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Scene Breakdown + Creating B-Roll from Scratch (Patreon)

Published:
2020-12-01 05:55:48
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

(I have chapter markers if you click through to the YouTube video proper)SO! I had a bazillion things I meant to be doing this week, but instead I got distracted working on a scene for Ep. 2 of Dynamo Dream. I'm still kind of torn if I want to do the final 10% of work to totally finish it, or just leave it almost done (as I apparently do with everything), and jump back to finishing the stuff I meant to be finishing.This is the type of scene I dig when it comes to low-budget shenanigans, though; just some green cloth and a tent, and we're able to make a reasonable scene of a guy on a campout on an alien planet. DetonationFilms.com is my go-to place for stock footage. Bob's been blowing stuff up and filming it since forever (back in like 2002, the old fan film forum days).  

Here's the video showing how to import google maps data into blender- again, super powerful, but I think distinctly not allowed by the terms of service? And below is the spotlight texture, if you feel like using it for anything! Just scale it on a single axis to make it wider/narrower. To be a little self critical, since I was trying to just bash out this scene, I really do think you can feel it. There's a little bit of a thoughtlessness to it, a kinda just "ship and ground, man and tent, and nothing beyond that" sort of feeling. And I think that's okay- it's just supposed to be a quick one minute scene, and I'd rather not spend a month on it- it's just worth keeping in mind.

Files

Scene Breakdown + Making B-Roll from Scratch

00:00 - Intro 01:42 - The Scene as it Is 05:39 - Quick Spotlights 09:45 - Google Maps Data... 12:04 - Research 13:35 - Modeling 36:12 - Composition Assembly 43:03 - Creating some Branding 49:50 - Okay now After Effects! 58:10 - Final Shot

Comments

Lukas Sprehn

I really hope we'll get to see these police choppers again in Dynamo Dream soon, because they are an iconic design to me! So good!

Lukas Sprehn

It is so interesting to look back and see just how much this episode and the story around it sort of changed from what the ideas you have here to what we got in A Single Point in Space! From more of a ground-bound weather science station and the use of the classic Superintelligence Police Chopper to the rented Phaeton spaceship in outer space. And although the Police Chpper is an iconic amazing design, the Phaeton spaceship scenes are more exciting visually because of what you can do in outer space. I don't suppose the Choppers can actually fly in space, so good choice to change the setting like that. That is, unless this is actually still supposed to be in outer space, on some sort of strange asteroid that somehow has an atmosphere? :P

Blake Rizzo

Detonation films. Wow that’s a flashback. Love these as always! Also is that location in Eastern WA near the gorge/Columbia River? That area is so pretty!

judelightning

ian your just the best please never retire

IanHubert

It's a few! I love the Frenchman Coulee area (and Ancient Lakes like 10 miles north)- but the area I was really stoked about is the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge (just south of Moses Lake). In spring, it turns totally lush/green in a really cool way (the mosquitos get INSANE in the evening, though). Definitely worth checking out!!

IanHubert

Ahaha thanks Jude!! I'll try to keep going for a while here.

judelightning

i just wanted to say two things i just posted that comment so wow! and GREAT! i mean you are a legend and it is an honor to talk to you

Aman Bhargava

Always a pleasure to listen to you. I really loved the last long text post too. I'm in a design school and some of what you talk about is very useful for fields other than film and VFX (BICMIB problems, for one!). I know you're completely caught up with Dynamo and other projects right now but I wonder if I could ever persuade you to write a short piece sometime in the next few months for our student newsletter about your design process and how you tackle creative issues? I think our students would really benefit from your insights!

Carson Reader

Hey Ian! Glad I signed up for this, it has been really helpful in learning blender. Quick question: do you ever use high quality PBR materials? if so when? it seems like you are always just using bits of regular images to texture things which appears to be pretty effective.

Hans Bruins

In the beginning, I became a patron because of your tutorials and of course: Dynamo. But nowadays, I am just in awe that I can follow your progress and have a look into your creative mind.

IanHubert

Hey Carson! Thanks for being here! And occasionally! But not often. Anecdotally (I've never really tested it), it seems like when blender starts to really lag to an annoying degree it's because I have too many high res textures going on, and making *proper* PBR materials can be a bit of a process (I'm not even really sure how to do it. The high quality ones you can get, are most of them just approximations based off of a photo, or are they captured with specific scanning methods? I think it can be both?). One of the biggest things I love from photo textures- especially the larger scale ones (like, of a whole tractor), is you get to borrow from the visual language of the original object; you can model a device, map it with photo textures, then do another pass on the model with the new cues from the textures, it's kind of an iterative process, and gives you a lot of things for free (the grime and wear that can build up in areas, or types of brackets you'd use to mount stuff to each other, and occasionally the engineering sensibilities that inspired the original object), whereas PBR textures tend to replicate one material really well, which can be *great* if you're trying to make architecture or something (most household objects DO tend to be a single material), but I think that's more in line with a "proper" VFX workflow, as opposed to what I'm usually trying to do for VFX, which is just kinda re-mix real life? I think that's a good way to put it? All that said, I haven't really used proper PBR materials much, and I'm mostly speaking out of ignorance- my guess is they're definitely more powerful, and probably the way to go moving forward, I just haven't really tried them much yet. Have you done much with them??

IanHubert

Also HAH! Yes! I actually got to meet Bob Forward down in LA once. He gave me his old GPS unit, and it had all these saved locations for the best places to blow stuff up out in the desert!

David Morales

I’m in Boise! So not too far, lol.

Carson Reader

I'm still relatively new to blender and 3D, so you would probably know better than I would. I mostly have used them for like floors and walls and stuff where the material is kinda the whole thing, as I find they tend to look pretty realistic without much tweaking. However, I've found your methods much more effective for basically everything else, because it's much easier to texture when basically any image can be your source, and as you said, I find that adding details to the model based on the texture is a really great way to make complex and detailed models quickly. Maybe PBR is better for more prominent objects in a scene? Idk though, your method seems like it is pretty effective for a variety of things.

Nathan Vegdahl

The vast majority of PBR textures out there are definitely approximated from photos or photo scans. Granted, by people who know what they're doing, and sometimes using special software to help out. But they're not using any specialized equipment to actually scan material properties accurately. A lot of the PBR texture libraries out there are marketed in a way to slyly suggest (without actually saying so) that they're physically accurate. But in reality what they are is just very well tuned. And that's still worth a lot: that's a lot of work that you don't have to do yourself. But it's not fundamentally more accurate than you could do yourself with enough time and expertise. Any library that actually does provide accurately scanned materials would look a lot more like the MERL BRDF Database than the e.g. Poliigon or its competitors. And, moreover, it's unlikely you could even use that scanned data in most renderers. To be clear: I do think these PBR texture sites are very valuable, and (marketing aside) none of this is meant as a criticism. They provide very high-quality, well-tuned, PBR-shader-compatible textures that work well under all lighting conditions. I'm just saying there's nothing magic or especially scientific behind them.

Bo Maryniuk

Ian, there is a bug: the Flüger wing (that thing on the right side of anonomanomononenomonometer) will be 180 degrees rotated opposite, if with that direction of the wind. :-) BTW, speaking of "free options", have you considered switching/trying Davinci Resolve yet instead of After Effects?

David Wissel

Ian you're freaking amazing man!! Please do more of these long videos of the whole process. Learning so much from them and also inspiring to watch you work :)

IanHubert

Wait are you sure?? The wind's supposed to be blowing right to left, so drag would cause the larger panel to blow off to the left, yeah? And oh man- Resolve could TOTALLY replace Premiere, and it looks like it's above-and-beyond full of great tools for color correction, but it doesn't have a bunch of the tools I'd really need for it to be an AE killer (point/planar tracking/3d layers/so forth)- Actually! Blender's a lot closer in that regard. I should really poke my head into Resolve again some time soon here. :D

IanHubert

Oh nice! I really want to drive east one of these days. I've been to Boise before (my aunt/uncle used to live there like 25 years ago), but that's the furthest I've been!

Bo Maryniuk

Ah, LOL! OK, forget my previous statement: I overlooked the direction of the mist. But I still keep looking "what's wrong with it?". OK, what still boggles my mind is that the speed of the vapor and pretty fast rotation of cups still feels odd to correlation of the speed of Flugel wiggling: Flugel is still too smoothly relaxed instead of having typical jerks if the wind gets strong enough. Look what I mean (the video even fits to your model): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3uanOS2Bq0

IanHubert

Gotcha! Thanks for that, Nathan! Actually- I think there's some new AI-type systems for automatically constructing more realistic roughness/normal maps- that'd be interesting to play around with (the demos have been wild). I always feel like there should have to be motion or something in the source images (like, loading in a video) for it to REALLY be able to extract any roughness/normal data, but ehhhhhh, machines keep getting better at that stuff!

IanHubert

Ah! Hans! That's super great to hear, thank you! I was kind of worried at first about the "and here's just what I'm working on/thinking about" posts, and kind of felt like I should only focus on generating tutorials and stuff, so the response to these more flexible posts has made me feel a lot more at home in the whole patreon format- thanks! :D

Cameron Shepherd

My god this is freakin' beautiful! Are there any courses or videos etc that you have used in the past for learning visual composition? I only ask because every shot of yours is so perfectly composed and is a genuine pleasure to look at. Cheers Ian!

FruitZeus

This is super awesome!!! One idea that came to mind was adding hooks to the cables (Ctrl + H) just on the top where it connects to the Aenenome... The A word. yes that. Because it shakes separately from the pole with Zip Ties. Might offer some flexibility to the cables in a somewhat visually interesting way.On a separate note, I absolutely love what you did with Google maps imagery. So that's definitely Illegal then? Or just frowned upon? I'd love to use that method in an upcoming project if it's not fully illegal lol.

Juan Cobo

I get so excited everytime I get an email saying theres a new Ian video up 🙏

Doug Brown

Love it! Further insight into the movie making mind that is Ian Hubert... genius. :)

Doug Brown

I think the only education you need is to watch the greatest films of all time... you'll get a lot outta that for composition, camera placement and lens choice.... probably :)

Mark Miller

Finally watched through this whole thing. Great stuff. It was super useful to see what kind of stuff you relegate to compositing (in AE or whatever). I find myself spending too long trying to composite in the Blender render, and seeing you just blast some stuff out of Blender and then spend time tweaking it in compositing is pretty freeing.

Marius Finnstun

So cool to see a complete shot being made! Being able to manufacture shots that help make sense of the story is so cool. Are you planning on doing more of these? i may have just missed it, but I didn't understand how he went from standing outside the tent looking the black hole to suddenly being inside the ship. Are you planning on making shots for that, or does it just make sense that he ran inside the ship as we were looking the expanding black hole?

Charlie

Ian, you should try Davinci Resolve's green screening capabilities. it's outstanding how fast and effectively it works. Just thought I'd mention it (DELTA KEYER)

Bo Maryniuk

Charlie, in 16 actually that part I think sucks there. :-) I use blender for keying with a bit complex setup, but at the end it pays back much better. Maybe 17 is better, but I haven't tried it yet.

IanHubert

Yeah! That's a part I still have to figure out. I think I might do an animated shot with the rokoko suit of him walking into the ship and it taking off as the ball thing expands. The scene's also going to have a little ending bit- just gotta figure out the best way to do it :D

IanHubert

Yeah! It's a great tut- worked just as described! Although there seems to be a bit of a technique for getting the highest res stuff (google maps really only wants to show you a specific amount of geometry, so you gotta figure out how to optimize your view, especially if you're doing "big chunks".)

Will Tejeda

I've not used it very in-depth but the Fusion tab/page in Resolve could do those things you mentioned Fusion was originally more of a competitor to Nuke than after effects, before i was bought by BMD and stuffed into Resolve If you have a Resolve dongle license you also are able to unlock the full standalone version of Fusion (and i think now even the regular license key works as well, but that wasn't always the case. don't quote me on it though)

max pirrit

Ian! Great Work! I have a request! (may be wrong here but) do you have key bindings on your mouse for modeling and generally navigating UI? If so....i would LOVE to know what your set up is...your efficiency is staggering!

Diego Nossa

This was great Ian! Always learning new techniques and your workflows is very helpful! The amount of work you did without saving was making me anxious I have to admit.

Richard Blow

This process doesn't seem to work in 2.91 or the alpha build of 2.92. I opened a build of 2.90 and it works there. Is it only me?

sofia

you don't play BALL on a TRACK

IanHubert

Oh! For modeling, I have one- it's "Select Linked" that I can hit with the "Mouse 4" button. It lets me just select one vertex of a mesh and grab the rest of it. I also do a ton of re-centering with the num pad period. Blender's really optimized to let you keep your left hand on the keyboard, and right on the mouse (it's cool hearing Ton talk about his philosophy behind it- a lot of thought went into the ergonomics of it all (right click seleeeect, haha), and I can totally feel that flow interrupted in those few times when I have to switch both hands to the keyboard to fill in a search bar or something. Actually- I want to have a list of words you can type with only your left hand, so I can try to skew that way with my filenames :P (OKAY- just googled it. Stewardesses Reverberate.) If there are any moments specifically in the video, navigation or whatnot-wise, I can probably say what I'm doing- Blender's super hot-key centric, which is RAD for efficiency (I'm a dork, but I like to think of them like spells?) but the downside is that once it becomes muscle memory I don't always realize I'm doing something and forget to vocalize it.

IanHubert

Ahahahahaha yeahhhh... THAT SAID, I suspect it's mostly a testament to the infrequency with with Blender crashes on my computer that I can feel pretty relaxed about it (although there are a few maneuvers where I always save beforehand (usually automatically, muscle-memory wise), because I don't trust em. THAT SAID- I usually rely pretty heavily on the auto-save feature to recover my work, but that only works after that initial save, and that's... yeah that's definitely bit me a few times :P

IanHubert

SO- iiiiiitttttt's... reconstructing 3d models from the google maps data is one of the few things explicitly forbidden. But using the models they've already constructed? Probably the same, but- So Google licenses the satellite/flyover data from other sources, and that gives them certain usage rights, non of which include re-distributing it as downloadable 3d data for use as assets in a production. And since google is the one doing all the processing to create the 3d data (I assume), even if you went back to the source data (a whole process in itself, I'm sure), you'd still have to figure out how to recreate the 3d data (which I suspect they do with a bunch of SUPER clever machine-learning based in-house photogrammetry reconstruction methods). That to say, the reason it's almost impossible to get permission is because nobody CAN give permission for the reconstructed data. And while I'm like 99% sure any human involved in the process would see that data used in a sci-fi film or whatever and think, "Damn that's cool as hell to see this used that way", finding that human who can give you the "official thumbs up" seems to be impossible? I could be wrong about any part of this- it's just what I've been able to figure out from extensive googling because I've been VERY MUCH asking the same question, hahahaha

Gretchen Krueger (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-20 10:00 You’re very good at modeling quickly and taking full advantage of hotkeys and shortcuts in your workflow. Was that mostly from deliberately practicing or is it more a “you get better at the tool the longer you use it” sort of thing?
2020-12-02 05:34

max pirrit

That 'select linked' key bind is a great one....gonna have to steal it! Thanks for answering!

IanHubert

Ooo- a bit of both- I've been using Blender for- esh, 17 years or something? But I also definitely force myself to use hotkeys. If I ever notice I've done something "the long way" I'll actually undo it, then REdo it using the hotkey, to try to get that muscle memory. That said, I suspect there are vastly more efficient ways. I know MasterXeon's HardOps workflow is designed to be incredibly efficient (he built the whole tool to basically beef up his workflow- it's incredible), I'm just engrained enough with standard blender that trying to mix stuff up at this point gets pretty frustrating (the switch to the new 2.8 hotkeys was VERY frustrating for a couple weeks, haha)

Zachary Macintyre

This is such good content! I always try and plan everything out and do things in stages, so it's quite nice to see you trawl old footage and see what you can make with what you have and your CG chops.

Zachary Macintyre

It brings me so much joy every time you go "Y'know what...?" and take another diversion to make it look better.

IanHubert

HAH!!! Oh man. For years we were trying to plan out this running gag of various background scenarios where balls would be on tracks, in like random hamfisted ways. We had a bunch of ideas at one point, but... that was 8+ years ago, and I've forgotten :/ I do remember at one point Nate and I were talking about trackball mice, and we just stopped midsentence, hahaha

IanHubert

Oh thanks so much! Yeah like Doug said, I'm not sure if I ever watched a course as much as just a ton of movies and stuff (I'd be super curious to see how people teach composition though!) I'm not even sure if I could make a good video about it, because so much of it is just kinda letting my gut take over. I tried to talk about it a bit at the beginning of this video here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/making-shot-pt-2-38286892 Cause I agree- I think when people say, "hey that's good lighting!" or something like that, what they're USUALLY reacting to is actually the composition. I've seen images that are kinda lackluster in every regard except for the composition, and because of that they're GREAT images.

IanHubert

Ahahaha, I'm glad! It's the reason I'm up at 4:10 right now. Keep trying to start a render, and keep stopping it to tweak one last thing (I've been doing this for nearly 2 hours :P)

Lukas Sprehn

Great to see Truax as Sterling again! Can't wait to see what he gets up to, the context of being there, the aftermath etc. I think Josh is the best actor you have had in Dynamo period, and his character one of the most fascinating ones.

Lukas Sprehn

Walking? I'd be RUNNING from that shiz. Only to try and get closer to research... Then scram again.

Lukas Sprehn

Watch a lot of movies and look at a lot of art. Figure out what people like, what you like, and that should translate to what works well. If it appeals to you, it is probably good. Consoooome media.

Max Haberstroh

2.91 does not work for me either. 2.90 does the trick.

mindsize

Man, he makes this look so easy.

Greg Beaudry

Ian can you please do a video on After Affects? How to apply masks, color correcting, etc?

Carter Burr-Kirven

If you're asking just about the basics of workflow, using the software, there's a wonderful variety of resources on the internet! Video Copilot, if you haven't heard of them already, is probably the gold standard. If you've barely even touched AE, check out the Introduction to After Effects series they've got at videocopilot.net/basic !

Greg Beaudry

Hey man thanks for the recommendation! I'll check those out. I'm pretty familiar with photoshop and premiere but AE is giving me trouble mostly with coloring and how to make masks effected by footage like Ian was talking about with the blur and the smoke footage!

Carter Burr-Kirven

Those blur layers are using TrackMattes, a feature AE has where a layer's opacity can be driven by the brightness/alpha of another—sort of like a combination between Photoshop's layer masks and clipping masks. As for color, After Effects has pretty much all the same abilities as Photoshop or Premiere, so if you have preferred color tools in those programs, you can always just stick to those ones for starters. I personally feel like After Effects' learning curve is one of the gentler ones of the programs I've used, especially if you're coming from Premiere and Photoshop, you're 90% there already, compared to something completely alien like Blender! But that could be just me.

Harold Scott

Wouldn't ship need a lil bit of noise movement as the wind would cause the wings to lift a lil

IanHubert

Possibly, yeah! One of those "is it worth the rendertime?" things, but could help the whole thing feel more dynamic, yeah!

haarish

i have a problem with importing rdc in blennder 2.9

Tim and Daniel

Hi Ian, I think there is an art that you are especially good at that more people would sign up for your patron if you made a series of resources for adding live footage to blender environments. I think they would come in droves! Nuke for example doesn't have the automatic shading and lighting which is one of the things makes blender special.. so please!

Tim and Daniel

Its the part where you add people to models that is so so special.. come on Ian, pretty please...blender on top :)

michael warneke

how did you actually end up making the final rock textures/models?

Paul Spooner

I went to try this Google Maps import, and it seems like Google has closed all the loopholes. Tried with Edge, Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox, and they all fail in various ways when the renderdoc process is running. Seems like RenderDoc has been patched (even older versions) to not capture the 3D pipeline for Chrome as well. If you still have a process for extracting this geometry, I'd love to hear what it is.

IanHubert

Ah that's good to know! I haven't looked into it since this video, so it probably means those techniques don't work anymore. Which- honestly- it's nice to not have the temptation, since I was never sure about the legality :P

Paul Spooner

Guess I'll just have to run some screenshots through the photogrammetry engine then. It's more an inconvenience than a prohibition.