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.

Funny In 15 Project

We have been given an assignment titled ' Funny In 15 in 5 '. The goal is to create a 15 second animated film that will make the audience laugh. We are also to complete it in 5 weeks, hence the title.

 Our class was divided into groups, and my group has 3 members - Leo, Katie and I.

 Katie is in charge of storyboarding, and the initial idea of the film was a half-witted seagull who is sitting idle in the middle of an ocean. A ship is sailing towards the seagull, but the seagull dodges it and flies away, only to hit against a buoy and then fall into the ocean.

The current storyboard is slightly different - The seagull dodges the ship, but then flies away and hits against the hull of another ship. And that other ship just happens to be the Titanic :) The Titanic then immediately sinks in a comical fashion. The punchline is that the seagull was the real reason behind the sinking of the Titanic, and not icebergs.

In this project, I have been given the role of creating and animating the ocean, the boat, and the buoy. But of course with the new storyboard, I will be creating and animating the Titanic as well. I am using Maya to create and animate all of these, and I will using the fluid effects in Maya to animate the splashes, ripples and waves in the ocean. Since we are going for a 2D-ish look in this film, I am going to apply toon shaders to all the elements in Maya.

At first I didn't know how to apply a toon shader to the ocean as it uses displacement textures. But after going through a few tutorials online, I discovered that the ocean first had to be converted to a polygon mesh without history, and then the toon shader could be applied. After applying the toon shader and tweaking with the outlines, I achieved the following look.










Log: 17th October, 2014.


I modelled the Titanic and applied the toon shader to it.
Modelling took a very short time as it has a nice simple, minimalistic, charming design. I also made a short sample animation of it sinking, and showed it to my team. I used two tone shaded brightness for the toon textures on both the titanic and the smaller boat. By doing this, the models have a 2D appearance, but at the same time it doesn't look flat and without a sense of volume, thanks to the shading element. I'll also have a go at making some splash tests with the toon ocean.

Log: 22nd October, 2014.

Due to a short amount of time before the deadline, we have decided to scrap the Maya simulated ocean, as experimenting with the toon shader and figuring out how to create satisfactory toon textured foam, waves and ripples, would take too long for us to get the film ready by time. I finished the final renders today, which were 3 sequences. One of the small boat sailing towards the seagull, the panning shot (where the bird hits the hull of the titanic), and the overall shot of the titanic sinking. Animating the boat was fairly simple. I just marked the start position and end position at the appropriate keyframes, and positioning the boat higher and lower from its default altitude a few times between the keyframes to make it bounce and up and down when it moves. I had to animate the bouys as well. And I made 2 bouys react according to the wake from the boat, as they were close to the boat.

The panning shot (where the seagull hits the hull of the titanic), was a laborious part. The speed at which the Maya camera moved accross the 2 buoys and titanic, was much faster than how the camera panned in the animatic. This was because of the number of frames that the animation had to be in. The animatic did not have a frame limit, hence it could pan the desired distance at the desired speed. However in this situation, time is a constant. The camera had to pan a considerable distance to have a satisfactory effect. So deciding how much distance the camera had to pan, how far the bouys had to be, how close they had to be to the camera, was a huge task that took a whole lot of time. After much tweaking around, we managed to get a good result after resizing the buoys, positioning them closer to the camera, and reducing the distance the camera has to pan, but not by too much so that it still looks close to what is in the animatic. We were then satisfied with the speed at which the camera pans.

 The titanic sinking shot was easy to animate. However at this point, Maya was beginning to create horrible problems. The rendered images in the sequence that came out, appeared stretched vertically. I have no idea why this happened. I hadn't changed any parameters in Maya since the last render which happened perfectly. I googled, googled, and googled and didn't seem to find any similar problem to which there were solutions. I then switched the renderer from Maya software to Mentalray and that seemed to do the trick. The rendered images from mental ray came out alright.

I encountered the same stretched images problem when re-rendering the first boat shot because the earlier one had an unwanted polygon plane. Again I used the mentalray renderer and it did the trick.



Log: 24th October, 2014.

We finished the project! Katie and Leo were very happy with the final renders, and they mixed the sound effects with the final footage, and uploaded it on the Learningspace. It's a shame we didn't have enough time to create the 2D Maya simulated ocean. It would have worked really well I feel, creating lush, detailed splashes and waves.

Experimental Animation

For this assignment, we had to produce 3 different 20-second animations using 3 different techniques that did not use the computer apart from post production and editing. We were also given a choice of soundtracks to work with and the idea was to make the 3 films play along with the soundtrack and relate to it in some way.

 





1st Technique: For the first technique I used a pencil, paper and a lightbox to animate a stickman character dancing to the first 20 seconds of the song I chose. I then photographed each page with a camera and arranged the frames together in Adobe Premier. I paid close attention to the variations and rhythm of the song and how the character would react to it. Before I animated, I imagined myself dancing to the song and thought of what I would do if I were in the stickman's position, and then I went ahead and animated what came to mind. Two inspirations I used for this song was the famous ' Staying Alive ' dance move from Saturday Night Fever and a dance move which Johnny Bravo uses in his cartoon intro.

 


2nd Technique: For the next 20 second film, I cut green coloured cardboard paper in small pieces and arranged them on an A4 paper positioned below a mounted camera connected to a laptop. The idea fo this film was to make the green cardboard pieces react to the music. I found this technique very easy because it was easy to manipulate and move around the green paper pieces. I was focusing more on the song here and deciding how the bits of paper would sway and react to the music.







3rd Technique: For the third 20 second film, I decided to make a stop motion animation in which computer peripherals come to life. I made on mouse climb out of a hole on a table and inspect a crushed green paper that was lying on the other end of the table. Then another mouse climbs out of a the same hole and moves along to inspect the crushed paper too. Mouse 1 accidentally knocks the paper off the table and then Mouse 2 gets annoyed because of this and Mouse 1 and Mouse 2 engage in a fight and in all that chaos another green crushed paper lands of the table, and all three of them fight over it, and then the film ends. I had to take many frames for this animation to ensure that the characters in it moved in a smooth enough manner, and I had to put my flexibility skills to the test too as I was holding the controller for the mounted camera on one hand and stretching out my other hand to hold the wire of the mouse from underneath the table and keep it still.



AT-ST Model

This is a project I started about two weeks ago. I'm modeling an AT-ST (From the Star Wars universe) in Maya. AT-ST stands for All Terrain Scout Transport, and it's a 2-legged vehicle, armed with laser cannons and a few missiles. You see these vehicles in ' Empire Strikes Back ' during the Hoth Battle scene and in ' Return of the Jedi '. I haven't finished the model yet but this is a picture of what I have created so far.

I have somewhat completed the model, but I am not completely satisfied by it. I feel like it needs more detail to give it some more life. I haven't textured it yet and it definitely needs a nice layered texture for that rough dirty metal look.

I tried 2 renders with the model - One in standard lighting and the other with a physical sun and sky based lighting. The 2nd one makes the model look like its made out of plaster, and that is definitely not the effect I intended. The first render though is close to the effect I'm trying to achieve.

Another issue is that the head of the AT-ST looks very disproportionate to its legs. I'll have to make it a bit smaller. It does look a little comical now, almost like a caricature and it would work well for a nice cute Star Wars themed cartoon but I'm trying to achieve a more realistic look, much closer to what is seen in the films.

Motion Studies Walk Cycle Assignment

For this motion studies assignment, we had to design a character's walk cycle. I made a stickman figure in Flash and then created a rig for him using the bone tool. This was the first time I tried something like this in Flash and I ran into many problems in the beginning with this character because the joints acted funny and moved in ridiculous ways. After much experimenting, I finally managed to make the character move in regular earthly way.

Traditional Animation

Traditional Animation:

Recently our class has started creating simple animations using traditional animation techniques - Pencil, paper and lightboxes.

I actually found this more enjoyable than Flash because it was way more intuitive and everything felt more natural and organic. It was more tedious yes, but it was a nice experience.

Our first assignment using this method was to animate one character throwing a hammer at another character and then animating how that character would react after being hit:

MAZED Project

MAZED Project:

Log : (9th March 2014)

Our class has been approached by a company producing iPhone Apps which help people learn about the history of Cornwall. Our class was divided into groups and each group was assigned a particular story. The stories are Cornish Folk tales, and each group is supposed to make animations depicting the respective story they are given. My group has been given the story ' Copper for Cake ' which is an old folk tale about a miner. The groups assign various roles within themselves. In my group, I have been given the role of Editor and the person in charge of post production. I am also in charge of sound effects. My group has decided to make the animation in a 2D cut-out style. My team has come up with impressive character sketches and a storyboard so far. I am currently arranging the frames of the storyboard into an animatic and I will post it on this space when I am done. As I finish each segment of the project I will post it on this space gradually and keep logging the date when I make each post.

 As of now I feel like making the sound effects shouldn't be too difficult. I will have to find an effective way of recording the sound effects that take place within the cave and ensure they have the appropriate reverberation.







Log: (11th March 2014)

I finished the first draft of the animatic yesterday. One part I had difficulty with was deciding how much of a time gap there should be between when Sam's helmet falls on the ground and when the knocker reaches in to grab the Figgy 'Obbin. The time gap had to let the Knockes appear sinister and let the audience know that it had planned to kill Sam. But if it was too long even by a second, the animation would appear awkward. The first draft of my animatic did not contain sound. I then went on youtube and downloaded some sound effects such as loud clanging sounds and the sound of a rock falling on the ground, and added these to the animatic. Dan had also recorded his voiceover of the narration and I mixed this in with the animatic. I used Audacity to edit the voiceover and separate the segments in the track to insert them in the appropriate areas of the animatic. I now have to add ambient sound effects that play when Sam enters the cave and sounds such as birds chirping and wind blowing when he steps outside.




Log: (18th April 2014)

Today I made the 4th version of the animatic. Jack had redone certain parts of his storyboard over the Easter break and added some new frames so I  made the same alterations to the animatic. This time I added the soundtrack that we have decided to use and several other sound effects. Nick had told us to add shot numbers to the animatic so I did that too. The fourth animatic flowed and looked really good with the extra sound effects, voiceover and especially the soundtrack! The sound effects were downloaded from a website called http://www.freesfx.co.uk/.


Log: (1st May 2014)

Today the remaining members of my group finished their animations and the final movie was supposed to be handed in tomorrow afternoon. My job was to edit the film - arrange the scenes, insert the dialogue, sound effects and finalize the film. The day was absolutely chaotic and the other team members were struggling to finish their animations as soon as possible, and the animations were handed to me at night. I worked on the film from 12:00 AM to 9:00 AM in the library. I ran into countless problems because I didn't know where the various scenes where stored and which versions I had to use. And I couldn't ask anyone because they all were asleep after 3 AM.

 I'm not whining or anything, but it would have been great if my team had finished their animations at least 1 day earlier so that I had more time to work on it. And it would have been even greater if they arranged all their scenes into one folder so that I knew where to look, and kept all the scenes in one format. One of the scenes even had a problem as the main character had 4 arms instead of 2. Many of the scenes had huge file sizes and since I was using an extremely slow computer, I had to use a media encoder to change their format to compress them so that they wouldn't cause a heavy load on the computer.

I should have stressed to my group earlier that it was important for them to finish their work early enough for me to edit it. I will keep this entire experience in my mind the next time I'm on a group project and make sure I do so.

4 Poses With Eleven

In this assignment, we were supposed to use the Maya character rig called ' Eleven ' and take rendered shots of him in 4 different poses, showing emotion.

For this first shot, he is in a sinister pose, rubbing his hands and plotting something evil. However the squated legs depict a certain sense of childishness and innocence in him:

In the second shot, he is in a joyful pose, like a ballet dancer in mid air.

In the third shot, he is in a horrified and shocked state, as if he just at that moment lost something precious to him.

For this fourth pose, he is in a very condescending pose. Bewildered at the same time, as if he is listening to a person who he thinks is speaking absolute nonsense.

In this assignment I learnt quite a bit about how to operate character rigs in Maya and how their various features can be easily controlled through the channel box.

Bouncing Ball In Maya

For this assignment, we were supposed to animate a ball bouncing in Maya.

Eleven Pushing A Block

Here I have animated the ' Eleven ' character rig that were given for our Maya assignments. I have animated Eleven pushing a large block. I wanted to make the block look it was heavy, so I first animated Eleven's movements, and then animated the movement of the block. I gave Eleven some head movements to make it look like he was putting quite a bit of effort into pushing the block.

Eleven Picking Up a Block

We were given a Maya character rig called ' Eleven ', and in this project we were supposed to make him pick up an object from the ground. I made the character pick up a simple grey block from the ground. I went through problems in this assignment because an error had caused the textures of the character to go haywire, so I had to re-texture the character's skin and hair. I was also unable to texture the eyes and so in this animation his eyes are black.

Burt Walk Cycle

This was one of our Maya assignments, where we were given a character rig called ' Burt ' and we had to make him walk. This was the first time I was animating a character within Maya and so I found it difficult to animate the foot placements, foot and toe roll, etc. I made Burt walk on a checker textured plane to give the viewer a sense of the distance covered by Burt. 

Flash Sound Project

For this project we were given a sound clip and we were supposed to come up with an animation that we could mix the sound clip with and that would give the sound clip some context. The sound clip contained all sorts of strange noises and a scream at the end. I decided to animate a cafeteria scene, because I felt the sound effects in the audio clip matches some of the things that go on in a cafeteria really well. A customer's burping, the chef chopping vegetables in his station could associate well with the snapping sound effect in the clip, a receptionist speaking into the phone, the splashing sound effect in the clip could be the sound of another customer drinking from a nearby water fountain. And of course the alien, mumbling the word " hello " while slowly creeping up on the receptionist, causing her to drop the phone and scream in terror.

Cubey Emotion 2

In this assignment we had to animate Cubey along with another character. Either one of the characters takes on a more dominant role while the other one takes on a submissive role. The story behind my animation was: Cubey is painting something on an easel, and the smaller character comes rushing into the scene in a joyful mood, and bumps Cubey in a playful manner, causing Cubey's hand to move and create an unwanted mark on the canvas. The moment he bumps Cubey, he realizes his mistake. Cubey gets frustrated, pointing at his painting and becomes furious. The smaller character gets scared at this point. Cubey then intimidates and makes the smaller character walk backwards to the other end of the frame. The smaller character then becomes sad, as Cubey tells him to go away. This entire scenario is very identical to the common situation of a child interrupting his father while he is working, and the father then getting agitated and telling his son to go to his room, and that was the inspiration for this scene. I used symbols such as the exclamation mark on top of Cubey's head, the smoke that comes out of his ears and the lines around his head to emphasize his anger and irritation. To show the sadness of the little character, I animated his back bending, and then him slowly walking out of the frame. I made a few mistakes in this animation, like how the paint on the canvas still shows when Cubey's head is supposed to be in front of it.

Cubey Jump

In this assignment we animated a cube-like character (Cubey), jumping from point A to point B. This was one of my early assignments and I made the mistake of drawing in too many frames, making the animation look very shaky.

Bouncing Balls in Flash

This was our first Flash assignment on the course. We had to animate a football bouncing and a bowling ball bouncing. I used the squash and stretch element for both the balls, but to a much lesser extent for the bowling ball to show its rigidity and heaviness.