#their cave base made specifically so that it would be less detectable using cave layers? and convincing people they still live at spawn?

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Hi!! I’ve just spent way too long writing down a probably excessive amount of worldbuilding for Jevin’s species in @martuzzio‘s hermit space outlaws AU!!! Disclaimer: I pulled everything scientific-sounding in this post straight out of my ass. Also I’m pretty sure I contradict things that have been established as canon at at least a couple points. martuzzio, please feel free to take this or leave it, or only take part of it, whatever you like. I just got hit by worldbuilding inspiration! And I had to get it out!!

History of Slimes!

Modern slimes’ ancestors were simple, non-intelligent slimes a lot like the Minecraft ones. Jevin’s species (the only intelligent species on the planet) is specifically descended from cave dwelling slimes, but there were also species that lived aboveground in damp environments such as swamps.

Ancient slimes needed very damp environments in order to survive. (Even the ones that lived aboveground were nocturnal, because direct sunlight could be deadly to them!) Modern slimes, including Jevin’s species, are much much more resilient than their ancestors, though hot and dry environments are still bad for them. This change came about because of a mass extinction event that killed most ancient slime species as well as most other life on the planet!

Slimeworld used to be a very wet place, but several million years ago, something happened to cause a planet-wide drought. The evolutionary pressures of the drought are what eventually led to the rise of Slimes as an intelligent species - before then, there was no intelligent life on the planet.

The cause would have to be unnatural, because I'm pretty sure there’s no natural way for a planet to just lose all its water. So I think some advanced spacefaring species came and drained most of the water off of Slimeworld for some reason. Why? Who knows, they’re probably all dead now.

This catastrophe left almost no habitats for slimes to live in. The surface-dwelling species almost all died immediately, with only a few hanging on in obscure corners of the world. The ones in the caves were a little safer, but not for long, because the devastation wasn’t just limited to slimes!

The extreme damage to Slimeworld’s environment killed off most life on the planet. The ancient cave slimes thrived for a little while! Dead stuff falling into caves from above had always been their main food source. But eventually the fallout of the drought settled and the famine hit them too.

Food was scarce and it wasn’t coming to them anymore. Anything that wanted to eat on this new world needed to be able to survive and ideally travel long distances in the harsher climates of the outside world. Most cave slimes couldn’t do that, so most cave slimes died off. But a few had mutations that let them do just well enough to survive. Those were the ones that evolved into Jevin’s species!

Ancient slimes spent a long time hanging around cave mouths, rolling out at night to find food and retreating back during the day. The ones that got the furthest and still managed to make it back were the most successful. The first big break of the Slime species in terms of intelligence was when they started carrying their shelter around with them instead of having to hide every day.

That’s right: the first human technology was sharp stick, but the first Slime technology was leaf hat.

Physiology of Slimes!

Ancient slimes started out pretty much the same as slime molds here on Earth. They were colonies of individual organisms that all acted together like a single body, but could survive just fine on their own. However over time they evolved to become more and more dependent on the colony, and the cells became more and more specialized. Now they’re something in between a colony and an individual! Each cell of their body is technically a different organism, but they can’t function outside of the colony. Also, each colony does have a single consciousness, they’re not hiveminds.

They evolved like this because in the harsh environment of the drought, a single cell would die in minutes. A colony could retain moisture for much longer! The fact that colonies were now staying together all the time let them start to evolve more internal organization, which led to the evolution of intelligence!

Slimes are very structurally simple. A slime is made up of a jelly-like mass and a more rubbery, less malleable core.

The jelly layer cells have a unique structure - under a microscope they kind of look like sea urchins, but with long flexible tendrils instead of spines. The way they tangle and cling lets the slime hold together and keep its structure instead of melting!

The tendrils also act as transmitters and receptors for the electrical signals sent out by the slime’s “brain.” Each cell is in constant communication with all the cells around it, which is how a slime moves and controls its body. They also pass nutrients to each other based on chemical signals!

However the structure of these cells means that they lose water very easily. In hot or dry environments, the tendrils of the cells retract to reduce the amount of surface area that water can escape from. This means they don’t cling together as easily, and the slime “melts.” Enough time in its melted state and the cells start to die because nutrients aren’t being passed around the body like they should be.

The jelly-layer cells are all pretty much interchangeable. They’re also very adaptable! When exposed to open air, jelly cells lock up their tendrils and partially dehydrate themselves, passing the liquid back into the mass of jelly behind them. The result is the thin, rubbery “skin” of a slime’s body. This was the most crucial adaptation that allowed modern Slimes’ ancestors to survive the drought, since it drastically improves their ability to retain water.

The core cells are different, more structured. The core is a slime’s brain. If most of a slime’s body is like jelly, the core would be like stringy algae. It’s still very flexible and malleable, but if it tears or breaks, that damage can’t just be healed by squishing the parts back together. The brain is usually kept scrunched up safely in the middle of the slime’s body, and there’s a dense layer of more rubbery jelly surrounding it.

Slimes can digest almost any organic material, but a lot of the life on their planet evolved to be toxic to them, and if something is toxic to slimes you better believe it’s toxic to most everything else. There are a lot of really weird toxins native to Slimeworld!

Culture of Slimes!

First I’ll just copy/paste the ask about Slime fashion I sent to martuzzio a while ago since I am still enamored with it:

idea: since they're blind, Jevin's species's fashion is entirely based around the vibrations they make when they contact whatever surface they're moving on. you pick up different materials or combinations of material depending on what "look" you're going for and hold it on the outside of your body. they could use all kinds of material for this - cloth, metal, powders, whatever. you arrange different items in patterns on your surface to create different "outfits" (soundscapes) of vibration. the more complex the pattern, the fancier and more formal the "dress." this stuff makes it a bit more difficult to move since it reduces their traction, and it also takes effort to maintain more complicated "outfits", so dressing up is really only for formal situations or showing off. casual dress is keeping just a few things you like the sound of on your surface, and it's also perfectly acceptable to wear nothing at all. of course this all looks really weird to people with eyes.

Slime language doesn’t just involve sound. It also incorporates chemical signals (which give a sense of the slime’s mood and fulfill the same function as body language does for us humans) and touch. Two slimes having a conversation will press tendrils of their body together and communicate with something like a cross between braille and sign language. This is actually the main component of their language - sound is kind of secondary. It’s impossible for a non-slime to “speak” the slime language without the help of technology, and slimes can’t make the range of sounds that humans do with their vocal cords. Fortunately they can hear at least as well as humans and using a soundboard to talk is pretty intuitive for them!

Most slime cities are either underground or underwater. The oceans of Slimeworld are pretty densely populated! It actually led to a lot of environmental problems in the Slime species’s history, because there isn’t a ton of ocean left to live in. A lot of aquatic animals on the planet went extinct during the slimes’ industrial revolution a thousand years or so ago.

Slimes obviously don’t have visual art since they’re blind. Some of the main art forms of the species are perfume and culinary art! Because of all the stuff on their planet that’s toxic to them, slimes evolved a very keen sense of taste/smell. They can detect minuscule amounts of a chemical. Most other species can’t appreciate their art because their senses aren’t fine enough to pick up on all the subtle flavors and smells! Also slimes’ ideas about what tastes and smells good can be... eccentric.

They also do sculpture and music. They have some really awesome musical instruments because they can shape their body to whatever shape it needs to be to use the instrument!

Personal space isn’t really a thing in slime culture. Their language requires being in constant contact to speak, so casual touch with strangers isn’t just normal, it’s the polite thing to do. If there’s a group of slimes in a room, each one is pretty much always touching at least one or two others. Blobbing together is natural for them!

...aaand that’s all I got for now, because it’s 4:30 AM. I hope this is coherent because I didn’t really edit it! If you have literally any questions at all please let me know! because there are certainly details that didn’t make it in here!!

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VFX REACT EPISODE 3

EPISODE 3 - MARVEL

Thanos

Over a dozen studios worked on this movie.

They have different levels of resolution for different shots. So they have the highest resolution, the highest detailed 3D model of Thanos's face for all the hero close up shots. But farther away, all those details, mores would be gigabytes of wasted data. 

He has pores and little wrinkles on his cheek, and when hey smiles, they stretch and squish. That kind of stuff, there's special technology for it, but it's such high end, such custom made technology. But it's those kinda things that make faces look real. Or the crows feet at the corner of his eyes, and his skin folding into those crows feet.

The stubble hairs on Thanos are catching the light. The stubble is probably the team needing Thanos to look real, and we don't identify faces without hair as being real, so they needed to stubble on him. 

Black panther (1 on 1 fight in crystal cave)

This scene doesn't look good, but do you know why? This scene they shot in October, and the VFX team got it, it was December. They only had about six weeks to do this entire scene. "Okay, let's say they're given another six months, what do you do to make this scene better?"

First I would approach the production designer and ask "why do you have a black cave, on a black road, with two guys in black suits? Because now there's no way for me to have their silhouette read." We're in a tricky situation where I need to be able to see these figures, but they're on a black background. So I need to just artificially raise the light [ like a curves layer ] for him to pop out. And now he's kinda like grey and black.

But there's no contact shadow, under his armpit, underneath his head. And if you look at the background, the rules of the scene establish that the black levels in the background go deeper then what you're seeing on the suit. So he's just kinda artificially raised up.

If you look at his head, his head is shiny. The brightness shining on his head implies that the light shining on his head is brighter than that. But the lights in the scene around us that we're seeing with our eyes, are not that bright. It's a subtle thing, but subconsciously you can see that it's wrong, because you see light every day.

Having one single source of light, really just making a very dramatic looking image, would have improved it so much. Like Jurassic Park or Detective Pikachu. Ambient lighting is the death of realism for visual effects. Nothing IRL is ever just ambiently lit.

They probably apply a lot of motion blur to hide the flaws. There are a couple ways you can do motion blur in CG. The quick and easy way to do it is called motion vectors = Where for every pixel, you get another pixel that's a color, and that color represents a direction. Later on in post [production] you can stretch that pixel out based on that motion vector you're getting, make more of a motion blur or less. It's great for changing things. Here's the problem though, it can only describe 1 direction. So if my hand does an arc, and for that one shutter you're getting an arc of motion, When it can't describe a curve, it can only describe a direction. "So you're saying the motion blur isn't actually baked into the 3D render, it's an actual filter that's applied on top of it." "That makes sense because adding motion blur straight out of the render adds a lot of time, but it's how you get the curves in motion blur, it's more realistic that way. But, they rendered out a pass, and then they added it later." "Which is a valid thing to do, we do it all the time." "Absolutely."  

This is a better shot because he's standing next to an actual light so you're getting some actual volume. But also, bear in mind, he is still blending into the background, so it goes back to the production design thing you're talking about. A good visual effects shot is more then just technical prowess, it has to have artistic vision as well. You have to have all the stuff that would make any shot look good. Just because it's technically accurate doesn't mean those things exist.

"It's interesting how such a small thing can take people out." "It's a big challenge we face as VFX artists. The more high end we go with our effect, the more any tiny little flaw stands out."

Iron man

Putting on the metal suit

Two things stand out to me:

First, the motion looks pretty decent for them putting CG on a head. The hard thing is, you have to project shadows onto a real face. You basically have to remodel the face in CG, and use it has a shadow catcher basically that from the 3D objects being there to cast a shadow onto that. 

It looks really good when the mask comes down to cover his face, because the shadow looks really solid because not only is it casting a shadow, but it's removing the shine from his skin. There, that's an artist going in there and taking the time to figure out what the skin tone would look like in the shadow but also removing shine.

Second touch I really like, is the finger smudges on the helmet. That's the  first thing you should learn as a texture artist, when it comes to making textures for CG objects, is surface imperfections. That will bring the realism up from "oh yeah that looks real I guess!" to "Oh that is a real thing." Like look at my chrome helmet, there's dust on here, there's fingerprints, and the fingerprints react to light in a specific way, there's scratches and wash. It's more then just a chromed-out sphere.

Iron man 2 putting on suit from suitcase

So outside here his face has a lot more light acting on it, so it's harder to fake a shadow on it, so they just get through it really fast by having the helmet close on it quickly.

It's not just the modeling, and the cool lighting and rendering, it's the animation. The animators are killing it here, like the design for all the mechanical intricacies. And that stuff-- you actually have to study mechanical design, you can't just fake it 100%. 

"Like even [ the pieces of the mask fitting and locking into place ], that would take me like a week just to animate that! Shows you how many people it takes to do an entire movie."

Avengers

How much shadows are on his face are perfect. Look at those perfect shadows [ when the mask comes down over his face ]!

Anytime you see a CG thing and there's a flair over the top of that, that flair was recreated for that shot. If there's a flair over where you want to put a CG element, the problem is that you have a half transparent color circle, and somehow you need to like mask it out to put it on top of your footage-- even though its like half transparent-- it's like trying to mask out a window LOL. 

The director of photography needs to choose lenses here that don't flare for the visual effects elements so they can add the flare in later.

Dr. Strange

You can actually do a lot of those particle effects while using After Effects and Trapcode Particular which is a particle plugin for After Effects.

Look at this, this is orthographic projection= doesn't have actual vanishing points ( like isometric pixel art ). Perspective projection = DOES have vanishing points.