For the final delivery of this term we had to make a showreel documenting what we’ve done from term 2 and 3 as this unit includes the two terms. Here is what I’ve been doing over the past few months, some works are incomplete and only experiments of new techniques and softwares for VFX, comp and animation.
Solo Project – Week 6
This week I kept animating and recording reference for animation, but did not finish any shot due to the focus on the lighting task for the collab indie project. I did try to comp the shots I had and this was the result:
I was happy with the result, although there is still a lot of work ahead so that I can consider this project finished, but this first sketch was just how I imagined it. I would have liked to finish at least one shot with the ninja and have a 3 character animation, where they all interact and react to each other. Something I will want to finish in the future, hopefully before this masters is over.
I believe it will be a good asset for my showreel.
Indie Film Production – Week 8
Lighting
The lighting session this week was about getting the car in to the maya scene and trying out some renders with it, as well as use the AOVs that KK fixed in my scene. So we began by importing the latest version of the lotus model and place it in to the maya scene, try out a render and we noticed that the geometry of the car was in low poly. KK tried to figure it out but then I tried to press one, as I had done some modeling on maya before, when pressing 1 the geometry converts in to high poly.
After that was fixed KK asked me to get the ground color ready for next meeting as this was a shorter one, due to the amount of work from this final weeks. KK asked me to see if I could try to render something on the render farm from maya as well as ask Luke or Christos if it was possible to render from nuke on the render farm.
Matchmove
I finally got more points on the CP_0400 shot and booked a session with Dom for next week, as I tried to set the meeting to late in the week, so Dom was already booked. But I think I got better results this time.
Indie Film Production – Week 7
This week I had 2 meetings with KK and Giulia and one meeting with Dom, I had issues with the completing of the lighting tasks, KK asked us to match the lighting, prepare the macbeth chart and try to set the AOVs and render layers. The AOVs did not work for me, not the disabling of the image plane and skydomes.
Lighting
We began by rendering the reference spheres, which I had issues with because I could not disable the image plane nor the skydomes from the render so the result was not the expect, but KK showed us a way to set up a “button” on a new shelf in maya where we could turn off and on the image plane.
The skydomes are deactivated by the render layers which is also something very confusing to me, but we figured it out and were able to rende the spheres to get to nuke, on giulias’ machine. I kept having issues so KK fixed them during the week and got back to me on this weeks’ second session.
This now has to be imported to nuke to get the light matching.
With the spheres in nuke we can create another viewer window and match the lighting with the footage through a bounding box made on the lighter area of the grey sphere and the same process for the chrome sphere.
After this, KK showed us a cool way to solve this hdri problem, by croping the chrome sphere from the footage and with a spherical transform node get the “HDRI” displayed in it.
Ofcourse, the result was not the best but we got the idea of how to see what really is on the chrome sphere. On the second meeting, KK fixed my scene and I was able to export the spheres correctly, and he taught us how to make a projection on the geometry using the node editor in maya.
Projection from viewport:
Projection from render cam:
After this KK showed us how to get the Macbeth Chart ready to import to the scene and have it as light reference. On nuke, we must rotate the image until we get it aligned, crop it and use the schew setting on y and x and distort the image until it is as much as possible like a square.
While treating the macbeth chart we noticed the footage had already been edited to look like a night shot so we got the values closer to the original before exporting the final chart image.
Matchmove:
On matchmove this week, I had a meeting where he told me the best way to get the points to track on a blurry and dark image was to use image controls on black and white or with the saturation at its maximum. I had already set a few points, that Dom said were good and now I must continue to make sure I can finish every task I signed up to.
Indie Film Production – Week 6
This week I focused more on lighting, although I did begin to track a shot, and set a meeting with Dom for next week (has we was already booked for this week) to get some tips on how to track such blurry shots. Also I had 3 meetings with KK and Giulia ( a student from the VFX MA) joined the team, which was great as help in these sorts of tasks is never too much. As she also knows a bit more about nuke, I was super glad to have help.
Lighting
This weeks’ task was to prepare the maya folder with everything on it, as well as create folders inside the scene and render folders for me and Giulia, we divided the shots for the 2 of us. I got the reference footage for the z004 and Giulia got the z002, these shots are not going to be used in the actual movie but will be usefull for lighting purposes. The woman carries 2 spheres and the Macbeth chart which we will have to prepare and get the right values.
z002:
z004:
KK had asked me to prepare a maya scene and get the spheres in the right place, with some HDRI we found. This is the one we are using as it is the one truer to the footage.
After setting up the scene and placed roughly a camera on the right place we created the road geo and added a character, I chose Amanda rig, as I really like this rig and got the right materials and attributes to the spheres, this is how ir tlooked like:
At first, I was a bit confused why we needed to have the skydomes if we were going to have the cameras from matchmove and I believed that that would be it, but later I understood the whole purpose of this.
The lighting task for next week is to import a render of the reference spheres alone and get them to nuke to match the lighting as well as the macbeth chart.
Matchmove
This week on matchmove, I was able to track a few more points on my CP_0400 but as it was taking too much time, I honestly focused more on getting the lighting tasks done, as there were more people on the matchmove role than lighting.
Solo Project – Week 5
This week I was able to finish shot 08, where amanda walks to Lisas’ table and sits, while Lisa says hello. With this shot I tried to reference animation from lisa on shot 07 but for some reason I did it wrong and it did not work so Lisa is really only posed, not animated. Next week I will try to solve this issue, also because I want to understand referencing a bit better, it is something that never goes right for me, I must study it in order to get better results.
On shot 07 I added facial expressions to Lisa, but this shot is not finished yet as the hand needs animating on the fingers and arm movement. This project has been left a bit on the side due to the indie project as I am doing a role that I knew nothing about and need to learn some things from scratch.
Shot 07:
Shot 08:
One of the things I changed on this shot was the camera movement, until now every shot had a still camera, but it is also important to have some movement or else every thing looks very monotonous and boring. Camera movement is aslo a subject I must improve in order to get better animations.
Solo Project – Week 4
For the solo project this week, I did not evolve as much as I would like as I was more focused in understanding the lighting for the indie project. I was able to complete the previz of 1 shot and began another from my short animation, shot 06 when Lisa leaves the store sad and shot 07 when lisa is waiting for her friend at the cafe, which is still incomplete.
Shot 03:
On this shot I tried to do a sad walk but not too exagerated and changed the facial expression to a sad one, facial animation is something I chose to do later in this project as I know I would loose too much time on it.
On shot 07 I was having more trouble because of timing, it is still something I need to improve on as everything I do is based on the timing of a step which is not always a good idea. It is a relative reference that must not be used frequently.
The rotating of the head was always too fast and everything else had to be adjusted as well. Hopefully next week the progress of this project will be much better.
FMP and Thesis Proposal
FMP and Thesis proposal! The monster I was so afraid of turned out to be fun! I admit I was struggling to find a theme and something I really wanted to do also important and meaningfull for my showreel, something new. In my head nothing was new, so I booked a session with Luke and he helped me look in to some areas that were newer and no one talked about it much, like AR, VR, deep fakes, etc…
I did my research and all those things looked pretty cool but I could not relate to any of them, nor wanted to really do that. For me, animation is the real thing, of course I am open to new things and techniques but always around animation and ways to do it better.
So, I decided to make a creature animation shot for my FMP, where I want to have a human interact with a non-humanoid character either a lion or a monster. I’ve always been a fan of monsters since I was young that was what I loved to draw the most, I was free to create anything without it needing to look like something, monsters are freedom to an artist in my opinion.
FMP was decided, the hard part was really to decide what to talk about in my thesis, I don’t want to talk about monsters because that is something that has been around for too long, no one wants to hear more about it, I wouldn’t know what to say honestly. So I did research for a long time without any luck, I wanted to talk about lighting and rendering as it is so important the way an animation looks, if something is not very well animated but has an amazing light and render some people won’t even notice the bad animation.
But… I was getting bored with that subject, until I thought about the female characters and looked it up and found an article about the head of animation of Frozen (2013) who had the unfortunate idea of saying “female characters are so hard to animate because they need to look pretty” and also talked about the limited range of facial expressions for women just because they need to look good. WHAT? WHY? That was it for me… Really needed to talk about this. Even because I’ve never related to any female character in my life, but Mulan, and Mulan was also a princess…
I always liked to dess as a boy, when I was young people would mistake me for a boy and I loved it! I see myself as a woman now though… Anyway, I believe things need to change, the world is changing why would we (artists and animators) not evolve with it. If we think about it animation movies sort of teach something to the kids, it taught me back then, not so well if you ask me, as a girl I always felt the need to fit in where I didn’t, as I’m not so girly. Kids don’t understand that you can be yourself, kids learn from what they think is correct.
What kind of message are we sending them…?
What are we teaching them? What are we teaching ourselves…?
So, here it is, my FMP and Thesis proposal:
Solo Project – Week 3
This week I recorded some reference footage and began blocking out some shots. When animating I noticed a few issues with the Merry rig as all of that rig would break each time I keyed anything. The problem was solved by kamil, it was a simple change on the settings of maya, now everything works as it should.
For a while there I thought I would have to change rigs as I was having so much trouble and couldn’t even understand what was happening with the rig, I’m glad I was able to keep using the Merry rig, as female rigs are always weird and not very apelative, this one I really like, as well as the Amanda rig.
I began by animating the first shot but with the issues that came up I began animating the shot 08 and 09 where the Amanda rig is already on scene. This is a playblast from shot 08:
On this shot, Anna (amanda rig) is arriving to her meeting with her friend Lisa (merry rig) and sits on the chair, by this time I hadn’t solved the merry problems. After the problem was solved, I began animating on the 2 first shots where this character enters in the store scene as they are quick and don’t have more characters to animate.
Shot 01 (playblast):
Shot 03 (playblast):
Ofcourse, all these shots still need a lot of work, I expect to finish previs of every shot in the next 2 weeks.
Indie Film Production – Week 5
This week I had 2 sessions with KK as the footage arrived and as it was delayed we needed to get moving on the lighting task.
Lighting
In the previous session KK asked me to make the nuke set up for the hdri we had found to get the high value and low value, I had an issue when finding the high value as the node has 2 outputs and on the viewer panel I wasn’t able to see anything. KK showed me a way to discover if there really was no information on that node, by hitting ctrl + mouse click on the viewer we can see if the values of the rgb channel change. They did change, so, the way to fix this was to change the outputs of the nodes and the problem was solved.
So the clamp node sets every value above one to one and the merge node (minus) is the hdri minus the clamp node info which will help us discover the location of the light source.
HDRI:
unchanged HDRI HDRI (f13)
Clamp node:
clamped (no changes on f value) clamped (f13)
Merge node (minus):
merge node unchanged merge node (f13)
As we can see the hdri contains all the info, while the clamp node clamps that info and the merge node is all about the light source and intensity.
Before exporting values, we tried to debug the skydome issue from the previous session and discovered that the path for the hdri was different and tried a few more renders with the spheres and another issue appeared: the floor was not showing up, so KK was going to look into it and let me know next session.
In the middle of the week, the footage came! I sent it to KK and we had a session on friday to see what needs to be done. The first step was to organize everything on nuke and separate the shots for the different light rigs that we need to make. Every shot we had access to was imported to nuke and in the end we got a small video with the videos referenced with labels and blacking out when finished.
We uploaded this to ftrack and KK asked me to find HDRI matching the light from the footage, prepare a maya folder with everything needed inside, to set up the spheres in a maya scene and to see if I was able to track a shot (that turned out to not be necessary for next session).
Matchmove
When the footage arrived, I set a meeting with KK and while I waited I began tracking a shot, which was challenging as the footage is a bit blurry as it moves too fast, but I think this is a good practice, I don’t believe the footage in industry is always perfect to track like the shots we began working on. Eventually I stopped working on matchmove and prioritised the lighting tasks as it is much more complex than I thought.