Term 2 is here and it began with a talk with Medhi a Houdini artist who is going to teach us Houdini for at least a month. I never worked with houdini but I’ve seen some things made with it that are just amazing, it is a 3D procedural software used a lot in the industry as it is so versatile and good.
I am excited to learn a new software and to really understand it, but the scary part is that everything is created with nodes, it can also be created on viewport but eventually everyone who uses houdini needs to mess with the nodes.
We met Medhi, and the day after we got a video tutorial explaining the software interface and a few experiences with some noise nodes to create rocks for example and with our first task – model a wood cabin! I always loved modeling, it was my first contact with 3D and it’s always good to know it.
I admit at the beggining I didn’t really understand much of the rocks exercise, nothing was really going how it was supposed to, so I just watched and took notes to begin doing the cabin. So we created a test model (for reference) and a geometry node and inside: a box and gave it the right size, then 3 more boxes that were the door and windows, have them on the right position and create a boolean node (just like maya) to have it shape the door and windows. After this we created a delete node that separated the roof and floor from the cabin structure to be possible to edit them separately.
It was a simple exercise but I learnt a lot, when creating different nodes we have a perception of the possibilities within the nodes, and in each one there are A LOT of options, which is amazing. The interface is super cool and I think… user friendly, for me at least! Some things are similiar to maya, some options and the way the software works, but takes a bit of pratice to know the place and the way some things work.
In the end this was the cabin:
The node network:
The task for this week was to add some more detail and some wood planks on the side of the walls and whatever we thought good for the cabin, using what we learnt in the session.
It took a while to decide, as at first I thought about tracking the body of a man on a bike, but we did that right before the session so I wanted to do something different like a spaceship landing somewhere or some buildings emerging from the floor.
I went on pexels.com to search for footage and found a really cool one of a drone shot in the desert, a very open space with a ton of possibilities. With this footage I went looking for 3D models of buildings and spaceships, and found an awesome one.
I agreed with Dom to start tracking the shot before our session just to pratice a bit alone and to be quicker for the sessions, but I couldn’t export the footage with a decent quality to 3DEqualizer, every time I tried it the footage was full of noise!
So we began tracking on the session, starting for the floor on the left side, then right side “walls”, then floor and finally backgrounds, always tracking in parallel and perpendicular lines to be easier to have a perception of the points location. After this we select the floor points and create a plane on 3DE. We were able to track all the points in 1h40 and import it to maya.
We were able to track every point in 1h30 and finished the project to import to MAYA. That really is the part I have more difficulties as what happens in my screen is always different. So, we imported the footage, and the goal was to make a polygon plane on the floor so we could import the futuristic car rig I found and animate it but I was not being able to do the same as Dom as in maya I was moving the footage instead of the plane I had created to place on the floor. It is a task for next session, next week!
Hair is the mass of thin structures on the head of a person, according to the Cambridge dictionary. Of course, everyone knows what hair is, we all have it and it’s part of who we are or who we think we are and it also tells something about ourselves and the moment we are in.
In multiple cultures across the world hair has different meanings and beliefs, like samurai soldiers that would cut the hair if they were defeated or the native american people who believed that hair was sacred and significant to who we are as an individual and if we look at our society, in the present day we can see that hair is still a form of expression. We might not need to cut our hair when we are defeated but a lot of people change their hair as a way to express themselves, about who they are and what they stand for.
What does hair say about you?
It’s not like we can look at someone and know them by their hair style but people take an idea of what you might be like because of some stereotyped definition our society has on a certain hair style. It gives personality to someone and self-esteem, strength even or the opposite, it can make you feel bad about yourself and ashamed. Women rely on hair a lot, it is usually longer than man’s hair so they take more time to take care of it, but for both it is important as it is so close to the face. When someone goes to a mirror to check how they look the first things are face and hair, only then we look at the rest, the head is the first thing someone sees when greeting someone.
Hair in Animation
In movies, we can see that villains usually have crazy, bulky, expressive hair that makes up for their intentions and personality, or an adventurous character has a thick wavy or curly hair, flowy, or an innocent and naïve character has a blonde straight hair very shiny and pretty.
One of the most difficult things to animate is hair, for decades Pixar struggled with it, but it didn’t stop them for sure!
In the animation movie Monsters Inc. (2001) we can see that boo has pigtails, but the director Pete Docter wanted Boo to have long hair, but that would be so hard that they ended up giving her pig tails as it was easier to animate. If we think of Boo with lon hair she stops having that curiosity feel and look that the pigtails give her.
Hair is still a very new thing and still has a long way to go. If we look at history of animation, the first Pixar movies didn’t have a lot of human characters and the ones it had didn’t have much air time, didn’t really show the full body and every human had short hair but, with the evolution of technology things started to change.
The first animated feature entirely populated by humans was Incredibles (2004) where the director Brad Bird insisted on the long hair previously wanted for Boo on Violet, her signature hair is part of her character and took a team fully dedicated to it 6 months to render. Her hair is straight and as it covers part of her face gives her that shy look and the ability to hide with it, but half way to the production of the movie the team didn’t really know if it was possible to fully give life to Violet. In the end they just created different hair styles to be used in different situations and changed it accordingly.
After years improving their methods, the next challenge would be Tangled (2010), to animate more than 20 meters of hair and give it weight, while it could never behave like in real life, such long hair would be a nightmare to walk or move with it. The solution for Rapunzel’s hair was to mix simulation and rigging where animators had a lot of controls to animate but also have the simulation to make it more believable. This was the first time that hair acted like a limb in which animators had controls to blend in animation and simulation.
Brave (2012) came along, Merida’s character key feature is her hair and how wild it is, once again, it is part of her character the red curly hair that refuses to do what the rules want and directly represents Merida’s personality and wild spirit.
This was a whole new level of difficulty, not only long but curly hair, where the hair has to be stiff to maintain the curl but also be soft in it is movement. This process made them create a new technique called “core curve and points”, where the curve is the necklace chain and the points, including the springs, are the beads and allow Merida’s hair to move along her character.
Four years later, the movie Moana (2016) where Moana’s hair is extremely flowy and loose, she has an adventurous and stubborn personality, if no one goes with her she will go alone, she is fearless and her hair says that about her. This time Pixar animators wanted to have Moana touch and play with her hair as she is a teenager and would add a lot to her character so this time artists upgraded the software used for Rapunzel’s hair for an initial groom and developed a new software named quicksilver along with xGen as a new system to control the hair.
All these characters had to be created in a unique way and software was developed specifically just for them – this is how Pixar evolves and continues to exceed our expectations in every movie they make, their tools and team always go beyond what is possible at the moment.
How is hair in animation created?
The human head has around 100.000 hair strands, it would be impossible to animate so many hairs or rig them, so it needs to be simulated and rigged in some situations it is still time
consuming and takes a full team dedicated to it. There are multiple ways to create hair in animation tools like nHair, xGen, shaveandahaircut, ornatrix, among others, these often include both rigging and simulation, as hair is something that cannot be animated by hand.
So, what is a simulation?
A simulation is a mathematical coding, performed by a computer, designed to predict the behaviour and the outcome of a real world or physical system – it basically copies what happens in the real world. With hair it needs physics and maths to programme on a computer and obtain the desired results depending on the type of hair that is being animated.
Long hair was first simulated with violet’s signature hair but the most troubling problem was in Tangled with Rapunzel’s twenty-meter hair, in which the hair was rigged and simulated. Long hair is so hard to animate due to the number of things that have to be put in to consideration as hair needs to react to environment, colliding with the character and with itself. Rapunzel had the need for an extremely long hair so it had to be rigged, as a whole, and animated by hand in shots where the hair had to do unrealistic things such as grabbing a door handle. But simulation always has to help, animating a rig can be time consuming and it is not practical so with simulation it is possible to animate gravity, density, acceleration, velocity and force real life based.
As for curly hair is a bit different as it behaves like a spring so the simulation had to be made through a mathematical algorithm called Hooke’s Law. It states the force needed to extend or compress a spring, sometimes also used in long hair.
F – spring force
k – spring constant
x – spring stretch or compression
This didn’t work at first when Pixar was simulating Merida from Brave as her hair was too loose and would go crazy when the character did sudden movements, so they decided to create a spring core inside the spring as a way to keep the stiffness of curly hair but also it’s natural and loose look.
After long and curly hair comes the grooming and combing the hair, like Elsa’s character from Frozen (2010) and Frozen II (2013) where she has a long braided to which Disney created a software called Tonic that allows artists to model and sculpt the hair as they need through layering systems along with simulation to allow hair to interact with wind and water.
Vornoi Diagram
One really important thing are clumps of hair and fur it is needed for a reslistic randon distribution of hair. The Voronoi Diagram, in mathemathics it represents a partition of a plane into regions close to each of a given set of objects. The result of this is something like right side image and creates a patern found in nature, such as the wings of a fly, or a giraffe’s hair patern, leaves, elefant skin. This allows artists to have a real life based mathematical system to distribute hair on a surface or even have it dirty or clumped.
Conclusion
Hair is part of one’s culture and has weight on individual identity, as technology is evolving so fast and each time it looks better and better, hair is becoming a part of storytelling and character “enhancer” due to it’s flexibility to change appearance it can be used to build and give personality to a character as well as reality.
In animation hair is trully a hard thing to do and every time artists encounter more challenges and problems to solve which always ends with them developing a new software to meet their wishes.
The audience needs to connect and be able to relate to the character even through culture or a hair style or even the meaning of that hair style. Teenage years is where we see how important hair is, those are the years when one needs to find himself and hair is, again, a way of expression and change. A good story is the one that actually makes the audience enter it and forget everything else for a moment, the more realistic it is the character the most relatable it can be, now more and more hair is a growing concept that still has a lot to accomplish.
Previosly, we had a rotomation session with Dom, where we had to place an iron man helmet on the head of a man on the street, this time we had to apply a full body model of a robot on the body of a man on a bike. Super exciting but challenging, in these sessions it is expected of us to be extremelly focused so we can really understand how it is done as it can be our way in the industry.
The first step was to create a Maya project folder and create three new folders: Models, 3DE_Scenes and Maya_Scripts, copy the robot model to the Models folder and the textures to the sourceimages folder. We must have a footage folder and a maya project folder.
Camera Tracking
On 3DE, on the basic environment, import the image sequence set it to start at frame 1 and end at frame 300, set gamma to 2.000, export buffer compression files and save the project. The goal is to find points in the different depths and track them – as the bike was moving and the background blured a bit these points were harder to track so they took longer. The camera tracking has to be in a camera group and the body track has to be in a different point group, also it’s always helpfull to have the image controls panel under the object browser as we need to change brightness and saturation multiple times to help tracking.
After all the camera points were tracked this is what it looked like:
As the first group of points is tracked, we have to calc from scratch and use result if everything is in its right place – like the image below
The paralax is tracked, now we had to track the floor and repeat the process. After that save and start taking care of the lens. On focal length tab change focal length from fixed to adjust and open parameter adjustment window.
As the footage is downloaded from the internet we don’t know what camera was used to record it so we have to hit Adaptive at least three times, so the software can adapt to the footage and give us the best option. Now, we select the distortion on the lens tab and on parameter adjustment window select brute force all, make sure both A and B lens range is on fine and hit adjust.
After this we add the quadric distortion – degree 4 and repeat the process, but this time the expected result is a cube, which I gladly had! Not so much trouble in this session!
It took much longer to adjust than the previous ones, so Dom told us we could hit stop when the red line reached half of way, as long as we had a cube being created. Again… Save and version up! If 3DEqualizer crashes it corrupts the file and we loose all the work. Now we must calc from scratch again and use result.
On the basic environment, add new point group on the camera group, double click on it and name it body_group – a new group where we are going to track his body. Dom said we had to find points only on the shoulders and neck, which in my opinion were even harder because he was wearing a black leather jacket and the wrinkles would change so the tracking took a long time, but fortunately I managed to get the amount of points that Dom asked.
When all the points are in it’s place, we create a new scene on Maya and set the project to the one in the beggining of the session, import the model in to the scene, select the body of thee model – export selection to the Models folder as an .obj – name it – save!
Back on 3DEqualizer, with the body group selected – right click and import the model in to the scene and repeat the process from last session: open a second 3DE window, having one of them on lineup and the other on orientation environment so that we can assign the body points to the body. On orientation window we must place the model on top of the footage through scale, translate and rotate. As soon as the model is in the right place, on lineup window go to edit – project points on 3D models. I had a problem when doing this in which the model didn’t follow the man.
The way to solve this was really to re-import the model and redo the scaling and position again and project the points on 3D model, and it worked! So, time to save and export the .mel script and save it on the maya projects folder, finally run warp4 and render footage.
Maya
The model now follows the man on the bike, but it is still very unrealistic as the body is in it’s original position and none of it’s limbs are in the right place; that is where Maya comes in to action.
As animators we are also actors – how can you give life and personality to a character if you can’t act or represent them correctly. You must know your character and make him unique.
This last task of term 1 was to create a performance animation in which we had to shoot our own footage and audio. I admit I could not find a sound clip that I actually liked for a long time, I wanted something funny so I went looking for things in Jim Carrey movies as he is a very expressive person and has the best facial movements. But then I realised I could never perform something close to what he does. Modern Family was also in mind but I couldn’t decide so, I watched a video from Sir Wade on youtube and he had some tips about picking audio clips for animation and it really helped.
Then… It came to my mind! Monthy Pitons! My father was always a fan and made me watch it all as a kid and it is certainly fun – ofcourse I could never perform like them either but I could be more creative in representing the dialogue. They have much more monologues and a very thick accent so I took the challenge. The audio clip is from the 3rd episode of the series Flying Circus (1959 – 1974) in which Eric Idle playing Arthur Nudge engages a man on a bar to ask how it is like to be with a woman, so he has a very confusing and weird way to ask the man how it is and in the end he says “… what’s it like?” and reveals he has never been with one.
As he talks very fast I had to write down what he said and repeat it over and over in front of a camera – very embarassing! I wasn’t made to be in front of a camera.
– Is a… is your wife a goer? Ay? Know what I mean? Know what I mean? Nudge nudge know what I mean? Say no more!
– Your wife? Does she go? Ay? Know what I mean? Know what I mean? Does she go? Ay?
– I’ll bet she does! I’ll bet she does! Say no more! Say no more! Know what I mean? Nudge nudge!
I chose the rig called Clairee Boy and recorded the reference footage – which was not great
This rig has the best phoneme system, the chin is included in every mouth movement, I only noticed this when I started working on it, it was a great surprise. When the phoneme animation was finished I had to start blocking everything else.
I went to the shot for reference and used mine too, although I was reading the script as he talks too fast and I always missed something when I wasn’t looking, so the reference footage I shot is really just a reference of real movement to complement with the original footage.
I had to have some sort of set dressing even if it was just a table and a few chairs so, I found some on free3d.com and added them to the project and had my character sit on a chair so it looks like he is talking to someone, even if it is in a monologue mode.
Blocking
After I finished the blocking I sent my work to Luke for feedback and I realised my blocking was half done, the feet don’t really move nor the eyes and eyebrows nor the fingers. I was so focused on giving some expression to the spine, arms and neck, that I forgot the rest. This project definitely opened my eyes and taught me that I have to be more aware of everything else, the more we work on something the better it looks – even if my character is sat down and no one really looks at the feet, they are part of it and everyone moves every part of their body while talking, the eyes don’t stay on the same place and we blink more than we think of.
The next stage of this project is to improve my blocking and polish the final shot.
Ofcourse, character animation is nothing without facial animation, it gives life and personality to the character, it indicates what is going on on a specific situation. So, we were asked to do a phoneme animation, we had access to 3 different audio clips which we could use and ofcourse choose a character from the library with a facial rig to start animating.
I was super curious to try a facial rig with a phoneme system, not because it’s easier but because it showed me the right movements of a 3D character face, everything moves not just the lips. I went through every rig in the library as I always want to try a new one, but I ended up using Franklin again as his facial rig was amazing, in my opinion. His face is lifeless until you use the phoneme system, he looks boring and his body is super weird as it has weird curls in his upper body.
At first, I was quite scared as I thought it would be much harder to do this task, but I was wrong, it was super fun mostly because I was looking at myself and I realised I do the most awkward faces when talking – every one does, but we do all those movements so fast that no one notices.
The first thing to do is ofcourse shooting reference footage, choose a character to use, create a project folder and insert the audio clip on the timeline (the prefered audio formats are .wav or .mp3) and finally we can start animating!
This is the reference I shot:
I also found a diagram that helped me figure out the “key poses” of the mouth in specific syllabes/sounds.
It was quite fast to do the phoneme animation, but it looked boring as the only thing moving was the mouth…
So, I decided to add some life to it, I tried to find the clip from where the audio clip was taken and see some other movements the actor did, or even just to take ideas for the rest of his body.
But the actor is very still, so I just thought I would make franklin disapointed while talking.
This was the final result:
I really liked the final result, although it is not the best animation ever, I really enjoyed doing this task as it was fun and I learned somethings I didn’t understand how they worked.
