1000 Cranes finished

So its been a stressful week or so for me recently, Anja gave me half a week to do just under half the movie in after effects, I roto-scoped so much stuff i cant even explain it, cleaned up about 30 frames altogether (sounds very little when you say it..but 15 minutes per frame is a long time especially for my poor wrists).

I managed to composite everything that was asked of me though and Create animation of the Crane in after effects using key framing and the graph editor, something i previously didn't even know existed in after effects.

I'll upload the scenes I composited and animated within a day or so, but now its almost 3am and I don't feel like doing it right now as id have to wait till its finished to click the "publish post" button.

Thoughts on this year (Simple project overview + Time_table

Well the year is over now, we handed in the final(ish) movie Friday just gone.

This is just a quick post to talk about the movies Ive worked on, this is in no way to insult any of my team members, I have respect for everyone I have worked with, even if the experience hasnt been quite what i wanted at all times.

Il start with Junk food and then speak about 1000 Cranes and then finally go onto The Light Of Us.

Its been the most stressful 2 weeks of most peoples lives, ive had to composite almost all of Anja's movie in just a few days, composite what we had of Chris's movie in just 2 days and set up god knows how many jobs on the render farm...Which brings me to my next point.

Render farm:

Everyone thought that once we started rendering it'd be done in just a day or 2 due to the immense speeds of the render farm, oh how wrong we were...The render farm is temperamental, it ignores commands at random points and sometimes even when it does finish ALL frames it just doesn't actually send them to any directory so they don't even exist anymore which in turn makes them useless.

Ive had a LOT of problems with the renderfarm, so serious that in the end we began rendering through Local computers instead, which due to the high level of texturing detail and lighting details, not to mention the memory needed to render the models alone, made rendering on Local machines a complete nightmare. Renders took litterally DAYS to finish individual shots and i must have re-rendered the opening scene over 15 times due to opacity not being included, sophies face turning invisible, textures being missing or even the renderfarm just failing hundreds of frames but not notifying me.

Im the only person in the group who knows how to use the renderfarm and i would have liked to show the others if we had the time, but unfortunatly we didnt so instead setting up the files for the renderfarm fell on the shoulders of Me and Louis, Louis is the only person who seemed to know the shots and frame numbers (though im unsure why he never thought to tell everyone else that way no one would have to rely on him so much).

We took on Ali (our producer) as a last minute animator but his stuff wasnt enough, and instead the stress fell on the other animators in the group, I was unable to help animate due to being so busy fixing all the textures and scenes whenever problems arose, setting up the renderfarm, and trying to keep Anja from breaking down.

In the Junk food movie I cant say anyone in particular is to blame as its everyone fault really, , I managed to keep myself busy with testing dynamics and texturing styles for the movie and Louis began modeling Sophie based off of a concept art he did for Chris. I'm not an animator myself so i cant really make an opinion on whether the animation was fast enough because it might have taken me 6 months longer for all i know.

unfortunately i didn't receive the Environments on time and then I didn't texture as fast as i was expecting too as i ran into a few small problems and needed a little advice from Chris at certain points. Chris created the textures for Sophie face I edited it slightly but in general the texture is Chris's work and that probably explains why it looks so awesome. Chris also taught me a great deal in Photoshop and im eternally grateful for that, he is a great friend and a fantastic artist, im really looking forward to going against him in the next upcoming Dominance wars, and almost anything else he enters ^_^, I might set my bar high in this respect but its a challenge il dedicate myself to.

I don't regret working with Chris as his movie has great Potential, my only and Main qualm would be that Chris is a nice guy, that sounds a bit strange i know, but he is a little too nice, he tries to avoid confrontation whenever possible and that probably led us to a few problems, though it probably also helped us avoid a more problems too. Whilst at the same time as i say that, even if Chris was angry at people its not as if he could force anyone to work hard/harder or even at all, the responsibility lies predominantly with each individual in the group, if you work on someone else s movie then its obvious that you are responsible for someone else's grade and that's not always a good thing.


1000 Cranes:

Working for Anja is extremely stressful, her movie has so much potential and her artwork and visions for the movie are extremely beautiful and im happy that we managed to complete the movie in time for hand in ^_^. If i could go back then i would probably still work with Anja as i just get on well with her, she isnt easy to work with due to being a little unorganised at times, but only a littl, but despite these slight flaws she is a great friend and she has one of the most important things a director needs "a constant passion" for her movie.

If it wasnt for her passion then she probably would have given up a long time ago, she might be bad at explaining things but the movie was completed and the final thing looked absolutely amazing and i have the utmost respect for her fine art abilities and abstract mind. I may not like her style of artwork ( this is personal opinion...i think its well drawn but its not pretty or elegant to me) but i can see that its amazing and i could NOT do nearly as good as she can.


Heba did the work eventually even if it wasn't always on time, but its a bad thing because Heba had less work to do because Anja kept saying "its fine its perfect" and then did it again herself, this puts more stress on Anja and unfortunately leaves other team members such as Heba thinking that the work they did so far was acceptable and then not being set much other work.

I was producer for Anja, I will admit that im not the BEST producer ever, I managed to set Simon and Heba work and have Simon complete it in time and im very thankful to Simon for the hard work that he put in. I spoke to Anja about dates and hand ins and i cant MAKE someone work faster and as director Anja is allowed the final say and she overrules everything i say anyway so all in all I only managed to get most of the work at the correct times and try my best to organise things.

I managed to composite and put together and even animate several sections of the movie that ammount to about 40% of the movie in total.

The Light Of us:


The work i did for Luisa in the 1st and second terms was fun and she is a great person to work with, like a normal director, she cant fully explain how she visualizes things herself, but that's perfectly acceptable and a perfectly normal trait. Luisa is a good director and a great friend, she is easy to talk to and discuss the movie with and I think working with her was very productive and During the 3rd term i felt very uneasy about the fact that i was now unable to help her with anything as she was creating the entire movie in after effects and because it wasn't fully planned out it meant that the workload could not be shared.

I got a little irritated when i modeled things that Luisa decided not to use, but in retrospect its fine i guess, Directors DO change their minds, its perfectly normal, not everyone likes it all the time (me included) but we just have to deal with it, Im sure if i made my own movie id probably change my mind every now and then too as its just a way of working.

I am yet to see her final piece but i am confident that it will be a great sucess and I am happy to have worked with such a strong and dedicated person.

What i Learned:

My main learning experiance this year was learning RealFlow for both Luisa and Chris, its an amazing Program and its been used on some of the most breathtaking special effects in movies.
I hope that my knowledge of realflow can help me get a job somewhere one day.
Another thing ive learned is that working with friends is a double edged sword, sometimes its great and othertimes it just makes things harder, so my aim for the future is to try to avoid working with friends if given the oppertunity, though of course this depends on the people and the project so i cant really be certain about anything.

I learned how to use the renderfarm i guess, im not sure if that counts as a possible learning outcome of anykind though, but this year had a few great lectures that ammounted to further insights into my future careers.

This wasnt quite the most professional project overview and yet it wasnt the worst, but this is how i feel and I dont think its right to insult anyone on a blog as its impersonal, so ive keep that to the very minimum and havent (in my opinion) insulted or intentionally offended anyone in any groups. This year has been an experiance I wont ever forget be it for better or worse.

Here is a timetable, its not the most detailed timetable ever, as this term was a very busy term for me and some of the jobs i did im not sure what to really call them i guess.
So this just shows what dates we saw tutors and what dates were organised for our groups, I showed up to every single group meeting we ever had and notes were taken regarding the work id done so far.

Rendering Woe's

Well...the past week and a bit have been a bit of a problem really, Rendering hasn't been going nearly as smoothly as we wanted it, due to Sophie having to be tweaked several times so she doesn't appear too dark or too plastic looking.

I started rendering the movie in different passes, diffuse, shadow, occlusion ect, though in the end its worked out that we only really have the time for a beauty pass and an occlusion pass, well actually im squeezing the occlusion in as without it sophie looks like a barbie doll, the shader is great, the model is great, just the lighting without occlusion makes her look like she is made from plastic.

I thought this would be a good oppertunity to upload the occlusion, the beauty and a combination just to show how it works, its not going to be detailed at all because i dont really have much time,what with compositing Anja's ENTIRE movie and Chris's at the same time.

This 1st image is the Beauty Pass (though she doesnt look very beautiful here just yet).

The image below is the occlusion pass.
This is the combination of the two, it adds some more depth shadows so sophie and makes her look a LOT nicer.
So this is pretty much how most of the movie is going to look, in this render here i didnt apply the occlusion to the environment but that doesnt really matter as its just to show off sophie anyways.

Information for the masses

This is just a quick little thing for anyone who might read this blog and is new to 3D, as this wont benefit our class as all the information in here is a low key version of what anyone in a 3rd year animation class like ours should already know.

This is something i posted on another blog not to long ago, i thought it might be informative so i thought id paste it here too for more people to see.

Textures

Most graphics hardware requires that your texture images always be a size that is a power of two in each dimension. That means you can use any of the following choices for a texture size: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, or so on (but unless you have a really high-end card, you'll probably need to stop there).

The textures don't usually have to be square: they don't have to have the same size in both dimensions. But each dimension does usually have to be a power of two. So 64 × 128 is all right, for instance, or 512 × 32, or 256 × 256. But you can't make a texture image that is 200 × 200 pixels, since 200 isn't a power of two.

To convert a texture from .tiff (or whatever the format) to .map just simply go to the render preferences (in Maya preferences) and tick the convert textures box.

Note: Maya software will NOT read .map textures as .map is purely for Mental ray. To render in Maya software you must convert the images from their original format to a .bot format. I am not sure how Maya hardware renderer works so unfortunately i cannot supply a format for that, but it does reply on your system hardware only so if your graphics card cannot support a texture size then neither can Maya hardware renderer.

Large jpegs over 6 meg can sometimes cause problems, for example im using a .tif file that is a total or 60 meg and it DOES cause Maya to be a little slower so i decided to convert the file to .map to speed up Maya a little.

Photoshop Textures:

For texture creation many people use Photoshop, some prefer to use Zbrush and other prefer to use Mudbox, but most people even if they start in a separate program, eventually come back to Photoshop to clean their textures.

Photoshop CS4 has a new POLYPAINT ability for 3d, though unfortunately this does not yet support layers and from my own personal experiences it doesn't look very nice as its in the early stages of development right now.

If you wish to texture an object in either Photoshop or Mudbox or even Zbrush...the object MUST HAVE ASSIGNED UV'S otherwise it will not work properly and you will get some very ugly results. Also any ramps or anything applied in Maya will not work in Photoshop, as the ramp is connected to the material and OBJ export ONLY exports the object and texture references, it exports UV's too but not the textures assigned to the UVS.

With an OBJ file there is a .MTL file, this is the MATERIAL references file, if you delete this then the OBJ will not know where to collect the textures from and all texture references will be ruined, this however does NOT delete UV's as the uvs are part of the OBJ file and MTL file is just for texture names and references.

On a quick side note...UVS and PSD networks are NOT related...a PSD network assigns a texture and a UV decides the texture coordinates, if the object has bad UV mapping then a PSD network will just look extremely ugly. PSD networks are created for the purpose of testing, so that when yo make a change it instantly updates in Maya, this is a fantastic feature for testing but not for the final result. Once all the textures are finished they should be converted to another format such as .jpeg, .PNG, or any other format you wish. Though PSD networks DO work when you render, but this is purely so that you can view your results faster and not for the final film output.

Unfortunately the MAIN drawback for PSD networks is that you cannot use any texture size, the maximum texture size that you can use in a PSD network is 2-49 x 2048 sized image, as the slider doesn't go any further and entering your own Numbers doesn't work. This image shows what i just explained. its unfortunate really.

Dynamics and particles:

Once something is finished and perfected with particles or dynamics they should either be cached (this saves it to memory and makes the file run a LOT faster then without a cache) or converted to key frames. Dynamics act different upon each individual render so they need to be converted to key frames and then edited if they aren't already perfect. This changes it to an animation and increases both render time along with playback and playblast time.

I didn't know about dynamics caching or about converting them to key frames and this caused a previous project of mine to look different in the render to in the viewport and i got a lower grade for it. I would prefer if my friends did NOT fail or get lower grades or even struggle because of something simple they didn't know, as sometimes when you spend all your time learning complex things...you don't notice the smaller things.

Bit of Break

Now that all the films texturing is done I have little to work for Junk Food these past few days.

Me and Chris set up a 500 frame environment Fly through for the Graveyard environment on Thursday but due to human error it failed, though we didn't discover that until the next day.
So on Friday i went in and fixed it all up and now it SHOULD be rendering that 500 frames through the render farm perfectly fine.

During that time ive had to get my images ready for Harvey, Which wasn't as simple as i was hoping, it took me a while to find out the correct sizes and render something that didn't go blurry or even 1% pixelated at re size. They didn't go bad or anything...im just really picky with stuff like that.

Today natasha sent me a scene containing some rocks that she modelled (go to Natasha's blog to see the post she has on those), and asked me to UV unwrap them and texture them.
So I uv unwrapped them quickly using XSI as im listening to music and the UV editor in maya seems to screw with my music player(s) (i need to reinstall a few things to fix this...fresh reinstall).
Once i unwrapped them i imported them back into Maya and assigned a texture and a Bump map.

The once plain rocks (the original models looked like rocks still) now look nice and Bumpy all over. This was like a 5 minutes job at most and the results are rather nice actually.


This is one of the shots i gave to harvey for the D&D animation showcase, im no good with lighting so i just threw a quick light behind the crane so that the cranes scaffolding would come across.
Though this shot does shot a 100% textured environment.
Tis is the 2nd shot that i gave to Harvey, just showing the 1st environment fully textured, though this isnt the final cliff face texture as thats all down to Chris now.

Sophie Animation Test

Well today i started to think that my animation folder is a little lacking, I have the after effects credits for Anja and also the entire scene with the feathers but i think i need more still...

So i came home and seeing as Photoshop was randomly acting up (causing me to be unable to texture anything now...) i decided to play about with Sophie's skirt a little, i thought that it would be nice if it animated in the wind. Its not for the movie as the movie is blend shaped whereas this is just done using the Lattice deformer and key framed, It took a while as I havent animated in a LONG time and animation is not my strong suit...So doing this did take me a fair few hours of work for something so simple...well initially it was too strong, then not strong enough. And now i did a nice in between so a small gust of wind is supposed to blow the skirt causing it to kind of ripple across the Fabric a little, then it calms and its all over and done with. I think i got to this result alright, Im sure there is probably a MUCH easier way to do this, with rigid bodies but i tried that and the skirt was stiffer then stone...so that wasnt nice at all...

Crane Textures

In the late evening i began to UV unwrap and texture the Crane, and a few short hours later it was completed.
The model was Created by Mehmet (as was every model in this scene actually) and textured, unwrapped by me.
Here are a few shots of the crane's this top snapshot is a render of the crane up close with another crane in the background as this scene contains several cranes layed about the Crater.


This is just a quick viewport grab to show how the texture looks in the viewport without shadows.
This is a render from just above the canyon showing how things look, i think things are looking okei personally, the color pallet isn't too varied but that's just the style of the movie, it all blends rather nicely together i think