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.
The Correlation Between Western Animation’s Target Audience and Overall Quality
If you’re from a Western country, you probably can read between the lines when you encounter the “Adult Animation” section of Netflix. You want to enjoy some nice animation, but feel like engaging your brain more than a children’s movie would accomplish, and so you skip through nearly identical titles and indistinguishable art styles- Family Guy, American Dad, F is for Family, Big Mouth– until you land on one. You then ask yourself whether you’re in the mood to tolerate lowbrow, boring sexual humor and exaggerated levels of gore and viscera so that you can engage in a conversation about the show with your friend who has a Pickle Rick tattoo. The fact of the matter is that a lot of Western animated television shows are indistinguishable from the others. They all seem to trip up on the same hurdle: convincing adults that they’re not for children.
It isn’t that all or any of these shows are bad, necessarily- in fact, most do well for their intended purpose. It is, however, dull that they all follow the same format, and even the same genre. Western adult animation infrequently exists outside of comedy. It’s almost as if the fact that they’re animated is part of the joke- here you are, an adult viewer, watching a cartoon. The show invariably revolves around intentionally distasteful amounts of sex and violence rather than an actual plot, not only to assert its place as adult animation but also to further push the “joke” that you’re watching this in a cartoon.
There is no lack in the children’s animation category of a diversity in genres, even horror, thanks to Courage the Cowardly Dog. So why does the category “Adult Animation” dictate a zeitgeist of low comedy, rather than including a broad scope of genres, stories, themes, and art styles?
The long and short of it is that although we are very slowly moving away, animation is still broadly considered a children’s medium in the West. Due to this dichotomy juxtaposed with the leaps and bounds being made in the animation industry- technically and narratively- we now have this phenomenon of “children’s” animation that can often be more nuanced, complex, and well-written than “adult” animation. A perfect example is the Emmy award winning Avatar: The Last Airbender. Avatar deals transparently with themes of war, death, politics, responsibility, spirituality, mindfulness, and cultural differences.With incredible stories, writing, and breathtaking visuals, It’s not hard to see why Avatar appeals to adults as well as children. None of it is “dumbed down”, yet it is still considered to be child-oriented, presumably because, despite its depictions of air raids and systemic oppression, not a single swear word is uttered and sex is only hinted at in the slightest of whispers. It’s interesting that the line seems to be drawn here. Despite its popularity among adults, I question whether Avatar would even make it to a pilot episode if pitched as an adult show.
There’s a long history surrounding this situation. In the mid-20th century, animation in the West was originally created for all audiences, and some very traditional cartoons, like Felix the Cat and Betty Boop, were actually meant to appeal more to an adult audience. Though they didn’t rely heavily on “adult topics” as adult animation does today, they didn’t hold back on references to sex and drug use. With television being a rather new medium, though, guidelines were quickly being drawn up to govern this lawless land in a climate that was much more Puritanical than our own. The 1934 Hays Code set up a strict set of rules as to what could be shown on TV, and Fleischer, Disney’s rival, lost their powerful Betty Boop character’s impact and fell behind in the race to be the leading animation studio. Disney’s cleaner, more child-oriented animation then reigned, and other studios struggled to emulate that rather than create their own content, with animation being too expensive of a medium to take risks.
Then came the 60’s, when all-ages animated TV shows were moved to the Saturday morning slots, and did numbers from the huge percentage of children watching TV at that hour. At the same time, with the rise of popularity in television and the higher percentage of families who owned one, animation studios saw budgets being slashed and a demand for quicker, cheaper output. Hannah-Barbera, animation titan of the day, accomplished this through the use of “limited animation”. This resulted in the mockable looping, paper-doll-like animation with repeating backgrounds recognizable from Scooby-Doo and the like. With brainless animation, the plot also suffered, and a child-friendly narrative was easier and faster to write.
After the Hays Code was lifted in the late 60s, adult animators like Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, American Pop, Cool World) immediately began creating fantastic work that did include typical “adult humor”, but also relied on more dynamic, complex narrative structure and exploration of heavier themes, like racial inequality and generational responsibility. He and his peers, however, did not prosper in the same sense that children’s animators did, and adult animation was still somewhat underground and viewed as an artistic enterprise rather than realistic as mainstream media.
Then Who Framed Roger Rabbit earned four Oscars, and turned the public eye towards adult animation. It wasn’t until the 80’s and 90’s, though, when 24 hour television meant a high demand for new content, that adult animation began receiving television slots. The Simpsons did well from the get-go, and served as the new standard model for a hit adult animated series. Thus, most animated adult shows revolved around comedy as a tried-and-true moneymaker.
1997 and 99 respectively birthed the Family Guy and South Park era. This began the rise of shock-factor humor in “adult cartoons”, in order to over-assert its place as an adult medium.
And so that brings us back to nowadays. Though they aren’t as popular as others, there are a few new contenders that explore some heavier themes and narrative structures in genres outside of comedy, at the same time experimenting with different ways to implement the art form.
To this point I have been addressing 2D animation only, mostly due to the very negligible amount of 3D animation that exists in the “adult” subcategory. As of the time of writing there is only one 3D animated series on Netflix: Love, Death, and Robots. This series truly marks a turning point, not only in its brilliance, but also because of its use of hyper realistic models in narrative fiction, almost exclusively used up to this point in video games. Although all of its shorts are good, I personally feel that these hyper realistically animated ones have the best narrative structure, and noticed that they spent much less time trying to convince the audience to watch it and devoted more energy to the story. My conclusion from these observations is that 3D animation holds less of a stigma of being “for children” than 2D animation does- but only when it’s hyper-realistic. I theorize that this is because hyper-realistic animation has, for the most part, only been associated with adult-oriented video games, and now the only boundary it needs to push is claiming its place in the film and TV world. Despite the rocky past, I foresee a bright future for broadening the scope of adult animation and utilizing it as a tool for new and intelligent storytelling in the future. We as 3D animators are lucky to be taking our place in the industry during this time.
Bibliography
Aitchison, S., 2020. Why Is Adult Animation In America All So Same-Y?. [online] Fanbyte. Available at: <https://www.fanbyte.com/features/adult-animation/> [Accessed 23 December 2020].
Kowalski, J., 2017. Hanna-Barbera: The Architects Of Saturday Morning – Illustration History. [online] Illustrationhistory.org. Available at: <https://www.illustrationhistory.org/essays/hanna-barbera-the-architects-of-saturday-morning> [Accessed 12 January 2021].
Lawrence, J., 2020. Cartoons Have Always Been For Adults But Here’s How They Got Tangled Up With Kids. [online] The Conversation. Available at: <https://theconversation.com/cartoons-have-always-been-for-adults-but-heres-how-they-got-tangled-up-with-kids-130421> [Accessed 23 December 2020].
Zuckerman, L., 2020. How The C.I.A. Played Dirty Tricks With Culture (Published 2000). [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/18/books/how-the-cia-played-dirty-tricks-with-culture.html> [Accessed 23 December 2020].
Similar to most of my 3DEqualizer sessions, I was able to follow closely on the 8th during the first half of the day, but fell off the wagon in the second half. That being said, I made it much farther than I have before using 3DE and attribute my higher competency to my one on one sessions with Dom. I believe that I have a greater understanding not only of how tracking works, but of the software in general. These sessions have also allowed me to understand more about paths in Maya and how projects are set as well as control parenting in the Outliner.
I made it to our first check-in happy with my calculation curve, but with a high deviation:
Dom informed me that I must include some of the points in the background in order for the track to understand that area. I had originally hid the points that I attempted to track in this area, because they weren’t tracking well due to the motion blur and were throwing off my deviation. But I copied the points that he put down and came up with a much better number:
After this we began adding points along the road. I couldn’t understand why, but each time I placed a point on the road, my “calc from scratch” window showed me an alarming zig-zagging line clearly confused by my attemps. So I worked through the lunch break, and discovered that some points along the left side of the road were enough to even it out, as long as I placed enough down. I also found a couple small spots on the right side that tracked well. After tracking the road, we returned from lunch and adjusted parameters:
I was relieved to find that so far my background track was going perfectly. This was genuinely a big difference from every other full class session I had done in 3DE I had done in the past.
When I placed the obj file, I was a little nervous that I’d encounter the iron man helmet problem, but it went without a hitch:
I was a little concerned that the suit seemed to be a little too big for the man, though, as I tried to line the shoulder points up, until Dom informed me that it was ok if some were along the arms as we would be deleting the image plane and animating the arms anyway.
I was unable to keep following when we encountered an issue with moving the rig’s geo and its skeleton at the same time. Dom explained his fix with the locators a couple times, but I found myself hopelessly lost. And so, later on, I will take a look into those files with the locator, study them, and animate the rig myself.
