22-23 Feb 2021

Today, I started rigging the space buggy so that I could produce an animation for one of my shots, which is shot 07. The model is from the university library.

As usual, when I opened any 3d files especially for rigging, I will check and make sure the model is ready first. I relinked its textures using the ‘File Path Editor’ to have dynamic path to our collaborative folder so that it will always find the ‘sourceimages’ subfolder regardless of the change to the root address and drive. I also converted all materials to Arnold as we planned to use Arnold rendering for our project.

Next, I need to separate some of the space buggy components especially all its wheels so it can be rigged and move individually. Currently the wheel meshes were within the same mesh group with the body.

Like the problem with previous spaceship model, there were many separated polygons and overlapping vertices which make ‘double-clicking’ to select each component become harder. This is a very common problem happened when the model was converted and transferred using other 3d file format. So I did some meshes clean-up using the vertex ‘Merge’ function with very minimum threshold to fix the problem. I then managed to select each wheel meshes more easily.

I separated all the 6 wheels using the ‘Edit Mesh > Extract’ function. As I mentioned in the previous post, the Maya mesh separating function can be quite tedious because it will create a new group and divide each component in the selection into different objects with generic name. I need to rename and combine some of the object that supposed to be 1 component back. After that, I separated and combined some other components that I think are appropriate to follow the wheels or the body.

With all the necessary components separated, I started creating all the controllers using the ‘NURBS Circle’ with ‘Linear’ Degree and 8 Sections to have low poly shape so animator can have clear visual when the shape rotates.

I setup 1 root controller which placed at the center ground level, 1 controller for the body and 2 controllers for each wheel; 1 intended for wheel suspension and another for wheel rotation. I locked the suspension controllers to be able to move up and down only and wheel controller locked for rotation only. To sum, the rig hierarchy was setup this way; ‘root > body’ & ‘root > suspension > wheel’. All the meshes where parented to their respective controller using the simple Parent Constrain method.

It was a fairly simple rig but sufficient for the vehicle animation in shot 07. There is no physic or rigid body applied which mean all controllers must be animated manually. I think it’s good because I can have direct control for the animation and learn how animate the vehicle properly.

I finalised the rig by arranging and renaming everything accordingly in the Outliner for better management. I uploaded the rigged space buggy file to our collaborative folder and let the team know in case anyone want to check and use it.

24 Feb 2021

Early in the morning I started animating shot 07 as I was eager to animate this shot. I begin by referencing the space buggy model into the animation file and placing Jordan and Michael characters on the buggy to resemble the storyboard.

I then looking for the right spot in the background for the scene to happen. I want the buggy to run over some small rocks so that the vehicle will have some suspension motions to make the scene more dramatic. There are already several potential spots with small rocks in the background model but after several testing with camera angle, I finally decided the area with good rocks arrangement and angle for the space colony.

The animation process is pretty simple actually. I animated the root first to move from point A to B with the small rocks in its path. I then animated the wheel suspensions to move up and down when the wheel reached the rocks.

After I get the wheel suspensions right, I animated the buggy’s body to react accordingly to the suspension with some follow through and overlapping motions.

For the wheel rotation, I just made one cycle (360 degree) for the first 30 frame only and loop it in the Graph Editor using ‘Curves > Post Infinity > Cycle’ to have a continuous motion.

After that, I proceed to make the camera animation. I want to have a bit of cinematic feel to it by closeup on the small rocks at the beginning and pull out and up towards the end of the scene to show the wide desert area while keeping the space colony always in view throughout the shot to show that the characters are heading to it. I used ‘Camera and Aim’ so I can control the camera target more easily and animate the ‘aim’ to have some shake and natural movement to it. At the end, it turned out the characters were not really visible in the shot because of the camera angle and the buggy has some big components at its side that covered the characters.

I did some render tests and noticed the space buggy textures were a bit too dark. So I made some changes to its materials in the original model file and have it all updated to the animation file as I used the reference system for the vehicle.

I sent the finished animation file and updated space buggy model to our collaborative folder so that the VFX team can put their lighting and effects to the scene.

26 Feb 2021

We have another weekly video meeting today. Only animation and VFX team were involved this time as we discussing about our progress so far. The sound team was still focusing to produce the music and sound effects.

During the meeting Ghera asking about if he can have a spaceship model with the backdoor closed for the shot 01. I told him that I will update the model as requested.

Right after the meeting, I proceed to separate the backdoor, changed it pivot location and rotated the door to close it. I parented the door to the spaceship and it can be animated. It was a quick task as I have done this process several times before. I then tested the model in the template animation file (with no animation), and the model was updated successfully.

I was about to send the file to our collaborative folder, but I thought I should check if the model will update correctly with Emma’s animation file. I found the back part of the spaceship broke and the door was not moving together with the body in the animation file, where it should move together since it was in the same hierarchy. With further investigate, I noticed that the spaceship hierarchy in the Outliner was different and some of its meshes were changed. I asked Emma to know what she had changed when she animated the shot.

It turned out that Emma changed the parenting structure and merged some of the spaceship meshes in order to make all the parts to move together. She animated the object and not the spaceship group. It was my mistake. I should have properly rig the spaceship with controllers for the root, door etc. I should also inform Emma to animate the spaceship’s group when I decided to use the simple group-parent style rig.

This is something new that I learned today because I never expected the reference model can be modified in animation file, especially to the mesh level. I have worked in 3dsmax and Blender where the reference / proxy model can only be animated, changed in terms of position, rotation and location. The meshes cannot be changed to prevent mistakes and unwanted modifications to the model during animation, at least until we change the proxy settings as local.

27 Feb 2021

I fixed the problem by not separating the backdoor and managed to update the spaceship reference without damaging the Emma’s animation. The door now cannot be animated, but since we don’t have any shot with the backdoor animation, then we are going to be fine. I uploaded the updated file to our collaborative folder on OneDrive and university network.

15-16 Feb 2021

In the morning I do the last preparation for the implementation of the new file structure and referencing system. I saw that Emma already animated the spaceship landing. Initially, I thought that I want to understand how to use the Maya reference system first before I explain the plan to the team. But at this moment I felt that I made a mistake and guilty for not mentioning about it earlier because Emma probably needs to animate the scene again using the new file if we are going to implement it.

Later that day, I explained what I have prepared in our Discord channel and pointed out all of the advantages of using the reference system in out project. I want to get approval from the team first before I push the new files to our collaboration folder.

Antoni then suggested me to improve the background with bigger mountains at the back and I agreed with him. I imported several mountain models from Emma’s file into my background model. I optimised the model first and arranged the mountains to fill around the existing background. I think it’s definitely looks much better now with all the mountains.

As the team approved the implementation of the reference system, I uploaded everything I have prepared to our collaboration folder. I didn’t delete the old file but put them in a backup folder in case we want to revert to the old file and structures.

17 Feb 2021

This morning we had class with Luke where he demoed about how to use zoetrope technique in Maya. Zoetrope is a premade effect in image sequences format where we can apply it as textures on a plane. It’s like a sprite. It can be very useful for previs project for making quick effects like smoke, fire and muzzle flash without the need to make an actual simulated particle effect from scratch. There is a huge library of zoetrope in the university network and Luke shared folder for us to use.

In the afternoon, we had another weekly video meeting on Discord. We discussed a bit about using zoetrope for some effects in the project. Antoni and Ghera looked into the zoetrope folders to see some of the effects, and we were particularly excited with the sandstorm effect which could be useful for some of the shots in the story. Antoni and Ghera actually was thinking about using actual particle simulation and already researching and experimenting some of the effects. So we decided the VFX team can use any technique that they prefer since they probably want to learn and improve their skills for making an actual effect and not using premade image sequence effects.

For sound department, Ben said that he and Cally have been discussing to split their work where one of them will work for the sound and music on Act 1, another on Act 2 and both of them for Act 3.

During the meeting, I took the opportunity to explain more about the new file structure to the team especially to Emma, Antoni and Ghera. I shared my screen to show them how to use it and what they should do when opening and creating new files so that the referencing will work properly.

After that Emma and I discussed about to split the works for the animation tasks. Emma will do shot 02, 03, 04 and 05, while I’m going to do shot 06, 07, 08 and 09. Emma mentioned that she was a bit concern about the space buggy model for shot 07 whether it can be used or not. I agreed to look into the space buggy file and will do the rigging if it’s not yet rigged so that it can be animated for shot 07.

At the end of the meeting, we decided to have an additional shared folder on OneDrive which will mirror all of the contents from the collaborative folder in the university network. The OneDrive folder will also work as a backup in case anything happened to the primary folder.

18 Feb 2021

Early in the morning, I drew a techvis for shot and camera planning of Act 2 from shot 10 to 18. It can be very useful when we proceed to animate Act 2 later. I planned to have variety of camera angles and movements for this act.

At 11.00am today, we had booked a one-to-one session with Luke today to look into our project and give his opinions and suggestions. Only animation and visual effects team were in this session since it will discuss more towards these departments. Luke seemed pleased with our current progress. He then showed us on how to use a CamShake plugin in Maya to help us making a camera shake. Luke said that camera will at least has tiny shake motions even when static which will add a level of realism.

Luke demoed the plug-in using the university computer, and I asked him whether the camera shake will still work if we take the animation file to work on our own computer or we need to install the plugin first. Luke explained that the camera shake will still there, but we won’t be able to edit it if we don’t have the plug-in installed.

We then discussed a bit more with Luke about using the zoetrope technique or actual effects. He showed us some examples and said it’s up to us to use any technique that we prefer.

8 – 9 Feb 2021

We started this week with video meeting on Discord. This time, we have everyone in the meeting to discuss the storyboard that Emma and I had produced yesterday.

From the storyboard we were able to anticipated what model, animation, visual effects and sound needed for the project. Everyone agreed with the storyboard and then we discussed for everyone next tasks.

The animation department (Emma and I) will start building and preparing 3d models while the visual effects department (Ghera and Antoni) will research and experiment on some visual effects. For the the sound department (Cally and Ben), Emma volunteered to make an animatic from the storyboard to get a rough pace for the story so that Cally and Ben can start drafting audio and music without having to wait for the animation to finish first.

Right after the meeting Emma created a project folder on the University network for all team members to access and working on the project files. I also continue to gather as many free models from the internet that can be useful for the project.

10 Feb 2021

In today’s class, Luke demo to us of how to use and apply motion capture to any character rig as a method to make previs animation process faster. I don’t understand much during the lecture and will watch the recorded session to understand more regarding this topic.

In the evening, Emma posted a preview of her early works on our Discord channel and it looks good. Later that night I checked her works on the university network to see how she prepared the files. I found that all props and background models were imported into 1 file, which may not an issue now but can be problematic when we have multiple animation files with everything inside each of those files. The files can be very big and updating each file can be very tedious if we decide to change something to the background model or textures for example.

It’s definitely not Emma fault though as she probably new to this. I wouldn’t know about this either, but I was a bit fortunate to have some experiences working on several animation projects before to understand the usefulness of referencing system, file management and asset optimisation. Each character, prop and background model are suppose to be separated into different files and composed by linking them into another file. With this method, any model and texture can be updated and the changes can be pushed back to all animation files automatically. Plus, all working files will become much smaller in size and easy to manage. I think this can be very good for our group learning process as well.

The problem at this moment was that I used 3dsmax and Blender pipeline before and not familiar with how Maya referencing works, but I don’t think it will be much different. I didn’t tell the team yet that I want to implement this as I want to understand and confident on how to do this in Maya first. I will work on this tomorrow morning.

11 Feb 2021

Referencing System

Today I started preparing the project folder with reference system in mind on my local computer first. I downloaded all Emma’s files from the university network as my starting point and restructure from there. In the current files, some models were linked from the university model library, which are good, but they were located outside of our collaborative project folder. It can be a problem if any of the team member want to download the project folder to work on their local computer and will experience missing files. It may also will cause damage to the original model in the university library if we decide to modify the model’s shapes and rigs for our project.

In the original Emma’s project proposal, I can see some of the models that Emma planned to use. So I copied all the expected models and their respective texture files from library into our collaborative folder. I setup all the linked textures using ‘File Path Editor’ as dynamic paths inside the project folder so that anyone who copy the project folder will get the textures automatically loaded when they open the project file regardless of the root and parents folder structure.

Next, I started experimenting to see how referencing system works in Maya by linking all the models into a test file that I called ‘playground’ using the Maya Reference Editor. Then I did some experiments with static model first. I modified its shapes in the original file, and saw it updated automatically in the ‘playground’ file. After that, I tested what will happened if I updated a rigged character that has animation. I made a simple animation to the character in the ‘playground’ file and changed its shapes and textures in its original file. The character was updated successfully with all the animations still intact. It’s awesome! The only thing was that I cannot make too much dramatic changes to the bone location and its group as it will break the animation. But this is expected, and it works about the same as other 3d software. I also tested several other things like changing pivot, layers and group. There are small things that irritated me about how Maya project and referencing system works when compared to other software, but I think it’s manageable. I feel so great that I’m now understood the referencing in Maya, how it’s work and its limitations.

Space Ship Model

Next, I do a quick adjustment to the existing spaceship model. I want to do a very simple parent rig to the spaceship especially for its doors so they can be rotated and animated for one of the scenes. The doors were combined within the same mesh group of the body, so I need to separate them first. When I’m double-clicking on the door mesh to select it, it didn’t select the whole door. Which usually means its faces are separated and multiple vertices were overlapped in the same place. This is a very common problem happened when the model was converted and transferred using other 3d file format. So I did some meshes clean-up using the vertex ‘Merge’ function with very minimum threshold to fix the problem. I then managed to select the whole door meshes easily.

I then separated both doors using the ‘Edit Mesh > Extract’ function. The Maya separate function can be quite tedious because it will create a new group and divide each component in the selection into different objects whereas in other 3d software, it will only separate into 2 objects which are the original object and the separated mesh that we selected with original name still intact. But in Maya case, we have to rename the main object back, combine all the meshes that suppose to be one and clean the history. I’m not sure if there is another way to separate mesh but as far I look into tutorials and forum discussion, this is the way to do it in Maya. I will look into this again in the future as I don’t want to waste more time finding solution as this function is working, only it’s a bit annoying to me.

With the doors separated, I adjusted their pivot location and orientation in the right direction, so that the doors can be rotated properly. I then set both doors as child to the spaceship group and rename everything in the Outliner properly. I didn’t do a complete rig with controller for the spaceship as its only need a basic movement for the body and door. So I think a simple group-parent rig would be sufficient.

12 – 14 Feb 2021

Desert Planet Landscape Model

Now I’m ready to proceed with building the background models for Act 01 which are the desert landscape and space colony. I used one of the ground models from Emma’s file as my starting point. Because the polygon count was quite high, I optimised the meshes first using several tools like ‘Mesh > Reduce’ bit by bit, ‘Edit Mesh > Merge’ and some vertex by manual ‘Target Weld’ when Reduce and Merge not working as I expected. I flatten and adjusted some high of the ground shapes as I think it could be used in some shots of the story. During this process I also made a draft space colony model for scaling and location reference. I will revisit this model for detailing.

After the landscape ready, I then imported the modular rock models that I prepared last week and arranged them manually one by one on the ground model. During the process, I organised the Outliner so it is easier to manage as the modular rocks meshes started populating the area.  For basic lighting, I used the HDRI and lighting setup from Emma’s file with some modifications. This aspect may be changed later by Antoni and Ghera from VFX department. So technically, not everything was lost from her original works. During the whole process, I used a screenshot from ‘The Martian’ film as my reference.

Space Colony Model

I went back to the draft space colony model and adding more details to it. I didn’t built the building from scratch, but by combining some modified components from a free space station model to save time. After spending a whole day at the end of the week, I decided to wrap the work for the background model. I did not finish the interior of the building yet as it should has several more models such as tents inside it. So I just put some boxed as a dummy for this moment. I will update the building again and since we can use referencing system, the model changes can be pushed to all animation files at any time. It can also be a good demonstration for the team members so they can see how useful this feature is.

Rendered Images

After everything was ready, I set all the files using category naming convention with ‘char’ for character, ‘prop’ for props, ‘bg’ for background, and ‘anim’ for animation files.

I prepared a template file for ‘anim’ (animation) file with all assets like characters, props and background were linked into the file. So animators (Emma and I) can just grab this template file without the need to setup the references again and again every time we make new animation file.

I finished everything by the night at end of the week but I didn’t push my works to the collaboration folder in the university network yet. I want to brief everyone first about the system that I’ve prepared by tomorrow, 15 February 2021.

1 – 3 Feb 2021

I started the week by searching and collecting free models from the internet that I think can be used for the project. There are many good free models but some of them were in different 3d formats and not for Maya. So, I spent a bit of time to convert the models to Maya and relinked the materials.

I saw that Emma and Antony also started sharing initial assets and references that they found online in the group chat. So I think everyone was excited to start working on this project.

We discussed of when is the suitable time for our first video meeting and agreed to meet online on Thursday, Feb 4^th.

4 Feb 2021

During the first video meeting, we’ve got the opportunity to know each other better and understand everyone specialties which are important for collaboration work. I feel confident with everyone in the group and believe we can achieve a good result with the project. 

Group Leader: Emma Copeland
Animator: Emma Copeland, Kamil Fauzi
VFX: Gherardo Varani, Antoni Coll
Sound Design: Cally Spence, Ben Harrison

Antoni from VFX was unable to be in the meeting today as he was traveling back to London, but Gherardo took notes for him. 

We discussed and began planning out the initial steps for our project. I suggested that we start by making storyboards first based on the Emma’s story outline. So we can get a picture on how the scenes will look like, identify required assets and anticipate any technical issues. With storyboard, all departments can have a guide to start preparing and designing their materials without having to wait for the other stage to complete first. 

There are 3 acts in the story, and we divided the storyboard tasks:
Act 1 & 3: Emma
Act 2: Kamil

We decided to have another video meeting on the next Monday, Feb 8^th to discuss again after the storyboards finished.

Right after the meeting, I shared some of the models that I have converted to Maya in the group chat.

5 Feb 2021

While drawing the storyboard, I asked the other departments if they have ideas that they want Emma and I to include in the storyboard.

7 Feb 2021

By the end of the week, Emma & I managed to finish the storyboards for tomorrow’s meeting (Monday, Feb 8th).

My storyboard for Act 2:

Emma storyboard for Act 1 & 3: