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).
Friday, April 19, 2013
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
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.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
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.
Monday, February 25, 2013
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.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
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.
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.
Friday, February 15, 2013
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.
This one is a full body animation with lip sync.
So.. I was having a problem with recording the screen but Ill get that worked out and posted later.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
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.
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