After I stopped making my “Let’s Play” videos I dropped off with Davinci Resolve kind of hard. I was still watching videos on how to use it, and I even dropped the coin to upgrade to the Studio version so I could get all of the toys, but it wasn’t until this past week when I decided that I needed to justify having done so, which sent me back into Fusion to work on some motion graphics stuff for a friend’s YouTube channel (more on that probably later).

While mograph is cool, my real Holy Grail is visual effects. Back in the day when I was learning After Effects, I had modeled a “cyberdeck” in Blender and composited it with a quick video I shot in my basement office (such as it was at the time). The resolution on the video was kind of low, but I liked the final product; it’s not Hollywood quality, but who uses “Hollywood” and “quality” in the same sentence these days anyway?

Now that I have the full power of Resolve and feel comfortable with Fusion enough to tackle some simple motion graphics, it was time to kick it up a notch and jump right to visual effects, right? RIGHT?!

Well, this is the result. I managed to kick this in a few hours, most of which was given over to the rendering of the buildings in Blender. They came from a Kitbash3D pack called “Neo City (Mini)” which is a subset of some of Kitbash3D’s larger sets. I grabbed a video from Pixabay from videographer santosjesus90 because of the wide open space and the unique camera movement.

Of course, this is a first stab — probably the only stab on this one, really — and it looks “just OK” to me and that’s not even because I’ve been staring it it all morning. For one, the composition of the buildings is just haphazard. I put them where I thought they might look decent, with some overlap and depth. I also don’t like the “transition” between the buildings and the grounds as they look weird, just dropped in there as a bunch of urban structures sitting in the desert; maybe some sandstone buildings would have worked better? Second, the lighting in Blender was killin’ me. I tried to get the light sources in the same relative area, direction, and strength as they seem to be in the video, but with the buildings being tall and distant, it’s hard to tell based on the shadows they’re casting on the ground and each other. I find lighting very difficult to get even close to correct. Third, the buildings aren’t properly blurred or sharpened in relation to the rest of the landscape. My goal was to try out “Z-depth” for blur and other aspects as the camera is moving away and around the buildings, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the Z-depth work so I’ll need to put more time towards researching that.