect images properly, I assume you have to assign the video clip onto some kind of texture map of a 3D mesh- This worked fine for the terminator model he used in kidwars, since it was a 3D model, but I don't know how you would translate that into some type of reflection on a video clip of actors with lightsabers.

Later-
Jeremy

 

British!?

Well I take that as a compliment

My plugin wouldn't really help there.. it's more of the reverse... i.e. ACTUAL lighting changes (that really happen on the set) can be applied to the 3D model sorta-kinda-easily. (Although the plugin is for reflections, and not for 'lighting' per se)

However I hear some people did interactive lighting on peoples faces from sabres on post. I am fairly certain they did in Essence of the Force... at least the guy who made that film posted here and said something like that.

/Z