The collaborative project this term was, as I said before, self-directed study so we have to either get a project within the university or outside of it or we could ask Luke for a role in an Indie Film Production. As I did not have any ideas or projects I would like to join I asked for a role in the production, at first I signed up for animation and matchmove but Luke asked me if I could do some lighting shots, so I set a meeting with KK to understand lighting a bit better.
I have to admit, I’m terrible at it but I hope to get a bit better, I should know more about this subject even to light my shots instead of struggling with it each time, it is an important thing to consider if we want to get some emotion out of it.
I will not be doing animation, instead I will be doing lighting and matchmove. Before doing the actual shots we were given some exercises as a preparation for our roles, the lighting task will be getting some day light shots into night light shots as well as light up a crash scene (buildings, car, street) also in day light and night light.
Crash Scene:
For the matchmove role, we have a few shots from pexels, with streets and cars on a street from diferent angles – we need to track them.
For this next term we have to make at least 2 projects one solo and one collaborative project. This is the part where the masters really starts to change its shape into what we want professionally so the next step of our education is self-directed study, to be able to work on our own and plan it properly. Ofcourse, in a stage where I feel unprepared being told what to do is more comfortable, but that is the point: to take us out of our comfort zone and learn from it.
My proposal for this project was an animated short story, with a story of my own, although that seemed over ambitious it’s never too bad to try it. So I began writting a story, and another and realised that I had a huge difficulty in finishing the story, what do I want to tell? What is the goal of all that? But I eventually wrote one, too big in fact. I set up a 1 to 1 with Luke and realised that i could do the story i wrote for my FMP and for this term’s solo project I chose to do a short story but this time, really short, not trying to explain anything just using a performance to tell a story. This way I believe I can improve the body language of my animations.
This story is about greed and fake friendships. A girl sees a handbag and immeadiately falls in love with it on her way to meet her girl friend for a tea, she walks in the shop, asks for the price and leaves as she has no money to afford it. When her friend shows up, she has the exact same bag she just saw and asks if she likes it, jealous of her friend, they drink their tea and a ninja comes and kidnaps her friend, surprised the girl sees her friend being taken, looks at the bag and keeps it to herself.
When searching for rigs I found a really cool website that had a lot of them and some free! So, the 3 characters I will use are from that website, Amanda, merry and Ninja.
Amanda rig
Ninja rig
Merry rig
The environments I need would be a cafe or a bar, the hall of a store and a street where the store is. I’m still looking for good environments but I can also create a simple environment with some assets and set a scene.
The second performance animation we had to make had to be with two characters in which at least one had to speak. So the first task was to search for an audio clip and have it approved by luke, then look for rigs from the asset library, record reference footage twice and start working.
The first 3 audio clips I chose were from Final Space (netflix series), The hustle (movie) and from Peaky blinders. The first one couldn’t be as it is from an animation, the second was not very good (I admit) so it was the peaky blinders clip. It is a dialogue where Polly was speaking to Grace in the moment she founds out the betrayed Tommy. It is a slow dialogue but I believe it will be a good practice to know how to make characters move without any major movements. I do have some trouble with timings and this seemed like a good exercise for that. Although I went looking for more audio as I regreted choosing this one, but I ended up keeping it.
The characters I chose were Janine and Lou
janine
lou
I had Janine as Polly and Lou as Grace and began recording the footage. The first one was too bad so, I re-recorded it and the result was much better.
I chose the environment “Victorian Interior”, found a table, glasses and a fancy botle on turbosquid and built up the scene. I began by animating phonemes from each character and then animate the body according to my reference footage, Polly was first then Grace.
These two characters have to pick up and change hands when grabbing objects and that, I believe, was where I lost and keep losing time with as I was using the animSnap tool to have the objects constrain to the hands but they would go crazy and the objects just appeared on the other side of the scene. My solution for this was to block everything like they had the objects on their hands and in the end I would deal with it. I ended up only parenting one cup to grace’s hand, as she wouldn’t have to pick up anything else with that hand. This is a problem I will have to learn how to fix and really understand constraints and all that comes with it.
This is the final playlast of the blocking:
I still have to figure out how to light this scene properly, this environment came with a ton of lights but I would like to improve on it and be the one to light my work as it is such an important concept of emotion and reality.
After the blocking I tried to make a shot sequence with the camera sequencer and this was the result:
This second session of lighting was made with katana, a software by Foundry and in my opinion was better to understand the concepts KK was teaching us. We used frames from the movie Fight Club (1999), by David Fincher and lighted a CG scene with the same lights as the frames from the movie. Nuke and Katana are very similiar but I think Katana is bit more intuitive and easy to understand.
KK prepared a file for us and gave an intro at the beggining of the session which gave us a proper workflow on how to work with multiple shots like organizing the shots by angle and re-using light rigs. The angle of the shots and the amount of light they get can sometimes change but that can be tweaked in katana when re-using the same light rig with a small variation for a different shot.
One of the things KK mentioned was when looking for an HDRI an important aspect to be aware of is the position of the sun, as the HDRI can be used as a light and on the website HDRIHaven they preview what the light looks like on different materials which is extremelly helpfull.
The first step of this exercise was to set the graph state variables (GSV), change it’s name to “shot” and add a variable for each shot, in this case we created 5 variables named “shot01, shot02… etc”. After this we go to the node editor and on the lighting node group we can see there is a Gaffer Three node this is the master light rig which then will be tweaked and changed for each shot or camera angle and overwrite them accordingly.
For this we create a Variable Switch node and add it bellow the gaffer three node, to add more inputs to this node we just need to hit the arrow until we have the desired number, in this case we created 4 inputs and connected the gaffer three node on those 4 inputs we just made. To see the parameters of a node we need to either hit E when that node is sellected or hit the square on the right side of it until a green color appears. On the right side pannel we name the variable as “shot” and in the patterns we can set 1, 2 and 3 for each shot group. So the first will be shot01 shot03, the second will be shot02 shot04 and the last one will be shot05.
Before changing anything else we made a few renders to be sure of how they work on the setup KK made for us. A render for just the characters and everything together (background and characters) and these can be seen on the catalog tab where we can see a list of the renders we made.
Back on the node graph, on the input one we create a new gaffer three node and connect it to the according connector. On the parameters tab we have no lights but if we hit “show incoming scene” we will see what the above gaffer three node has inside on this node and change it just for this input. We deactivated the fill light so we can focus only on the env light, to edit it, right click and hit adopt for edditing. With this we can see new parameters showing up on the pannel bellow in the material tab.
To activate live renders for the lights we are using we go to the scene graph, that works like maya’s outliner and we can see everything this project has, we select the light group and check the live render box on the env light so we can have it rendered along with the image. On the object tab we can apply rotation to this light and match it to the right setting according to the movie frame we are trying to replicate while in live rendering. Hitting “S” to change between cg render and original frame.
This process was only for shot 1 so now we have to check if shot 3 (that is on the same camera angle group) is correct with this setting. As it isn’t, we have to add another input on the variable switch node and connect the shot 1 gaffer three node to this last input and get shot 3 on this last input. Add another gaffer three node on input 4 and with a live render tweak it’s rotation to match the original frame. This is how it looked like after tweaking:
shot01
shot03
After the light matches the original frames we can make a render of the prepared plates KK made for us, where there is only the background of the original frame without the actors and check if the light matches. The exercise for this session is to match every character with the original plates, so we must do this for all the frames.
When comparing the character render with the prepared plate we can select “toogle overlay/underlay controls”, middle mouse drag the background image to the underlay spot and we have the final image for this shot.
Shot 1:
Shot 3:
KK told us to do the rest of the shots with what he had just taught us.
Shot 2:
Shot 4:
Shot 5:
The only thing that I was unable to find out how to do was to export the render images, everytime I rendered to disk nothing appeared so I took screenshots of the final frames. I am aware that some things are wrong and I expect to review them with KK on our 1 to 1 next week.
