ok. last ae question for awhile. mask & saber glow?

hi all. first i'd like to thank everyone for the help concerning my previous questions.

so. no that i've masked my entire project my saber glow is still projecting past my mask and onto each subject.

is this just a case of not drawing my mask far enough out from the beam?

thanks.

p.s. probably already answered my own question. just don't want to go back and start over.

 

..Explain further. I don't understand the question. What are you masking, or what are you trying to stop from happening?

 

the mask works fine except it doesn't seem to prevent the glow form appearing around the edges of the mask.

think i've just masked to close to the beam and the glow is outside of it.

 

What you're seeing is normal. Your mask will only cover the core of the saber. When you add the blur layers to make the glow, the blurs (and hence the glow) will extend outside the mask. That's the way it's supposed to look.

Justin

 

Eaxctly: Glow is an in-camera effect. Glow spills out in the image plane from the superbright core.

Note that the newer starwars films does this *incorrectly* in many shots. All ROTS trailers does it incorrectly too.

/Z

 

MZ. i don't see what you're pointing out in the ROTS teaser. frame by frame i don't see anything wrong w/ it. can you specify?

 

If you were to take a bright glowing object, and hold it partly behind your hand, the glow would still wrap around part of your hand. However, in AOTC and ROTS, the saber glow stops ver unrealistically where ever it gets covered by an arm or something else.

This makes it look like colored cloud of dust rather than the effect of an extremely bright lightsource in front of a camera.

Anybody care to post a comparison pic?

 

All ROTS trailers does it incorrectly too

There's more than one?! I've only seen the teaser. Where can I find the others?

Sorry. Off topic. But I don't want to miss any trailers.

 

Yeah, AOTC and ROTS lightsabers look like crap. They're just big dark blobs of moving color and not a brilliant glow like they should be. For what it's worth, tough, the sabers in TFM looked good.

 

I think you're all misunderstanding CRUDE_MATTER's question.

CM, the problem you're seeing comes from using the mask feather glow method as originally outlined in Ryan_W's tutorial. When you add a subtraction mask, it subtracts from the layer. However, because it is a separate mask than the shape of the blade, the feathering still applies to the entire length of the other mask. So you'll still see the "glow" spilling over the whole edge of the subtraction mask, cutting across objects, people, etc, even though the blade is obscured.

While mask feathering is faster to process than a blur algorithm, that's where you stand when a saber is occluded in any way. What you need to do instead is draw the blade mask, and the necessary subtraction masks, and use the Gaussian or Fast Blur filters (I recommend Fast Blur -- it's, as the name implies, MUCH faster, and the visual difference in this case is negligible) to blur the entire layer. This makes sure the glow wraps around the shape of your object and doesn't spill over.

The rest of the process is exactly the same, just leave the masks unfeathered and do the work with the blur filter instead.

Hope that helps.

M. Scott

 

Phantom's spelled with a Ph

[image=http://s95303915.onlinehome.us/images/glow.jpg]

 

The main problem with the ROTS sabers (like the AOTC sabers) is that they don't behave like light. Light never just stops, and it never changes color suddenly. The ROTS sabers do both of those. The core is white, but then suddenly changes to red/purple/whatever. Then the glow just suddenly stops, instead of gradually spreading out like real light does.

Here's a comparison pic I made from a shot in the trailer.

[image=http://www.halfwayproductions.com/images/rots-comparison.jpg]

Justin

 

Ryan and Sidious....

BEST. PIC. EVA!!!!

 

I was just watching AOTC and you can almost see the lightsaber effects go from good to bad to crap from Obi-Jango to the Droid factory to the arena. And then you puke in the duel

 

I know what you mena DMPledi, I was just doing the same.

 

What DorkmanScott said works perfectly. That's the way to go.

http://www.freewebs.com/ianvfx/misc/light%20wrap.jpg

(copy and paste in new window)

- Ian