[HOAX] Haiti UFO Video - YouTube

Hi there, just registered after reading all 67 pages LOL

Some good insight on these, but I wanted to explain the capabilities of these programs that he said he used, since I use them all the time - when I saw this video, the first thing I thought was fake, because of the camera motion, angle and the lighting. However, I recognized it as a marvelous animation, because of the nice focus effects and rendering.

First off, Modo - that's an excellent modeling package. Very powerful.

Next up, we have Lightwave. A marvelous 3D program. They do Battlestar Galactica entirely with this software, and they've recently updated it with photoreal motionblur and a Real Lens camera (you want a Nikon D1 with 135MM dicomar lens? three clicks gets you the actual algorithm that duplicates that camera and lens)

Last is Vue 6. There are two iterations of this program, Infinite and Xstream. I believe they used Xstream on this, because it actually works within Lightwave, giving you the Real Lens system and the motionblur. Vue has nice motionblur but not as good as LW's (yet).

Now some people have been talking about Direct X and Cryengine2. While I am gobsmacked at cryengine2's DX10 render power (I would kill to be able to have that interface in Vue) none of these programs use DX9 or 10. Their interfaces are driven by OpenGL, and all the images you see have to be drawn (rendered) frame by frame.

For the kind of realistic lighting and shading that we see in this video, they would probably have set the scene up as a radiosity scene (radiosity is a way to bounce light around so that you get better shading) in both programs.

Now, to be sure, I don't know the artists who made this video, but I've done it enough myself (though never to their degree of mastery) to know the illusion behind how its done. This is how *I* would do it, and indeed a scene using these techniques is rendering NOW, and I will post it to my youtube page to show how easy it is. :-) The render time, by the way, says 179hours. 49 minutes a frame even on my QX6700 quad overclocked 3.2ghz.

1) the original artist said they filmed something, so I guess so. A good way to get camera motion data to be used later.
2) load up Modo and model yourself something cool, texture to taste.
3) Load up a motiontracker like Boujou (costs $10,000, but he said he had a company, right? There are free motiontrackers though) and get the camera motion data.
4) load this data into Lightwave. Load the video as frames into Lightwave as a background plate for alignment.
5) load your UFO. Make it match the camera move you now have loaded. Add in lights and glows.
6) Load in Vue 6 Xstream plugin. Load up a sunset atmosphere, tweak until it matches the background plate.
7) Tweak lighting further in Lightwave and Vue. This does take time because of the need to render out a frame to see what it actually looks like.
8) Add in some foliage from Vue. The palm trees all look alike because the artists apparently used single instances and DID NOT use the ecosystem painter - if they HAD used the ecosystem painter the trees would have all been grown slightly differently and oriented at different angles. The object used, in case anyone is interested, is the Coconut tree object.
9) Tweak some more. Time consuming. Though.. 2 years? Definetely in no hurry, months probably passed with no work done.
10) Render with photoreal blur, real lens camera (hopefully matching what lens you used on the real camera that's giving you the background plate). Either send to a renderfarm or be patient. Renderfarms arent too expensive nowadays amazingly. And there are people (like me) who like to leave their PCs on. Why not render? Go on vacation.

11) Compress nicely and upload to Youtube.

I'm not saying this is precisely how they did it, but its what I would do.

And to the people that did it, could you post the objects and scene file? Would be fun to play with. PLEEEEEEZE