In order to get all the footage for my Special Effects and Research Seminar projects, I purchased a small video camera (which I have no intention of keeping, thank you, fourteen day return policy).
The camera in question is a Flip Mino HD.
Handsome, no?
Not so much. This portable and useful camera is built around a tiny, tiny sensor. Whilst capable of shooting 1280 x 720 progressive video, it has a darker side. It suffers from rolling shutter. Badly.
A close approximation of my reaction to this news.
Some explanation.
There are two types of sensor used in digital video cameras, the older and cheaper CCD, and the newer, and more expensive, CMOS. CMOS sensors have the great advantage of all the pixels being read all at once. CCDs, however, are read line by line, meaning the top of the image is captured before the bottom of the image.
‘How does this affect me?’, you ask. It means that any objects with vertical lines in the image will become objects with diagonal lines, if the camera, or the object moves.
Here is an excellent video explaining this
If you need to camera track the footage, to generate a 3D camera track for Maya or Nuke, rolling shutter can compromise the quality of that track. Another area in which you will have difficulty, is if you try and composite rendered 3D elements into that footage. If the footage is skewed, and your elements aren’t, it’s going to look bad.
This distortion needs to be corrected, and to do so, we use RollingShutter, an excellent plugin from The Foundry for their compositing tool, Nuke.
For the Flip, I have had favourable results with a Correction setting of 0.7, and Shutter Sync set to 0.5.
The footage I’m working with suffers from this so badly, that I’ve opted to use RollingShutter to skew my 3D elements in line with the footage, rather than correcting the plate. This is because the grainy nature of the Flip video causes a significant number of artefacts to appear after processing.
All in all, this has been a learning experience, and it has taught me a valuable lesson. Rent a good camera, rather than buying a shoddy one.




This was my first test of GoZ, although I only used it to transfer the base-mesh to ZBrush. It’s refreshing to not have to stop and save out a .obj of whatever I’m working on. That small break in the workflow always felt incongruous.
I rapidly block in forms with the move brush and the standard brush
The sculpt begins to take shape, with the nose, ears and the brow line becoming apparent.
I finally add the artificial eyes and strengthen the chin considerably.
A quick concept sketch is laid down. Other areas are studied in closer detail on other sheets of paper.
In Maya, I rapidly build the body of the Whale from a cube. I choose to drop the hind flipper as it makes the creature resemble a turtle too closely.
Detail is sculpted into the mesh in ZBrush, with steadily increasing levels of subdivision to accommodate the increasingly complex details.
The base mesh built in Maya, shown smoothed.
A rapid sculpt from ZBrush. There is a minor issue with ZBrush interpreting elements of the mesh from Maya incorrectly.
Next I draw a fast and cartoony sketch. This will act as a guide during the modelling process.
In order to progress quickly with the creature, I lay out Zspheres in Zbrush. This allows me to interactively work with the proportions in 3D and experiment with different forms.
The Adaptive Skin mesh is imported into Maya. This mesh isn’t ideal and will pose challenges later in the modelling process.
The finished mesh in Maya. I have added accoutrements such as the start of a saddle and a set of reigns with a bit.
The partly finished sculpt in Zbrush.
I knew the face was going to drive the whole character so I set about finding a shape which was going to put it centre-stage.
Here I lay out a pleasing shape with ZSpheres. I like this method because I can experiment and work very quickly.
The Adaptive Skin mesh ZBrush generated was very ugly and would have taken a very long time to fix before any progress could be made. I chose to discard it.
I take screenshots of the front and the side of the ZSphere model, and use them as image-planes in Maya. Here you see them next to the grid.
I build the mesh by hand in Maya. Here is a smoothed version of the basic mesh to better demonstrate the desired shapes and proportions.
I model a mouth and eye-sockets, which fit closely around two large, flat Nurbs spheres. I wanted to exaggerate the mouth and make the skin looked stretched.