This week I re-shoot my acting video with different style and angle. In the previous version, the characters were talking to the camera but in the new acting, I made both characters facing and talking to each other. This time, they were visible in a full-body shot so we can see the whole body movements.

Same as before, I’m quite struggled with acting. It took me more than 2 hours and 88 videos to finally get the acting that I’m satisfied with. I edited the video and combined both characters in one shot using masking technique to make them look like they were talking to each other.

I uploaded the video to Ftrack and Luke approved it. I can now proceed to the animation process and use the video footage as reference.

Week: 15 – 21 Feb

Throughout this week’s tutorial we used the Arnold rendering engine instead on the built-in Houdini’s Mantra. I headed to Autodesk website to download and install the trial version of Arnold. I then switched the rendering engine in Houdini to Arnold as I followed the Mehdi’s tutorial.

For this tutorial, I used the ‘rubbertoy’ as the subject and attached the ‘Attribute Delete’ node to clear any attribute of the 3d model. After that, I applied a new ‘Standard Surface’ material shader to the model. With the shader, we can change the object’s color, specular, roughness etc. But for this exercise, I just followed and used the same shader settings from Mehdi’s tutorial.

I added an ‘Arnold Light’ node into the scene which act as the ‘Key’ lighting. By default, the Light type is set as ‘Point Light’ which is omni direction.

Before going deeper into the lighting, I added a new camera node to add a camera into the scene to set the view angle of the render. I repositioned the camera until I got good angle of the subject (rubbertoy).

Next, I went back to the ‘Arnold Light’ that I created before and changed the light type. There are many option available for the light such as Point, Distant, Spot, Quad, Disk, Cylinder, Skydome, Mesh and Photometric. Each light has different parameters and settings that effects the render.

I changed the light type to ‘Distant’ first to try and see how the render looks like. The lighting has now became a direct light instead of omni direction.

I played around with the render settings and lighting parameters a bit to see how the render reacts to it. I also added a ‘Grid’ node to add a plane under the subject so shadow can be casted on it.

I added the second ‘Arnold Light’ and changed the Light Type to ‘Quad’. This lighting will act as the ‘Back’ lighting for the scene. In the next part, I tested and experimented several lighting parameters as well as reposition the lights to get the lighting I want.

I went back to the first lighting and changed its type to Skydome and applied a HDR texture that I downloaded from the internet.

I experimented with the settings several time but I didn’t manage to get the same visual as seen in Mehdi’s tutorial. I’m not really sure if I missed anything or was it because of the trial version of Arnold. I didn’t finish the whole part of the tutorial as I need to finish some other tasks in the collaborative project. I may revisit this tutorial again later.

The dialogue for character performance was confirmed last week. This week, I recorded myself acting out the dialogue. Its quite hard for me actually as I don’t have talent in acting. I recorded tremendous amount of clips just to get good ones for the 30 sec dialogue. I then edited the clips that I think were good enough and uploaded the video to Ftrack for review by Luke.

In the class session today, Luke rejected my acting video and suggested to do a re-shoot with different acting style and view angle where both characters should be shown full-body while facing and interacting each other. Luke mentioned that I should make the scene totally in different situation than the original Tiberian Sun clip and it can be a very funny scene.

I totally agreed with Luke’s suggestions and will do a re-shot probably in the weekend or early next week.

In this term, we will have another character performance animation practice as a continuation from the last term. And for this time, there must be 2 characters that interact with each other.

In today’s class Luke briefed and showed several videos regarding this topic. And for the first task, each of us need to find 3 short dialogues as options and upload it to Ftrack by 3pm today. Luke will choose which audio is the best and suitable for our character performance animation.

I quickly browsed several films and videos for suitable dialogues and ended up with multiple options. I chose the best 3 dialogues that I think can be interesting to animate. And the 3 dialogues that made into the final cut were short scenes from The Terminal (film), Avatar (film) and Tiberian Sun (Game cutscene).

My first choice was of course the dialogue from my favourite game, Tiberian Sun. But when I compiled the audio, I intentionally put Tiberian Sun at the last place to make it look like it was my last choice. And turned out, Luke really chose that dialogue!

The next task now is to personally acting out the dialogue and record it as a reference footage for the animation. This made me a bit nervous because I don’t have talent in acting. We will then required to upload the acting video to Ftrack next week so Luke can give feedback and opinion to it.

Visualisation Process

Previs or Previsualization is pre-production process of visual planning and mapping out scenes before filming and production. It can be done using many methods such as drawing, storyboard, animatic, photography, and more advance using 3d graphic. Previs helps the director and production team to experiment and understand the camera direction, subject placements, lighting and compositions of the scenes. It can also serve to identify the technical aspects, required assets and possible issues before money is spend on actual production.

Postvis is combining previs elements or placeholder visual effects with the live action footage to quickly preview the film and validate the before proceeding for the final process. It provides a post-production blueprint for the VFX team and a comprehensive look at the film for test screenings.

Techvis is an aid to explain how certain scenes could be accomplished. It can be in many forms such as sketch drawing, detailed schematic diagrams and simulation videos that reveal the relationship between camera rigs, actors, how sets were constructed and what the visual effects process might then involve. Techvis ensures that every previs shot is achievable and can be reproduced during the shooting.

Animation Types

VFX animation refers to visual effect animations in live-action film or video. It involves enhancing footages by fixing visual, adding digital props, character and particle effects. The added elements are usually designed to look as realistic as possible that blend with the live-action footages. The process involves tracking, manual animation and simulation.

Film animation refers to fully animated movie. The animation can be cartoony or in realistic style depends on the concept. Although more advanced methods like motion capture can be used, most film animation production prefers to animate manually to have more control and make the stylised animation more visible.

Game animation refers to animation created for game and real-time interactive use. The animations are usually action sets designed to be loop-able and can be blended with other action. The process can be manually animated or motion captured. In terms of finishing look, the animator sometimes will ignore the intersection between polygon and parts as long as the overall animation is good. 

Motion Capture Types

Motion capture or mocap is a technique of recording the motion of person or object so it can be applied to virtual character and object. The process requires actors to act and implementation of special equipment or hardware to track the movements. Among the data that can be captured are body, fingers, lip and facial expressions. The results are usually intended to look realistic to be used in film, animation and games.

Matchmove is a technique used to track the motion of the camera in a footage so computer graphics can be implemented into the scene to appear in perfectly matched perspective with correct motion, position and orientation. Match moving is typically a software-based technology and applied after the normal footage is recorded.

Rotomation is a technique of tracking and animating 3d element by matching the movement frame by frame with the actor or object in the live-action footage. The method is used to replace or adding parts to the original subjects with digital version.

Week: 1 – 7 Feb

This week tutorial from Mehdi is about creating particle in Houdini. We learned how generate particles that attached to a character.

There were several completely new nodes since this was about simulation and different than the last week modeling nodes, such as popsource, timeshift, scatter as well as node to affect force like gravity and wind. There were also a lot of playing with numbers & values for the particle generation, birth and the strength of the forces.

Result

Week: 24 – 31 Jan

Last week we were introduced with Houdini software by Mehdi Daghfous. I never used Houdini before. Starting from this week forward, Mehdi will provide a weekly tutorial for us to practice and familiar with the software.

This week tutorial is about the basic interface and getting to understand the software concept. Speaking of concept, Houdini is quite different from any other 3d software I’ve tried before. It is nodes based and use it for pretty much everything. It’s like we do a visual coding and connect the functions to achieve what we want to create. There are a lot of syntax that we should know as well to use throughout the software.

These are some of them that I noted when watching Mehdi tutorial:

• OBJ : Object
• SOP : Surface operators
• DOP : Dynamics operators
• ROP : Render operators
• $HIP : Path for saving file
• $OS : Export geo name
• $F4 : Frame number

We learned how to build a simple cabin model and get to familiar with the fundamental of the software along the way. During the modeling process, I found that Houdini has all the standard modeling tools like we found in the other 3d software, but with they are done through nodes. It’s quite tricky at first as to understand what and where the nodes can be connected. But I can see the advantage of this is where a node can be shared which creating a number of procedural objects and instances with variations or similar parameters can be faster.

Final Model 1

This is my cabin model after following the tutorial. As my ‘OCD’ kicks in, I also organised the nodes and renamed everything accordingly.

Final Model 2

Mehdi want us to add wood shape wall to the cabin and do it ourselves using the knowledge that we have learned before. Below is my cabin version 2.

Throughout the first semester, I have learnt so much in terms of technical aspects and knowledges in animation. I’m very grateful to learn so many things from the professionals at UAL and practice techniques used by the industry. One of the things that I think was contributing to my development is to do this blog page as part of the learning process. The blog is where I need to write about my thinking on certain topics, documenting the works process and problem-solving steps when completing the animation tasks. I really feel this is a very interesting learning process that has helped me to not only thinking about making nice animation but also more conscious about the progresses. I’m actually very weak at writing that sometimes it can take days for me to just draft one blog entry before I can publish it. This blog has to some extent helped me to improve my English as well which can be very useful if I want to work in the international production companies.

In terms of technical, I’m actually a long time 3dsmax and Blender user due to my previous working experiences. I barely use Maya before, so I took this opportunity to learn the software significantly. It can be different from someone that never use any 3d software before than someone who already has some other software workflows baked into the brain and muscle memory. During the first several weeks, I’m quite struggled to change my habits when navigating around the software as I keep pressing the wrong buttons and shortcuts. It can be a bit frustrating, but I have managed to improve in that regards and more comfortable working with Maya now. I also learnt and practicing a lot of techniques from tutorial videos of how to do the things I know with other software in Maya. To me, knowing technical aspect is very important so I can use the full potentials of the software when doing the animation parts. I also learnt how to use 3DEqualizer to do camera tracking and rotomation as it being used in the film industry.

Finishing the first term, I can say that I still has a lot to learn and improve. I’m very excited to continue learning in the next term at UAL.

Future Path

Regarding my thinking about the future path, I’m actually very interested in two different branches in the field which are character rigging (including animation) and cinematography in animation. This is why I attempted to somewhat combine those two elements in my previous personal animation several years ago, although not very successful.

The characters in the animation don’t have a very good rig, plus it don’t show the character face as I’m quite weak with facial rigs at that time. But lately, I’m growing to love character rig and animation after my previous working experiences and also when doing character animation assignments during the first term at UAL. I’m really interested to have deep knowledge and skill to produce sophisticated character rigs.

On the other side, I’m still very interested with the art of cinematography when telling stories. As you can see in my full animation, I’m quite focus on how the camera moves and delivers the shots. I love how camera angle, movement and composition can convey the mood in a film or animation. Especially in 3D, camera can be more flexible to play around with any idea to give dramatic, actions and sensation feeling to the audience.

I hope I can further my knowledge and excel in this two different areas. Or maybe I should focus on one only. My heart was torn in two now.