The program is called Sketch2Photo, and the name pretty much says exactly what it’s designed to do. The gist is you draw a sketch on a computer connected to the net, label those line drawings (i.e. a person=person), and then the program goes onto the web and finds candidate pictures that match the contours your draw. The next step uses some pretty slick auto-rotoscoping techniques to then match the composition you drew and, VUALA!

Too good to be true? Well watch the video below to decide for yourself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I really hope that it’s everything it promises to be and more, because I could think of a few uses for VFX artists out there that’s for sure!

LINK: Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage (PDF Paper)

LINK: Amazing Program Turns Sketches Into Photo Montages

PhotoSketch allows users to create photomontages from basic stick-figure sketches – you don’t even have to have any kind of artistic talent to convey your idea. As explained in the video below, the tool takes a simple sketch of the desired montage elements and pulls photographs that correspond to them from Google, Flickr and Yahoo.

The program then decides from a variety of matching results which ones work together the best and merges each disparate image element into a cohesive whole. It even matches them to the scene with the correct color tones and adds shadows as needed. The whole process takes about 15 minutes.

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The online UK magazine, Digital Arts has published a story detailing all the work done by Frantic Films on John Woo’s ‘Red Cliff’. This film has been long in the making and I actually did some rotoscoping work on the ‘epic naval battle’ that the article talks about. And the final product really is a huge accomplishment. So it’s great to see the film finally getting some well deserved press!

LINK: Behind the scenes on the VFX of John Woo’s new epic movie, Red Cliff

Frantic Films VFX created visual effects shots for the forthcoming John Woo-directed epic, Red Cliff, including one of the film’s key naval battle scenes. The most expensive Chinese-language picture ever made, Red Cliff is based on the historic Battle of Red Cliffs and other events during the end of the Han Dynasty and immediately prior to the period of the Three Kingdoms in ancient China.

“The challenge of creating an entire pipeline for managing the water, fire, smoke, thousands of CG boats and tens of thousands of actors – not to mention cloth simulations for the flags – all in a time span measured in days and weeks, was an incredible effort,” concluded Chris Bond, creative director and president, Frantic Films. “I want to thank the team enormously for all of their work and applaud Jason and Bridgitte for their leadership.”

LINK: Doug Hogan Portfolio – Red Cliff 2

Rotoscoping is usually the red headed step child of Compositing. Everyone just wants to avoid it. But this rotoscoping job for John Woo’s epic ‘Red Cliff 2? was an absolute blast.

The shot I was tasked with was one of the more complicated. It was a scene depicting an epic navel battle in the dead of night…during a storm. Complete with ropes swaying the wind, explosions, and stuntmen falling off of the ships. All with the deadline of a week. A tall order to say the least, but luckily I got to team up with a team of 3 other very talented roto artists, and divided the shot off into sections.

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