Houdini

Summary: This week I continued my work in learning Houdini. The main issue that I was able to over come was exporting FBX files to Houdini correctly. I also figured out how to export alembic files to Houdini.

Pros: I actually exported a full scene correctly from Maya to Houdini.

Cons: Alembic and FBX in Houdini both have their strength and weaknesses.

Hours: 4

Rigging

Summary: Nothing too new this week for rigging. I finished up dyer. I added all the finger controls/ sdks. I fixed the ikfk blending. I also added in eye controls.

Pros: At this point the rigs are finished! Expect fixing some weighting issues and any other issues.

Cons: None other that hand sdks take a long time to make.

Hours: 10

For next week:

Prepare for the presentation.

Move onto the face rigging.

This week was another successful one!

It’s always reassuring to see more and more cards move over to the “done” stack! This week we made significant progress with our animation blocking, finished UVing the characters’ clothing models, met with Professor Dave Mauriello to figure out Shoggoth topology, prototypted a shape-shifting Shoggoth rig, finished a new cut of our Animatic, added extra functionality in the hands and eyes to Danforth’s rig, created hairstyles for our characters with VRayFur and XGen, and figured out what deliverables will be included in our end-of-term presentation.  Phew!

For our weekly check-in on Tuesday, Pat will be talking about his Shoggoth research and explaining the innovative nature of our shape-shifting jelly monster. By next week, we plan to show finished characters (with hair, clothes and textures), have a new animatic cut (with help from Film faculty Brian Baker), finish the characters’ body rigs, show more animation progress, and have an update on the city environment.

Task #1: Danforth: Hair & Fur

My major deliverable this week was to create all the hair and fur systems for Dyer and Danforth. I created hair cap geometry for the characters’ hair, eyebrows, hat and upper lip, then ended up using a few different methods for hair generation,.

For Danforth’s eyebrows, hair and furry hat, I used VRay fur. VRay fur renders very quickly and is easy to work with, but does not feature any artisan grooming tools and relies on ramps for styling. VRay fur also can’t be simulated, so it’s best used for very short hair that can be animated with noise. I used a VrayHairMtl3 shader for the hair and eyebrows and a VRayFastSSS2 shader for the hat fluff.

• Positive Stuff:  For a first pass, I’m pretty happy with this! The eyes can use a bit more scruffiness and his sideburns need a more natural taper, but those are easy fixes.
• Problems / issues: Still not happy with the hat fluff. For some reason, even when I crank up the sides on the VRay fur, the hat fluff still seems triangulated when close up. It works nicely for ranged shots, though. We’re also looking to see if the SSS shader can be substituted with a hair material with very high transmission to save on render times, but we’ve been having some trouble with the anisotropic specularity.

Hours: 8

Task #2: Dyer: Hair (xgen & nHair)

Dyer’s hair setup was a bit more complicated than Danforth’s, largely due to his very stylized, swooshy hair. His eyebrows are VRay fur just like Danforth’s, albeit a bit less polished as I spent less time on them. They’ll be cleaned up in the next draft.

Dyer’s hair and mutache were created in xgen, a plug-in which I’ve found to be simultaneously rewarding and infuriating to work with. Xgen is buggy as hell and crashed upwards of 20 times while I was trying to groom the hair primitives, but the grooming tools are soooo easy to work with. I eventually got a result I was happy with, exported the xgen primitives as curves in a .mel file, and used the curves to drive an nHair system. I haven’t played at all with the simulation settings; I was just concerned with creating a static hairdo that I was happy with for this week.

• Positive Stuff: I think Dyer’s hair swoop came out nicely, for a first try! I still need to run these images past the team for critique, but I think we’re off to a good start with these.
• Problems / issues: I need to clean up the hair systems a bit more (specifically the eyebrows) and rework the textures so they’re a bit higher fidelity. I also need to look into eyelashes and methods of blending the hair follicles into the scalp better.Hours: 10

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS:

1. Refine hair based on critiques
2. Texture clothing from Dave
3. Render character turntables! (Major end-of-term deliverable!)

I missed last week’s PPJ, so tonight’s will be something of a double feature.

Last week, I worked with Gabe and his merry band of animators to get all our scenes ready to go with cameras, display layers, proper heirarchical organization, etc.  I also worked on styling VRayFur for Danforth’s hat lining, and figuring out how to best re-generate our city in Maya.

Layout / Scene Preparation (last week)

• Summary: Finished placing cameras in our scenes, cleaned up the outliner, made sure everything was named sensibly and consistently, and set up references and display layers as per Gabe’s request.  All our scenes are now ready for our animators!
• Positives: I’m free to start detailing our environments, do render tests, etc. now that the animators have what they need.
• Negatives: None.
• Hours: 4-5

VRayFur

• Summary: I helped Val out with designing lining for Danforth’s hat.  It’s supposed to be a wooly / cotton lining (see above), and I tried creating it using VRayFur.  The results were promising, but not quite what we were going for…  I think a blend of displacement mapping or particle scattering with a thin layer of fur for detail will be our best bet, and will test it this week.
• Positives: Creating the whole lining using fur is surprisingly fast, both to tweak and render.  And though the look this produces is not quite right, it can easily be combined with some other elements to make a much better appearance.
• Negatives: Nada.
• Hours: 2

City Re-Generation

• Summary: The original drafts of the city were created using a procedural generation script for 3DS Max, and unfortunately Maya doesn’t have anything similar.  I spent a while looking for a good procedural solution in Maya, something that would allow me to easily update building models and control height, distribution, etc.  After hours of searching and testing, the most promising tool appears to be XGen, though it’s somewhat notoriously unstable at the moment…
• Positives: With XGen’s expressions and mapping system, I should be able to broadly control how the cityscape generates, and hopefully export the final product as a particle system or a bunch of instances.
• Negatives: XGen is very unstable (it crashed on launch several times while I was testing it), and that really scares me.  I want to be sure this won’t cause any problems during rendering or for our animators before implementing it.
• Hours: 4

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Stress-test XGen, with anticipation of using it for cityscape.
2. Spruce up the city and temple scenes for our end-of-term presentation!

Rigging

This week I fell a little behind because I went into hospital in the beginngig of the week for a back injury.

Summary: To this point I finished all that need to be put into danforth for the body rigging. Unless anything else comes up, that being rig issues, the rig breaking, and helping gabe with the weighting. This week I finished all the SDKs for the hands. I switched the IK FK switch so they can be blended between one and zero. I rigged the hat. The hat still needs a little work on the weighting. Finally I added controls for the eyes.

Pros: Danforth is very close  for facial rigging.

Cons: Need to catch up and finish dyers extra rigging.

Hours: 10

 

Houdini

Summary. I continued my weekly study of learning Houdini. This is mainly for advanced animation but anything I learn in Houdini I believe will help in the future when I begin working on effects.

Pros: I am slowly starting to understand different parts of Houdini. Excited to try implement. Houdini in the project

Cons: Still a lot of Houdini to learn.

Hours: 3

Did some more animating and finalized the clothes. I’m no longer worried about the rigs, as Anthony and Gabe appear to have solved every problem.

Modeling Clothing

• Summary:Finished modeling and UVing the clothes, including the sim meshes
• Positive Stuff: Everything went smoothly
• Problems / issues: Nada
• Hours: 6

Animating

• Summary: Got two more shots blocked in
• Positive Stuff: Stuff is going pretty quickly, so I think I can get ahead of the game over break
• Problems / issues: Wasn’t able to spend too much time on things this week with three papers due for other classes, so I’m a little behind.
• Hours: 6

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Animation
2. Animation
3. Animation

This week was yet another spent refining the Animatic. We finally have reached a place where we’re comfortable taking it to the editing faculty and getting feedback. Pending their commentary on the timing and one or two more versions we should have a completely finished animatic by the end of this week (assuming we meet with the faculty).

Animatic 

I continued to focus on the animatic this week as we’re quite close to finalizing our timing. One of my main goals for the end of this week was to apply several changes that would let us get the most out of our Animatic. These features include a running shot timer for the entire animation, a shot timer for each individual shot and the shot’s scene title clearly displayed. In addition I’ve also been experimenting with Shoggoth sounds and have been steadily building a sound-scape to assist in blocking in folly later on.

Pros- A lot of progress has been made and the video is slowly becoming a more and more useful tool for moving forward.

Cons- Still waiting on a response from the editing faculty.

Hours Spent- 8

Motion Graphics

I’ve began work on the motion graphics portion of our animation by assembling rough comps and experimenting with camera angles. I’ve also been conceptualizing the ending credits as well and have been in contact with a third party 2D artist to discuss procuring art for different solutions.

Pros – Good for figuring out placement

Cons– A lot more to do especially with ending credits

Hours Spent – 2

This week, I continued blocking some animations, but I also met with some faculty members, got some great advice, and restarted the shoggoth.

Shoggoth

Summary: I met with Dave Mauriello this week, and we discussed how to approach the shoggoth. I walked away from this meeting with 2 pieces of paper covered in doodles and some new ideas. I ended up having to throw away the previous shoggoth. This was a depressing realization, but I can still use it for overall look and it was good sculpting practice. The method we are now going to use is something far more fluid for the animators, and it will be built and rigged in a way that I have never done before.

Pros: The new method for modeling and animating the body parts is incredibly accurate to the look that we had originally, and should be manageable to model, rig, and animate.

Cons: I had to ditch the previous iteration as I approached the creature from the wrong angle and I am unable to salvage parts from it.

Hours: 8

Animating

Summary: This week I was able to block in 4 more shots. I am more or less on track with these, and they are turning out as I would expect. We also received the final audio, so now we can time the actions to the correct audio, not just our best guesses.

Pros: The shots are getting done on schedule, and having the final audio really helps with the process.

Cons: Due to the audio changing, I will have to go back and change the timing of the shots from previous weeks, as they will no longer match up correctly.

Hours: 7

Moving forward

1. Model any props as needed

2. Continue Animating

3. Set up a base mesh for the shoggoth

Animation

Summary:   This week all I did was animate.  I’ve almost finished another 8 of my shots. (premature blocking I mean).  We are trying to get a rough blocking pass done by the final fall presentation so Dave, Pat, and I have been working hard to get that done!  In order to block I’ve had to go through all our reference footage and then cut together the parts that I want to use. I also helped Anthony out a bit with the rigs but I didn’t quite get to weight painting this week, I plan on polishing the weights within the next couple days.  I’ve also started thinking about a plan for next quarter’s in terms of animation schedule.

Pros:   I am making lots of progress and the more I get into it the less I’m worried about getting everything done.

Cons:   I’m probably going to have to go back in, when we start polishing, and re-block in some of my shots because I don’t quite like how they look and I’d like to record some different reference.  This isn’t really a con, but this seemed like the best place to put this.

Hours: ~8

Upcoming:   My main job is to keep animating but I also plan on polishing up the weights for our characters.

Glad to report that we had another very successful week! This week we learned that our rig referencing solution works quite well (we were able to update the rigs with modified joints and skin weights after animation was already in progress), we got some killer audio performances from Dean, Connor and Andrew (newly casted as Professor Lake), and our shot list has been updated to record all of our progress and make prioritizing shots much easier. Anthony has been working hard to fix up the body rigs before moving into facial rigging, and we now have an awesome hair solution (courtesy of Jeremy Fernsler) that allows us to use xgen’s sculpting tools with a VRay-compatible simulation system. Fun fun fun!

Next week you can count on finished hair styles, textured clothing, more animation progress, a new animatic cut, and an outline of what we’ll be presenting at our end of fall presentation on December 2nd. Stay tuned!

This week, we started blocking in our animations. We also set up a timeline to make sure that all of our animations are finished on time.

Shoggoth

Summary: Spent a few more hours fixing the tentacle and working on the topology of the body. I am meeting up with Dave Mariello this week to go over exactly what we need the topology to be so the shoggoth can do what it needs to.

Pros: Made some progress with the topology and I’m pretty happy with it.

Cons: Since I haven’t met with the teacher yet, I can’t move forward with this.

Hours: 2

Animating

Summary: I was able to push this animation a lot farther this week, and I was able to block in 4 shots and set up my next 3. We also created a timeline for ourselves that took the 21 shots we need to do and split it up into manageable chunks for the next few weeks.

Pros: Both rigs are fantastic and working smoothly, and the fact that everything is referenced allows all the animations to update readily.

Cons: When danforth was updated once, his head and elbows all broke, so I needed to spend an hour getting them back. These delays were expected, however, and aren’t really a major issue.

Hours: 10

Moving forward

1. Model any props as needed

2. Continue Animating

3. Get the shoggoth set up

This was quite the productive week! Pre-production is in full swing and as such I’ve been busy this week. In addition to wrapping up layout and finishing the first draft of the Animatic, the stars aligned and I was able to record final audio from all three of my actors including all grunts and sighs and ooh and ahhs.

Final Audio – https://vimeo.com/111811854

Summary– I brought all three of my actors into the studio and ran through the entirety of the script, making adjustments where needed. Additionally, I hauled an EX camera into the studio to gather reference for our animators.
Pros- The audio came out great and the reference should be super handy especially for some of the more intensely acted portions of the script

Cons- I brought two cameras to capture with but one was missing the micro SD card so I had to make due with one (which was still more than sufficient for my goals).

Hours Spent- 8 hours

Animatic

Summary- I finished the rough draft of the latest Animatic and integrated the place holder audio. For Tuesday I will be integrating the final audio as well as additional motion graphics to give more life to the storyboards.

Pros- Stronger visual direction, good length, good sense of timing.

Cons– Could be more highly animated, a problem which I hope to solve by Tuesday.

Hours Spent – 5

Layout

Summary-  revised scene layout based on critiques and comments from animators.

Pros- Better space for animating, clear channels of communication

Cons- None

Hours Spent-  4

Total Time Spent – 17 hours

Task #1: Shot list 

I spent most of my time early this week focusing on our shot list, and it is now finished! We have a total of 75 shots in our animation, 65 of which require character animation. This is a fairly huge task, of course, but I’m confident that we’ll be able to get it done. Gabe, Dave and Pat (our 3 character animators) divided the shots up between them, and we intend to be finished with blocking by the end of the term.

The spreadsheet I created is color-coded by scene location and contains fields for shot ID, shot type, storyboard thumbnail, camera movement, description, dialogue, shot owner, priority, notes, lip sync, character animation, and duration. The duration field will be updated with each new iteration of the animatic to ensure that we stay on-target and to inform shot priority.

• Positive Stuff:  Having the state of our production down in one place will make it much, much easier to prioritize and assign tasks in the future.
• Problems / issues: I still need a time-tracking solution and a way to track progress on each shot. For now, Gabe is having the animators write out a schedule for themselves to ensure that the blocking is done this quarter, but we’ll probably need a more robust solution down the line.

Hours: 10

Task #2: Hair Workflow Testing

Summary: I spent a few hours playing around with hair this week after Jeremy Fernsler covered his process in class on Thursday. Although my hair tests were very ugly (hence no screenshots), I loooove this workflow.

• Positive Stuff: We now know how we’re doing hair! This week I’ll be working on the hair for both Dyer and Danforth. I’m going to sculpt the hair in xgen, export the curves as a .mel file, use them to drive nHair, and render the hair in V-Ray.
• Problems / issues: Render times are going to spike with the hair included, but I’m very happy that we found a way to use xgen’s grooming tools with vray so I’m okay with the hit.

Hours: 3

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS:

1. Create hair for D&D
2. Texture clothing from Dave
3. Render character turntables! (possibly push to next week)
4. Create outline of end fall presentation

This week I finally got to animate!  I’ve also worked a lot with Anthony, assisting him with weight painting, and double checking things so we can get these body rigs done and allow Anthony to get started on the character’s faces!

Animation

Last week we got the story boards and proxy rigs finished, so we have stated animating!  On Monday Dave, Pat, and I met and divided up all the shots and we made sure we all got an even amount of action shots and acting shots.  We each have about 21 shots to work on, which is pushing it, but I’m not worried because we have a very competent team.  I’m also going to be keeping on top of all the animation to make sure everything gets done and done well!  We have set up twice a week ‘crits’ but since we are only in a rough blocking stage we arn’t going to have actually crit meetings until we have more to crit.  Right now our two day a week deadlines are primarily to keep us on track in order to get our entire short blocked out by the end of term.  I’ve also gotten 5 of my 21 shots roughly blocked in this week.

Pros: It’s cool to start seeing our animation come together.

Cons: Well, there is A LOT to animate.

Hours: 7 hours

Rig Stuff (weight painting)

On top of animating I have worked a lot with Anthony this week with our rigs.  Dave, Pat, and I had played around a lot with the proxy rigs before we started to animate, but some issues came up that we couldn’t have foreseen until we reached this point in the process.  Anthony has been doing a great job addressing all these problems this week!  I’ve also done A TON of weight painting to help Anthony keep his sanity.  We want to make sure the rigs work perfectly and I’m confident all these little issues will be resolved within the next week.

Pros: We’ve got some really nice deformations happening

Cons: Painting weights is time consuming, but necessary

Hours: 8

Upcoming Tasks:

1.) Fine tune the weight maps of our characters

2.) Block in another 3-5 shots

3). Model boots (meant to do that this week but other tasks took longer than initially projected)

Finally animating whooooooooooo! Also finished up some clothes stuff.

Modeling Clothing

• Summary: Finished Danforth’s jacket and pants, just need to UV them and get them off to Val.
• Positive Stuff: Should still be easy to Dyer, got the jacket and pants modeled
• Problems / issues: The jacket is accurate and should sim well, but I’ms till not quite sold on the design. Want to pitch another option to the team next time we meet.
• Hours: 9

Animating (Whoooooooo!)

• Summary: Actually started animating! Got two shots blocked in and am working on two more.
• Positive Stuff: Actually moving forward with things, and we’ve got a plan to get everything blocked by break
• Problems / issues: Some slight rigging issues as we move from the proxy rig to the smooth-bind rig, but Anthony and Gabe are hard at work sorting them out.
• Hours: 8.5

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. UV clothing
2. Block more animation
3. Hair sculpts?

Rigging

Summary

Being that I was not getting great weighting from last week and to save time gabe decided to help out this week with rigging. The way things worked out is that I worked on base weights for both danforth and dyer. I got all the weights to an alright state, then gabe went in and did all the fine tuneing. I am really happy with the result of the weighting that gabe did. The weights will still change as the animation progresses. Gabe also added in a extra joint to help with the squash and stretch in the body.

Along with weighting I worked on some rigging fixes. The animators found some issues with the rigs that I went in and changed. The setup for the neck control was not as good as I hoped it was going to be. Therefore I went and changed the neck back to a regular Fk neck setup. I also fixed the fk controls in the arms. I set up the controls up so the clavicle controls are on the same rotation axis as the fk controls. While gabe was weighting he saw some joint placement errors, so I fixed those issues as well.

Finally I worked on hands. It took me some time to find a good setup for the hands. I was able to set up the hands in a way that will let me go in and add in extra control in the future. As well I avoided using sdks and used the connection editor, which will also save time in the future. The rest of the hands will be finished tomorrow.

Pros – It was great working together with gabe, he helped a lot. I am excited to start the face rigging.

Cons – Some of the issues in the rigs could of been prevented.

Hours: 13

 

Learning Houdini

Summary

This week I continued learning Houdini. I worked on learning the smoke solver in Houdini and attached smoke to broken up geometry. I was able to get some pretty good results with fast sim times compared to maya

Pros – Houdini is fun to learn.

Cons –  Figuring out how to incorporate Houdini into everything with the project.

Hours: 10

 

 

 

This was a successful week! We’ve officially rolled over into the animation stage, have worked out the kinks with camera layout and scene setup, and are on track with our characters, animatic and animation-necessary assets.

We met this week to go over layout concerns in person, tweaking our environments and designs to make everything ready for animation. We set up our file hierarchy and are populating our shots, referencing in environments and testing connections. We ran into some unforseen problems with the render farm this week — according to the farm, Maya (linux) is failing to load in both 2014 and 2015. I emailed Jeremy about this issue and hopefully we’ll get some feedback soon. The farm is going to be our biggest hurdle for completing this project on schedule, so at least it’s good that we figured out the problems this early.

This coming week, we will be in full animation mode. Our intended deliverables for next week include pop-through animation, a new animatic cut (with the new storyboards and placeholder audio), painted rig weights, hair and clothing tests, and some solution for the farm.

Summary

It’s been a busy week! Ever since we locked down our script my pipeline has opened up completely. I’ve moved forward on the Animatic and should have a finished first draft by the end of Monday. Additionally I’ve taken it on myself to film motion capture reference for our animators for several pivotal scenes while wrapping up the last stages of camera layout.

Motion Capture Argument

I brought in our Danforth actor to hop into the motion capture suit and perform his scene in 3D space. Connor Behm is a professional stage actor and his training really shows when given the opportunity to flourish. In addition to gathering the 3D data, we also recreated the argument scene shot for shot to be used as additional reference by the animators.

Pros- It was really interesting working with a seasoned actor in the mocap lab. It was a much more cerebral take on acting than I’ve done before, and I feel it really showed in the final footage

Cons- I would have liked to get our Dyer in the lab as well but unfortunately he was unalienable

Hours Spent – 7

Layout

I’ve been wrapping up Layout this week as Gabe Dave and pat move to start animating. At the moment these scenes only have basic geometry, but I look forward to populating them with more detailed topology.

Pros-Moving into the final stages, meetings with animators went well and proved fruitful.

Cons- Still a tad bit more to do.

Hours Spent – 5

Animatic

It feels good to be making progress on the Animatic. As the last of the storyboards have been trickling in I’ve been syncing up boards and audio. I still have a bit more polishing to do, but I’m pleased to report that I should have a finished first cut by the end of tomorrow.

Pros- Progress! Very nearly there, just one more push.

Cons- I would like to have finalized audio at this stage, but co-coordinating three professional freelancers can be tough.

Hours Spent – 4

Task #1: Renderfarm Troubleshooting 

Summary: We ran into an unforseen problem this week with the render farm. At first I started by trying to get Josh’s symlinks running through the farm, but it quickly became apparent that nothing at all was rendering and that Maya was failing to even initiate on the farm machines. Apparently it hasn’t been working at all for the past few weeks (according to Ross and Ian of www.coffeebotonline.com/), so I emailed Jeremy and asked for his help. He’ll be looking into it, as this is something that is imperative to the success of our project. I will also be bringing these concerns up at our Tuesday meeting with Michael.

• Positive Stuff: Well, at least we found out the problem now…
• Problems / issues: Everything :(Hours: 3

Task #2: Mocap Reference Recording

Summary: I worked with Ethan and Connor today to record video reference of Ethan’s motion capture session. I was able to recreate the camera angles in our storyboards and get great reference for both facial and body expressions.

• Positive Stuff:  These shots will definitely help the animators lock into Connor’s performance. Ideally it would have been cool to use the virtual camera to record the mocap with the same camera angles, but the animators have expressed that they’d rather work with video anyway so this works well.
• Problems / issues: It took much longer than I had expected — I wanted to have my shot list done by today, but I got tied up with the recording Ethan. Luckily the shot list is well underway and I forsee no problems getting it done tomorrow during my lunch break at work.

Hours: 7

Task #3: Shot List

Summary: I began to set up a master shot list to match our storyboards

• Positive Stuff:  These shots will definitely help the animators lock into Connor’s performance. Ideally it would have been cool to use the virtual camera to record the mocap with the same camera angles, but the animators have expressed that they’d rather work with video anyway so this works well.
• Problems / issues: I didn’t have as much time to work on this than I thought I would, due to the mocap reference taking so long. It will be done tomorrow though! I need the finished animatic to finish populating the Shot Durations anyway, so this wasn’t too much of a setback.

Hours: 2

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS:

1. Hair (going over in Jeremy’s class!)
2. Get Renderfarm Working (?)
3. Texture Dave’s clothes!

This week we continued work on camera layout, though it was delayed again by confusion over our storyboards.  I also worked with Val on solving issues with our project heirarchy, organization, and how to make it compatible with both the renderfarm and our team’s computers (more difficult than you’d think)

Camera Layout

• Summary: Same as last week, just re-creating our storyboards in our rough 3D environments so animation can begin.
• Positives: Scenes are finally moving on to the animation stage!
• Negatives: Due to confusion around which storyboards are the most up-to-date, as last week very little work got done on this front.
• Hours: 3

Project Organization / Logistics

• Summary: We worked on figuring out the best way to compartmentalize our project and keep it neatly structured without getting redundant and difficult to manage, settling on a system using symlinks to reference folders with shared assets etc.
• Positives: The kinks are pretty much ironed out, our system should make switching between on and off campus computers a breeze and make navigating the project directories as painless as possible!
• Negatives: The renderfarm has been out of commission recently, so we can’t test our system on there.  It should work, but in case it doesn’t we have a few backup plans.
• Hours: 5

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Finish camera layout, we really should’ve wrapped this up ages ago
2. Work on adding detail to city, recreating procedural generation in Maya

This week we have finally transitioned into animation mode.  Dave, Pat, and myself finished recording reference for the pop through while Ethan, Val, and Josh worked on layout/ setting up our environment scenes for animation.  Anthony has also gotten us some proxy rigs and we’ve been able to start blocking.

Recording Reference

Dave, Pat, and I spent a while filming ourselves acting out the scenes.  We had gotten through about half of the scenes last week so we finished the other half of the movie this week.  We now have over 100 takes to go through and use for our initial blocking.  More reference will need to be filmed in the future, especially when we get to lip sync, but we have a lot to work with for now.  Since the plan is to get our project completely blocked out by the end of term I need to go through the scenes with the other animators so we can decide who will work on what shots (that is happening tomorrow) and after that it’s off to the races!

Pros: We got a lot of interesting takes and shots to use for blocking.

Cons: Acting is haaaaaaaard!

Hours: 4.5

Animating

This morning we had a quick layout meeting with the team and then I started to work on one of our shots.  For now myself and the other animators only have a shot or two to work on, but after tomorrow I’ll be able to work on blocking all my shots together (because we are dividing up shots tomorrow).

Pros: So happy to finally be doing the best part of the project

Cons: Need to know which shots I’ll be working on before I can make drastic progress/ waiting for the final parts of layout to get done.

Hours: 2.5

Next week:

-Animating A LOT!

-Maybe helping Anthony paint weights (Not entirely sure yet)

This week, I surrendered with the book, as I couldn’t afford to sink more time into it. I got a functional rig set up that should work for most of the shots. I also filmed reference with the other animators and began animating.

Lake’s Journal

Summary: The interior pages were deleted, and the middle where the pages meet has been adjusted so that it works at any angle. The book can also be scaled, so it can be adjusted slightly to fit into specific scenes.

Pro:  The book can now be used in most shots, and is on the server ready to go.

Con: The interior pages had to be abandoned due to technical issues.

Hours: 2

Filming Reference

Summary: Dave, Gabe, and I got together to film animation reference for several scenes, including some that were outdoors. We now have all the reference we need to get started with animating. This footage is now on the server and waiting to be processed.

Pros: All the first pass reference is finished. and it came out rather well.

Cons: The footage isn’t organized yet, nor has it been optimized for animation, as we captured it at 30 fps, but it needs to be 24.

Hours: 3.5

Animating

Summary: I took the reference for the airplane scene and processed it into an image sequence at 24 frames per second. I then got it in Maya, got all the needed assets, and started animating. This is simply blocked in, with nothing advanced yet.

Pros: It feels good to be animating, and we have enough done that there shouldn’t be much backtracking as we go forwards.

Cons: Only 1 rig is ready, so only one character can be animated.

Hours: 3.5

Moving forward

1. Model any props as needed

2. Continue Animating

3. Meet to divvy up the shots that need animating

This week I started working on the weights for dyer. I was not able to work as much this week because I had some issues at home to deal with.

Rigging

Summary: I spent a lot of time painting the weights for dyer and did not get too far. The tight edge loops around the legs is giving me trouble to get good deformations out of the legs. I was going to make corrective blendshapes, but I want some what good deformations for making the blendshapes. After awhile I got something working with dyer.

Pros: Nothing at the moment

Cons: The weight painting was not working well

Hours: 7

Houdini Clouds

Summary: I was able to make clouds in Houdini. They seem like they will be a good option for some of the shots in the animation.

Pros: The clouds look really good.

Cons: Long render times.

Hours: 4

Upcoming tasks

Painting weights.

Real excited to start animating, but unfortunately did not get to it this week as planned. 😦 Other classes and life continue to get in the way of actually moving forward, but we’re inching our way there.

Modeling Clothing

• Summary: Blocked in Danforth’s clothes and have started getting more details in.
• Positive Stuff: Blocked in pretty well, should be easy to adapt for Dyer when I’m finished.
• Problems / issues: Some difficulties getting the proportions/edge-flow right to communicate the seams, but I think I worked it out. Am worried the clothes are going to look to baggy and undesigned, but we can adjust later if needed.
• Hours: 3

Shooting Reference

• Summary: Met up with Gabe and Pat at the URBN center to film preliminary reference for our shots… again.
• Positive Stuff: Worked out some more problems we didn’t know about, ready to use it to animate! Also had a friend there who was able to act WAY better than we all were!
• Problems / issues: Same as last week: some unexpected issues with converting the boards to 3D, again some pretty awful acting.
• Hours: 4.5 (Despite what Pat apparently thinks)

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Finish clothing
2. Finish hair
3. Block the animation

This was a moderately successful week, albeit a bit slower than the past few. We did not get around to animation like we initially intended, instead spending more time refining our storyboards and working on assets. Our characters are textured, our layout scenes are beginning to be populated with cameras, and we’ve decided on an asset directory that should accommodate all our production needs.  We collectively agree that the extra time spent on preparing for animation will put us in a better place. We have a solid project foundation set up, and the extra time meant that Anthony could further refine his proxy rigs to give the animators the most fluid experience possible.

We will begin animation tomorrow! The next week will also include hair and clothing tests, a newly completed animatic, and more fun rig additions. We will also determine a solution for referencing in assets and rigs to scenes in a way that the render farm can work with.

Sidenote: I’m considering reworking our Gantt chart. In its current form, it takes way too much of my time to update on a weekly basis, and I’d rather use that time working on production. We’ve adopted a pseudo-agile workflow for our early production phases, and because we recently doubled back on our script we have a few portions of our Gantt chart that are currently outdated. I’ll be remedying that in the next week (possibly by simplifying the Gantt chart down into quarterly chunks). I will also be posting screenshots from our Trello boards from now on.

I spent most of my time this week working on the textures shaders for Dyer and Danforth. The majority of the work into render testing the eye shaders, as they need to be incredibly detailed in order to convey the necessary emotion in our script. I also brought up asset management and workflow with Nick at our weekly meeting, and he worked us through a few options for

Task #1: Textures / Shaders for Dyer & Danforth

ss s

Summary: This week I textured Dyer and Danforth. I spent most of my time working on their eyes, trying to find a shading solution that gave them that lifelike sparkle. I started off with a very helpful tutorial but ended up making a few modifications — for example, I added an extra layer of geometry for the cornea and modified the displacements on the iris geo to add some depth during close-ups. I’m almost worried that the eyes are TOO lifelike, but I’m sure that any uncanniness will be resolved when I work on hair this week.

I started with VRaySSS2 shaders for their skin, then painted 3 different skin maps for each character: overall color, scatter radius and subsurface color. The eyes also have levels of subsurface scattering, which I think helps to soften them a lot. I painted a layer of veins in the sclera that can be animated to create a bloodshot eyes effect, which I’m sure will prove useful for many of our shots.

• Positive Stuff: I especially like how Danforth’s textures came out.!
• Problems / issues: Dyer isn’t bad, but he lacks the freckles, imperfections and level of detail that Danforth has. I feel as though Dyer’s current state lacks a lot of his personality, and I’m hoping that will be fixed once I give him his very distinctive hair and mustache. I talked to Dave about this, and he agreed that we shouldn’t create imperfections without having a story behind them. I’ll revisit these characters next week while working on the hair.

Hours: 10

Task #2: Asset Management / Directory Meeting

Summary: At this week’s meeting, Nick ran us through a project directory template that he has used in the past in asset-heavy productions. I took notes and consulted a few other people (including Jeremy and Team Coffebot), and tomorrow I’ll be setting up our project folders so we can get rolling with shot placement and animation.

• Positive Stuff:  This format allows for a very clean, detailed and extensive project that has intelligent locations for all assets. This includes places for personal folders, technical research, reference, and both 3D and 2D production assets.
• Problems / issues: One of the main things we have to troubleshoot for this project is how to store and update rigs and textures without breaking the references within our Maya files. Because I was under the impression that the render farm can’t handle non-local referencing, we came up with a few options for redirecting Qube to texture locations outside of the default project window. After talking to Ross and Ian, however, I learned that we can link our textures to external folders so long as they exist on the network. This will require some testing on the farm, which I will be working on this week. I will also message Ross this week and see if he can give me a breakdown of their renderfarm pipeline.

Hours: 2

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS:

1. Hair testing!
2. General pipeline stuff (directory creation, farm testing, etc)
3. Helping with camera layout

Summary

We’ve made a lot of progress this week! After locking in our script I’ve been moving onto the Animatic and blocking in the camera shots with Josh. I’ve also finished roughing in the exterior of Lake’s camp which still has a bit of work to go on the terrain front but is more than ready for laying out shots.

Audio Recording

Gabe and I went through the script and narrated it in it’s entirety. This audio will be used for timing purposes on the Animatic once the rest of the boards are filled in.

Pros – Got a good feeling for the new timing of our script .

Cons– Audio quality isn’t the best, but it’s a place holder so it will do for the time being.

Hours Spent- 1 

Animatic

I’ve been replacing boards on the timeline as well as deleting old stills. Tomorrow I’ll be spending the whole day wrapping up the second draft

Pros- The new boards are gorgeous and are looking great back to back. Gives a much stronger sense of shots and what’s going on in the scenes

Cons- I do wish I had more musical cues to play around with, but you can’t always get what you want

Hours Spent – 5

Layout

Roughed in rest of Lake’s Camp exterior, will begin laying out camera shots tomorrow.

Pros- Exterior is looking good, definite sense of where everything is.

Cons- Terrain still needs polishing.

Hours Spent – 4

Rigging

• Summary: So this week i finished up both of the proxy rigs except for the hands. But the animators can begin! So I found out i found my twist attribute was not good enough to replace making pole vector controls. It took me a awhile to set up in the beginning. But I found an amazing trick to set them up, which saved me a lot of time.  From there i added a lot of extra controls. I added visibility controls to hide different parts of the proxy rig, and the global controls for the flexiplane rig.  I added space matching for the pole vectors, feet and hands. The leg pole vectors can now follow the body control, or the ik control. The arm pole vectors can follow the ik control, the clavicle control, and the body control. I added added auto clavicle controls for both arms. The feet can switch between local space and world space. I added a attribute to the elbow bend controls to follow the pole vector control.The arms can switch between local, head, and world space. I also attached curves to the pole vectors. Just in case the pole vectors get lost in geometry.  A minor add, but I colored coded the rig.
• Positive stuff  : Animation can begin… I hope!

• Problems/ issues : Setting up the pole vectors. The twist in dyers forearm was off. I fixed it but I am not sure if still looks incorrect.

Hours : 15

• 

 Learning Houdini

• Summary: I would not say what i learned in Houdini  this week directly influences our current progress. But it will help later down the road. I went through the first part of one of my fxphd courses that goes over tree animations. It went deep into complex topics in houdini.

• Positive stuff  : Going through the course helped show me more the power of Houdini.

• Problems/ issues : Houdini can get complicated fast.

Hours: 15

Not nearly as busy this week. I finished up the new storyboards, ran some more nCloth tests, and started shooting reference with Gabe and Pat.

Storyboards

• Summary: Thumbnailed the final scenes and finished drawing out the boards!
• Positive Stuff: Hopefully done, definitely enough to move forward with.
• Problems / issues: Had some difficulties reworking some of the old scenes that I’d grown attached to, but that’s how you know you’re making the right decisions, right?
• Hours: 5

Additional nCloth Tests

• Summary: This week I revisited the walk cycle with a couple more tests. First, I actually modeled pants with a pocket to see how they’d work using a wrap deformer on the simmed cloth. I also bound the input mesh to the leg rig and spent more time working with the material settings.
• Positive Stuff: Got a cloth that seems like a nice, thick leather/insulated snow-pant type material, the pocket moved and deformed with the mesh perfectly, and binding the input mesh to the leg solved whole worlds of problems I was having last week.
• Problems / issues: Binding the leg to the mesh was a slightly difficult process, which is kind of dependent on the rig. It’s always possible, but might be more complex from rig to rig. Additionally,   geometry and poly-flow might become much more important.
• Hours: 4

Shooting Reference

• Summary: Met up with Gabe and Pat at the URBN center to start filming preliminary reference for our shots.
• Positive Stuff: Got a much better sense of timing for most of the scenes, solved some space issues that weren’t apparent in the storyboards.
• Problems / issues: Some of the storyboards are great 2D compositions but didn’t quite allow for all; the movement we needed in 3D. Additionally, the three of us are not great actors, so there’s some pretty cheesy performances.
• Hours: 4

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Sculpt hair
2. Model clothing
3. Block the animation

This week was all about prepping for animation.  We plan to start animating this coming week so I recorded some placeholder dialogue with Ethan and then reference with Dave and Pat.

Ethan and I ran through the script a couple times just to get some spacing for the animatic.  We plan to bring in our voice actors within the next couple weeks to record our final dialogue.

Hours: 1

I then recorded a lot of film reference for animation.  We got through half of the script and we plan on finishing the other half this coming week.  We took multiple takes of each shot and switched who acted so we could get a variety of actions to choose from.  We plan on using this mostly for initial blocking of our scenes and gesture drawings.  We will tighten up the blocking once we get the actual timing of the scenes with the final recording of our voice actors.

Pros: Got a lot of good reference

Cons: Takes a loooooong time and only halfway done

Hours: 3

Moving forward:

1. Animation, animation, animation!