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FMP Previs Week 2

A lot of good ideas came to mind and in the end I chose the one I see as a challenge, as I never animated a creature, and as an achievable project. When looking through animation mentors’ instagram page I saw an animation from a student showcase from 2019, by Leandro Adeonato.

My idea is based on this animation, in which i’ll be using ninja as a fighter and the Raptor rig from resource share.

Sinopse:

A curious ninja investagtes an ancient fight ring but suddendly the presence of a raptor surprises him and they both will fight until the ninja defeats it with great effort. When celebrating the mother Raptor appears, scared, the ninja releases a high pitched scream and runs away like a child.

The rigs I intend to use are:

Ninja, by

Raptor, by

At first I wanted to use the t-rex rig, as it is more realistic, but I’ve decided to use raptor as it is more cartoony and I want to represent a baby creature and cartoony styles have a wider range of possibility regarding expressions and movement. I went on to test the rigs and noticed that the textures for raptor are not being assigned and I can’t really fix the problem or understand whats wrong. Time to ask for help!

Building up master scene

For some reason, I’ve always liked green environments, wild with bones and somehow misterious. So my idea for the master scene would be in a wild place, like an exotic forest where the ninja is exploring an ancient fight ring, so I thought about rib bones around the fight ring and a stone tilled floor surrounded by torches and iluminated by fire.

The light source being fire might be a bit too hard to do and it is not decided yet. I do want a dark environment with strong shadows. I made a quick sketch of what I want the environment to look like:

Assets:

  • stone tilled floor
  • bone ribs
  • exotic trees
  • rocks
  • bushes
  • variety of plants
  • torches
  • ninja rig
  • raptor rig 2x

From this list the only thing missing is the stone tilled floor and the torches. All my assets were downloaded from turbo squid and free3D.

Variety of plants:

Rocks:

Rib Bone structure:

When searching for this model nothing seemed to work, until I found a t-rex skeleton rig which worked perfectly for what I wanted, I removed the controls and kept the mesh.

I realised the ribs were to close to select the faces of each piece of geometry so I deleted face by face, duplicating the bones I wanted.

Master Scene:

After setting up the master scene I downloaded an hdri from HDRIHaven website and did some render tests. I did get some issues with the lights and reflections but I was able o have a better idea of what it will look like. The stone tilled floor will be modeled in maya and zBrush.

Test Render Master Scene:

render_cam_test
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FMP Previs Week 1

This weeks blog is about the previs for the final major project, something I’ve been struggling for a while due to my indecisiveness regarding the idea and script. Nothing really seems good or exciting enough so, I took some time to think and explore my possibilities considering the time we have to write a thesis and create a project. I tend to be overambitous but I don’t think I can afford to take such a risk now.

When I first thought about what i wanted to do for the final major project what came to mind first was either a dragon or any other creature that does not exist, the fact that I wanted to gather reference and learn how to put together so many diferent movements from different animals. Super exciting.

I found a really cool rig, blurgha. I can’t even say what does that rig look like, it is extremelly complex. I got a meeting with luke where he advised me to make lots of animation tests as well as test the rigs before start animating. So I did, also grabbed a dragon rig and made tests on it too.

Dragon:

Blurgha:

The first one I tested was blurgha, I wanted to make a small walkcycle but honestly I was having too much trouble understanding how that body structure worked, so I chose to make a punch, as it has such strong arms.

I looked up references from lizards, gorilas, frogs, crocodiles and orangutans. Some of these helped me understand it all a bit better but nothing concrete. Anyway, this is what the first test looked like:

Of course, it is still a very rough and raw animation but I got to know a bit of this character and how it moves. The weight is also an important detail as it is so big, can’t really be fast and there has to be a lot of overlapping action mostly in his upper body parts, belly etc…

Another thing that I tried to improve was the camera movement, it is important to give some relevance to weight and reality to the shot, even as a test.

After this, I went to test the dragon and made a small step also to understand how that creature moves as it has no arms but has wings which are sort of like an arm but with a different and much more limited movement. The hips also have a different way to move as it is more similiar to a bird.

I looked up reference footage from ostrich, snakes, chicken, eagles as well as game of thrones dragon shots and lord of the rings. Dragons have been something that one sees more and more on movies and tv series so there is actually a whole lot more to look at regarding reference footage. Of course, an animator must never copy the work of another artist but it doesn’t hurt to see how they did it and how they got to it.

I really wanted to show the dragon test but for some reason I have lost the data, on the maya scene where i did the test there is a problem with the model and the animaton waas lost. I will continue to try and solve this issua as soon as possible.

Along with testing and trying to animate something roughly I went looking for animators that specialize on creature animation and I found an artist called Daniel Fotheringham. He has worked for movies such as the hobbit (dragon animation) as well as game of thrones, the lion king, among others. I was impressed by his work and the way he gave some good tips on how to begin understanding and what tools could be helpfull to improve producivity and technique.

This video was a great way to understand some ways to animate creatures, one of the tips he mentioned was animation layers, short animation tests like the paw hitting the floor or a simple movement of the head. Small things that if improved on a simple test can become much easier to do when actually animating.

After watching the master class I did some research on animation layers as I had never really payed a lot of atention to it. A mistake of course, it is usefull in so many ways. I did use animation layers in my tests included in this post. The ability to animate on top of something you did on another layer without any problem or have some keys on a control out of your way, is extremelly helpfull.

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Showreel Term 3

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

nuke setup – latlong test

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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: