Although i have frequently being involved with projects that incorporate various flavors of 3D VFX elements, i never actually managed to learn how to use a 3D software package. A single lifetime is just not enough to learn everything we’d like. Gladly of course, there are many 3D artists who are really good at what they do!
Coming from an indie/guerilla filmmaking background however, were one will usually have to wear more hats than one to save the day, it was always bugging me that i couldn’t do the simplest task in 3D for my own projects. Enter Blender, the open source, rapidly advancing 3D software. It is free to use and hard to miss as a huge community that is constantly growing around it is pushing it towards the mainstream. I kept it in my sights for a long time but never actually tried it until last week.
So, i recently shot a TV trailer for the Greek version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The location we found in the last possible moment was an incomplete Asian themed garden that included a small pagoda. Unfortunately its roof was still unfinished when we shot the video but somehow it fitted the concept* so it remained in the video as it was.
After the trailer aired on TV, i had a couple of days off so It seemed like an excellent opportunity to give Blender a try and attempt to somehow complete the roof in postproduction as an exercise. I found that the CG COOKIE website is an amazing starting point for someone like me. They have really well made videos that introduce Blender’s UI and mesh modeling for beginners.
I spent the first day watching the CG Cookie videos and fooling around with the software. The second day i started modelling the roof. My first attempt was a disaster but it helped me understand what the efficient way to approach the problem was. With the next attempt i think that i ended up with something useable. It was made with simple geometries under ‘Array” modifiers. The model wouldn’t appear in any close ups so i decided to make some simple shaders and lit it in a way that matched the shot.
The composite was done in Davinci Resolve’s Fusion so the new shot went straight into the original edit with an effortless workflow. The camera moved really slowly so there was no need for a camera match move. A single rendered frame of the roof with a 2D track was enough for everything. The water reflection was also done in Fusion so no additional passes needed to be renderer in Blender.
The process was basically a test to see if Blender can be used by a non-3D artist for quick and dirty VFX. Maybe to replace or add an object to a scene, create a set extension, etc. I think that those are things that can be easily achieved without a deep knowledge of Blender. Some basic understanding of VFX will be enough. The included Cycles renderer is fast and very realistic so Blender can most likely be an one stop solution for this sort of thing.