While Posing and Animation covers animation of characters and props, cinematography covers animation of cameras, including topics such as shot composition. Related is also Lighting and Visual Effects which covers position of lights in a scene and other once off visual effects that are not directly camera related.
Blog Posts
Text to Camera Shots with LLM AI
A personal side project is converting textual descriptions of camera positioning (for filmmaking) to a machine readable form. Screenplays normally do not include camera directions (that is left for the Director to do on set), but I am interested in creating 3D animations from just a screenplay and want to give the writer control over…
3D Video vs 3D Animated Scenes
I have been exploring OpenUSD (formerly USD from Pixar) for creating computer generated animated videos. I create the characters, backgrounds, and animations as 3D models, then render it to a 2D video you can view on social media. Out of curiosity I just got a store demo of the Apple Vision Pro, exploring both 180…
Sunbeams via Fog in Omniverse
I am trying to work out how to do various cinematic effects in Omniverse. This post is one step on that journey, particularly for “God Rays” (sunbeams) through the clouds. Here is an extreme example (generated by DALL-E) of the sort of effect I am after. The challenge I have had is to get the…
Selecting Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) HDRP volume settings in Unity
Ambient occlusion is a lighting effect that increases shadows where two surfaces meet. In real life, there is less light bouncing around surfaces in corners or where two walls meet – this is called ambient occlusion. As I am aiming for semi-realistic images in my videos (not 2D cel shading as in most comics and…
Rain, raindrops, puddles, and water in Unity HDRP
One effect I used in my first episode is rain to amplify the mood. This involved raindrops on glass windows, rain falling from the sky, and ripples/puddles of rain on the ground. Here is an example shot with rain falling from the sky, glistening in the lights, with puddles rippling on the ground (although the…
Lighting Tricks in Unity HDRP for Cinematic Effect
I am creating a simple animated cartoon using Unity and the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). One challenge that comes up is how to control the lighting levels of shots – how to make it look “good”, and consistent with neighboring shots in a sequence. Unity with HDRP provides a number of tools that can…
Unity HDRP Lighting, Exposure, and the Sequences Package
In this post I describe how I am planning to get the exposure right when using the Unity Sequences package with the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). My goal is to create a simple animated cartoon using Unity as an evening hobby project. I am in the process of upgrading my project from the built…
HDRP Shader Graph and Wind Zones
I am (slowly!) working on creating an animated cartoon series using Unity 3D to animate the characters. I am upgrading the project from the older Unity built-in render pipeline to the latest High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), which is forcing me to re-learn how to achieve various effects. I wrote up a recent blog mentioning…
Wind in HDRP – my journey so far
Added Aug 20, 2022: Please note: This post can still be interesting, but if you want my final answer, check out this newer post. One of the unexpected areas of change when upgrading my Unity project from the built in render pipeline to HDRP was that Wind support is now different. My existing trees with…
The use of camera movements
There are many great resources out there on how to move the camera for a great camera shot. Here I share a few videos introducing the basic concepts and then get into when to use those concepts. Basic camera shots Bloop Animation shared this video on The basics of camera shots (most common ones you…
HDRP Depth of Field with moving targets
Depth of field is a Unity camera effect in allows you to blur the background and foreground, creating greater focus on your character. I recently wrote an article about how to achieve depth of field in HDRP (which I am going to assume you have already read), but upgrading the opening shot of my series…
Extra Ordinary, the Series 