Final Trailer

Without Amy’s Scroll Writing:

With the Scroll Writing:

Conclusion:

Overall, I’m really proud of what the team has achieved, including every change that has been made with further feedback so close to the deadline. I changed the tunnel scene according to Kevin’s feedback from twisting the camera within the tunnel so that the dark side forest would be flipped upside down, but I tried to squeeze this into the time frame we had. I think that it stands out the most in the entire trailer because of its speed, but the frame rate could have been decreased to slow this down within after effects. I also think the scroll writing is a little shaky but it’s well done for only starting on the last day. Honestly, I was surprised at how unique and strange the lighting technique would turn out with our models and backgrounds, but I really like it and it is nice to have tried something new.

WIP

Reflective Post

I really thought this module helped me learn so many new things. It was so different working with a company and hearing new feedback every week. I’m used to having my own work criticised by people I know but I felt like I was under a lot more pressure trying to impress someone from a company because I’d be looking for work placement later this year. I think this helped me work a lot harder and try to show Kevin where my skills lie but also that I can do quite a few different things.

I was extremely happy that I got to continue to work on my sculpting skills, carrying on from last semester’s multi-part project. I thoroughly enjoyed it and have gained many new skills from it this time around such as transferring normal and occlusion maps within x-normals, using zremesher to retopologise my high poly sculpts and being able to sculpt my own concepts. I believe this semester has helped build up my portfolio and my website for my next work placement, whenever this may be. I am happy to have learnt so much, even when the group project was difficult at times and when Kevin went out of touch for around a month and left me as project leader.

Portfolio

Class Experiments

Automated Rigging Systems

http://www.supercrumbly.com/3d.php?sid=207#.VzTjo_krJhF

Alec asked us to have a look into these two automated Rigging Systems:

Mixamo:

I uploaded a retopologised sculpt of mine and looked at the animations available. They gave me a laugh!

Class Experiments

Dynamics Simulation Techniques

Fantasia (1940).

sorcerer’s apprentice was the main source of inspiration.

The Abyss

ILM developed new techniques for the feature film.

The Prince of Egypt

New techniques such as moving the camera around the scene.
Exposure tool- hand drawn 2d characters were able to be brought into a 3d world. exposure tool warps the backgrounds.
3d bugs.
angel of death was computer generated as well as a lot of the people in the parting of the red sea.

The mill did visual fx for gladiator in london. They mostly work on adverts.

MPC film fx reel.

http://www.moving-picture.com/reels/our-reels/

http://www.moving-picture.com/reels/our-reels/film-fx-reel

Lorenzo Lavatelli- effects technical director:

Art of destruction fx guide.

podcast- brave.

When simulating dynamics in maya set playback to play every frame. forces each frame to be calculated.
Dynamic systems available in maya: nparticles, ncloth, fluid, soft and rigid bodies, bitfrost and bullet.
nparticles can be used for dust, smoke, fire, water and wind effects.
fx menu,, nparticles, create emitter. play every frame. max playback speed real time 24fps.
falls down because of gravity. attribute editor. emitter- emitter type controls shape.
min/max distance will say where to start from.
use hardware rendered for particles. does it quite quickly.
fields and solvers- interactive playback.

NCloth

select objects that will come into contact with ncloth, under ncloth menu select passive collider.
select ncloth object and under ncloth menu select ncloth. there are presents such as silk.

My samples:

This is better to watch in HD as the particles are so small and barely noticeable. I wanted to get a firefly effect but it needs tweaking.

Class Experiments

Render Passes

Ambient pass: flat colour. create an ambient light. bring ambient shade right down.

Direct light pass: just lights

Occlusion: change samples to change resolution. increase max distance if it doesn’t have the right spread.

Reflection: reflection of table etc.

Specular:

Benefit of having specular and reflection passes: can change the opacity later on or increase it. Separate specular pass is good to have for control over highlights.

Benefit of occlusion: good to have instead of final gather.

Multiply occlusion and ambient together. multiply rgb above it. direct light, linear dodge on top of occlusion and ambient. duplicate direct light on top of itself and change opacity. creates some more shading. set the reflection to screen it or add linear dodge. set specular to screen as well.

Order:

rgb_matte, specular, reflection, direct light, occlusion, ambient, beauty pass.

Create new layer, black and white gradient, from light window to dark room, multiply or overlay on top in photoshop to cheat some lighting.

If you want to change the colour of something you can replace it with an alpha mask to change levels or hue etc.

separate character shadow: assign material, use background, gives shadow in alpha channel

Class Experiments

Compositing

Add light to shot in photoshop

(Rendered in maya)

Take the shot into photoshop, create a new layer, add a gradient and set the layer to multiply
To emphasise any lighting in the scene

Change Colour of object after rendering

Render out a RGB version of the object and it will create alpha masks of the object
Create a selection mask of the object
Create an adjustment layer with hue/saturation
Alter colour to whatever you want
Useful if a client comes back wanting some colours tweaked, or the levels, whatever it may be. Just render out alpha masks.

How to render a character separate to background

Select character > create layer from selected (in render panel)
Attributes > turn off primary visibility
(To turn off multiple object at once, select them all > general editor > attribute editor > render tab > select primary visibility > 0 (to switch off))
Right click on the render buttons on the little render window and you can render from different cameras
Render settings > Quality > Turn on FinalGather
Some of the advanced settings are hidden > scroll down > Final Gathering Accuracy and Point Interpolation are the most important settings to play with
Note you can increase the lighting quality without changing render time too much, bumping up the quality increases render time exponentially

Compositing

Load up scene “window”
Insert image plane
Align ground plane with ground in the image
Add background shader to ground plane
Lower the values to 0 in attribute editor for it
Try and align light with the light in the image
Render

Class Experiments

Class- Rigging

IK vs FK

IK Pros

allows the end of the joint hierarchy to stay in place
easier to offset keyframe timing from the rest of the rig.

IK Leg Setup

2 IK solvers in maya:

Single-chain solver- simple solution that drives all joints by the single chain

Single- plane solver- allows control of the overall joint chain orientation- best for arm and leg ik systems.

IK legs are more common, FK leg animation is used only when a character is off the ground (swimming, flying, falling).

IK chain can be used on a joint chain with 3 or more joints. In a single plane solver it is common to control the rotation plane with a pole vector constraint (for animating the elbow or knee orientations).

Tutorial:

Most animators prefer to use gimbo mode (rotate settings) to help avoid flip rotations.
gimbal lock- two rotations overlap.
using a matchup tool to join fk and ik joints.

Class:

Create nurb circle- hold v to snap to vertices. hold d while in translate and hold v to snap to joint. freeze transform and delete history when done.

have 3 separate groups for geo, joints and controls.

create ik before parenting nurbs to rig. (ik between leg and ankle).

rotate plane solver- select first joint (top of leg) and ankle joint- can rotate without leg moving. parent ik handle (ik_leg), to under controls group. do this from ankle to ball of foot and from ball of foot to toe to have more control.

display animation- ik handle size, increase if its too small.

Use up and down keys to move up and down the hierarchy joints.

Create locators for heel, ball and toe- (can scale down in channel box). parent under foot control after snapping them to bottom of foot in areas. select the 3 iks (leg, ball toe) then ball and toe and parent to heel so heel is controlling the rest. Next- rotate toe locator (select ball loc, ik ball, ik leg and ik toe under the toe loc). can do toe swivels now etc. next- rotate ball of foot. move ik leg under bal loc.

To create control option in channel box, create attribute under edit options in channel box. windows, animation editors, connection editor (or use node editor to connect).

Class Experiments

3D Animation techniques

When animating try to use references. Can import the reference into another camera in maya. Use the sound as a guide as well. Any ambient sound may help with timing.

If you want to use Mery Rig in Maya 2016-

Windows>settings/preferences>preferences>animation>evaluation>DG

Stepped vs Spline Animation

Spline pros: ease in/ease out, walk cycle (simple animations), more organic, quicker to see how animation will work

Stepped pros: easier to plan ahead, good to work out complicated rigs and characters, good to work out timing, less random keys

Spline cons: get lost in the keys, messy, easy to get distracted by inbetween keys, more difficult to work cleanly.

Stepped cons: can look robotic, swapping to spine tangents early causes floaty timing.

Cameras: Create 2, ref cam, action cam, (go to refcam, import movie from sourceimages can change to image sequence instead

File- create reference file. can update.

Ref videos: Need slight pauses so the audience can catch up.

TweenMachine plugin: drag to shelf as mel script. changes averaging between two key poses quickly.

Manual Process	tweenMachine
Select all controls on the character	Select all controls on the character
Change interpolation on all keyframes to linear	Left-click on frame 7 in the timeline
Left-click on frame 3 in the timeline	Adjust a slider in the tweenMachine interface to -70
Middle-click on frame 7 in the timeline
Set a key
Change interpolation on all keyframes to stepped

View Camera tools: grease pencil tool– can draw out movements

Planning Animation:

Look at storyboard/animatic/reference.
key poses: how far can you take the pose? 70% think about how the audience reads it.
inbetweens/breakdowns- 20% think about arcs, favouring previous or next pose which can dictate timing (ease in/out motions).
Polish-spline- 10% thinking about overlapping animation/follow through/subtle movements- facial animation/lip sync

Automated Rigging Systems:

https://www.mixamo.com/workflows/maya

http://www.supercrumbly.com/3d.php?sid=207#.Vt7fepOLSRs

Mixamo– online rigging process- look into it.

Jesse Baumgartner: Engy’s invention blocking passes. Uses stepped technique for blocking animation.

Billygoat entertainment: HM SPIFFING walk cycle tutorial.

Class Experiments

Buoys

Alec showed us this tutorial on the varieties of textures and settings built in to maya. He told us to play around with our buoy models from last semester, to pick one and to texture it. He also gave us a HDR image to add detail to the reflectivity of the buoy.

Blinn: Specular shading-