Tim Schweizer's Development Blog
Just another myblog.arts site

Month: February 2023

Categories
Maya

Week 15: Maya Development

This marked the first week in our next 4 week development project: The Oddly Satisfying animation. While the title of the project seems to be quite vague it is based on a series of animations that can be found online that have become somewhat generified. An example of a compilation of such animations can be found here.

Oddly Satisfying

While they can vary wildly in tone from realistic to abstract in both content and color palate I have decided to go with a more abstract piece as to further differentiate this from the last project where I aimed to create a more realistic looking piece.

While I was stumped for a while on what to actually produce I eventually had an idea for a machine that I would deem oddly satisfying that I did a quick sketch of.

The basic idea would be that a ring flows down from the top, onto an arm which then has the ring slide, just perfectly shaped to fit, into the tube and from there the animation would loop infinitely. The abstract comes in as the machine doesn’t resemble anything all that realistic and its purpose is entirely left to interpretation and the oddly satisfying elements would come from its motion down the arm and the tube.

Initial Prototype

While I eventually figured out how to create an initial prototype I had to modify quite a bit as the perspective of the machine revealed more of it than I had originally planned and while I wanted there to be only one central piece that all arms connected to I, after animating it through a combination of edges converted to lines and line constraints, that the donut would have to phase through 3 other arms to slide down the first arm. This would be too egregious of a breach of realism and turn the animation off from being satisfying. Another issue I had was, to fill up space, it was recommended I added a plate that the tube could come from and make the scene more visually interesting

Loop not possible with unsymmetrical design

As I hadn’t made this first version in the center of the world or with any precision I was left with the choice to start again and be careful setting it up or attempt to make it symmetrical by hand. After trying by hand I realized it’d be useless to do so and instead recreated my progress in a new scene where I was careful to make everything symmetrical.

Initial State
Animation Moving

Another facet of this week’s class was MASH. A powerful motion graphics system in Maya. While I experimented with it I did not ultimately use it in this current version of my animation. This is something I want to change as I should try to learn as much of Maya as I can so this weekend I will watch MASH tutorials to get a wider grasp on what MASH can do so I can implement it.

I also made some slight modifications to the camera work of my Rube Goldberg machine and re-rendered it. As my instructor Nick pointed out that my cut goes against the main idea of Rube Goldberg machine animation where it is meant to be a single continuous shot to show off cause and effect.

Categories
Collaborative

Week 4: Collaboration

As part of my initial research I created a padlet document to serve as a mood board that would be open for all my team members to contribute any pieces they felt I should be aware of in guiding my future modelling work.

https://padlet.com/tschweizer06202211/cat-kaiju-mood-board-5p0d7cwx6rg8t4aw

The link to the padlet is posted above.

Alongside simply finding pieces of work by others about neofuturism and brutalism I also found design blog posts about XCOM 2’s city design. Since this was one of the inspirations that I was given by the team I figured reading and understanding these design blog posts would help me understand what I was looking for in my work.

https://xcom.com/news/art-of-xcom-2-war-of-the-chosen-abandoned-city-concept-art/

https://xcom.com/news/en-the-environments-of-xcom-2-advent-city-center/

https://xcom.com/news/en-the-environments-of-xcom-2-small-town/

In addition to these blog posts I found two articles that could help me in understanding the design philosophies of the two different architecture styles.

First was “The Aesthetics of Science Fiction. What does SciFi Look Like After Cyberpunk?” written by Rick Liebling posted on Medium. This document goes over several architecture’s connections to sci-fi and our changing vision of the future but does directly speak about Brutalism and it’s representation in the genre giving me more information to base my designs on.

Secondly was A century of Futurist Architecture: From Theory to Reality by Farhan Asim and Venu Shree which directly speaks about neofuturism’s design principles, namely a focus on ‘modern’ inventions in technology for its material such as glass and lightweight aluminum with a focus on abstract design.

I also looked into how to make use of the Shatter function in Maya via its online documentation and youtube tutorials which was simple to understand and should be easy to implement into my design pipeline in future. This youtube video provided me with lots of information and demonstrations.

I also watched a few tutorials on rigging to refresh myself and get my accustomed to rigging an entire skeleton as opposed to just a jaw and face as I had done last semester.

This video provided me a lot of information on rigging and animation and how to set up constraints and controllers so that animations need not be done directly with the joints which would be an issue. As modeling the cat would be my first major foray into organic modeling I looked up some quick tutorials online and this one taught me a lot about subdividing my models after creating basic shapes and extensive use of the crease tool to enhance both my control and the organic look of the model.

I also looked at some quick tutorials on low poly modeling for cats to get an idea how others in my field have done it which I can then use to help me when constructing my own. One such tutorial was this.

Lastly I also created some models this week at the request of my teammates so they could have more to present in an upcoming report they had to give. The models are shown below.

Brutalist big
Brutalist small
Neofuturist small
Neofuturist big

The models still need improvement and in future I think what will give me the most trouble is scaling the models appropriately. As I have not had to make multiple models in separate scenes that in the end need to be next to each other in a separate environment I am not used to having to worry about scale.

Categories
Careers Research

VFX Careers: Runner

One role that interests me as a VFX student is the role of Runner. Having heard about it vaguely and in passing for a long time left me with a very confused understanding as to what a Runner is. When I asked people, some would jokingly say ‘They get coffee’ and leave it at that leaving me confused. Others would say that they have their hands in doing a little bit of everything inside of a studio and this would leave me no less confused as to ‘what’ a Runner’s role is and more importantly how this role functions as an entry role into the VFX industry.

From looking at Screen Skills website to gain an initial understanding of the role it seems much of what I heard before is accurate to what a Runner does. Their main role is to essentially be a jack of all trades within the studio or department that they are employed under so what a runner does exactly is dependent on that studio or department. The role either lines you up to work in production management or in a VFX artists role. The major commonality from studio to studio with the Runner, as supported by another VFX job resource website ‘My First Job in Film’, is functioning as the in-between. You are responsible for looking after the office, keeping it organized and tidy as well as ‘running’ different materials and messages between departments. The latter role being your biggest function within the studio hence the title of ‘Runner’. Of course, this does also mean you grab plenty of coffee, tea and other things for the studio as your co-workers are occupied with other work.

Handing off documents to others

A blog post from Simon Deverux from Access VFX titled ‘Getting into VFX: Runners’ also outlines, in their own eyes, what a Runner and how it contributes to the a growing VFX’s artist’s career. It outlines that part of the Runner’s job is also to, through training shots and aiding other artists, learn the myriads of tools being used in the VFX trade. What those tools are is entirely dependent on the studio. A runner for a game studio may end up learning how to use Unity or an in-house engine. They will pick up further modelling and texture skills. A runner for a studio that focuses on body tracking software for character animation would likely pick up skills in using the technology, both in setting up and recording it then later in using that data and cleaning it up.

Something that I hadn’t considered about the role that is vital to learn, especially early on in your career, that the Runner is a great role for developing is organization, team-working and communication skill. With some much to do a Runner must learn to organize their time. By interacting with so many different people in the studio they will quickly learn how to communicate with different people. You must as a Runner work with many other people and in an industry reliant on team work developing that skill, which one will inevitably do, as a Runner is vital to future success in the VFX industry no matter which direction it leads you in, be it games, mixed media, television, film or commercials.

The role of a Runner is a lot clearer to me now thanks to the various resources I found online and while the jokes and jests about the role do reflect, to an extent, the reality of the role of a Runner this information has made the role much clearer to me. Not only the literal function of the role but how this role will contribute to my personal development as VFX artist and to my career in the industry.

Categories
Nuke

Week 14: Nuke Development

This week we focused on advanced components of EXR via their multiple passes that allow us extensive lighting controls in Nuke. Alongside that how using different methods we can grade those different layers safely without affecting other portions of the grade or compromising the alpha. For homework we had to use the different passes to grade a car into a scene and make it look realistic. This was my result.

Ungraded
Graded

This was not too difficult as it was only a still though I think there’s certain way it can improve. Namely I’m not sure if the lighting is correct on the top of the car. I think that maybe, depending on distance, the lamp on the bus stop directly behind that car should light up the roof of the car a little but I’m not too certain.

The hardest thing for me to do this week was re-arrange my scene from last week as essentially the way I had done it, thinking it would be simpler with the merge, resulted in a scene that would only be fixed if I implemented 3D geography and matched it to the bricks and such because the cards, being 2D, did not have enough geometry for it to function. Having to re-do, re-arrange and re-think how I did the scene was difficult as its painful to have completed something and then have to essentially restart.

Ungraded

Graded

As can be scene there are still some issues with the roto, namely as it gets closer the quality of the image becomes blurry because of where I took the projection. It can also clearly seen to be flat as well so this would require me to, at a later point in time, go back and make adjustments to the roto. This however need only come later as there are more pressing things that require my attention.

Categories
Maya

Week 14: Maya Development

This week was spent mostly correcting the issues present in the UVs from last week which was quickly solved thanks to Nick’s aid in fixing some outstanding issues with my model. Namely adding creases to keep the model in a more refined shape and inverting normals that had become flipped during modeling. Past that what was most engaging about the week was rendering. Toying with the different setting to make the most clear image I could alongside keeping render times down. As I had 672 frames I aimed to have each frame render in around 30 seconds as to keep the render time down to 5-6 hours as that would be able to render in our class time so I wouldn’t end up using the computer while another class needed it for their studies. Below is the final output.