Week Three and Four

Here's the final result for the week three project.  I repeated the clip three times in the YouTube video because it is so short by it's self.  So if you were wondering what the jumping was, that's it
Week Three Comp

During week four the project was to take a CG (Computer Generated) car and put on top of a background image (the plate) and make it look photo-real.  Now I didn't like that plate that I was given so along with my assigned project I chose another and did one for myself as well.  Here is the assigned plate with the car comped in.

Click to enlarge

The image at the top of this post is a plate I chose to do for myself on top of the assigned project.  I also did a quick breakdown on how it was put together so be sure to check that out!

Breakdown

Week Three Already!

Before I start, last week we focused on lighting so I'll post some pictures from that. We were assigned to portray a mood by only using lighting.

 

Now for the real deal, keying. Keying is when we take a shot and composite it into another. Like before, what better way to explain than to show an example. Actually, now that I think about it, this is almost like the other video with the car and the motorcycle. This time however, we have a plate (background) and footage of a person. We actually got to choose the footage and plates (which I organised for the whole class ;) Anyways, I chose a shot of a city street at night along with some footage of James, a student who graduated last block.

 

Now James was filmed on a greenscreen. This means that I have to extract the green and put him on top of the plate, making sure to get all the strands of hair! Not only am I overlaying him but, matching color and noise. For those who don't know I put an example of noise below :)

The project isn't due until Monday but I thought I'd get a head start so I'll post what I've done so far!

 

Noise on left, less noise on right

 

Lighitng Week Two

 

Sneek peek to week three project

 

 

Block Three!

 

 

It's already the beginning of week 3 ahhhhh! Time flies, especially when you take into account that there are only 12 weeks a block! I better get everyone all caught up then. So all in all block three is all about compositing. Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. What better way to show you what it means then with an example.

 

Week one the assignment was to composite a CG (Computer Generated) car into a scene with a motorcycle driving on the road. We would have to make the car drive behind the motorcycle. I'll throw together a quick breakdown so you can see what had to be done (im just learning the software though so the breakdowns will get better!). That brings up another point. Breakdowns are when the final shot is shown layer by layer to show the amount of work that went into the composite. These are mostly used when showing off work to employers, not so much for film. In film you want the final perfected shot. Anyways, heres that first shot, and a little teaser for something that I'm working on myself!

 

I almost forgot!  The software we use is NukeX for all those interested =)

 

Week One Assignment

Teaser

 

 

 

Re-Cap

Well I think its about time I get to writing in this thing again!

Since my last post we have done a few projects in class ending a big project towards the end of block 2, the group project.

One of the last weeks of block two we did a group project.  There were 4 leads with each team having 5-6 people in them.  I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the leads to work on the project!  It went smoothly, however as I had predicted it had been a little chaotic towards the end.  We had 2 1/2 weeks to make a animated short with a story built around audio.  Each group got to choose there audio from a live action movie.  Now we couldn't simply recreate the scene in the movie with the audio, we had to make an entirely different plot.  This had to be nothing like the movie.  We spent the first day brainstorming and thinking of ideas for our short and by the end of the day had a good solid one.
Now the plan was to finish the animation at week 1 /12.  That would give us plenty of buffer time in case there were problems in the pipeline of the production, which there were..  We ended up working down to the last night to get the final video put together.  I had a great team, and they did a lot of work.  That is also something worth mentioning though.. Being the team lead I had the smallest part in the animation.  Now some other leads chose to do the hardest roles in the short, but here was my logic.  I had to make sure everything was running smoothly, check on people constantly to make sure work was getting done, help with problems (everyone in the group was coming to me with issues they were having).  Doing all that on top of having a major role in the animation would have been too hectic and caused me too much distraction from the group.  I think I made the rite choice in doing this, and in the end it payed off!  Our group got a 90/100  on the project.
I do have to say that if I was going to do this again I would change the pipeline a little (pipe line is a term we use in production, one task moving down the chain "pipe" to the next).

Group Project

Side Project

Over the weekend there was a convention held here in Orlando called MegaCon.  Its a  is a large multi-genre convention that caters to the comic book, sci-fi, anime, fantasy, and gaming communities.  DAVE School had a booth there we we showed of what we did here at the school.

There are two flat-screen TVs in the back that are on stands.  They were duplicating what was being done on computers by students below, I was one of these students.  I was modeling in Audtodsk Maya so I thought I would bring in some things from school to work on.  One of these things was a pen that I made the day before.

 

Youtube - 3D Pen with Filmed Pen

Youtube - Pen Turn-Table

 



More Mocap

We have been working more and more with motion capture these past few weeks and I have learned to love and hate it. Motion capture is great because you get fast accurate results. However, the way that you edit this data can be messy. We use a software package called Motion Builder. This program can read C3D data. C3D data is just the format in which the motion capture cameras are recorded in. Now don’t get me wrong Motion Builder is a very powerful tool, but I find it to be extremely glitchy. For those interested what version, we use the 2011 32bit edition in class. Neither here nor there we had to learn it and I’m happy I did because the technology is only getting better and better. Having a background in this will only help if I want to pursue motion capture in the future. But that being said, as of now I don’t like it’s not my favorite thing in the world.

So, for our project we had to pick a well-known movie scene with a significant amount of talking and moving around and re-tell it using motion capture. To tell you the truth I think the hardest part was finding a movie scene to use! I decided to use the movie Step Brothers, one that almost every 90's kid has seen in our teen years. Here’s a link to what I did with the original video in the bottom right corner. It’s not an exact match, but its close. We only got two takes with the mocap actor. The class only got him for 1 day so we all had to do our scenes that day. There are 24 of us so it was a little rushed but it was still fun to get a taste of the fufill process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_j29nS0Q3o

T-Shirt Contest

I won the T-Shirt contest! So not only will my design be on every new t-shirt but I also get drive on access to the school. Here at Universal there are the theme parks and the backlot. The back lot is where all everything behind the scenes goes on (ride repair, stages for recording movies, advertising etc. The school is located in the backlot which you need clearance to get into. Normal clearance covers just walking into the back lot. You need special permission to drive onto the backlot and I get that privilege for a while now!

I had a meeting today with the founder of the school who chose was judging the design. He asked if I could make a larger resolution image (bigger). Now I think this is common knowledge but I will explain anyways. A rasterized image (normal picture) has a certain resolution. Once you go beyond 100% the image becomes blurry/pixelated. A vector image on the other hand can be scaled up infinitely with no distortion or blurring. This is because vector images are driven by mathematical shapes. I never really took the time to teach myself about vectors to much because I never really needed them but, because Jeff (the founder of the school) wanted a larger resolution image/vector I though "What a great time to learn!" In about 2 hours I had converted my image into a vector. Now it can be scaled as big as the school wants!  Oh and he did as that I change the color around "DAVE" to be white just to make it pop a little so that was the only other change that I made to the design.

 

Motion Capture

We have moved on from lip syncing and hand keyed animation and into motion capture.  Motion capture is great for quickly getting realistic animation.  The system we use here at DAVE School uses infrared cameras.  I believe there are 12 in all and are positioned as pictured below. 

Now the actor wears a suit with 53 super reflective spheres placed all over his body.  The cameras looks for these and communicate with each other to figure out where in 3D space these spheres are located.  There is a lot of math going on, its actually pretty impressive.  They are all doing real-time trigonometry to solve for 53 unknowns.

Now no system is perfect and the flaw that this system has is occlusion (when the spheres can not be seen by any of the cameras).  Using 53 markers makes occlusion less likely though.

So this information is recorded and processed into a file that we can edit.  There are a lot of steps and filters to go through to make sure the end result is good, however that being said I could probably do all this in a matter of an hour and end up a 5 minute animation all smoothed out.  We do of course have to go back and hand key the hands, facial expressions and such (unless you decide to capture the face and hands as well.  This is done in big films sometimes ex; The Hobbit, Avatar)

Now your probably wondering wow this is cool, but how expensive is it.. well, each one of these cameras cost $18,000.  Then you have to figure x12 is $216000 or at least thats what I'm told.  So its not really a cheap setup.  Even if you want to rent out a Mocap (Motion Capture) studio, it cost thousands of dollars a day.  So we are very lucky to have this great studio to work with!

Here is an example we were given.  This was pre-recorded and the exercise was to get rid of any noise.  Ohh I forgot to tell you, these cameras sample/record 120 times per/second.  So in 1 second that camera calculates and record the location of all 53 points 120 times.  That's a lot of information to work with.  So this is when apply filters that get rid of this noise, the same filters in fact that are used in music production actually.

Karate Mocap Link

This isn't from here at the school, I just did a simple search online, but this is what the actors with their suits look like.

Lip Sync

Theres more to animation then just walking and running, jumping and climbing stairs.  Speach is an important part and the best way to show someone is talking is to animate their mouths (obviously).  This is where lip sync comes into play.

 

Now its not as hard as I thought it was going to be but that being said it is still a litlle difficult.  In short we take our original model, copy him (so now we have two of the same) and change the copy to make a smile face for example.  What we can then do is blend the original into the copy using a slider.  The more you move the slider the closer it gets to the changed copy.  We have to make lots of these copies.  I think I ended up making 20 or so.  One for every shape the mouth makes when talking, smile, frown, sad, blinking ect.  It is probably a little hard to grasp but tell you what ill make a video and post it below along with the clips I had to do for class.

These first two are only head and mouth movement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_DgMEXqBss

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl_8Og5KP2Q

 

This one is a full body animation with lip sync.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imOoCJLGHZQ

 

So.. I was having a problem with recording the screen but Ill get that worked out and posted later.

 



Obstacle Course

For this last project we did I was a little surprised because we got quite a bit of time to do it. The project was to have Skippy go through an obstacle course. We got the project Friday and it isn't due until tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 8am. That’s about 4 days for a project that could technically be done in a day. However, out instructor had a meeting in LA with the director of the school along with the academic director to talk to a studio that does Pre-vis.

Brief description of Pre-Vis. Basically it’s an unrendered animation that directors will have made so that they can view and adjust camera angles and timing of a shot before the final shot is made in real-time. So when it comes time for the real shot to be, well shot, or rendered, the camera angles and timing are already all figured out.  I put some exaples below with the previs being on the left and the final shot on the right.

 

Now back to the obstacle course. Skippy had to go over four items; stairs, a cube, a ladder, and a fourth item that we could create. I decided to do something on the simpler side and made him go through some tiers.

http://youtu.be/8qZtTdVeEEY

100%

 

Stairs and a Jump

Yesterday we had to make Skippy go up a few steps and jump off.  Nothing to difficult just a little time consuming.  Heres the link =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G8k3AouVmY&feature=youtu.be

T-Shirt Design

This isn't anything we're learning in class or anything, just a little contest the school is holding to design a new t-shirt for the school.  This is my entry.  Ohh and the prize, a free t-shirt and two weeks drive on access to the school (closer parking).

Personality Walks

This week we are continuing with the walk cycles, however this time we have to pick 2/5 personalities from a list and portray them in the walk.

Sad Walk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOk33DCE6Zo&feature=youtu.be

Angry Walk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_u0jVOLej4&feature=youtu.be

Quick Tip =)

Hey one more quick thing, you can enlarge the images by clicking on them.. some people didnt know this.  The images just look a little better when they're bigger.  Plus you can see more!

Rigging and Walking

Instead of trying to explain everything I thought I could just show you.  So, I made a little one minute clip of me moving this little guy around.  His names Skippy by the way.  Now, I didn't model him but I did give him all of his bones and controllers to make it able to move him around.  Putting these bones in and making sure that everything works the way it should is called rigging.  There's a lot more to it than it seems though.  Its not just throwing in these things and having it work, no.  You have to tell which bones can control which points of the skin (Ill post a cool picture of the this process, called "painting weights") , what bone controls what bone, and then you get into things like IK (Inverse Kinematics), and so on..  Its not really all that hard, just a little time consuming is all. 

Below is a picture of a process called "painting weights".  In the first image the bone connecting the shoulder to the elbow is selected.  The color represents what skin that bone will effect.  The "hotter" the color the more it will effect when moved and the "cooler" the color the less it will effect when moved.  The second image has the bone that connects the elbow to the hand.  You can see that it effects some of the area that the other bone effects.  They overlap a little.  This results in a smooth bend.  And of course all the black is the unaffected area.

And finally the link to the short clip I made.



Youtube Link

Youtube

I ended up making youtube account so that I could post higher resolution videos.  This a link to the Youtube channel that I made that has all the videos from block two.  For the later posts I will post individual links to the videos.  There is a short discription below each video as well so be sure to read that. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbW_GviwN2K3JIVeyB1Vow?feature=mhee

Week Two

Week two is going great. There is still not too, too much work being assigned but enough to keep me busy. I’m happy I have some extra time because it gives me a chance to get some personal projects done.

This week we talked about character animation. Posing a character in such a way that it is easy to understand quickly and easily. One of the most stressed things that our teacher, whose name is Dave West by the way, is that you should be able to see a silhouette of the character and understand what is going on. There is a picture below as an example.

He had us pose a simple character in 6 different positions and also gave us 6 different emotions that we would have to make the character act out. Now the character doesn’t have any facial features so we can only sure the body and its parts; legs, arms, hands, fingers, head, etc.

Here are a few shots that I did. The silhouette is on the left and the shaded on the right. See if you can guess what it is... anger, and a gymnast.



 

Car Stunts

As the large project for week one we had to make a car do some stunts.  Weave between some cones, jump some busses, go on two wheels, and last intereact with an extra cone in any way you want (I did a dounut around it).  Heres the final product.  (Im trying to figure out why im not able to post full size videos here, I'll try to get them up as soon as I figure it out =)

 



Block Two - Animation

I’m back from winter break, the longest break I get in my year here at The DAVE School. It was great to see family and friends but now it’s time to get back to work.
I’m almost done with the first week already and have learned quite a bit in animation. We have had three mini-assignments and one larger. That makes four assignments and the weekly quiz (every Friday). Even though we have had so many assignments I don’t feel as stressed as I did in Block One. Now maybe this is because I’m used to the work schedule, but I really think it’s just that animation, as of now, seems to be a little easier then modeling.
I’ve always had things like this come to me pretty easy, modeling, animation, computers etc., ever since I was little so I’m lucky in that way but it also gives me the chance to help my classmates which only enforces what I’m learning. Anyways.
This is 3D animation, but a lot of the things we are learning are based on 2D animation. The reason I’m telling you is because the first few projects look simple but in reality they are quiet difficult. We had to do, (1) The Ball Bounce, make a ball bounce and have a squash and stretch effect (2) The Bounce Room, make two balls bounce into a room with the physics that they might have in real life (3) Logo Animation, Animate a logo in a conservative perspective (slow and easy on the eyes) and finally (4) Story, Tell a story using only a cube, sphere, and cone. These objects cannot be textured (have to be a single color) and can only be squashed and stretched.
Below I have the animations that I made, along with a rendered animation that I made for the Ball Bounce. Speaking of that, when we hand these projects in we are actually handing in something called a playblast and without going into detail it’s basically a very simple, rough video of the animation, where as something like the rendered out Ball Bounce I have is high in detail, lighting and texturing. These playblast take seconds where as a higher detailed animation would take upwards of hours.

 

Ball Bounce
Playblast - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KIWWlQcnpoS3lyeDQ/edit
Render - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KIR2N1QkZQNzRhc2c/edit

Bounce Room - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KISmVlRlNyRzVpdjA/edit

DAVE School Logo - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KIcks4Qkk0LWxZNEk/edit

Story - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8iJSVnUM7KIYl9kWTRNczBwcXM/edit