My progress over the past few months has been incredible, and I’ve learned so much more than I ever imagined myself being able to do. I owe this huge advancement to the course’s thorough structure, the vast wealth of resources available to us, and our leaders’ genuine desire for our professional success. However, I’ve still got quite a long ways to go before my work meets industry standards.
Some of my pitfalls in the past have been understanding controls on more complex rigs, as well as accounting for body weight and having a better eye for realistic posing. I hope to get a lot better in my technical skills as I proceed in the course.
Tentatively, I’d like to consider lighting and camera work as my specialism. I spend a very long time setting up my lights and cameras and it’s always one of the most fun parts of my project.
These are the two most recent projects that I’ve touched. I spent quite a while setting up the lights on both. In the tailed ball scene, I worked hard to give the light a natural, daytime effect, dappling yellow through the leaves of the trees (which I had carefully placed), while never completely obscuring the animal in darkness, and making sure to project its shadow on the rocks for observation of the silhouette. I spend a long time playing with the water, trying to find a balance in depth and reflectivity. On my performance animation, I spend almost two days on the lights (not to mention collecting a tasteful amount of debris and scene elements). My idea had many aims: frame Janine (which I did with four surrounding area lights illuminating only her, specifically a stronger backlight for an eerie feel), highlight the blood on the stairs (which also serves to frame her), cast the rest of the house into sharp-shadowed darkness (drawing the eye to Janine and the stairs), and create an eerie reflection on the floor. I chose a bright red velvet shirt and heels to associate her with the blood on the stairs as well as give her an untrustworthy aura. I also used a camera technique I hadn’t tried before, panning around quickly to the rest of the characters on the opposite side of the room. This was intended to both cut the tension as well as add to the fast-paced nature of the scene.
-I digress, I’m very interested in lighting and cinematography. I know I have to learn basically everything in order to even begin understanding it technically, so hopefully I’m not put off by what this work actually entails.
In the beginning of the tutorial I got confused very quickly. I was having a hard time understanding what Mehdi was talking about when he discussed UVs. The last time I also struggled to understand the concept of normals, which is a similar subject. I did a little bit of research online and found this diagram to be helpful:
-as well as the explanation that UV does not stand for anything but instead refers to the points used on the map, as XYZ are already taken in reference to area in space.
On to the project-
POP Object: a container for particles
POP Solver: toolbox for calculating the physics
POP Source: generates particles on the surface of the object
Scatter: generates points on the surface of the object
SOP Path: sources the object
At first I was worried because I couldn’t see my object in the POP network while Mehdi could, and then realized I simply had to move to a frame in which the points had begun conglomerating.
I was already really excited about my simulation with still half an hour left to go, and was surprised when Mehdi said “let’s make it more interesting”! There’s so much in Houdini I don’t know, I can only imagine all the awesome things that we could choose from.
I rendered our first flipbook:
I specifically chose to work with a little less points than Mehdi, just because I felt like they were obscuring my character and I didn’t like it aesthetically.
But in the next step I was a bit confused. Mehdi created a sphere as a test object to work on our point attributes with, but when I did that, Houdini would not let me. Logically, the point simulation we created was coded to work with the group testgeometry_crag1, so they would not apply to the sphere.
I’m not sure why Houdini allowed Mehdi to do this, unless I missed a step along the way.
I managed to resolve this on my own, but the issue I’m proudest of resolving on my own was the inability to see any particle at all at frame 0- I remembered that we set the beginning frame to 235 in our popsource and went back to include all the frames. That, and I once again adjusted the parameters in the pscale to my own liking. I actually turned the birth rate way back up and made the particles even smaller.
Unfortunately, Houdini then crashed. And it was about 1 AM, so I called it a night.
Next day, though, I returned, with my brain function switched on, and I found it super easy to recreate the finished product.
Below you’ll find the text from the PDF I put together detailing my previs idea for anyone who wants to join my project. I created this story with a couple different things in mind- one, that it utilizes assets we already have for free and can easily work into the story, and two, that it allows each group to showcase their work well. I plan to be one of the 3D animators working on previs blocking, and I want that work to show on my showreel when I get into the industry. Personally, I’m also interested in lighting, and as we learn more about that this term perhaps I can apply the knowledge to this project, as well as learning from my VFX peers. I think the storyline is doable but I obviously am open to any changes or suggestions, as the main thing is getting 10 weeks worth of work done and setting reasonable goals.
Sci Fi Thriller/Horror Short Film Previs Project
Duration: approx. 1-3 minutes
The Researcher
(working title- The Colonist?)
Story
ACT I
Establishing shot of spaceship flying over planet. Lands on surface. We see an astronaut (A) emerge. The astronaut begins walking around on the surface, kneeling among the rock and analyzing samples. A second astronaut (B) walks over to A quietly, surprising her when she looks up. A and B shake hands. B points towards a large glass dome in the distance. A and B take the Space Buggy (or walk) to the dome. A enters and takes off her helmet. Looks back at B as she walks in, who is standing outside staring in. A walks towards a tent and enters. Pan out- long shot of the dome, showing us overhead of the colony.
ACT II
It is night. A awakens suddenly on a cot, inside the tent. She steps outside and looks towards the horizon. A sees an odd silhouette moving in the distance. Close up on A squinting. We see A leaving the dome in her spacesuit and helmet. Approaching the object, she sees that it is B, crawling erratically on the ground. She follows at a distance. B crawls into a cave. A looks back, then follows B in.
ACT III
Hours pass- it is now morning (perhaps we show a sped up sunrise- can do this easily with HDRI globe). A emerges slowly from the cave, looking straight ahead. Walks directly to spaceship and flies off. We see Earth in the spaceship’s viewport, then reflected in A’s helmet. Last shot is some indication that A is not the human we originally met- perhaps slime oozing from gloves or helmet, or maybe A crawls away from the cockpit.
Scene Assembly
I wrote this to make the most of the assets we have for free at UAL. We already have almost everything we need for this story. These are some of the HDRI globes we have that could work:
We already have a martian colony:
And we’ve got a spaceship with an extensive interior:
Plus the Space Buggy that I mentioned,
As for the astronauts, we have this sci fi armor character and textures for it in almost every color. I think it actually works with the plot that B is indistinguishable from A except for the color of her armor. Plus this rig allows us helmet on-helmet off shots. And, we have a rig of this same character in different outfits, which would allow for the shot where she is sleeping.
Production/Output:
I think we should be ok with a few animators doing blocking work and a couple VFX artists doing cameras, lighting, etc. If a sound design student needs a project and wants to hop on to this, they’d be more than welcome, there’s no dialogue and a good backing soundtrack could really help. As for the final output I think we should be good with just a blocked out product, and even if we have just half of the scenes blocked we’ll probably be fine.
In any project I work on with peers, I believe that professional behavior includes getting tasks done on time, seeking out compromise, discussing and solving problems, prioritizing work that needs to be done, and being negotiable and agreeable. Obviously a team can be friends, but during a work session work must come first. That said, it helps to take some time to get to know each other and open up a friendly environment for discussion.
Time to learn Houdini! Despite my growing trepidation related to the constant reassurances that it will be fun after a grievously long learning curve, I went into this first tutorial eager to learn. I tentatively want to declare my specialization as lighting and texturing. I still have a very long ways to go in this area, and in fact I’m really just getting started. But I’ve heard from everyone that Houdini is the software to use for this and I’m excited to see what I can do.
Here’s some of the most important notes I took during the beginning of the session.
Vocab
obj > object
img > compositing
ch > animation
mat > materials
shop > shaders
out > rendering
stage > USD (?)
tasks > pipeline
SOP: old term for geo –Surface OPerators
OBJ: object
DOP: Dynamics OPerators
ROP: Rendering OPerators
VOP: Vex OPerators > Vex: Houdini scripting language, similar to Mel.
$HIP > file output
$OS > object name
bgeo: Houdini file format that can save anything. bgeo.sc = compressed
1 unit = 1 meter
About half an hour in, I was sure I was lost because Mehdi added a geometry node to his sphere, while I could not find the node “geometry” listed and only had more advanced options-
My menu vs Mehdi’s
-but I realized quickly that it came down to being in the object context rather than the SOP context- the SOP context has many more options as most of the work is done there. I found a couple times that when I was unable to follow along it was because I was in the OBJ rather than SOP context- for example, trying to place a file node.
I brought in my own OBJ file to follow along with the file SOP node- a set of dice I’d used in my performance animation:
I was originally unsure why they are wireframe, and quickly realized that toggling between these options-
-allows for different levels of visibility.
After some trial and error I managed to merge my dice and sphere objects, and scale them down when I realized that a unit is equivalent to a meter. This should be important knowledge down the road.
Moving onto the next Houdini scene. I was stymied for a while because Mehdi, when creating a ROP Geo node for his torus, saved his project under $HIP, and I had changed my project’s path to a specific folder for schoolwork. I kept trying to change the file output to this folder and was unable to locate the geo. However, I went back into the tutorial the next day and realized, upon listening more closely, that $HIP does not necessarily mean any kind of Houdini preferences folder, instead it refers to whichever path the file is saved in, therefore there is no need for me to change the $HIP path to my own- it’s already there. Sure enough I saved it under $HIP and was able to locate it in the geo folder of my project.
$HIP can be a variable, $HIPNAME cannot.
The only other problem I ran into was all the way at the very end.
Somehow I could not stop the raised points from being deleted when I merged the roof with the main cabin.
The way I ended up solving this was simply re-creating the transform node for the points. It still wasn’t working, but I deleted and re-attached the connector and somehow that changed everything. I am not sure how this worked. To me, the tree looks exactly the same before and after I did this.
I moved on to Mehdi’s bonus project: building the cabin with pronounced wood slats. I was able to remake the entire cabin, but for some reason my booleans for the windows weren’t working, and I’m sure that although the cabin looks good there is something mathematically off. I am sure that the Q&A session will provide me with more insight.
Additional questions-
Why create a transform node instead of just working in the viewport?
How does the divide node work?
I’m still not sure what the delete node actually does.
This one was very difficult. I’ve come pretty far since I made it, and I had a very cursory knowledge of how to use a rig when I first started. The graph editor was frankly all over the place and it was hard to untangle those wires. Not only that, but this rig still, to the best of my knowledge, has no toe roll ability, so I often ran into the issue of having to set several keys on each foot impact. This forces the legs to be a bit more jolty than I’d prefer. Even polished up for my showreel I wouldn’t say this is my best work and if I had time I would rather pick a different rig to start over on in order to showcase my walk cycle ability. Nevertheless I worked on this for quite a while and I’d now consider it to be …..acceptable.
Fixes include making footfall more realistic/fixing feet touching the ground or glitching under it errors, cleaning up graph editor on the spine and hip swing, smoothing motion at the end in the final pose, bringing the root down in the middle so that the legs are never too outstretched, getting the fabric to fall a little bit more naturally at the end, and re-examining the head bob.
During feedback, I was told that two things were serious faults in my original animation: footwork- feet sometimes not touching the floor or not landing for long enough to give a plausible feeling of weight- and limbs stretching too far. I was reminded that when the legs are outstretched the knee will always be bent a little, and another classmate was told that in midair, poses will always be a little softer, which was very relevant to my work too.
I needed to take a break from the gymnast, but I’m glad that I came back with more knowledge and more motivation to fix her.
I started with the midair splits that were far too exaggerated, and found they were worse than I remember.
I can’t believe I actually let it look like this before. I went in and softened that pose:
And then I went on to the next split:
Before vs After
As I tackled the footwork, I found a whole mess of issues.
In a lot of these, not only was the foot not touching the ground, but it was also not landing flat enough or long enough to be plausible in order to carry her weight, and oftentimes I found that the knees weren’t bending enough, which also makes the weight look a little bit less believable as she must bend her legs somewhat to catch herself after a high jump.
Before vs After
I found quite a few in which the feet simply were bending unnaturally:
Before vs After
Before vs After
After working on all of these, the only issue that I had left to deal with was this constant issue that’s been plaguing me of the skin on her neck moving outwards along with the ponytail.
This has prevented me from making the hair animation as dramatic as I want it to be. I searched the outliner and found many parent constraints on that top ponytail controller, but unfortunately they were labelled complicatedly and I could not hide or delete any of them. So I simply solved the issue by lessening the exaggeration of the ponytail’s movement, as much as it pained me. I really wanted to make it even more dramatic than before.
Rewatching it, I went back and added in a lot of head motion that wasn’t there before. I had originally made her simply look up or down, but this time I spend a lot more energy conveying her emotion as well as making the head bob, conveying gravity. I then added in some more expression on her face at the end, an eyebrow twitch, a slight smile, and the jaw opening and closing a little bit on her last landing to show some exhaustion.
I rendered and only found a couple small issues. One being that the camera doesn’t account for the height of her leap on the second split, another that her arms seem to whirl wildly a bit on the first jump, and third that she lurches forward clumsily going into her twirl. I accounted for all these things and re-rendered.
Before vs After
….And now I’m happy with it! I feel that weight and expression are both conveyed a lot better. I’m also happy with the decision to use only one camera this time, it was too confusing in such a short clip to use two. I feel confident putting this on my showreel now.
I finished blocking the “shush” at the end, and got ready to start polishing everyone. At this point I was feeling pretty confident in my animation already and was excited to polish it up.
0-104 block (left) vs polish (right)
I worked 100 frames at a time. My method was to go into the graph editor and delete keyframes that were unnecessary, jolty, or confusing- in that they interfered with the key pose. I also adjusted the curves to make sure that the now-simplified keyframes paused on each gesture.
102-194 block (left ) vs polish (right)
This gesture was my weakest. In this segment Janine says, “for another half an hour” with great malice. I felt that my original version somehow looked unrealistic, like maybe her abs were incredibly strong, and that her body wasn’t moving correctly, as well as the gesture simply not expressing enough emotion. I spent several hours on my polish and was happy with its smoothing as well as the way I had changed the pose a little bit. I’ve centered her spine quite a lot and made sure to allow her feet to adjust to the weight shifting, as well as given her a more dynamic hand gesture. This segment has gone from one of my least favorite parts of my animation to what I feel is one of my strongest.
191-330 block vs polish
And here’s the end of the animation. I was already pretty happy with her expressive body movement in the block and felt that it was already rather smooth, so I struggled in polishing with smoothing out her movement while also keeping the emotionally erratic nature of her gestures.
0-194 footwork
191-330 footwork
As I didn’t pay enough attention to the feet in my last polish, I made sure that they would be extensively studied this time around. I made sure that her shoes never dip beneath the floor nor rest above it, and caught a lot of mistakes this way.
full polish 1
Here is the full polish, as well as a comparison of the block vs the polish.
0-194 block (left) vs polish (right)
The only thing I could find left to fix, more apparent to me now with the texture hidden, was that her body turns a bit too aggressively at the end, like it’s snapping.
Once again I was very careful not to remove the dynamic expressiveness in this motion while smoothing. Next I moved on to polishing the extras. Despite the fact that all of them only had a couple frames of animation, I intended to go through and make sure nothing stood out to me as blatantly incorrect.
Here’s Lou- fixed some hair flip timing to feel a little bit more like it obeyed the laws of physics, and adjusted her left arm to move a little bit more realistically with her spine. I also gave her more facial animation than she originally had.
Franklin was mostly just a case of making sure his hips and legs moved with his body. However, he reminded me to go back and make sure that Janine’s wine glass was moving correctly, as I’d changed her arm position.
Sure enough, it wasn’t, which i fixed in the same way as before: parent constraining the wrist control to the glass, keying movement every 2-3 frames, then deleting the parent constraint when glass is let go of. Then I move the glass to its final position offscreen as if thrown and make sure to add rotation as the base is heavier than the top.
Satisfied, I moved on.
I’m proud of the David polish, and believe that the finger and toe movements really bring this one home.
With Bonnie, most of her polish involved touching up the timing on her hair. I also gave her some more left arm motion and finger animation.
Here is the first test render. I couldn’t find any mistakes off the bat except for the head jolting weirdly at the word “study”, so I deleted the unnecessary keyframes and re-rendered. Oftentimes I am unable to really notice something until I look at the project rendered, and that’s where the render farm really comes in handy when working on finishing touches. I also decided that the camera doesn’t need to take that long to pan around, so I let it move a little quicker. I originally thought if it was too fast it would give viewers whiplash, but I actually think faster may be better as there is less time to absorb visual cues in the background and try to analyze them. I had toyed with the idea of putting something alarming in the corner there, but as I’ve said before, I’m already unsure if the blood is too much.
I was feeling pretty proud of this, and unable to find any glaring mistakes myself, but I was unsure. So I reached out for feedback on (I know) the internet. I got very poor reception and an overwhelming response that a 14 second animation is way out of my skill level and that all of it is jittery, causing the viewer only to focus on the joltiness of the movement and distracting from the actual narrative. This caused me to spend 3 days away from the project in abject frustration, as I can’t seem to see these issues myself, making me question my ability to animate well at all. But I’ll return to the project shortly, and work as hard as I can at making it the best it can be.
