Season 2 digital effects reel

[bassman]

As I had originally suspected, the opening shot of season two was a poor green screen effect. Probably added during the eleventh hour....

[Neil]

Some of those CGI zombies are pretty damn impressive!

[bassman]

Some of those CGI zombies are pretty damn impressive! I agree! Just like the first season, it's a real shock to me how they are able to get away with such great effects. This is how CG effects should be used. With the exception of the opening shot with Rick. That shot always seemed poor to me, but everything else is golden.

[rongravy]

That would be cool if they could CG zombie extras into my old wedding videos.

[bassman]

They've updated the reel with footage from the entire season. It should go without saying, but don't watch this if you haven't seen the last few episodes... http://www.stargatestudios.net/# Not on youtube yet, but it's on Stargate's home page.

[Thorn]

These are always fun to watch, thanks!

[MinionZombie]

They've updated the reel with footage from the entire season. It should go without saying, but don't watch this if you haven't seen the last few episodes... http://www.stargatestudios.net/# Not on youtube yet, but it's on Stargate's home page. Their zombie work continues to amaze me. The CGI zombies blend seemlessly with the real actors in big group shots - excellent work. Some of the more obvious effects (e.g. the well walker's stomach, or the shelf-attack zombie) is clearly CGI, but it's well crafted nonetheless, but the best stuff is when they're expanding the world with CGI (additional zombies, landscape work etc) as it's totally convincing and looks like it's always been there and was actually filmed on location. Excellent work from Stargate.

[Neil]

It's interesting they even put in stuff for no reason other than artistic effect. Note the car and motorcycle in the highway scene 11 seconds in! Were they even needed?

[bassman]

It's interesting they even put in stuff for no reason other than artistic effect. Note the car and motorcycle in the highway scene 11 seconds in! Were they even needed? I imagine they just wanted to fill in the bare areas and make the highway set look more crowded. It's like the military base set in the pilot episode. The only thing really there was the shell of the helicopter. They added a second helicopter, all the barrels, bodies, etc. How many real zombies were eating Otis? Maybe four?

[Thorn]

I imagine they just wanted to fill in the bare areas and make the highway set look more crowded. It's like the military base set in the pilot episode. The only thing really there was the shell of the helicopter. They added a second helicopter, all the barrels, bodies, etc. How many real zombies were eating Otis? Maybe four? Agree with Neil, an well said Bass they are just filling up the shot and that to me speaks volumes of their dedication to cause, attention to detail, and desire to produce an amazing product.

[Knighty]

Impressive stuff, especially the big crowd scenes. I would think some of it would be capturing singles or groups on a green screen set then placing that footage within a scene, rather than fully CGI characters. Amazing how much work goes into it though

[babomb]

Impressive stuff, especially the big crowd scenes. I would think some of it would be capturing singles or groups on a green screen set then placing that footage within a scene, rather than fully CGI characters. Amazing how much work goes into it though If they were real people against a green screen then you'd have to pay those people, the camera operators, the composite artists, technical operators etc.. The shots where there's a bunch of walkers in the distance that are CG are indistinguishable from real shots. Those are done with crowd motion software that allows you to daisy chain a few behaviors together to give the illusion of intelligent motion. So while they ARE fully CG characters, they are very low resolution models with the same attributes between all of them. The behavior attributes are randomized so they appear to be doing different things. Since you only see them for a few seconds at a time you don't have time to notice the repeating patterns or that each walker is a random "instance" of the same model. So they only really create maybe 5 low resolution CG characters, then they generate up to probably 50 different copies of those same 5 models to create a crowd scene. The further the walker is from the camera, the lower the resolution and complexity of its appearance and behavior. It's visual trickery. So instead of needing a whole crew of people to pull of a green screen crowd shot, you only need 1 software artist who rigs the CG aspects of the shot then passes it off to the FX supervisor who drops it into the production pipeline. I always loved that shot where Shane and Lori are watching the city get destroyed. It was great to see it in this reel as a multi-layered digital matte painting. 3D arts has been a hobby of mine for over 10 years. I know the difficulties of achieving real photo-realism in a CG render. The part I love the most from this reel are the 3D wireframe overlays. Alot of people are under the misconception that when doing FX shots or CG rendering in general that the computer does all the work. The computer just does what computers do, which is crunch numbers. Doing photorealistic CG requires knowledge of material science combined with artistic observation. So you have to be able to tell the computer how to make the light realistically bounce off every CG object/element. The textures on the zombies that make them look real require someone to paint multiple seperate versions of the texture by hand in Photoshop. -- -------- Post added at 10:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:13 PM ---------- Here's a little more info from FXGuide-http://www.fxguide.com/featured/stargate_studios_walking_the_dead/