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MillimeterBeta Sight: Autodesk Flare
Jul 14, 2009 12:00 PM, By Kirk Balden, VFX supervisor and senior Flame artist at Smoke & Mirrors' New York outpost
Smoke & Mirrors is first with Flare.
A 30-second PSA called "Signs," which Smoke & Mirrors recently completed for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), was perhaps the world's first Flare project.
Starting with the original background footage, which was shot on 35mm and transferred to 2K DPX files, our solution was to derive four 3D tracking solutions (one for each sign) for the whole scene in Flame and attach a simple 3D object created in Softimage to the four overpasses. We then created the sign composites using a combination of stills shot with a digital SLR and HD video captured with a prosumer Sony HD camera to obtain the flapping motion made by the wind on the edges of the sheet. Those signs were then projected onto our 3D objects, completing the illusion of a piece of fabric draped over an overpass.
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Efficiencies in workflow
Integration between Flare and Flame is absolutely seamless. All our tracking and garbage masking was done in Flare, and then renders were taken out of Flare and imported back into Flame for compositing and color correction. Our spot featured 24 seconds of uninterrupted 2K video, so stringing all the signs together and hitting render would have taken 26 hours per go. So we broke the process down, working on each sign separately. We'd load the setup on Flare, kick off a render, and then start working on the next sign in the sequence.
From a pure efficiency perspective, this was a great workflow. We didn't need to clog up the Flame system with rendering tasks, nor were we spewing footage into other parts of the facility, thus polluting other framestores as tends to happen when you get other Flames involved in a project that should be living on one system. This can cause organizational nightmares if you're not constantly moving files back to the master station every day. With Flare, I simply launched from my Flame's framestore and rendered back to it without worrying about where the footage was going.
Adding Flare to our post workflow on this project not only helped us improve efficiencies, it provides our junior Flame artists with a valuable career-advancing opportunity because they're learning an industry-standard tool.
The bottom line
Flare is one of those systems that, in the short term, makes it possible to get assistant work done more affordably, efficiently, and easily. In the long term, it enables you to redesign your facility in ways you may never have imagined. The floating license unchained from hardware lets you do more than you could by wheeling a Flame into a bay. The freedom this affords is pretty exciting.
Kirk Balden is a VFX supervisor and senior Flame artist at Smoke & Mirrors' New York outpost. He has been a Flame and Smoke artist since 1998. Smoke & Mirrors is a visual effects and postproduction company servicing advertising, film, and music video projects.
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