Month: November 2022

Over the past 23 weeks, I was able to, I feel, successfully make a documentary which utilises and adapts the animated form to express itself more subjectively. Since animation is a medium I feel should be used in ways that go outside of what can be achieved with the live-action camera, I felt this to be particularly important when portraying interviews adapted from narratives of real people’s lives.

Final Film

Below is the final film, which presented 6 people’s experiences during the coronavirus lockdown in interview format. It uses visual metaphor to encapsulate how the home became an extension of ourselves during this time period by anthropomorphizing the interviewees as architecturally location-relevant houses.

Showreel

Below is the showreel, which delves into some of the processes that helped create this film and highlights the different key stages of production.

Critical Reflection

Retrospectively looking at my film, while I feel it achieved what I had initially set out to do, there are various aspects that I would change in terms of technique and visual presentation. My main regret and focus with the film is that the animation could not be as detailed as I wished, with a lot of sacrifice of secondary animation due to rigging technicalities and time constraints. With more time, I would have loved to explore exactly how each of the different characters would have moved and created individual walk cycles/ character animation tests to see how they are all personified through movement (i.e. blinks with curtains shutting etc.). Secondly, I feel there was a lot of potentials to explore more rendering capabilities and texturing. As mentioned some weeks prior, I wanted to explore how the toon shader may have looked with bump maps and different mesh deforming techniques to try and get the impression of further material, which is something I intend to explore in further depth going forward with my own personal modelling. I feel the blend of using a toon shader and additional texturing techniques is what really sells it within the style, and I look forward to exploring this further. For this film, I also feel I could have researched further into 3D lighting for Arnold as I struggled to adjust each individual environment to portray their time of day effectively. I feel this is particularly highlighted in the scenes at night, as I could have done more with the inclusion of lights with the stars and the moon.

Narratively, the piece seems to work together in humorous aspects, with a few hidden references to other characters and the idea they all exist in the same world; however, in future, I really wish to push for detail in my project, working far more extensively on creating detailed models to see environments. This included researching more into simulation techniques such as X-gen, as I was unable to render ‘wind’ simulations and collisions due to time constraints. I would have also liked to have done more research into particle simulations for the clouds and smoke, and seeing if this can be paired with more stylised aesthetics.

In order to research techniques and considerations further, I have created a list of books which may assist in furthering my knowledge in 3D for future projects.

Further reading:

• John Wiley and Sons Inc. (2013) Maya Visual Effects The Innovator’s Guide. Autodesk Official Press.
• Abishek, K. (2021) Immersive 3D Design Visualisation: With Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine 4. New York: A press.
• Beane, Andy. (2012) 3D Animation Essentials. J. Wiley and Sons: Indianapolis.
• Giambruno, Mark. 3D graphics and Animation: From Starting Up to Standing Out. New Riders: Indianapolis.

shot list

Nearing the end of all of my shots, I feel the use of this shot list proved immensely useful, especially in keeping track of renders and render times. This proved especially useful as several shots had to be re-rendered or are currently being re-rendered. One such shot is shot 13, in which there is a slight collision between the floor lamp and the wall. While this adjustment will most likely not be fixed in time for submission, I hope to rectify this discrepancy for my film going forward.

For the final shot of the film, I really wanted to utilise the lighting and time of day to act as metaphorical implications that support the spoken word. The last words of the film are “because if we’ve been through this, there is no way we can’t get through more”. By making the setting a morning Dawn scene, not only does this add more visually interesting implications that the character has been abducted all night is is now returning home by morning, but it also symbolises a new beginning and the end of a period of time (in this instance, lockdown itself). I wanted to end the film in this lighthearted and hopeful way to leave viewers optimistic about the future. 

Due to the fact I have spent the past few weeks animating these characters, When approaching this shot, I felt very familiar with what to do and how to clean it up so that the process went a lot quicker. Initially, during the descent from the alien beam, I wanted to make the character flip upside down and fall on the ground. However, I did not have enough frames within the audio to sell that convincingly therefore decided to make the character land quite gracefully with only an impression of the weight returning after the beam had been retracted.

Trying to get a Dawn break look within the lighting of the scene proved to be quite tricky, with the initial sky dome light appearing more like a sunset in its darker, more orange saturation. Looking at references of the morning, I noticed that there is generally more of a “pink” saturation to the sky, with strong orange rim lighting on clouds that reflect from the sun. I feel in order to get the dramatic last shot, I will need to add a strong orange rim lighting effect to make everything blend more effectively in the scene. 

As highlighted in the playblast below, I attempted to experiment with how the sun rays would move and affect the lighting; however, going forward, I feel this will be much too complicated due to the fact that animating the mesh lights creates a lot of render times that will prolong my complete the whole film in time for the exhibit.

Since the camera pans back to the sky, I wanted to put the plane that has been frequenting the scenes into the shot once again to make a direct reference to the previous shot’s characters. Below indicates the finalised animation, including camera motions.

Now that all of my shots are animated, I put any remaining shots within the university-associated render farm. While I was initially having issues surrounding the use of it, which was prolonging my rendered content from being completed, in the last week, I got assistance and was able to get it working and ready to go for the heavier shots such as this one.

During the editing process, I explored different effects to try and make apparent the forced recorded nature of the interview and bring that into three-dimensional space. Typically during Amateurish interviews (such as my own), there is a lot of camera shaking due to a lack of tripod equipment and visual indications of the camera used to record (such as borders on old bus cameras). I also feel with the inclusion of phones into everyday social relevancy, there is a lot of video footage that would not be done on professional cameras. Trying to explore this within the realms of my one film, I added additional borders to accentuate the technology used to “record” and “capture “ these anthropomorphised houses. However, I felt these effects were too jarring from one another and distracted viewers from the main content and animation, therefore scrapped the idea.

Since the film intends to be displayed in an exhibit, I wanted to enable accessibility options, so in order to do this, I added some subtitling so that the content is clear in case any hard-of-hearing people wish to view the piece and have a contextual understanding. I also feel this will be good for exhibit purposes as only two people can use headphones per screen, and it allows space for more people to watch and understand the animation without inherently needing to hear the sound. While the sound does enhance the piece a lot, especially with the use of the Indexical voice of all my friends, it is not necessarily needed to get the idea across. 

Shot 16

Moving onto shot 16, the animation involves the ‘lack’ of gravity, so to speak, so the character is floating in mid-air.

The main thing I wanted to get right before starting the animation process was getting the environmental set-up and lighting correct since this is the key feature of the shot. My initial step was to create an Arnold area light that would act as a spotlight. As similarly utilised in my skeleton project last academic term, I adjusted the exposure and the spread to make it have a smaller focal point on the character. However, due to the lack of flooring and mesh for the light to fall on, this effect does not appear very obviously like a ‘spotlight’ therefore, I returned to the process I had created earlier in paring this light with a cylindrical cone that has heavy transmission applied to it.

Putting this cone in, paired with the light, created exactly the effect I was looking for and that I used in the previous shot. While I want it to look stark against the background, I feel the lack of anything in the back does not add to the effect and will need an additional AI skydome and directional light to create a strong rim lighting effect. I also wish to add stars as mesh lights similar to that of shot 11.

When Initially using a ‘transparent’ aistandard surface, it created a warping effect which made the house look like it was in a cylinder of water rather than a beam. Therefore I changed the material to a lambert as this proves more simple and effective as a ‘light’ beam.

When previewing the test render, I noticed that the strong directional light was casting a shadow onto the cylindrical shape, which is supposed to represent a strong beam of light. I feel this effect would bring viewers out of this perception slightly and ruins the overall look. In the cone meshes attribute editor, I was able to untick cast and show shadows in render, which removed this effect quite simply. During the render process with the shots that contain the “alien abduction” sequences, I will be sure to look carefully and bare this in mind. 

In order to get the area light to follow the cylindrical shape when panning across the screen, I used a parental constraint so that it would not get left behind and ruin the lighting in the render.

The next most essential step was making the whole environment look convincing as a night sky, with layers of clouds and stars that would add an overall depth to the shot. In order to get the mesh lights to reduce noise, I had to ensure that the samples for each individual light were up to about 5-7, so that render glitch discrepancies didn’t happen.

When modelling the stars, I wanted to add a little bit of variety once again to the purely round spherical mesh lights, so I created a ‘North Star’ Style of the model to help stylise the background further. I also feel with the addition of extra lighting will add reflections and additional lighting that will aesthetically enhance the render.

As previously mentioned, since this shot did not have much gravitational weight for the character, I had room to work with how I would stylistically make the character move. To get the feeling that they had a slight lack of control, I wanted their legs to hover in the air, almost as if they were swimming. I also wanted them to float up and down as if the ‘laser beam’ was fighting to work with gravity.

Improved render

Revisiting the first shot, I noticed there were several aspects of the render that needed improvement. First of all, during this render, I did not add rim lighting to the AI toon textures, which caused them to look bland and not blend into the overall scene. As you can see in the image below, on the right is the older render, and on the left is the newer render, which I feel fits much more cohesively together as a film. I also removed the secular from the roof as I felt that unless wet, roof tiles do not generally glisten to that extent, and It proved to be quite distracting from the rest of the animation.

Shot 17

The last Shot I did this week was shot 17, which is the second to last shot of the whole film. In this shot, one of the characters who were previously down the hole uses a ladder to climb to the other side of the cliffs, in which the two characters stare at each other across the gap.

Since this section relies on somewhat comedic timing, I felt that getting the camera pan correct was the initial step, as the camera needs to move in sync when the dialogue says “from a distance” to help exemplify said distance between people.

Below is the finished shot, which I feel works successfully in achieving the comedic timing of the additional character reveal. However, I feel if I had additional time, I would work more on the motion itself, as I did not have a lot of time to clean the animation in the graph editor, so for the most part, it appears very jerky and rushed. Going forward with the animation in future, I will rely less on Maya interpolative feature to create smooth animation, even under time constraints.

Shot 12

Beginning shot 12, the only key elements within this shot I needed to model were the cardboard boxes. I Aimed to keep this low poly to speed up render times due to the lack of time constraints and also to upkeep the simplicity of the visuals. I made the box with the ability to open the different ‘flaps’ of the tops so that I had the potential to add secondary animation also, Arnold’s counter renders filter will display the toon shader lines, giving the impression of the model being a cardboard box and not a smooth square.

In order to sell the height and dramatism of the shot, I wanted to make sure the camera moves from panning upwards to panning downwards to get the impression that the tower is taller than it is. I also wanted to give the impression that the tower was very unstable and insecure, much like how the situation over lockdown was. Especially since this part of the dialogue details trying to find makeshift workspaces to work from home in.

Much like the earlier shot involving the globe, I wanted to have a very simple background that accentuates the foreground. I also used the same colour background as the earlier shot (Shot 7) so that these two would match aesthetically and tonally. The key part about the lighting was to make sure that there was a strong directional light that would make the rim lighting visible on the edges, so the foreground assets would blend more seamlessly with the background. I also needed a strong light so that the facial expressions were visible.

Below is the finished shot; I think the concept for the shot works well and gives the impression of cluttered chaos. However, there are several aspects of this shot I could improve. My initial comment would be that the motion of the lower boxes is too stiff and uniform in motion. Looking at the reference video below, there is a slight offset, which I feel is due to the uniform way I parented the boxes, I was unable to create this effect.

Shot 13

Similar to shot 9, shot 13 is located on the interior of the house, and I followed a similar method and used the doors at offset times to accentuate different parts of the speech in a more visually dynamic way. For example, when the interviewee says “Its just finding the routine to do” I used the left door, and when he says “um” quite quickly after that I used the opportunity of having two doors to stress the jaw bonces and not have the ‘mouth’ move very quickly open and closed like it does in some shots which looks unnatural, even for a talking house. Improving on this shots animation however, I feel I could have done more with eyebrow movements because I feel at times they moved to robotically and uniformly, even though the implied material of them is bricks. I think it is important to find a middle ground between natural expression and the context of the implication of material the expression is being carved out of (I.e skin or Bricks).

Re-rendered shot

As highlighted in the previous shot, the lamp in the original render was slightly clipping through the wall, so to fix any of these discrepancies, I re-rended this with the lamp moved to a more appropriate location. This will aid in improving the host quality and selling the animated world in a more professional light.

Shot 5

For shot 5, I really wanted to explore the environmental terrain by keeping an aesthetic consistency of using spherical shapes. This was to accentuate the juxtaposition of child-like ‘safe’ looking aesthetics with quite darker, more serious tones of people discussing their experiences with the lockdown. In the initial environmental model, I thought it looked quite bare in spite of the use of X-gen, and I felt like it needed the background to further accent the key foreground elements.

Looking at the Tuscan landscape, since the house itself is based on the architecture in the area, many of these rolling hills feel very gentle and green. Translating this into the environmental design, I tried to create this smaller, enclosed area utilising the reference imagery to accentuate the isolation and feeling of confinement this particular interviewee experienced.

As seen below, the initial render test had a similar colour scheme to what I wanted to achieve, but there is no colour in the background, and the frame is highly overexposed in a way that washes everything out. Due to this lack of colour in the sky, I am not able to create rim lighting that would blend all the mesh and textures into the scene together. After the animation process is complete, I will then work on adjusting the lighting of the scene to be reminiscent of a warm Tuscan location.

After creating the environmental model, I moved on quite early to the animation stage, and the first process of lip sync was the ‘jaw bounces’. While In Kenny Roy’s book it states that you know, think about the way words are being said rather than just simply moving eh mouth in time with the audio, I still wanted to keep a level of stiffness to sell that they are houses (2014).

Below is the finished rendered animation. Due to the heavy use of X-Gen, lighting and mesh the render time took several days before it was complete. However I allowed contgency time for the week so that I gauge how long an intense environmental scene will take, especially going into shots 11 and 19. Shot 11 and 19 also have the inclusion of heavy lighting that is replicant of a ‘laser’ beam. Retrospectively looking at my animation in this shot, I feel that I could have spent more like smoothing the motion out as it appears very jerky at points.

Shot 8

For Shot 8, I wanted to replicate an environment that would be rememniscent of side scroller layouts in video games, especially that of the super Mario franchise. By using this association, especially with the kinetic sign that points towards a ‘hole’ it feels symbolic of the distance many people experienced from reality during lockdown, and also using a bright colourful aesthetic to distract and juxtapose from the spoken content.

Using the previous tutorial of creating X-Gen Grass, I made a new description to enhance the ground more and to match aesthetically the previous shots. I also feel this will help accentuate the ‘underground’ area.

Lighting

Since I wanted this scene to be brightly lit and to have a ‘sunny’ appearance that would contradcit with the darker, dingy looking ‘hole’. Since one of the interviewees states how they were stuck down the “hall” with a ‘random guy’, however since the audio quality isn’t the clearest and the interviewee has a slight accent, it also sounds slightly like ‘hole’. playing with this is decided to make a visual joke out of it, which led to the inspiration of the environment.

With the addition of the rim lighting, the character and environmental assets blended into the scene much more seamlessly, and due to the blue saturation of it, achieved a ‘cherrful’ sunny look that I was aiming to achieve.

When initially lighting the underground area, it was very dark and nothing in the scene was visible. In order to get the space to be enclosed to get a top down lighting effect, I had to create an enclosed piece of mesh that wasn’t open like a side scroller of a ‘dolls house’. This meant that I had a slightly limited space to work with the camera however added to the overall lighting.

Due to one of the characters being a ‘skyscaper’, I thought I would utilising interior lighting implications to add an additional light and glow to the scene, to make it stand out more. I also feel this utilsies the character designs to a better extent.

Below is the finished shot, which I think has the inclusion of a well timing camera move. However, reflectively, I think that the walking animation is not very neat and does not quite match the timing of the audio and therefore the camera. At times there are also noticeable knee-pops which indicates I should revisit the graph editor and ensure everything is smooth. I also feel i could have played more with the weight of the upper body, as it is massively disproportionate to the legs and could have been a really good opportunity for a more interesting, weighted follow through. I also feel that some of the motion is too ‘floaty’ and doesn’t convey the right amount of weight in general. Since this shot has a very long expected render time, and it currently still not finished, I will add these improvements to be added provided there is additional time for me to work on it.

Shot 11

Using the same environment as in shot 5, I changed the environment to create a night time setting that would appear more striking and allow for more contrast when visualising an ‘alien abduction’.

Trying to ehnace the setting and accentuate the time of day, I created some stars in the sky and turned them into mesh lights with a very high exposure so they would appear to be ‘glowing’. While I considered and testing making the beam of light a mesh light, It would not have created a transparent mesh, making the character not clearly visible.

A key part of this scene is the lighting aspect , since I wanted to add this very dramatic green hue that would illumate the scene. In doing this I added a very high intensity are light and used the spread so that it covered essentially the entire grass. The green environment also helped to enhance this overall.

In the video below is the completed animated shot, in which I think the eye darts and eye animation was quite successful given the lack of things to make character expression with. However, again I feel some of the motion is a bit too stiff and also in some parts too floating without clear character motivation. If given the time, I aim to improve this along with the earlier shots.

References:

• Roy, K. (2014) How to Cheat in Maya 2014: Tools and Techniques for Character Animation. Focal Press.