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Chasing Realism via Details (Patreon)

Published:
2025-05-16 06:32:01
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

A few "how can I make this shot better" techniques I've been using lately. Some new stuff, and some old!

Files

Chasing Realism via Details

A few "what can I do to make this shot better" techniques I've been using lately! Some new stuff, and some old! 0:00 intro (grass experiments) 6:10 Dust/Pollen! 10:59 Flares 13:21 Cables 14:45 Caustics 17:55 Luma Keying 21:00 Noise Modifiers 22:33 Bounced Light 27:40 Quick Flowers 32:42 Boat Shot 36:05 Fixing Dust 37:40 Rigid Bodies 40:00 Couple Days Later 41:18 Bubbles 41:38 Waterline

Comments

SwaMusic

Hey, team! Break time, new Ian video is out! ☕

SwaMusic

Spoke to the depths of my sould. "They're not hiring you to do stuff on accident. They're hiring you to do things on purpose!" 😂😭😭

IanHubert

I know!!! And it's frustrating sometimes because it's like "if we just MESS with this for a couple days, we might find something *Amazing*"... but also we might not :P

Michele Coser

Woah, lots of contents lately! Amazing as usual!!! Also, why each time i saw something made by you, i came up with somethning similar? Maybe because i love rusty decaying abandoned things :-)

skes

Loved this! If you're interested in clever ways to cover surfaces with scattering materials, I've always found this article a lot of fun: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0011

Nate

Grass is a pain in the a$$!! I've been struggling with a really large scene (4 kilometers) with these hair particles in blender too. My ultimate solution was to break the scene into sections. The area closest to the camera has the highest density of particles, and further and further away get reduced with larger particles. And I use alot of the "interpolated" particles too to try and save rendering power, but that can make the grass look weirdly uniform when waving so its a trade off. But man rendering is still tough, out of a 1 minute render, just 20 seconds can be spent initializing the scene before it even gets into cycles.

h

Hey Ian - and esteemed friends - I'm a full-on Resolve user now, but one thing keeps driving me nuts, and it'd be good to know whether I've missed something obvious, or how you work around it. If you're editing and need to extend a shot, it's easy enough to render out a bunch more frames from Blender/Houdini... but I can't find any way to get Resolve to update the clip's duration - you have to pull it in as a completely new item, copy over grades/effects, re-edit it in. Drives me nuts. AE's "Reload footage" was so useful, it turns out. All I can find on the forums etc are other people saying the same thing. Got any smart workarounds?

Robin Ruud

I can totally relate to that one. For really big scenes, I've found that I really need to work on optimizing the grass. Make large grass "clumps" that you instance around. Make different clumps with different levels of detail to use close and far away.

VoiD010AUT

Don't import your frames as an sequence in the media tab. Instead create a fusion clip and inside of that use a "loader" node. When your framenumber changes just click on the loader node click on open, reselect a frame and confirm. Then you get a message that your framenumber changed and if you want to change the clip lenght

VoiD010AUT

Also in the color tab, when you right click the preview window there is an option thats called something like save as still. When you MMB that still that grade gets applied to the current scene. With that it's ez to apply the same grade to different scenes or safe the grade so you can experiment further without losing your old grade

Ian Letarte

you had me unsure which parts of the shot were real and which were CG!

Platyelf

The jacket is *that* heavy? Thom makes in look effortless to wear in Prepare for Execution and what little I’ve seen of the Boat Episode

Alex Hanneman / Comp Academy

Ian you would love Nuke with Blender. You can export P data from Blender and then essentially lift various areas with 2.5D grades (that stick to the scene) - really similar to the first approach you tried with a volume grass except the lifting effect can be adjusted in real-time in post. A lot of times I create gobos this way and iterate fast over the CG, but it's a very useful way to lift / simplify detail / etc in post over existing renders.

IanHubert

I realized while editing that I was probably overestimating a bit with that 30 pounds thing... but yeah it's heavy! That black box on the back is an MDF cube full of batteries.

Ben Moran

I love when you say "I don't buy this at all" while pointing to a part of the frame I thought was real footage.

Emil Elias Huru

this is the kind of video i can watch a hundred times and still learn something from, thanks

Nate

Yes i’ve tried the clump technique as well, it definitely helps especially for distant parts.

Volen CK

Always such a treat to get a video from you, man. Learn a bunch, have some fun and of course - cooking. Thank you for everything you do!

IanHubert

Oh!! I do this constantly! In the media tab, do the usual “replace footage” option- but whereas when you first import the shot you have to select *all* the frames, if you’re just replacing you just select the first one! It should work totally as you’d hope!

Lonnon Foster

Do Buy is a great vacation spot, but a bit pricey.

h

Oh, you are da man. This saves a bunch of hassle... thanks. Right: me and ChatGPT are working on a script to do this a bit more smartly - save you having to dig back into the right folder of frames, and will automatically re-apply any LUT/Alpha mode stuff which gets wiped when you replace footage. Basically turn Resolve back into AE, as far as this single feature is concerned, lol Thanks dude!

h

@VoiD010AUT - worth knowing the Fusion page workaround, thanks. Most of my stuff is abstract graphics, long-form and high resolution, so I try and do as much basic "comping" by layering elements up directly on the timeline if possible, for speed - it makes a huge diff to render times. For those that can do comping in Fusion (or on the Fusion page) there's a handy "refresh Loaders" script that'll update all Loaders in a comp - think it's available in Reactor. Worth a look

IanHubert

Oh that's a great article!!! I gotta check out his other stuff!

Justin Dykhouse

I see what looks like a sketch of the boat from overhead at 19:41, moving slowly toward top of frame. Is this a placeholder for a yet-uncreated shot? I’m really interested in a way of working where one gradually increments shot versions starting with (for example) a storyboard frame and ending with a final. The presence of a sketch in this sequence puts me in mind of just such a method. I haven’t found anything about this in your other videos, and would really like to hear you describe your methods for shot-by-shot improvements, or if you have already described this in a previous video, may I ask for the name of the video or even a link? Thanks and thanks also for these posts, I always learn a lot. 🙏🏻

Dave Allan

Anybody deep into Rsolve seen a course thats on point?

Benjamin Brenner

This reminds me a little bit of a car scene post Ian made a while back, for the "Prepare For Execution" episode. I don't remember exactly where he started the video in terms of the production process, but it was really fun to watch the scene come together from blocking, animated, lighting, textured and finally the final shot. I hope he makes more videos like that in the future!

Matt Molloy

I felt it in my soul when you said you spend hours making changes and then decide you don't like the result at all when you make the test render. It's weird how processes like completely changing the lighting can feel like a huge improvement at the time, then you compare your two renders and suddenly feel like the old lighting was 1000x better! Thanks for the insight, this was a super useful video.