Alien Sighting VFX Shot

Our course has given us the task of producing 3 VFX Shots. We have to come up with our own ideas for the shots, and we also have to collaborate with students from the film course and fashion photography course, and allow them to shoot the live action footage for our shot, since that is their main expertise.


I have come up with a few ideas so far, and this is one idea that I'm definately working on for one of the VFX Shots:

1) VFX Alien Sighting: (Plot undisclosed as of now)

Crew Project

In the second year of our 3 year course, we are expected to help a third year student with their major film production which they are supposed to do in their year. I spoke to two 3rd-year students - Vicky, who's film is called ' The Bird ',  and Matteo, who's film is ' Headless ' and I'll be helping them.






17th Feb 2015 Log:

The Bird:

For this film I have to use Maya to create a sequence of Ivy Vines growing out of the ground. Since the film is in 2D, I will have to apply toon shaders to the objects in Maya when rendering them out.

Here is my first sample:

Here is my second sample where I tried to make the main vine spiral out slower and make the leaves more flappy:

Log: 23rd Feb 2015

Headless: This is the other film I am working on. The story is about a character who has been seperated from his head, but they still continue to operate. The task I have been given is animate the headless character walk on a street, when it accidentally kicks the head that is lying on the sidewalk, and then the head turns back and gets angry at the character. This is being animated in Maya. I made an error the first time, by not placing the animated characters in the centre of the frame of the camera.





Log: 3rd March 2015

The Bird:

I made another sample of the vine growing animation. Here I smoothened out the leaves, camfered them, and assigned a skeleton to each leaf, and rigged them to it. I then elaborately animated the leaves, to make them flap in a very smooth, and mellow manner. This one looks much more graceful than the previous 2 ones. However Vicky recently told me that she wanted the vine's to burst up at the start and then spread out in all directions after rising up. For that I'm going to create the vine rig again from scratch and design it to behave in the way she described.

Log: Sometime during the middle of March (Posted long after finished work)

The Bird:

I discovered a good way to create the vines, according to the requirements. Start at one small 3-sides cylinder, and then keyframe extrusions extending from it. At some of the extrusions, spontenously use the split polygon tool to make 2 new faces perpendicular to the direction of the main vine. And then seperately extrude them out in parting directions. And those branches themselves will further branch out by using the split polygon tool to create new faces within them, and extrude them in the same way. And there will oftne be multiple brances spreading out a the same section of the main vine, allowing a very vast network of vines.



(Starting out simple)

(Branching Out)

                    (Vast Network of branches)

Vast Network Of Branches

 (Smoothed out mesh and with a toon shader with two tone shaded brightness)


After finishing that animation, I found that finishing it off by smoothening the mesh, makes it look very natural, organic and smooth.

The animation itself looks marvellous. It doesn't appear jerky, or unnatural at all.








Log: 11th April

The Bird:

The earlier vine animation, in spite of being ambitious and working out terrific, wasn't the syle they were looking for in their film. I was showed a Blender tutorial, for growing a vine along a curve, which tapered at the end. And the extrustion can be keyframed, which means it is a lightning fast easy solution to create vines growing out without any hard work. Initially I had trouble transfering that principle in Maya, because I couldn't find any Maya tutorial that specialized in that, and so I was experimenting around in Maya, trying to work out a similar method which with one could easily making growing vines.

Initially I tried just making an EP curve, and then manually extruding a flat circile along it, using my gut instinct to position the centre of it at the curve, rather than use another method to snap it directly.
I found that that was working well.


Test 1:

The images above describe the first test. In this test, I made a bezier curve, and then created a polygon cylinder (deleted every part of the cylinder except for the top cap), then positioned it at the start of the curve. Then manually extruded out the cap, and positioned each new extension at the
key points of the curve. After reaching the end of the curve, I smooth meshed the entire
object. However now a problem is that the exact perpendicular angle at which the faces
are at each point, makes the animation look unnatural.





Test 2:

These images are of the 2nd test.
This time, I repeated the same procedure as earlier, but I deliberately did not position
the faces at even spaces to make it look less mechanical. I also rotated the faces at
each frame to be perpendicular to the current position at the curve in relation to the
face, so it should look more natural now. Further changes required: It looks better now. I could use the tapering function to make it thinner as it extrudes out.







Test 3:

These image are from the 3rd test. This time, I also scaled down the faces at each keyframe. It looks much more natural now and less robotic, as it has a streamlined, organic shape.



Log: May 20th

Here is the sample of the vine growth animation that the crew approved of.

And here is the animation I created with the help of a reference image of a room setup that the crew had given me. I used the same method used earlier for the approved sample.

11 Second Club Project

The Eleven Second club project is a solo project unlike the Funny in 15 film which was a group assignment. Here, our task was to take the month’s 11 second audio clip from the official Eleven Second Club website, and create an animation that is suitable for it, and then mix in the audio track with our animation and create a movie.

 

As you can see, I have chosen the scenario of a father talking to his son outside on the street. The story was that the family had had a fight, and then son packed his suitcase and decided to move out. And here he is seen waiting for a taxi right outside his house. The father then walks in from behind and then tries talk some wisdom into him, not explicitly telling him to stop whatever he's doing, but just to take a deep breath and think about his actions carefully. It's all up to the son after all.

 

 

 

I downloaded both character rigs from the offical eleven second club website, and modified the Norman Rig to look like a man in his 50's.

Ran into a few problems on this one. One major problem was the timing of the whole animation. I found out in the end, as I was putting it all together in adobe premiere, that the audio was not fully in sync with the clip. Even if it started right, at the end it just wouldn't be in sync. So I manually stretched out a few frames towards the end, where it starts to go out of sync, so that the hand gestures and lip movements all matched the audio track.

 

 

 

London Street

I have been working on this 3D model for a little while now. It is based on a roundabout in London just ahead of Waterloo Bridge. I've used Maya so far on this,

10 Second VFX Shot

Our course has given us an assignment of creating a 8-10 second shot where we have to blend in live footage and CGI.

For my shot I have chosen to take video footage of a short stroll through the student residences in which I live in, and in that shot I will composite a 3D spaceship fly by, a quick 180 degree camera turn and then a short aerial battle which will feature a couple of of spaceships, laser blasts, explosions, debris, and mud splatter.

We have 2 weeks to finish this project (short time, so I'll have to work extra hard every day to get it done by the deadline).

The spaceships are based on the Tie Fighter model and the X-Wing model found in the Star Wars movies.

This idea occured to me quite easily, because on the first day I arrived on the student residences, Glasney Student Village, I had gotten quite a strong Star Wars vibe from this place. I don't know what it is, maybe its the style of the buildings and layout of the place or its the colour scheme of the colony coupled with the gray skies of England that reminded me of Coruscant and the Death Star (the dominant colour of those two places is also gray). So when I got this assignment, I thought this would be perfect...to composite a star wars themed aerial battle in this place that reminds me of Star Wars!

After finishing and animating the 3D models, I plan to composite it in the live footage with NUKE.






Log: Blogger is acting very buggy at the moment and I can't upload images of my finished Tie Fighter model.


 Our course has extended the deadline of this project from 30th Jan to 6th Feb. I had decided to scrap the X wing model because of lack of time, but now I think I'll put that in the project again.


I made a really big mistake in the time planning section of this assignment. I spent too much time on modelling the spaceship and adding in too much detail. I made the same mistake last year as well on the Street Modelling project.


I'll have to pay more focus to the compositing section of this assignment now.









Log (29th Jan 2015):

I shot the footage today for the live action plate. It was quite cumbersome as the weather today was very sporadic - Spells of heavy rain and hail, and sessions of sunlight. I had to pick a time when there were enough clouds in the sky as I am going for the grey skies look, but to ensure it doesn't rain. And it looks like I did it in the nick of time, as it started to rain heavily as soon as I finished shooting the footage.



Here are two shots of the work I accomplished today. I'm planning on splitting the sequence into 2 parts. The tie fighter one, and the x wing one.