Categories
Advanced & Experimental Maya

Week 11: Maya Development

This week we started up a new project, a Rube Goldberg machine, in an effort to familiarize ourselves with using Maya as a simulation tool and with physics in 3D development environment in general. To fully grasp how simulation affects our work and results we created a manual animation first of a ball falling down the stairs

As well I did some testing with Bullet within Maya.

Afterwards we constructed a simple 3D scene with objects that we designated as passive and active in bullet to function as physics objects. From that initial testing of the physics and changing object’s settings was done to better grasp how Bullet works. We were then tasked with planning out a Rube Goldberg machine which I have planned out here in my notebook.

The most complex shape of this system so far is a funnel which it’s inspiration can be seen behind it and I, quickly, modeled it. Seeing how quickly I could do it made me excited as to me it was a clear sign of my development as a modeler.


Though a lot of the shapes in this machine are quite simple this leaves room to focus on texturing the objects to bring together a clean and cohesive environment.

Overall the most difficult task for me this week was keeping up with the quick pace of learning in our class but I managed to do it.

Categories
Advanced & Experimental Nuke

Week 11: Nuke Development

As the start of a new term were introduced into more advanced elements of nuke. This week we focused on the 3D development aspects of Nuke. We learned about how to import models from Maya into Nuke, Nuke’s own texturing abilities and on plate flattening from the lens of the camera it was shot on but most importantly we focused on 3D scene construction via the 3D tracker. This was the most focused on aspect and of course the most difficult.

My finished scene

While managing how to use the tracker itself to track the 3D environment isn’t difficult using its output, the Scene+, was for me the most difficult part. Mainly the issue is figuring out how to read the massive output of it and discern what is and isn’t necessary for its final implementation on a clean plate. As can be seen I need to improve my visual organization as its difficult to follow.

Categories
Nuke

Week 10: Nuke Development

For this week we reviewed each other’s balloon project work and talked about what we had learned throughout the last 10 weeks, consolidating what we had learned. In addition I received some feedback to my video and the major one was the addition of sound which I had overlooked thinking we weren’t meant to add any sound to this project. Since then I’ve gone back and added it and re-rendered it. The work is presented down below.

Without VHS Presets
With VHS Presets
Categories
Reels

Term 1 Demo Reel

Categories
Maya

Week 10: Maya Development

This is my final output for the face modelling exercise. overall I’m very happy with my progress. While I can clearly improve, mostly with shifting weight around the face as a person speaks. I think for my first attempt at facial animation, especially with my own rigged and modeled face, it has come out quite well. I attempted to match the lighting of the original scene by using Maya’s lighting tools to match what I assumed to be the light set up.

Lighting

As he’s fully lit all around with only minimal shadows in the original scene I assumed a three point lighting system was implemented with fairly bright key, back and fill lights so his face is fully lit up. The light was soft as well so I made sure it was widely dispersed.

Alongside this to create the texture for his eyeball being rolled into the back of his head as I retextured the older eye ball texture that we had and split the UVs from the back of the model to the back of the eyeball creating the a fully rounded eyeball with a blank back rather than a duplicate of the front side.

Lastly I modeled his gums and added a tongue though neither of those can be seen in the render as the original actor really doesn’t show much of any, his face movements are subtle.

Overall the thing I struggled with the most during this was properly animating the face and creating all the blend shapes necessary to make it fully work. Maya gave me some issues itself as its UI isn’t all the easy to read when it comes to knowing what exactly you’re shifting at a given point alongside visual glitches.

Categories
Design for Animation

Week 10: Design for Animation

https://vimeo.com/784674622

Linked above is my submission for the video aspect of my paper. Try as I might I couldn’t get it to embed.

Alternatively my paper for the course was submitted online. I used the spare time over the holidays to re-read and further refine it and deal with any unclear sentences or structures.

Categories
Nuke

Week 9: Nuke Development

In class we focused on doing clean up work. Removing elements from scenes that wouldn’t be wanted by using the clone tools, trackers and color correcting. Essentially using all the skills we had learned up to this point to achieve as seamless of a result as possible.

Cleaned up video
Non-edited video

I have added a stain to the floor to continue my work on using the trackers in Nuke and getting a 2D object to appear inside the world. Alongside that I removed the text above the lockers and the fire alarm next to the door. All these changes should be obvious when compared to the bottom video. While I had some issues with the clean up, mainly forgetting to add the hold frame node and being surprised by my Rotopaint messing up as the timeline went forward. Though thanks to that mistake I have a better understanding of how the Rotopaint node works. The most difficult thing was the tracking of the 2D stain as some misplaced tracking nodes meant that it would jitter as the perspective was not correct likely because of improper node placement.

In regards to my continued work on my Balloon Project I came to the idea to create two opposing scenes. Based on the recent uplift on youtube for horror based around found footage or analog horror I wanted to create something similar. As a fan of lovecraft I created one scene as below of the valley with the ocean above it and shifted it to be hued in otherworldly purples.

With the other scene I created an idyllic comforting atmosphere with soft greens and the balloon. Mimicking something you’d see on a postcard

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/124037318687

With that then I created in premiere pro this version of the video.

This one only has the transitions to it however I felt that to bring more home the feeling of an analog horror sense I’d need to add some VHS effects to it. While I initially tried to do it in Nuke I had difficulty achieving it using color correct and grade nodes and couldn’t get the muted colors and softness that, at the least when one thinks of VHS quality, you see. So instead I made use of some presets I had on Premiere Pro and made this.

Categories
Maya

Week 9: Maya Development

This week we came to try out hand at animating the faces we had constructed over the last few weeks. We were told to get a short clip and I took one from Dune. Specifically from 1:17-1:21 when Thufir gives an estimate of how much the space travel costs them.

Dune (Denis Villeneuve, 2021)

Learning to use the animation tools alongside the blend shapes to create the mouth shapes was pretty difficult. The biggest issue was with Maya itself as it often would shift the heat, not display my changes or would show a different key frame after adjustments were made. This made working on these blend shapes very difficult as I would constantly have to stop to correct Maya.

My blend shapes
A render of one of the keyframes

While the mouth movements have gotten quite far along I will have to go back to add movement to other key areas of the face like the cheeks to add more realism to the animations. Skin is attached to the entire face so when one part shifts so does all the immediate areas especially around the cheeks.

Overall my biggest challenges this week were handling Maya’s unique issues and keeping track of what blend shapes I was editing and which keyframes were being adjusted.

Categories
Design for Animation

Week 9: Design for Animation

After having completed my initial draft last week for my paper this week was spent editing it. Currently my paper is missing its literature review however my plan is to write that after I actually have finished editing the main body of my paper. By doing that I will be able to have an accurate gauge of how many words I will have to write my literature review without compromising my main body arguments. I often shave off whole sentences on my second draft as with all my ideas now written down I can see how more efficiently to convey the ideas they present. The thing I looked at to the most in my rewrite was my citations, I paid careful attention to make sure I’d gotten the right structure for my citations.

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789048522996/html

Above is one of my books that I hade to make sure to properly cite. Luckily JSTOR provides citations for it’s books automatically

In class we mostly discussed the structure of the paper again. This time though we focused on all the things surrounding the paper such as the titles, chaptering and writing abstracts. For me structure is always the most difficult part of an assignment as I’m constantly worried about having missed a component. It might be I’ve missed numbering a page or my font size is off and that ends up stressing me out more than writing the actual paper.

Categories
Design for Animation

Week 8: Design for Animation

Blood Blockade Battlefront (Episode 1)

Following on from the plan I created the previous week I wrote my paper over the course of this one. The first draft has now been completed and is currently in need of a heavy set of revising as it is over the word count before I have even implemented a literary review of my sources. Pictured above is a scene that I analyzed for my paper on crowd shots and individualism.

The biggest challenge in this paper for me is proper citation and intext citing using the Harvard system. Since I’m very used to MLA I need to be careful that I haven’t actually cited in MLA format and have to make sure I use the proper Harvard style. For this I will likely go through my final or semi-final draft with my professor to make sure that I haven’t cited anything incorrectly.