Tim Schweizer's Development Blog
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Author: Tim Schweizer

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Nuke

Week 8: Nuke Development

This week we focused on Planar tracking and its uses when it comes to replacing objects in scenes. After learning how to properly use the planar tracker we were tasked with using it to replace a poster in a shot. Below is my work on that.

I replaced the poster in the middle behind the pole. Reviewing it now I can see that the mask on the pole needs some readjusting as it clips into the pole itself. I will address this at a later time when I have more time to work on it as I suffered a loss of progress when my hard drive failed. As a result I had to completely do the work on the balloon festival from scratch.

Though it did give me a chance to rethink my scene and figure out what I actually want to do with this project as I was inspired from the work that I saw during the previous week’s class. This will be the first shot of the scene and I am trying to make it as idealistic and postcard-esque as possible to contrast another shot I will split in later.

We also were made aware of concatenation and how important it was by going over several examples of broken concatenation resulting in blurry scenes.

Categories
Maya

Week 8: Maya Development

This week I had a unique technical issue occur. My hard drive that I had been keeping my latest work died and as a result was set back to the work I had done the previous week. As a result many quality of life updates to the model I had performed were lost and while I was able to re-do some of them there are issues that I need to re-address later when I have more time. My main focus was to catch up and re-do the work we had done on Monday. Namely learning how to make use of the Set Driven animation tool.

Using this tool we added animations such as the mouth contorting in such a way when its open that the skin moves and resembles more so what happens to a real face.

The biggest challenge this week by far was dealing with the loss of my progress and work and having to redo it all. It does of course re-enforce my learning and teach me how to deal with these situations should they occur in the workplace.

Categories
Design for Animation

Week 7: Design for animation

This week in class we had group discussion about our topics and helping each other with any issues or difficulties people were facing in research or topic development. For me the thesis I have settled on is: “How Blood Blockade Battlefront uses crowds as symbols of the city’s liberating potential”. This would function through the lens of the ludic nucleus as defined by Manuel Castels alongside with an analysis of the series through the genre lens of the city symphony. I have a plan already written up along with quotes from my secondary sources that I will use to back up my argument. I am quite on track when it comes to my paper.

Categories
Nuke

Week 7: Nuke Development

This week’s classes focused on 2D tracking and making use of multiple trackers to create accurate 2D pins for surfaces. Along that we made use of trackers to stabilize footage to make it easier to work with and then reintroduce the instability later to properly incorporate all elements.

With that our home work was to replace the screen on a phone. We also had to design a screen to replace it with. While again my rotoing improves I still see obvious issues with it that I need to discuss and figure out as rotoing for me accurately is difficult. However matching the movements for the screen swipes was pretty simple to me. I also added a directional blur to the screen as it moves up as it makes it look more realistic.

Lastly I have a initial thing for the balloon festival. It is still very early and there is more I want to add but I need to find out how. One thing I want to add is, something from after effects, time ehco so that my balloon leaves behind copies of itself. I am finding it difficult to create multiple copies of one thing and integrate it into the scenes. Another is more visuals that affect the entire screen like either noise, grain or some kind of VHS looking affect.

Categories
Maya

Week 7: Maya Development

This week we continued to refine our face model by learning how to rig it using joints and skinning. While the joint work was a decently simple the skinning proved to be far more difficult. Trying to get the right distribution of weight to make sure the joints only affected the appropriate parts of the head were difficult. Especially getting it to work on the finer points of the model. Even with zooming in I found it difficult to paint the weight accurately.

In addition to that we also made teeth for our person’s mouth.

Another big development specifically for my model was with the help of Nick I learned more about how to use Maya’s tool set to fix the ears on my model and get far more accurate UVs as a result. Specifically using a combination of edge loops and the multi-cut tool to create better edge flows and removing verts that had far too many edges attached to it. Those verts with too many edges attached was the main culprit behind my UV issues.

Categories
Design for Animation

Week 6: Design for Animation

This week we focused on the formal elements of preparing for our paper, mostly on quoting, paraphrasing and argument construction. For me what was most useful from this class was learning about the Harvard Citation format as I have not used that citation format before and need to learn it. The other aspects are mostly a good refresher as I have come off a BA in Film Studies so I am very used to writing papers of this nature. We were given a task to paraphrase a quote provided.

The original quote: The authenticity of a documentary is ‘deeply linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images are linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images bear evidence of events that actually happened, by virtue of the indexical relationship between image and reality’

Horness Roe. A. (2013) Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

My paraphrase: Honess Roe writes (2013, Animated Documentary) that the authenticity of documentary relies on the perceived notion that it’s images are authentic and represent evidence of an event that has occurred. 

I have also begun rewatching Blood Blockade Battlefront and taking specific notes for the show based on my thesis which I have refined a bit more. I mention how BBB uses crowds to convey Manuel Castel’s ludic nucleus but specifically I want to explore and show how BBB uses crowds as a symbol of the city and the city’s liberating (IE transformative) nature that the Ludic Nucleus idea explores. The definition I use for Ludic Nucleus is the one provided by Lawrence Webb in The Cinema of Urban Crisis : Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City “the city as playground, and ultimately, for all its contradictions, a place imbued with liberating potential.”

Categories
Nuke

Week 6: Nuke Development

Moving on from Rotoscoping we focused this week on color grading and correction. We went over the basics of how to properly do so in nuke with un-premulting and premulting images again to both maintain image quality down the pipeline as more and more changes are done to the footage and to avoid it affecting the entire scene. For our homework for this week we had to take a fighter jet and correct it to better match the sky its in.

I think that while there are some parts that can be improved for my first time it’s gone quite well. While I’m not totally sure what specifically is holding it back what I do think I did well on was matching the shadows and keeping the light consistent. As while I originally thought the back half should be more orange when I checked references online I noticed that that didn’t really happen from this angle. The reason being that since the sun is low and we have an upward angle facing down all that light would be blocked by the trail from this angle.

Categories
Maya

Week 6: Maya Development

In this week we continued to work on our face models with a focus on two areas, texturing the face and creating and texturing eyeballs for our face model. Alongside that we as well got more experience when it came to using the shape editors to create differing states for our model

Eyes closed and then opened

Texturing was a new challenge as previously our texturing with UVs would have involved only simple shapes however with something as complex as a human face I came to see the important of being very careful when creating the models as the ears had several issue where multiple faces were linked together at a single point on the UV map due to my modelling of the ear. This made manipulating the UV shells very difficult and while I managed to get it to work in the end it has taught me why and how to be more careful the next time I start modeling.

Textured head alongside its UV map
Clearer image of Textured head

In addition to this we were introduced to Mudbox, a texturing program bundled with Maya that allowed us to edit the texture directly while it was wrapped around our models head. This allowed me to fix some issues with seams being apparent on the model around the back of the head. As well with adding skin to areas of the eye that were previously textured to resemble an empty eye socket instead of eye lids.

Lastly here is a render of my most current model

Categories
Design for Animation

Week 5: Design for Animation

We went over this week on animated documentaries going over a massive list of them and viewing them. This led ultimately to the question of “Can animation be a documentary”. While some people believe it to be a grey question of half yes half no, I unequivocally state the answer is a Yes. While some people raise an issue that animated documentaries shouldn’t count as documentaries because of the nature of using drawings and not ‘recorded reality’ via a camera this to me is a strange argument to make. Traditional documentaries that make use of ‘reality’ via camera recordings are as prone to creating falsities for the sake of drama or education. Documentaries have been know to reconstruct footage in the editing room to make separate events appear connected cutting between a predator and its prey that in reality were filmed neither at the same time nor in the same location. Documentaries frequently make use of reenactment to convey long since gone events using actors, props and sets and while it is filmed and we see real people one screen it is no more ‘real’ than an animated piece. Even more fundamentally than that is that one cannot ever truly capture reality. When a camera is pointed one way it will miss out on everything else. Things such as distance to subjects, timing, movement of a camera all inform the audience of something and can create relationships that objectively do not exist like a close up of a tiger’s face causing the audience to connect with the creature because of how cute it is.

However Honess Roe points out that Documentary is linked to the notions of realism, not realism itself. That to be a documentary one must merely convince their audiences that was is being seen is ‘real’. Animation can provide that just as well as recorded footage. Using Maitland’s ‘Tower’ as an example it recreates the events of the University of Texas shootings using animation. It recreates the scenarios through the various reports and testimonies of the events. There is your grounding element to ‘realism’ and with that what one sees unfold on screen carries the weight ‘notions of realism’. While of course some audience members could struggle to identify with it was much as they would a traditional documentary that is no reason to deny animated documentaries their status as documentaries. Their imagery is no less real than that of a traditional documentary.

Categories
Nuke

Week 5: Nuke Development

I had apparently misunderstood the nature of our last assignment and have gone back and improved on it. While it still has somethings not covered like a few instances where the shoelaces are not roto’d out properly given my current skillset with manually rotoing and the time I need to dedicate to other aspects of the course this is the best which I can currently do.

In addition to that we learned more about the tracking abilities of Nuke with the tracker node. It functions very similarly to AE where it tracks an object in 2D space (Though AE is capable of 3D tracking as well) and using that tracking data one can stabilize roto elements in a frame so there is no need to manually adjust complicated masks.