Category: Collaborative Unit

The final week of the collaborative unit was to make the final adjustments like adding overlays, editing the final video, sound and effects. It was obviously a week in which we met more often and had more contact as we gave feedback on each others work. I have to say, I always get worried with group projects as my past experiences were not so good in that matter but this one was really fun to work with and completely opened my horizons to how a professional future might look like or should be.

This project also included the goal to know how to work with other people as well as getting to know the students from this and other courses and it worked! I really enjoyed working with the people I worked with and I look forward for more. Ofcourse it is always stressing as we depend on other people’s work to get ours done too but when people commit to it and actually like what they’re doing I don’t think there is much to worry about.

With this project I did a lot of stuff that I had never done before and it wasn’t so bad, I have an idea of what I must improve and change in my working method. Working with cameras, lights, understanding the rendering settings and render farm were the main and scary parts of this projects as I had never used it much, so I had to take a bit more time to study those things and I believe I did a good work as it was my first try with it.

Final Previs Project:

The collaboration of each member of the group is clear, as I had the Michael Jackson performance with David (rig), Tina had Beyonce with Janine (rig), Abbie did an electronic music performance with Stich (rig) using sound made by Kenneth (sound design student).

For this project we created a server for the collaborative unit on discord and used it to discuss everything as well as calls and uploading work.

This week is we had another meeting to see how everyone’s work was going and to give some feedback as well as make some final changes. Finally render using the render farm and the pipeline.

At first I was looking for a way to render the sequence from the camera sequencer, I looked it up online and found a script that I ended up not using, as Dom messaged me and I had an hour talk with him working on the cameras because we thought it was possible to render it all at once using render layers. I had never used them and Dom taught me, it was pretty simple, but we were having a problem with the renderable cameras. That problem was solved when I asked Luke for help and turns out that what I wanted to do was not possible as the cameras could not be deleted as they were being used on a different render layer. So I deleted all of them and rendered each shot seperatly, which took a bit more time but the result was great.

Ofcourse, before all this everything needs to be properly referenced and there cannot be any error, which I also solved with the help of Luke, by deleting the ones that were wrong and not being used.

It was the first time I used the render farm and it is trully fast, it’s crazy. But I had some problems as in the end I tried to render multiple shots at once and for some reason the cameras changed between frames so I rendered it again and it was all correct.

This is how the final render looks like:

Now we only have to get all the performances together, get the overlays on top, some effects and it’s done!

This week I finished the camera work with the camera sequencer as well as the lighting. It was certainly an experience as I had never used the camera sequencer and added lights to a scene like this one.

So, I decided to begin with the blocking to then work on the cameras, I watched a few tutorials about the camera sequencer and it was pretty simple, it looks like premiere pro, we just have to set up the frame count and camera.

This was how the camera sequencer playblast looked like before lighting:

The lighting part was the hardest as it was not working not looking like I wanted it, I watched a few tutorials on it but it was not looking the same on my scene, so I decided to try every light maya has on an empty scene to understand how they worked. I still don’t know all of them, but I understand it better for sure.

I ended up using spot lights like my reference footage, I tried to be as loyal as possible to it, although in the end I made a few changes. I set up a line of orange and yellow lights in the back, a main white one in the center and five more on the top front of the stage. I like the final result but I know it is something I should improve in the future. This is what the set up looked like:

This is how the lights look like but for some reason they don’t all show up.

When lights are on the viewport it is not possible to see how all of them are as I duplicated them and there must be a bug, I can only have an idea of it when rendered. Also I changed the skydome HDRI to a night image on a park that seemed better for the performance of Michael Jackson.

This week I finished the blocking animation for my character, it took longer than I expected as Michael Jackson moves too much and defies physics in every possible way which makes it harder to have a notion of timing and movement. Some things still need tweking and improvement like facial expressions and spline.

This is the playblast of the blocking:

I added the hat and the mic with animSnap tool and downloaded the assets from turbosquid website. This tool is very usefull as nothing really needs to be parented to the hands and the tool just keys the object in the position you want – Amazing! The only thing is that I find easier to just snap the prop when all the animation is done, this way there are no problems when moving the members. I got a few bugs when I tried to snap before having any keys.

The constraints subject is something I should improve and understand better as it is so usefull and extremelly necessary to animate, but quite confusing. This tool just accelerates the process.

This performance that I chose to do was due to it’s dificulty and challenge, also as a way to understand better how the body works and moves, it was much more work than I expected and it was worth it but still needs a lot of improving.

The next step are cameras, using the camera sequencer and adding lights, something I also must study a bit as they are so many and sometimes I am aware that I don’t make the best decisions with lights.

This week I blocked the main poses of my character for the beggining of the animation as well as some camera animation with the camera sequencer. At first I had throught about having my character walk to his pose and begin from there but I was having some trouble as michael jackson does not walk normally, it’s more like dance walking, so it was not going very well so I decided to begin directly with the main pose and change to another one, then starts dance walking like in the reference.

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This first 300 frames are when he grabs the microphoen and the hat and throws it to the audience, then starts singing. I used anim snap to snap the hat to his head and then to his hand, The microphone isn’t yet parented as I want to finish the animation of the hand and arm so that everything stays in place.

This is the first playblast:

I also set the first 3 shots using the camera sequencer, I had never used it before and it is pretty intuitive, works similiar to premiere pro just less advanced. The cameras are all in place to, but I believe that after all the animation is done all will look better after a tweak in their movement.

This week was the beggining of the animation as the master file was completed and each member of the group could start to block the main poses. For me it is best to begin with the lip sync animation, I am aware that I can use animation layers for that but when previewing the animation it is always more interesting to have the character at least following the sound clip.

For this next stage I also went looking for ways to constrain animation for a period of time as my character will throw a hat to the audience and grab a microphone when he enters so I found out that when parent constraining an object, when both are keyed it is possible to animate “blend parent” attribute that keys the constraint. But on another project where a character has to grab a bottle and change the constrained hand I asked Luke if there was a better way to do it as I was only able to parent the object to one of the hands and there is a tool!! AnimSnap which does exactly the same but you don’t have to parent the object.

So I began my animation with the lip sync and a short walk to the middle of the stage so that Michael Jackson can prepare his pose before it all starts. While Mickael Jackson is walking to his position, a guitar player is making his solo and the first camera shot is from the audience, right after that it cuts to a camera behind the character which then makes a tilt shot from the feet to the head and we can see the view from the artist.

We already decided on the concert logo and will insert it in each act with different effects each time.

Lip Sync animation:

This was a week of decisions as we need to start animating, so we decided that we were going to have only one stage and every artist performed in the same one, this way the master file is less heavy and we can all have the same environment. The storyboards are complete and camera mapping too but me and Tina who have a full song to perform decided to cut the video a bit and adapt our animation to it orelse the final video length will be too big.

We had a meeting with luke to see if some of our ideas were possible, such as the three stage question and I had thought about having the artists interact with each other when they changed acts as well as a host presenting a show in between, which is still to be decided as we all have our animation tasks and the host will be something made if there is time.

The master file has to be completed so we can all start working on our animations and there is no need to get every animation in the same file, this way we can render the cameras on our master file and in the end get everything together in a video.

For my animation I added a different camera as I wanted to have the view of the audience behing the artist, a shot I imagined for Michael Jackson when he does his iconic poses. Another thing to be studied for my animation is the contraints, as I will need to have my character throw a hat in to the audience and grab a microphone when he enters the stage. So a few changes were made to his performance and will have to be adapted.

We decided that for now we only need the songs to animate and in the end we will make all the sound changes and add ons, this is a very exciting project as we are doing something based on life before all this pandemic situation which is always motivating, if we can’t be there we can always simulate and imagine it.

This week we met twice and came up with different ideas from before, as at first we were aiming to have 3 stages and each artist would perform in a different stage, but we realised that it would be weird as we would only have the artists perform and nothing else. So, we decided to make a single stage where we would have a 4th character and have it be the host of the show. This way the artists could talk to each other in between acts and have a performance not so focused on music and a rehearsed thing on stage.

This way we can actually play with cameras and not have it so much as a live broadcast from a festival, but more as a movie clip where artists perform and interact with each other. One thing that we were also thinking of doing is simulating the crowd, it is something none of us know how to do but we agreed that it is important as this is a show and artists need a crowd.

The artist I chose to animate is michael jackson as has such an iconic performance and it is a good challenge to evolve what I want to in animation, like the overlaping action, his dance is full of it! We are aiming at a more cartoony style and stylized animation, so I chose David from the asset library as I think he has such a good rig and that type of model is exactly what I like to animate.

Another thing that would be amazing to be able to do is change the model’s clothes, as Michael Jackson always used provocative and shiny clothes it would be good if it was possible to make some changes. If not, maybe change the materials and textures of david’s clothes.

The song I chose is billie jean as the coreography has the well known move “The Moon Walk” which I know is a challenging thing to do but I want to try it anyway.

This week we have 2 new members, Tina and Kamil from the VFX course! It is great to see the group getting bigger. The first one to come to the group was Tina from our class and when we were looking for more reference of artists and performances to do we decided to change back to the original idea, to actually animate artists performances and each one of the animators chooses a style and an artist to animate. The concept is having iconic performances and impersonate them on the characters from the asset library.

As we don’t have riged artists it will be fun to make a model that has nothing to do with that artist kind of have his soul inside. So now we really should start planing the shots and how everything is going to look, like a storyboard of what is going to happen and how.

Now we have fewer roles to fill, so hopefully this week those will all be filled, we decided we were going to meet up every friday after lunch and keep in touch through discord as we created a channel for our group to keep everything organized.

For this term we will have two new units and one of them is the Collaborative Unit in which we have to collaborate with students from our class and course and from other courses as well. For the assignment we had to choose between doing a previs animation, poster animation, vr or an immersive cartoon.

My group chose to do a previs animation of a simulation of a festival in which we want to animate artists performances on stage and simulate it like a festival.

When Luke said what we needed to do I was literally out of ideas, my brain froze and every idea seemed bad so I saw Abbie’s project proposal and asked if I could join, the project seemed interesting and we can do a lot with this idea. The next step was to find more people and start deciding some things like what artists are we going to animate, which performances, which music style, how would the lighting be, the stages… All those things need to be put in to consideration.

So, for the first search we ended up with a lot of electronic music references and lights, as me and Abbie are fans of electronic music everything was sort of going in that direction and for that would be much more interesting to animate the crowd as DJ’s are quite boring to watch. But we still have to be aware that more people will join the group and all this needs to be agreed by everyone.