Big Catch

So nearly six months from the start of production, my Advanced CG/Crowd Simulation animation for Drexel is done. Actual production only happened between late September through very early January. The past couple of months have just been waiting on the audio. If you have seen my reel you've already seen like a third of the animation. So in this case done means I am not going to work on it any more. Its actually really hard for me to watch. Very nearly every scene has issues I wish I could have addressed. Ultimately though, its time to move on. I learned quite a bit throughout the production of this piece.

I have been making animations in Maya for about a year now and I've pretty much stuck to that software (with help from Nuke for some basic compositing). This animation I decided to take on two new major software packages. I had to use Massive (for crowd simulation) to fulfill the requirements of my Crowds class. I also jumped into Houdini for the smoke simulations. I owe a lot to Dan Bodenstein for getting me started with that. I wouldn't have finished the smoke without his help. To get started in learning Houdini, I used a lot of Peter Quint's videos on Vimeo.

The audio and score was made by John Avarese. John teaches a lot of audio classes in the Film Department here at Drexel. He does really good work, including feature work. I was really excited to have him on the project. Definitely check him out: John Avarese.

Anywho, give my animation a look and let me know what you think!


(Click on the picture and watch it in HD)

Updated Pandora Rough Cut

All shots have been finished to a degree. I didn't get a chance to make too many changes to the rendered shots I had last week. Instead, I went ahead and finished most of the animation. All that is left, aside from rerendering the entire animation fixing all of the problems, is to get in some run cycles for the smoke monsters chasing the little dudes. Additionally I have to render out all of the smoke. You can see on the shot of the close up of the hero opening the box that the smoke doesn't match up to the geometry. I suspect it is a difference in the way that cameras are handled between Maya and Houdini. Some of the middle shots won't make too much sense the way they are now. I know. I wanted to get the Maya renders out as soon as I could so that I could see them in motion and see what I need to fix.



The only nagging worry I have is that I still have not found a way to comp the shadow monsters coming out of the columns. Chris pointed me to "Deep Camera Maps" in Houdini but it took over an hour to render one frame... and there isn't much support on the topic in the Houdini community. I haven't had much time to devote to it but obviously I'll get to it in the coming week.

YouTube Link to a larger version of the above.

Updated Previs

I updated the previs with rendered shots that I animated this weekend. Watching it right now I realized that I left out a shot of the previs. There is a reaction shot after the shadow monsters emerge from their smoke columns. Also I haven't updated the camera on the opening shot or the shadow monster crowd reveal, the one non rendered one after the columns hit. I am working on that shot now.




The second shot is probably too long. I showed it to some people and there seemed to be some agreement, and I agree, that I didn't really need that last shot. I could have the "No Fishing" sign reveal on the shot preceding it but facing the camera and towards the water.

If you have any crits I'd be more than happy to hear them. I'll be AMDO over the course of next week. I'm trying to have all the major animation done before Thanksgiving. Hopefully giving me two weeks for rendering and comp.

No Shaders

My Massive sim imported into the opening scene and rendered:



Obviously they don't have a shader but I'm not sure why... I have a shader from slim that should be rendering but Maya can't find it for some reason.

Smoke Column Viewport Render

A viewport render from my smoke sim. The shot opens with Fisher opening up the box (he hasn't been animated yet) and the smoke columns shoot out and land. The Shadow monsters haven't been simmed out for this shot yet and they won't be visible until the smoke hits the ground.



Massive is going fairly well. I am pretty comfortable with my opening town sim when the townspeople are just milling about. Other than the one agent that decided to stop, turn directly towards the camera, and wave for about 30 seconds, the agents behave as expected. The "panic" mode part of the sim isn't perfect yet. They tend to ignore the painted boundaries and run right into the water or through buildings.

URL for the video if it doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MRqjYoY3SY

Massive Trouble

By Sunday I had finished the bulk of my animations and then on Monday I wanted to get them into Massive. When I switched from shadow monsters to townspeople for the Massive sim I tested out the townsperson rig in Massive with a quick animation. He seemed to hop along fine. When I imported my run into Massive it looked ok at first glance. The animation played properly but was jumping back t the origin. No problem, I thought,just need to set it up to loop. So I got the animation trimmed down and blended so it looked smooth. But when I took the camera off of "follow" mode I quickly realized that something was terribly wrong. He would run forward through the loop but when he reached the end of the loop e would get pulled back. Its important to note that he would get pulled back but not to the origin. As it turns out his axis moves slowly along in the z direction while the character moves quickly. So when he reaches the end of his loop he gets yanked back to the axis, which has only moved a little.

I spent a great deal of (frustrating) time yesterday trying everything that I could think of to fix this but nothing seemed to work. What drives me crazy is that the hop test worked properly with no issues but the animation that I spent two days on won't work.

In other news, here is a render of a couple of shadow monsters.



*EDIT: OK, they work now. Apparently I was just doing it wrong.

Massive Cycles

Now that I've officially switched the crowd from the shadow monsters to townspeople I had a whole new set of animations to get ready for Massive. This is a playblast of the carver rig going through the following cycles: standing still to run, run, run to walk, walk, walk to stop, 5 or 6 idles, and standing still to walk. Additionally I have turns for both walking and running, and a walk to run. This completes the basic motions for the towns people crowd. I will add more as needed.



For the remainder of the week, I'll be working on getting smoke sims set up and getting my completed animations into massive.

Shadow Monster R&D and Test Renders

In Massive class last Wednesday, Chris mentioned that exporting deforming geometry in fbxs was going to be a problem. I needed it because I was going to be rendering the shadow monster crowd sim in Houdini after doing the volume simulation on it. As a fix he recommended breaking apart every limb and section on the shadow monsters and then parenting each individual to the rig. After doing this, animating a stand up sequence, and then running a volume sim on it I decided that the smoke covers up most of the noticeable seams on the joints and this will be a workable solution. I went ahead and animated a run and a walk with the broken limb rig.





The animation isn't perfect on the characters but it should be sufficient for the shots that I need. There are a total of four shots with shadow monsters in it. The first is the shot where they materialize out of the smoke columns, the second is where they assemble, cheer and then begin their run, the next is the birds eye view of the monsters causing mayhem in the town and the final shot is where one shadow monster chases a townsperson across the scene. Only two of the shots are crowd sims. I decided that it would be easier to hand animate the shadow monsters materializing from the columns. Since the frames will have to be reversed, trying to fit Massive into the effect will be far more trouble than it is worth. I'll be able to place the massive agents to match up with the hand animated characters using Chris's Houdini script. I've got points in Houdini with the normals facing in the right direction in preparation for placing them in Massive.

I am getting pretty happy with the smoke effects. The shader needs to be tweaked a bit. Right now there is a tiny bit too much fine noise. Maybe animating the offset of it will help to make it look a little more believable.





Higher quality versions of those are here and here.

I've modeled three more skull variations bring me to a total of 10 and probably the number of shadow monsters in my crowd. The two curved horned human variation will be the Hero shadow monster.







Dirtied up Fisher's vest a little.




Rendered a sequence from the first camera to test the water's wave speed. The water looks like it is moving a bit slow with the amplitude as high as it is. I'll need to refine this a bit more. Additionally there is some flickering in the water on the right side of the clip that I'll have to look into.



A note about the farm. I rendered this sequence on the farm and I was getting 1 to 3 minute renders. However, when one of the render machines got to a certain point (frame 40 or so) it just gave up. It didn't stop rendering but my render times shot up to 10 to 20 minutes and eventually 4 to 5 hours for no reason at all. The those frames are no different than any of the other ones. I suspect if I was to kill the job and then restart it the remaining 2 frames would take two minutes to render instead of six hours.

Fisher Texture Update

Thought I'd update this real quick... thinking about dirtying his vest a little.

Texture Tests

Two quick renders of the environment with some textures and basic lighting. The render settings are pretty low for them and the textures are only at about 60 - 70% complete. I will use matte paintings for the more distant backgrounds in the compositing stage at the end of the project. I'd like to get some haze and some particles floating about the air to give the scene some atmosphere and of course volume rays if I have time.



A render of the fisherman with a slightly updated texture map from the Carver. I might add more fur in different parts of the body like the arms and chest. Obviously the pipe and hat have yet to be surfaced and I am planning on modeling him some makeshift glasses.

New Skull

I modeled this last week but just now remembered to post it here. I'm planning on doing two or three more skulls to add variation to the shadow army. I'll probably get in a deer skull, a bull skull, and maybe a cat skull. I'm making these shadow parts interchangeable to be fed into Massive to vary up the armor.

Shadow Monster Rigging

The bones have been placed and I am currently working on skinning him. Maya 2011 has new skin weighting tools so I decided to switch to 2011 for just that part. I've already tested out exporting the weight map and bringing it back into Maya 2010 and I feel comfortable that this is the best way to complete the skinned rig. Luckily the skinning doesn't have to be perfect as the character will be flat shaded and blurry/smokey.

Pandora Preproduction: Scene Modeling

The scene is at roughly 85 to 95% complete. This is a rough estimate because the rest of the modeling will be dependent on how the renders look once there are textures and animation in the scene. The rest of the set modeling will be done on an as needed basis when I get to the animation and rendering stages.

Pandora Preproduction: Refined Previs

Taking into account many of the critiques I got over the last week I refined the story a bit. The previs is still fairly rough but is sufficient to show the shots in sequence.

I received a lot of good advice over the week but ultimately I decided to keep the actions simple. My weakest part is my character animation so I decided to minimize that aspect without ruining the story. The biggest change was keeping the character on the initial part of the dock after he releases the shadow army instead of returning to the end of the dock and continuing to fish. Instead he watches as another villager runs by in fear from a shadow monster. This is what prompts him to kick the box off the dock. The end closes with the fisherman looking at the "no fishing" sign that was just revealed by the shockwave of a big explosion.

I had received some good feedback about modifying the story so that the fisherman was unaware the whole time of what he unwittingly unleashed upon the world. However, upon reflection on how long I would need to complete the character animation I soon realized that it was not within the scope of this term.

PREVIS

Pandora Preproduction: Story Change

I wasn't very happy with my previous story idea. I didn't like the lead in and didn't know how to resolve it. I would have had to model and rig two different characters and that seemed an impossible task by myself. Therefore I changed my "wrapper" story and kept the Pandora's box core.

The hero is a slightly dull town yokel who is fishing at the start of the animation. He is starting to nod off when he gets something on his line. After a bit of a struggle he gets pulls a small evil looking box out of the water. He opens it and black smoke spills out in tendrils. Everywhere the tendrils land a shadow monster appears. Once assembled, the shadowy figures rally and go about the town, breaking things, setting buildings on fire and generally causing great mayhem. There will be a birds eye view of the town incorporating a massive simulation of the shadow monsters running through the streets and breaking things. Fire will sprout up on the buildings in the far shots. The hero is stunned by what he has caused and subtly kicks the box into the water and returns to his pier to fish wincing every time he hears an explosion or crashing sounds. The final shot is the hero sitting down in the position that he started in except in the background the town is on fire. Once he sits down a piece of debris falls from a "fishing" sign that he had been sitting next to the whole time only to reveal that the sign had said "NO fishing."

Story Boards:















PREVIS

The advantage of the new story, aside from an improved story, is that I will be repurposing the Carver rig and model. I will remove his glasses give him a hat and some other props and modify the texture but the weight painting will remain the same.

I am happy with this story and have no plans to significantly change it.

Pandora Preproduction

I like to use mythology for inspiration when I begin thinking of a story. It gives me an idea and story elements to build from. For my combined Advanced CG and Massive project, I decided to go with the story of Pandora’s box. According to the myth, Pandora is given a jar and then told not to open it. The jar contained all the evils of the world and when she opened it they all escaped and all that was left in the jar was hope. I am adapting that basic story to fit my own needs by changing Pandora into a male anamorphic chipmunk creature and a jar into an ornate box. I have no thematic reason for changing the character from the original story beyond that I will be able to make a cuter more sympathetic chipmunk in less time than I would be able to make a human woman.

Hero Character:




Evils:



The “evils of the world” will be represented by shadowy figures wearing various skeletal armor. When the box is opened, tendrils of smoke will burst out of the opening. Each of these tendrils will form a column that when they touch down to the ground one of the Evils will emerge. The actual body of the Evils will be geometry rendered out with a constant black shader applied. In Nuke I will blur and use various noise or 2d smoke effects for an alpha of the character pass. Ideally the bodies would be volumes but the simulation time and storage would be unreasonable for the scope of the project. On top of the bodies of the Evils will be various parts of armor or skeletal objects including skulls for heads. These objects will not be blurred or shadowy. I will use Massive for the crowd shot of the Evils closing in on the Hero and to randomize the skeletal parts that they wear. There will be one main Evil that I will hand animate. For the smoke tendrils/columns I will use Houdini volumes emitted by particles following a curve. For reference I found almost the exact effect I am looking for in the Harry Potter trailer. 1:50 at this LINK.





In all there would be 4 distinct effects.
1. Smoke billowing from the box.
2. Tendrils following a curve.
3. Smoke on the impact of the tendrils.
4. The Evils dissolving into particles.


Storyboards:












PREVIS


Problems:

Scale is the main problem with this project. Each individual element is not difficult but there is a lot to handle. There are 4 main effects. I have done simple volumes tests in Houdini and I think the tendrils and smoke will be fairly simple to set up. The dissolving people should also be easy. The difficulty will lie in integrating these elements with the characters in massive and getting them to render properly. The second problem is character animation and creation. My storyboards and previs feature the Carver from an earlier project of mine not the character I described. I do not think that the Carver fits the story, he is an older character, not one that would be searching around ruins. If I decide to go with a new character that could potentially add a lot of time to production. The solution I have to that problem is to enlist outside help for the rigging of both characters. Modeling and texturing is added work but both are jobs that I do quickly, efficiently, and with pleasure. If I can not find someone to rig the characters I will switch back to the Carver and the story will take the hit. Overall scale is the last problem, I am not sure I can finish the entire piece by the end of the 11 weeks. Once I have a better idea about how I will handle the aforementioned problems I may decide to cut it down to a trailer type of animation. Right now I feel the story and character need more development at the beginning of the animation to get the viewers to care about the character.