Summary/ Evaluation

This year has been stressful, challenging and fun. The tasks that were the most fun for me were perhaps learning and developing my 3D lighting skills and also creating the deck of cards and cognac scene. This was the setup I was most satisfied with and I was proud to have achieved such a high quality render and composite. I believe I have pushed myself so that I am no longer in my comfort zone as I was associating myself with things that I had never attempted before, such as lighting, texturing and UV mapping, I even attempted rigging. I think the most problematic obstacle in our project was the character. To be fair we probably should have learnt more about rigging before the course had started.

So we may not have a finished narrative but I believe that this was a great opportunity to learn new skills and techniques. It has given me knowledge of the industry pipeline and the importance of teamwork, communication and hard work. The most important thing I think that I will take away from this final year is not just some good work on a showreel, but the good memories, contacts with my fellow third year students and above all, new knowledge and skills. This was one of the main reasons I came to Ravensbourne was to take advantage of new software that was industry standard. I felt that knowledge in a new program such as Maya would make me more flexibly and improve my employability. To begin with I despised Maya, but I have grown to embrace it as a useful tool to aid me when I work. I believe I have improved so much as a 3D artist, and I know I am only scratching the surface, but this knowledge, I believe will serve me well for when I leave college. It will provide me with a basic foundation which I can then improve upon when in the workplace in the film industry. I am confident that I now have the skills required in order to become a valued and reliable employee.

Critical Analysis

There is always more we could have learnt and achieved, but in my opinion we produced some great work that I didn't not think I would produce back at the beginning of the year. We have learnt so much on this project. I have developed my 3D skills ten fold in as far as modeling and lighting and I believe these were the areas that were my strengths, and certainly the areas I most enjoyed. My weaknesses were perhaps animating, UV Mapping and rigging. If I was to do this this course differently I would have perhaps tried to get a larger group or I would have learnt more about rigging earlier on.

Thanks

Thankyou to all those that helped with the film. Id like to thank Abs Hans, Andy Kinnear, Tara Dulake, Clym Smith and Josh Griffin who all helped to bring life to our character by helping us in as far as rigging and blend shapes/ facial expressions.

I would also like to thank Joe steel for helping us with compositing some of the animation sequences.

Id like to thank Fahran Younas for UV mapping our character.

I would like to thank my parents and my grandparents for supporting me over these past few years at Ravensbourne, particularly this last and final year.

But most of all I would like to thank my brother for putting up with me and helping me improve as a 3D artist and aiding me on this project to produce some truly great work.

Directing

During this last year on this final project, directing has, I admit been stressful on occasions. However I have also enjoyed it tremendously. It is one of those "love hate" things. I have learnt so much over this final year. It has been a good opportunity and a steep learning curve. I wanted to direct my own film in order to improve upon my directorial and story telling skills. It was perhaps unrealistic to think that we could finish a complete narrative in under a year with just my brother and I working on the project. However it was a pleasure to work with my brother who could relate to my initial idea and vision and whom has tremendous talent. This final year was an opportunity for us both to learn new things and develop as artists. This experience has consequently made me more eager to continue directing in the future. I have alsways enjoyed directing and I love telling stories.

My idea was not initially picked but I managed to convince Mike that my idea was worth pursuing. I wanted to work on something, unique, original and different. I feel that animation does not need always need to cater for children and they certainly do not need to feature fluffy animals. I wanted to do something mature, that targeted the adult audience. I wanted to try and create an animation short between the realistic and the stylized. I wanted my idea to touch the audience through emotive story telling. After all my idea is about love and tragedy.

I also wanted to go ahead with my idea as I thought it would be the best way to learn, rather than work under someone else's film that I may not otherwise have learnt as much or had enjoyed working on. To direct was my own idea was my aim. If I fail to accomplish my initial targets, well at least I can say I tried. After all, University is all about learning and experimentation.

Lighting Problems

There is particular scene which I am attempting to light, and thus far it has proved tricky to get the lighting to what I want. It is the scene where Frank is smoking by the table. I dont want the scene to be to brightly lit, yet I do not wish it to be too dark so that you cannot see Frank. I want the lighting set up in such a way that it veils Franks eyes and forehead so that just his nose mouth and chin are visible. Because the scene is a medium shot there is very little I can do in order to manipulate the lighting in as far as "barn doors" etc. If it was a close up it would be a lot simpler as these lighting manipulators could be hidden by placing them outside the camera frame. I will try to see if I can improve upon the lighting setup tomorrow or else I may have to reconsider the composition of the shot entirely.

Apologies

I apologize for not updating my blog between January and February earlier this year. This discrepancy was due to the fact that I had multiple units to work on and deadlines were tight, particularly the dissertation. The dissertation was a major priority. It was however useful to this project as I was studying the importance of composition in filmmaking. I applied this new found knowledge when refining my shots and developing my filmic language in terms of camera placements etc.

Ready For Degree Show

I am concerned that we are behind schedule, however I am confident that we should have something to show at the degree show. As it stands we have in my opinion some fantastic work to show. Even if we do not manage to show the whole narrative we will be able to show the best renders and animations showcasing our lighting, texturing, and rendering skills.

Promotional Material: Poster

I have prepared a simple yet atmospheric and mysterious poster for the degree show to depict the mood of the film. I was very happy with the result, especially the lighting. I waned Frank either backlit or top lit with a large portion of his face concealed in shadow. The image below is the final result. I have already had plenty of positive feedback regarding this poster and I have posted it on Facebook to generate some interest.

Alex Progress Rendering

Alex is rendering in parallel to my machine in order to speed up rendering. We will render final gather passes first so if the worst comes to the worst we will have something somewhat finished to show. Occlusion passes on their own will not be ideal. Occlusion is necessary however as they greatly improve the quality of the image in terms of depth. We shall do occlusion passes after we have done final gather passes. Alex is making good progress and I am pleased with the quality of the renders and that they are extremely close to my initial vision.

Render Layers

We have decided to render in layers by separating the background, mid ground and foreground in order to cut down render time. If we render the background separate to the animated character, then this will significantly cut down render time. We will have to render the backgrounds as either .tga or .psd formats and the animated components as .png so that they can be easily placed above the backdrops.

Frank Smoking/ Sitting Shot 11

The image below shows the lighting and environment setup/ layout.

Below is an initial test render. The hardest aspect of preparing this scene was most definatley the lighting. For some reason this was perhaps the hardest scene I have had to light in the whole project. I was trying to get a composition as close to the original storyboard as possible, and have a shot to help inform the viewer of the layout of the apartment interior. Because it was a medium shot meant that everything was in the frame and I was limited to what I could do in order to create the illusion of lighting. I think that it is partly due to the fact that the shot is too flat and uninteresting. There are some nice aspects such as the subtle drop off of light on the back wall and the blue rim highlight that is created on Frank's upper arm and shoulder, however everything else seems to be very dull. The shot seems too balanced and the overhead lamp is not convincing enough. I thought perhaps I could improve things by altering the translucence attributes of the lamp shade or changing the texture of lamp shade, or perhaps the lamp shade should be completely opaque. I tried these solutions but none seemed to make much difference. It had to be the flat composition.

I decided to zoom in and have a lower camera angle. This was looking much better. I can now more easily veil Frank's face in darkness to make for a more interesting shot. I felt that having the hat in the bottom left of the frame and Frank's head in the top right would create an agreeable divide in the frame hinting that the hat was important for the proceeding shot. The lighting here still isn't perfect and needs some more tweaks, particularly on the centre of the table. The table and the hat need to be far more illuminated. But I do like how Frank is lit here.

What I shall do is divide the background, Frank and the table apart from each other and all will have different lighting setups. This way I can more easily control the lighting for each of the components and the merge them together in post.

Frank Dealing Shot 27

Below are some test renders of the card tossing shot. Fortunately these look good enough to present. There are some issues with odd mesh distortions, but there is nothing overly noticeable, plus it is helped by the fact that the lighting is producing some nice harsh shadows that help conceal any issues. I am quite pleased with the way this shot is turning out. It should look quite good when composited. Both the skin and the wood bump maps were set to a very low setting and the light intensity was set to 4.500. I only used one light for this scene. I tried introducing a second light but this got rid of some of the nice shadows and brightened the scene up too much. I also tried placing a blue light in the scene to create some blue highlights, but it just looked odd.

Below is the additional shot I had. It was a new idea for a shot, however once rendered it looked awful. The textures on the fingers themselves were simple not good enough. You can clearly make out where the rough and smooth textures meet to create a seam.

Exchanging Lighting Setups

When doing these shots that focused around the table I would use a prepared master light setup, however with some of the close up shots the lighting did not compliment the modeling or texturing. The lighting simply was not good enough and needed to be redone or improved upon. In some cases I had to start from scratch and create a new lighting set up for that specific shot.

Frank Lean in Light Shot 14

Below is an image showing the lighting setup I used. I constructed a lighting feature to act as a "barn door" in order to more easily control how much light was hitting Frank's face. This took a lot of work and trial and error to get right. The lamp shade itself was not working well enough. I decided to remove it from the scene, after all it wasn't showing within the frame. What I was after was to effectively disguise the top half of his face in shadow so that when he leans in towards the table, his face is gradually revealed by the light.

Below was a test render. I was not satisfied with this particular result. Frank's face was still too well lit. And the light itself was to low in its intensity. I decided to switch the light from no decay to linear to get some realistic drop-off on the light and to avoid an even spread of light which was apparent in the initial test render. I also turned the light samples from 8 to 55.

This was the result after much trial and error. I needed to lower the barn door too to get it to create a shadow that was not too harsh to be cast across his face. The render below is far far better and I think this is just what I was looking for. Enough shadow to conceal the top of his face and yet enough light to illuminate the rest of his features. I think this will look stunning when rendered completely as an animated sequence with a little compositing.

Below is a composite test. I increased the contrast and darkened the shadow. I am very pleased with this. This looks great. I especially like the eye reflection detail in his eyes, it really brings his eyes to life and breathes character into this model. Credit goes to Alex for doing such a great job with the texturing of Frank's facial skin. This is probably some of the best work in the whole film. I would be happy just presenting this sequence at the degree show.

Shot Order & Editing

Although I have tried to stick with the original storyboard and the ideas for the shots as well as their order, new ideas have surfaced and I realise now that the order of certain shots will change. For instance some shots will not feature in the final edit and some will be replaced by entirely new shots or different compositions. I have also thought of new shots to include to hint at what is going on such as the close up of the envelopes with the words "overdue" to suggest that Frank is in a bit of financial difficulty. The last shot with the apartment exterior will feature as the first shot of the film as a establishing shot, to inform the viewer where it is taking place and at what time. I will also indicate the mood of the film. There is no doubt that when it comes to editing I will come up with new ideas and the order of certain shots may change so as to perhaps make the narrative/ clip more coherent and understandable and also refine the shots in terms pace.

Shot List/ Schedule

This is the schedule/ shot list which I used for the third term.

Most of the shots have been rendered and composited, but due to problems with the character rig, the character animations were put behind schedule. Although we did manage to animate all the necessary shots we needed to form a partial narrative. I was surprised that we manage to get all the character animations done within a week. Now that deadline is almost upon us we are still in the process of rendering.

Rendering

Some problems were encountered when rendering, such as blotchy renders and rendered frames seemed far too over exposed. We solved the blotchy renders by re rendering and increasing the samples in the light attributes on the lights within the scenes and also increasing final gathering accuracy. We increased light samples to 50 and final gathering accuracy to 200. This will increase render time but it is worth it. I want my shots to look good and I believe that the better the quality the more appealing to the viewer.

Animating

For all these shots I wanted to make sure that they resembled the composition of the original storyboards. When Animating I wanted to keep things simple and subtle. I tried to evenly share the shots to be animated with my brother. I figured that if we are animating on different shots at the same time, we would speed up production and save time. There were occasions however where we both liaised with each-other to give advice and suggestions. I would say that I am particularly good at animating, nor do I wish to become an animator, but animating and bringing something to life can be fun, and when you finally manage to create a nice fluid animation there is a great feeling of accomplishment.

Shot08

Original Storyboard

Camera View

Animating this particular shot was a pain and took a full day to animate. Even when I had finished I still was not fully satisfied with the animation. But due to time constraints I told myself that for what it is it gets the point across. This was perhaps the trickiest animation I had to do out of all my shots. What I found most difficult was the fluidity and speed of the motion of the right hand that would toss the card.

Storyboard - Additional Shot

Camera View

This was the most fun to animate. It was a challenge and tricky to get right. The animations is still not exactly perfect. I would of liked more overlap and exaggeration. However this is by far the best character animation that I managed to do. I am very proud of how it has turned out. I think the slow in and slow out are especially effective and the way that his head arcs and makes a transition from a relaxed pose to a straighter position was perhaps the best bit of the animation. I am also proud of the nuances I managed to successfully introduce to his face in the eye brows mouth and eyes using the blend shapes. I like the way I had Frank chew on his cigar.

Storyboard - Additional Shot

Camera View

This was another animation I was proud of as there was some nice exaggeration I introduced to the hand spread attributes. As Frank's hands landed as he tapped the table there was some slight spread of the fingers. It is a nice animation but it may not feature in the final edit because I conducted a test render and the UV texturing on the fingers look terrible and completely ruin the shot. There were nasty seams visible too which ran the entire length of each finger. I tried shooting from another angle but this did not improve the look of the hands. The whole point of this shot was to show the animation close up. If I shoot from a distance, the viewer cannot fully appreciate the animation and it would be a waste. The hand is also top lit which limits what I can do to try and disguise the textures.

Shot07

Original Storyboard

Camera View

Because of the limitations of the rig I am unable to animate Frank's hands above his chest. If they are pushed beyond a certain point above his chest or if his hands are posed near his face his arms and shoulders begin to fold and distort. This means therefore that I cannot animate Frank throwing the card into the hat. This is a shame. I also thought that it would be nice to animate Frank either stoking his hair or rubbing his nose, but sadly I am unable to do so. What I have done instead is have him smoking in a relaxed position. I have also animated a breathing motion so that he is not completely static.

The following shots I gave to Alex to animate and I helped to light the scenes.

Shot01

Original Storyboard

I thought that this was a nice shot where frank is obscured in shadow gives a sense of mystery. It is supposed to be symbolic and emulate Frank's clouded state of mind. I also thought that the venetian blinds would be a way of indicating that Frank feels trapped as if he's in a prison. If rendered nicely with some nice lighting this could look stunning. I want the light to highlight his form, blue light fro the outside suggesting the coldness of his profession and the warm light which represents the love in his heart.

Camera View

For this shot Alex has done some very nice breathing motion. I suggested that we shoot the same shot but have a close up of his eyes.

Shot04

Original Storyboard

Again I thought this was a nice shot, to indicate that there there he is being watched. Primarily however I thought a shot looking down on Frank would indicate that there are forces greater than that of Frank. I particularly like the perspective here and the composition and layout of the shot.

Camera View

Shot17

Original Storyboard

Camera View

This was quite a tricky shot to render as there were no real effective upper body manipulators. I wanted Frank to move from a relaxed position to a straight position and to have him lean towards the camera. Getting the head to arc in a realistic fashion was a challenge. The animation is far from perfect but it could be worse.

Shot27

Original Storyboard

Camera View

For this shot I thought we could focus more in his facial expressions and focussing on his eyes. This was a relatively simple shot to animate as there is not much within the frame. I told Alex to focus on the eyebrows, the eyelids and blinks. I also wanted some movement in his eyes and introduce some eye dart. We also introduced a slight zoom in with the camera.

Limitations of the Rig

There is an issue with the Rig in that when you bring the arms/ hands up to the face the rig begins to break and deform. I would have liked to do some nice animations where Frank scratches or strokes his hair and rubs his nose. Unfortunately I was unable to do so despite many attempts of experimentation with the rig. I tried switching from FK to IK and switching the SC solvers to RP solvers but there was no difference. I assume it is due to a weighting issue.

Solved

We found out what the problem was, Andy helped us out and explained that it was due to the geometry render stats. Primary visibility, receive shadows and cast shadows had to be checked on. When we re rendered our geometry was now visible and renderable.

Rendering

Animation progress is going well, however we have discovered a weird issue when attempting to render the character animated shots. When rendered, Frank's body mesh is invisible. Only his hair eyes and vest are visible. We suspected that there was no lambert on the character so we re applied a new base texture on the mesh, this did not solve the problem. We also tried reversing the face normals, this didn't work either, we now think its something to do with either the layer setup, however everything seems to be set to visible or that the mesh is for some reason set to unrenderable. Hopefully we can solve this issue tomorrow with some advice/ suggestions from fellow students.

Animating: Playblast

At the moment the animating is going well, it is slow on occasions but then again we are not proficient animators and we are working with an unfamiliar rig. The rig is not perfect either but it shall do. We shall have to be careful when animating so as not to deform the rig too much so that odd pops and tears begin to appear. Also we have to try to be clever with the camera angles so as to hide or at least disguise some imperfections with the rig. We are using the playblast playback function in order to view our animations in real time as playing back the animations in the timeline/ viewport is useless and does not give you an accurate indication of what the animation is looking like. This method is a long winded one and there is a lot of trial and error involved.

Joe Meeting

I had a meeting with Joe to discuss his compositing progress. He explained that he had completed a couple more shots. However he was still finding that the colour correction on his laptop was slightly out of sync with our reference images. Joe had a feeling that this was after effects and its colour balance settings. Despite this, he had shown me what he had been up to and his shots were much improved and the he had done a good job on matching the colour as closely as he could to the reference composites. I also instructed him to adjust the brightness and contrast by increasing brightness and decreasing contrast so that the images were not so dark. I also suggested that he tone down the vignettes as they were too overpowering to the images. Overall I was pleased with his progress and his efforts.

Before

Far too red and dark.

After

Much nicer, bright and clearer. The colour of the wood matches the reference image and the vignette has been tones down.

Acquiring Sounds Effects

Im going to see if I can get hold of a sound effects hard drive in order to download some useful Sound Effects for our animation short.

I managed to acquire a collection of decent sound effects from the SFX External Hard Drive (HD).

I found useful interior household foley such as footsteps, door slams, clock ticks etc.

It was tedious to sift through all the sound files however as there were many folders and many of the sounds themselves were not categorized or named.

Meeting with Tara

I spoke to Tara and she has said that she will try to paint the weights in Maya 8.5 rather than 2011. She explained that it was due to backwards incompatibility and that it is due to the fact that 2011 uses paint weights interactive, where 2008 does not. Tara agreed to try and solve this issue by instead working in Maya 8.5. She then gave us the new rig with the blends connected to the face of our character. When I opened the file I was very glad to see that we had finally received the character with everything connected. The blend shapes were connected to the rest of the character rig with the joints, bones and handles etc. The clothes were also wraped around the character using the wrap deformer, so when the character moves the clothes deform and move with the character body geometry.

For some reason when manipulating the handles in order to move the character's limbs etc this caused Maya to lag. Its is not completely unusable however it is annoying. I tried to solve this issue by decreasing the subdivisions of the mesh and deleting any unwanted components within the scene and deleting history. I discovered however that in doing this the connections between the bones and the character and the blends with the face were removed. Also the painted weight history no longer existed. So I could not use this function. I tried using delete deformer history and there were similar problems. When key framing and animating, I experienced lag and this was not a good way of seeing how your animation is working. I shall have to use the play-blast function instead in order to see how the animation is looking. I was also recommended by Josh to turn of any textures, animate in normal mode rather than smooth preview and turn off the visibility of the clothes. We discovered that the wrap deformer was using up a lot of memory as the computer had to calculate how the clothes were behaving every frame that it was being manipulated. This could be solved by painting the weights of the clothes on the character, however I am told that this would be extremely difficult. The thing is we should have modeled the character and the clothes as a single mesh rather than separate geometry. Due to the fact that Alex and I had very little experience when modeling the character we did not realise this would be an issue. Lesson learned and if only we had known. But what we have is workable and we shall make do with what we have because it is too late for any changes now. Remodeling the character would be out of the question as we would be severely putting us behind schedule and the project would be at risk. Quite frankly I just want to start animating.

We discovered that Josh's suggestion of turning off the textures, the clothes and animating in normal component mode rather than smooth preview did lessen some of the lag issues we were experiencing. We will need to monitor how the clothes are behaving on the character and if the body geometry is permeating the vest geometry. We will have to look at the animation via the playblast function to bypass the laggy playback when viewing the animation through the viewport and timeline.

Tara's Rig. I do like how she colour coded the handles to make the rig more easily understood and navigated.

Tara Rig Problems

Tara sent me her rig file to see if she could rectify our problem of merging the blends with skeleton rig and try and do a better job than Clym and improve upon his work. I opened up the file and the rig was horribly distorted, warped and stretched. The mesh appeared to have exploded upward. Im not entirely sure what had happened but I suspected that it was due to an incompatibility with software and the two conflicting Maya versions, however Tara did say that she would try using 8.5 which I assumed would be a safe bet. I have worked with 8.5 in the past and there were no problems. I could not understand why there would be an issue. 2008 and 8.5 are essentially the same version.

I agreed to meet up with Tara the following day to try and resolve the issue. Abs said he would come in and see if he had any suggestions. I may have to upgrade to Maya 2012 to avoid these recurring issues.

Here is a picture of Tara's rig .mb file.