With only two weeks left to go of our collab unit, we’ve got a lot left to cover before the project’s due date on the 25th. For me, personally, there’s three things that I need to do:
Go into Act 1 Shot 1 and finish the animation on the spaceship- the VFX team has finished constructing the setup and all that still needs to be done is the simple animation. When this is done, I’ll render it out, and deliver it to the sound design team, and we’ll have our first finished shot by the middle of the week. Yay!
For the spaceship landing shot in Act 1 Shot 2, Antoni mentioned to me that he’d prefer if the ship hovers over the ground for a little bit longer to convey weight. I’m going to tweak that animation a bit and send it over to him. He’s said that he can work on his simulation without the animation needing to be done, so this takes a second priority after the Act 1 Shot 1 work.
Kamil and I need to match up our character positioning for Shots 5 & 6 for continuity purposes. I’ve already worked on Shot 4, which involves Jordan walking to the place she will be in Shot 5, so I need to take a look into Kamil’s file and reposition the character.
As for the rest of the group, the VFX team is working on an exhaust fume simulation for the buggy instead of tire tread marks, and Kamil is finishing up his work at the end of Act 1. The sound design team will be able to put their work into Act 1 Shot 1 as soon as it’s rendered out.
I’m very excited to see our first finished shot, and will update this blog with it as soon as it’s done!
After working on the simple tracking shot with Dom- the skateboarding track with the R2D2 3D model animated in- I’ve started working on a more dynamic shot. He chose this video for me because the camera angle and bumps on the road will prove to be a challenge of my skills, sharpening my knowledge of the software and producing a better shot for my showreel when the time comes to potentially look for jobs in 3DE.
Every week, we’ve been having check-ins so that he can critique the tracking I’ve done and offer tips. I’ve learned how to use time weight blending in the timeline editor on points that turn off suddenly, and have been using this to smooth dips in the average curve of the deviation graph.
He’s also shown me some other useful advice on tricky shots to track, such as creating keyframes on either frame of a point that jumps and splining it in the middle.
At this point, after refining my track a couple of times, I’m much more confident in my ability to remember the steps for calculation and parameter adjustment. Dom’s positive reinforcement in my work has really helped me gain a better understanding of the purpose of each step as well as ways that I can improve the track. This used to merely be memorized head knowledge, but now that I understand why the steps are necessary, it’s easier for me to get an idea of what I need to refine and what can be left alone as is.
The next step in working on this project is to track the buildings along the side. There is no object to track in this shot, so as soon as I’m done working on my camera lens adjustment, I can go ahead and throw the shot into Maya to put in whatever 3D object or animated rig I like. I was thinking that a good starting point would be a helicopter approaching over the sides of the buildings and landing in the foreground. It would give a good sense of the depth of my track, and the only animation would be quite simple.
That being said, if I want to take it to the next level, I may even incorporate a flying creature rather than a helicopter. This would require rather complex animation, though, and I may wait until we’ve talked about creature animation to get into that.
In my blocking pass critique, some of the feedback I got was that my characters needed to be facing each other more, like they’re having a real conversation, and that I need to be more careful about making sure they’re looking directly at one another. I was also told to switch the Sophia rig out for Carla because the Sophia rig is not very advanced, and the hair geo being immobile makes it look rather unprofessional.
So, over the past week, I transferred my Sophia animation out onto Carla using Studio Library in poses, then went in and smoothed out the animation between each. I did my best to turn Carla more towards the male character and keep her facing him to make it look more like they’re interacting, but I’m not sure if it’s enough. I’ll find out during my feedback tonight.
I also went in and updated Carla’s poses a little, as well as changed the jump out from the wall to simply two steps. Despite my best efforts, I am unsure as to whether the balance is believable during this segment, and feedback on that will also be very valuable.
A big part of what challenged me during the spline pass was making sure that the timing is expressive and believable, while being comfortable holding the poses between dialogue, yet still allowing the characters to move enough in their held pose that they still look “alive.” Another struggle I had was with the FK controls on the Carla’s left arm. I’m not sure if that’s going to be a problem down the road.
I still have a long ways to go, and haven’t even done the lip sync yet. That being said, I’m actually proud of the stage this is at so far.
On March 2nd, Ben and Callum (our sound designers) invited us to attend a meeting with their tutor, Ingrid, to talk about our project. Some of the topics that we discussed were our narrative/stylistic choices (especially pertaining to the reveal of the transformation at the end), reviewed our storyboard PDF once again, and analyzed our workflow and communication, and ways to incorporate creepy sound into this story. The feedback that we received was overwhelmingly positive with regards to the way we’ve split up the work, share files, and document our progression, but we did receive a tip that we should try screensharing more often to get a better understanding of what our teammates are working on.
Explaining our process and output helped me check in once again with where my teammates are at on the project and visualize our final product. As I’ve said before, I’m very proud of our daily communication. Here are some examples of the work each team has been doing this week:
Some of My Work this Week- Act 1 Shot 4
Some of the VFX Work this Week- Act 1 Shot 1
Some of Kamil’s Work this Week- Act 1 Shot 7Sound Design Work- Act 1 Draft
My blocking pass didn’t take very long to get done, but there’s a lot of work that needs to go into it over the next few weeks for the polish.
Some things I’d like to work on are the way that the female character interacts with the space- this obviously includes fixing any collisions of the geo through the planes I’ve set up, but in addition, I’d also like to really get in there and make the weight more believable as she leans against that back wall. I also need to work on the timing of each pose, and allow both characters longer pauses while the other one is talking. In particular, the female character’s movement needs a lot of polishing if it’s going to look natural. Strangely, the robot is much more fluid already.
Something that I do like is the stylistic characterization that I’ve got going for each character. Both of them really exude personality despite the fact that the performance is so short. I will say that using Maya has definitely gotten exponentially easier for me over time, and I didn’t run into any snags or confusion setting up my poses or jumping into the graph editor.
I’m very excited to get started working on this, and I’m already coming up with set ideas. I anticipate it being extremely fun, and I’m super motivated to get to work!
We had our weekly collaboration group catch up on Friday this week. As we’d all been sharing our progress with one another via OneDrive and the school network, there wasn’t much that we had to go over, but a quick check-in is essential for everyone to stay on the same page.
The VFX team discussed with us their thoughts on particle simulation. They’d decided that the best way to go would be to create the work in Maya rather than Houdini, and probably rely on simulations more often than zoetropes. Below is a prototype of the sandstorm effect.
Gherardo has also been working on setting up Act 1 Shot 1, and I’m really impressed with how well it’s come out so far.
It looks great and only requires animation on the spaceship. We talked a little bit about different ways to hide lights on solid objects, specifically in this case, the planets.
As for the animation team, my plan over the weekend is to learn to put some motion capture on Jordan in Act 1 Shot 4. Once I’ve got the hang of motion capture, things will run a lot faster.
Kamil and I spent some time discussing how our spaceship was rigged. Because I’d found that the doors weren’t moving as I needed them to, I’d animated them separately with my own parent constraints in my shots, and I’d done it rather loosely, too, only for the purposes of what I needed in each scene. But what I didn’t realize was that when Kamil then went in to update the rig, it broke the work I’d done on my shot because it was referenced in. So we spent some time discussing the resolution of the issue, and our spaceship is now good to go.
Render Test from Act 1 Shot 3
This week will be challenging to make progress as we balance it with our performance animations. My biggest goal is to teach myself motion capture, and we’ll take it from there.
I’ve had a very hard time with the Houdini tutorials lately, and so I was proud to even get through the first forty minutes following along. My smoke looks okay, but it’s doing something weird towards the end of the simulation, when a large box of light develops.
I was able to follow along until rendering, but then this happened. I’m going to book a session with Mehdi on Monday and just ask him what’s going on, I suspect there are multiple issues with my file.
UPDATE
I spoke to Mehdi and he informed me that the only issues were either with my graphics card or not hiding the geometry. I rendered again with the geometry hidden and was able to produce this:
The density adjustment slider was really interesting to me, and it’s cool to be able to choose between pure flames and a more smokey fire.
When it came time to render our simulation, I was at first met with the same issue as before:
But happily, I was able to solve the problem on my own this time! I realized that it was because the material shader name had not been updated and I reassigned it as well as making sure all the geo was hidden. As soon as I did, I got this image:
I feel that this week helped me understand rendering better and continued to help me get accustomed to the Houdini workflow. Being able to find my own material shader issue is a big step in the right direction of understanding the way Houdini nodes interact.
The first session I attended of the Vertex 2021 conference was the Virtual Production talk with Ian Failes, Theo Jones, Paul Franklin, and Hasraf Dulull.
The panelists began by giving an overview of what virtual production actually is, in case any audience members were going into it fresh. Virtual production is a system of tools that allow us to combine live action footage with CGI in real time, although, as Paul pointed out, this can encompass a vast number of different areas, and so it’s hard to specifically point to one output and say “this is virtual production”- it can be used for so many different things.
What most people are excited about right now, according to the panelists, is LED Wall, which can run a CGI environment on a live action set, effectively replacing the need for green screen. This can save a lot of time and money when shooting, and from a director’s standpoint it’s useful to be able to change lighting or any number of different props or scenes without having to entirely rework the physical set. However, the panelists also discussed the fact that it’s important for clients to manage their expectations, because although virtual production can allow a very fast turnaround and almost anything can be changed at any time, there is the requirement of testing time and trial and error.
The panelists finished off by telling us that there is a big need in the industry for Unreal Engine experienced artists, and with the resources available for free online on blogs, YouTube, or Unreal’s own website, it’s easy for absolutely anyone to get started on it from their own bedroom. This is one unexpected advantage to COVID- easy virtual access.
I was told that the character I was playing on the left was okay, but I could even restrict the motion a little more and remember to think pose-to-pose. I should make sure to brush the hair back first and then say the line, keeping in mind pose staging. I may extend the audio a bit in the beginning to do this.
As for the character on the right, I got a few critiques; I was told that he should take shorter strides into the frame and turn around with less of a jolt. The arms don’t need to wave so much. When he says “The University of the United States”, perhaps that can just be a brandished pointer finger, not one large sweeping movement. He can also stay in place more between poses. A good idea, too, is that he maybe looks at the camera when coming up with his lies, breaks the fourth wall a little bit, rather than making eye contact with her. This also contributes to the sense that he is lying.
One more thing is to make sure that the characters don’t physically pass in front of one another, as it confuses the silhouette.
Using the animated storyboard as a reference, Callum and Ben created a suspenseful theme to be used in Act 2, which I’m very excited about. It’s exactly what I was envisioning for the story.
In the meantime, I put together a set, and began working on rough blocking animation for Act 1 Shots 2 & 3.
Kamil then reached out to us with some suggestions for changes to the file structure, models, and set. He was able to reduce file size tremendously by referencing in each element of our scene:
In this setup, we use the animation file anim_act01_shot00 to work on the blocking, incrementing it for each shot so that eventually we have a new anim file for each one. The character, background, and spaceship are all referenced in. This way, we can work on updates to the set or character and have them update in all of our animation files. This is not only more efficient, but it allows us to get the animations to the VFX and sound design teams quicker so that they may begin working without waiting for us finalize every aspect of the scene.
He also updated the ship so that the shaders were applied correctly:
And began working on the colony. We still have some ways to go on this, but with our new referencing format, we can start animating without worrying about that yet.
The group expressed an interest, however, in keeping the large cliffs and canyons visible in the original set, as they had been planned into the storyboard. Kamil sent us an updated version with a possible way to lay this out:
While me and Kamil worked on set design and beginning animation, Antoni and Gherardo have been working on particle simulation ideas for the space dust and sandstorm scenes. This morning, we learned that we have a sandstorm zoetrope available on the class resource share folder, which is incredibly lucky for us.
During the meeting today, we decided on this plan for next week:
Kamil and Emma (Animation Team): We will split Act 1 so that I do shots 2-5 and Kamil does shots 6-9. We have all been discussing using an entirely different set for shot 1, so this doesn’t concern us yet. Kamil shared his screen with us during the call to demo how to use the pipeline for our work. I will transfer my previous animation to the new scene using Studio Library and get shot 2 to the rest of other teams by Thursday or Friday so that they can each begin working in it.
Ben and Callum (Sound Design Team): Once Ben and Callum have shot 2, they will start working on sound effects for it (spaceship whirring, wind, music, etc).
Antoni and Gherardo (VFX): This week, they will also take a look into shot 2 and begin working on their simulations in it, as well as settle on the most time and space efficient way to store these simulations (Zoetrope vs created in Maya or Houdini).
Once the rest of the group has shot 2, we can really begin getting a sense of transferring our work between teams and feeling out what our finished product will look like for each shot.
We are also meeting with Luke on Thursday to discuss all of these plans and take any feedback or suggestions necessary to better our project.
