#thirdfinalmajorproject

[scottyvfx]

I would like to conclude this project and my blog with my showreel, an amalgamation of some of my favourite university projects over the past three years. After 357 blog posts, this is the last one. 

And with that, I’ve finished my university course. It’s been a wild ride, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

- Scott

[scottyvfx]

Evaluation

This is it. The end of university. The conclusion of three years of tough but extremely rewarding work and personal development. I can’t believe I’m finally writing the conclusion of my last university project. Let’s take a look at my third and final FMP and how it went. 

It seems so long ago that I struggled to decide what to do for this project. Infact, I’ve only just remembered that I originally thought I would be doing a montage for a set of album covers. That direction changed dramatically after a discussion of Chris brought up the good idea of having an omnipotent figure creating something. Now that idea has been refined and created in a polished video. It was definitely good for me to make sure to talk to the tutors early on the project so I could avoid having an extended period of time without an idea.

The presentation that was due shortly after being assigned the project was also a huge boost for my productivity. I am pleased to say that I feel that my presentation went much better than it did in my previous project, probably due to the fact I got it done earlier and was actually fully awake to give it. My presentation meant that I would get at least a faint idea of what I should do for the video and most importantly encouraged me to get some animation tests done very early on. I took a similar philosophy as my design competition project and decided that I would do something out of my comfort zone to expand my skills - 3D character animation. This was something I had next to no experience but my many experiences with 2D key framing in After Effects and limited 3D experience in Cinema 4D made me think to myself that I should at least give it a go. I didn’t want to create a character from scratch so I downloaded a 3D model from turbosquid and went to town. This was very valuable. I quickly started learning what was involved in 3D character animation and some of the limits of the models. Learning what I could and couldn’t do with the 3D models. was very important for what would come later on. I decided to create a set of animations to accompany various slides with my presentation which the class loved, such as having the hands drop the project title into the middle of the frame. These initial animations gave me the confidence to tackle the entire idea of having two hands create the universe. Beyond that, I mainly kept to myself for the majority of the project. I admit that I should have consulted the tutors more but I was happy with how I proceeded with the project. The last advice session with Chris and Jason was very beneficial though with them providing good ideas that would take my video further. Ideally I should have talked to them more, but I’m very pleased with the end result so I don’t find it productive to wonder “what if?”. 

Overall this project went very smoothly, the only major hiccup was having my iMac kick the bucket at a crucial time. About just-over halfway through the project my Mac’s internal hard drive failed, taking all of the data on it with it. Thankfully I had everything backed up (except for a few saved games from my favourite games, which was still devastating), meaning this would only impede me time wise as my mac got repaired, which took a full week. I was at home while this happened but thankfully my dad had a spare macbook I used to create 2D elements inside of Adobe Illustrator. So in reality this only really set me back from working on 3D for a week whilst I worked on 2D. The moral of this story is to backup your data, thankfully I didn’t have to learn that the hard way! My mac dying would be even more of a non-issue if I was at uni where there are iMacs free to use. This was a good lesson in preparation and problem solving. 

I’m very happy with the breadth of research I’ve done for this project. Tons of research early on helped me nail down a visual style and types of animation I wanted to aim towards. I looked at so many things it helped me visualise almost every visual element of the project in my head. I also made sure to look at imagery throughout the project when I needed visual references and inspiration. A good example would be the industrial scene which I worked on with lots of imagery floating around my artboard as I worked for me to look at (some of which was included earlier on in my blog). I can’t really fault myself here, even though you can never do enough research. I definitely feel the visual style I used for my project was justified in helping to convey the humorous, lighthearted and abstract scientific and religious concepts in the project. The style also aligns well with my preferred style which I enjoy creating. 

I certainly gained valuable experience in doing 3D animation. There was a surprising amount of ‘stuff’ I had to do to get this to work. I underestimated how much would it would be to get two hands, 8 fingers and two thumbs animating correctly and believably over almost 2 minutes at 30 frames a second. I must have adjusted keyframes and animation arcs thousands of times and often for days at a time. The concept of tweaking animating arcs to create believable motion carries over from 2D animation in After Effects but becomes much more important when trying to animate an object that was alive. Many of the corrections I had to make at the end of the project was to animation that had arcs which caused the animation to ease in or out far too quickly or not at all; these ‘bad arcs’ this lead to a lot of the draft animations looking robotic. One of the most significant part of skill development in this project was when I re-rigged and re-skinned the hands models (and extended the mesh in the thumbs). This was completely out of my comfort zone and understanding before I started looking up tutorials on YouTube which I had to watch several times before I could start myself. I am VERY thankful I decided to do this because it would have killed this project if I hadn’t. The re-rigging and skinning was fundamental in enabling the hand models to express certain emotions and complete certain actions. Looking back at the project now it is easy to see that in almost every-piece of 3D animation that the wrists are used which wouldn’t have been possible if I had left in the original hand skeletons. The interactions between 2D and 3D elements pushed my newfound skills even further. I’m really pleased with how the 3D portions (and the 2D portions) of this project went and I would be interested in taking it a step further in learning how to cult models such as the hands to then rig myself. It is needless to say this project was hugely valuable to me beyond the final product. My only critique of personal development in this project is the fact that I didn’t get many physics interactions working. I did however get 3D-physics-driven collisions and fracturing working (both of which are present in the asteroid scenes) in addition to a plethora of particle simulations scattered throughout (the latter of which really helped define the visual style of the piece). 

My blog management with this project was also great. In the third year I have been keeping very diligent with updating my blog throughout my project. I feel this will be useful in documentation I may have to do in the future. One critique would that I didn’t update a to-do list on the blog very often, but I was keeping one handy and updating it throughout the project.

It was at the start of this project I decided I preferred motion graphics. Some people decide this much earlier in the course but I never really leaned way or another until I realised during the previous project I wanted to tackle motion graphics more. I would describe myself now as a motion designer who is also capable of taking the role of a generalist to complete VFX tasks. I did however decide to myself when I was struggling to breath in two morphsuits, alone, in a less-than-suitable green screen studio that I wasn’t going to tackle VFX-intensive tasks such as keying in any proceeding uni project. I’m happy with these decisions.

Time management was very good with this project. At no point did I ever feel the last-minute-panic or rush. I was certainly stressed at points but mostly when faced with daunting and alien tasks i.e rigging, huge amounts of 3D animation. I had a good margin at the end of the project for sitting back and reviewing the project which meant I could get my hands dirty correcting small visual errors in the piece without worrying about time. I did all this without sacrificing parts of the projects I wanted to tackle such as in the motion typography project where I had to cut out 2-4 scenes to make the deadline. During this project I did fight myself to get into a flow, but when I did I would often ride it all the way out until I was far too tired to carry on. I was able to adhere to my original vision closely, likely as a subsequent of my excellent time management. I found that accounting for the fact that most things take longer than expected worked well. I voluntarily worked until the wee hours of the morning weeks before the deadline to save myself headaches later on. I worked really hard, and I’m really proud of myself for it!

Overall, I'm very happy with how this project played out. I handled my time well and made something I'm proud of whilst pushing myself into new terroirty to learn new skills. If we're to change anything about this project I would look into finding a sound designer to collaborate on my audio with me. And in an ideal world I would try and find a way of simplifying the animation process (perhaps through motion capture?) so I could build and change animation faster to improve my work flow and create animations with even more depth.

Thank you

[scottyvfx]

Third Final Major Project Completed

Here it is, my third final major project, and I’m very proud of it. I didn’t post a draft of scenes 4 and 5 both a lot of changes and corrections have been made. Like I said in a previous blog post I’m very happy I decided to pursue and finish S4 (Scene 4) as it goes a long way to help sell the piece. After I had finished all of the visuals it was time to crack down on the audio and the soundtrack.

The most significant change between the last draft I posted and this final video is the audio. The sound effects and the music really go a long way to setting the tone and creating the humorous and light-hearted tone of the piece. For the soundtrack I used a range of audio sources including a cartoon show’s soundtrack from the 90′s which works very well in a number of places. I like to think I know how to choose soundtracks well for my pieces but sadly there’s only so much I can do when I don’t have any experience actually creating music or designing sounds. I sourced a large number of audio tracks I thought would work in various places and treated it like a video editing exercise inside of premiere. I would cut and fade between tracks and occasionally make use of audacity to more precisely edit audio, such as doing precise fades or extensions to make sure things blended together nicely. I did all that I can and there are still problems with different types of music not being blended nicely together but I think the current soundtrack still works very well for pushing the piece forward in terms of story, tone and atmosphere.

The sound effects were more conventional. I sourced the sounds from various games and free websites for sound effects and timed them up with the visuals in adobe premier. I made a first draft which I won’t be posting (it’s embarrassing!) using sounds I could source as quickly as possible as a draft to decide to myself if I should pursue making a better soundtrack or spend more time finding a narrator. Obviously, based off the final result you see here, I chose to develop my soundtrack more. After being suggested to find a narrator by Chris and Jason I was hesitant to follow the idea through. I never really put much thought into having a narration because it was never in my original vision and after thinking about it I’m not sure I would want one even if I had the capacity to go create one. I see the value in having one and the direction it could take the story and the humour but I just wasn’t ‘feeling it’. Not to mention it would be a colossal effort to find someone willing to narrate, and be present at a recording studio I would find and hire, all after putting serious thought into creating and refining a script. I didn’t want to do all that when I was happy with the path I was on already. Not to mention the narration was suggested with about a week to go on the project and I still had to do major visual work. I still think I made the best decision here.

Chris also suggested making the hand more agitated or crazy in addition to making the camera ‘detached’ and floaty. I didn’t really want to do these either. While this might be good for fidelity in animation I was looking for a calm, clumsy but well-intenioned omnipotent figure to orchestrate the universe’s creation. There were other suggested changes that I was much happier with doing. For example Chris suggested that I make debris emit from the hands as they crunch the asteroids into the Earth. I agreed this would be a good change and not only does it look good it also works well for telling the story. I used a fracturing plugin in Cinema 4D for dividing the asteroids I had already build into numerous fractures. This is what it looks like in Cinema 4D:

This was done by applying a random effector to the fracture group to enable spreading them out in 3D space (similarly to how I did the stars) and animating the strength of that to distribute them further.

Another change was to make the right hand react in S2 when the laser fires from the left hand. This is a small change but makes the hands much more interesting with some implied ‘pushback’ to the ‘body’ of the hands which in turns pushes both hands back. It also prevents the right hand from being useless in the scene and detracting from the rest of the shot.

There are numerous of small changes throughout the piece as polish to the animation. I went through the whole piece and examined every point at which the fingers would make abrupt or strange movements and fixed them. Generally these were caused in Cinema 4D by the program creating arches between keyframes. I’m not entirely sure how I missed these before rendering them; perhaps the renders playback more smoothly when played back in video form and make errors more apparent. I very painstakingly went through cinema 4D and corrected these, it was a very tedious process. It wasn’t tedious so much for editing the animations, it was rendering the animations out as .png images and trying to keep everything organised. For example, I would render out corrections for a number of new frames, whilst having to make sure to backup the old frames. I would then bring those frames into After Effects and overlay them over the old animation. This got logistically complicated very quickly. One example of problems this causes is trying to keep things organised when different sets of frames overlapped into the same range of frames in after effects. Overall, I wanted to do this because it allows me to backup sequences and render complete sequences efficiently and safely without doing long and intensive re-renders of the original animations.

An example of the mess of folders. This could have been simplified, admittedly.

I also tried to keep the complete video in after effects rendered out as a png sequence which meant I had to follow a similar process in Cinema 4D in rendering new sets of frames into the main folder, all while backing up the old frames incase things went wrong (which they did!). I’m glad I did this though because when I had to re-render the final video to ensure there were no problems with the visuals or audio it only took a short amount of time because I was mostly re-rendering .png sequences. This taught me a lesson to render computationally intense sequences rendered out as .pngs as soon as possible.

In the end, this tedious process was my best option for correcting small animation issues. I’m glad I did it though because I’m pleased with the polished look my final video has.

Now it’s time to evaluate the project.

[scottyvfx]

Main story completed

I’ve completed the main story sequence of the project! Another way of putting that is that I’ve completed all 5 scenes in terms of visuals, all that’s left now is to polish what I’ve done, add in sound effects and a sound track. I’m going to hold off posting anymore visual drafts until I’ve finished the project completely. The largest change between my last posted draft and now is that I:

Integrated the dolly-zoom shots in with the 2D sequences on the surface for scene 5 (S5).

Animated and completed S5′s space scene. This includes a number of 2D and 3D pieces of animation including a rocket launch animation, a destructive thunderstorm, and so on.

Integrated all scene 5 elements together.

Built all of the elements for S4 in adobe illustrator.

Animated all 2D elements of S4 in After Effects

Animated the 3D hands for S4, complete with shadows.

Corrected a few visual problems in the preceding scenes.

It’s a huge weight off my shoulders to have all 5 scenes completed. I was very close to excluding S4 from my project completely which would have affected the pacing and compromised the story. In the past I’ve sometimes been forced to remove scenes in order to meet time restraints so it’s a great accomplishment to avoid doing that in this project. I decided to dedicate a full day to see how far I could get with the scene before deciding whether or not to move on or not. Even if I couldn’t do S4 I would have to devise a way to connect scenes 3 and 5, which made it riskier if I decided to abandon the fourth scene as I would have wasted time. After about a day I decided it was worth dedicating more time to finishing the scene and I’m glad I did, it really completes the story and improves the piece overall.

My next focus is fixing the visual errors present and taking Chris’s advice on how the improve the piece. These include:

Make the S1 starting animating faster and more agitated

Add motion blur to all of the hand animations.

Add debris coming from the hands in S3 when 

Make the second hand react to laser fire in S2 and S3.

Add a stronger camera shake to the start of S1 and at the punch in S3. 

These suggestions are worrying because some of them involve fairly substantial changes to the 3D animation in more than one scene. I will have to prioritise correcting animation problems before focusing on changes which will add additional animation fidelity to what is already there. I am unsure of how these changes will affect my grade, but I don’t want to leave no time for audio which I think will be a strong component of this piece. 

[scottyvfx]

This the visuals of the project almost reaching the finish line it’s time to start thinking about and collecting audio for the piece. The first step is straight forward - gather audio and soundscapes that will play in relation with what’s happening on-screen. For example, the hands fire lasers into space so there needs to be laser sounds, and in the military scene there needs to be sounds of helicopters and weapons fire. Simple enough. This involves sourcing audio from sites across the web. What isn’t as straightforward is creating the soundtrack for the piece.

This isn’t as simple as dragging-and-dropping a music track over the top of the video as there’s points in the story that require events in the audio such as a crescendo. I’ve been looking at videos online I think could play a part in the soundtrack of my own piece. Above is a narration of scenes in space done by Whoopie Goldberg. In my discussions with Jason and Chris they suggested i get a similar light hearted narration for my piece but honestly I don’t think I have the time to find a voice actor, create a script and get him or her into a high-quality recording studio before the deadline. I did like the soundtrack of the piece above which is grand and exciting.

This next example from ‘Life: A cosmic Story’ is great example of ambience that could play during points in the story of little action. The voice actress also does a great job explaining the visuals to make them easier to understand - a problem I could struggle with.

Cynaide & Happiness’s ‘Waiting for the bus’ has a great track which expresses the emotion of the story in a fashion I would like to do similarly in my piece. This is closely aligned to what I’d like to do, but this is evidently composed specifically for the visuals. I don’t know how to do something similar which is a point of concern for me.

And just for fun I’ve included this Disney-themed sketch from ‘Family Guy’. I’ve also included it as a reminder that the overall tone of my piece should be humorous and light-hearted. I’d like to have an expressive soundtrack, although I’d rather not have the concert of singing disney-like characters.

[scottyvfx]

Behind

I’m a bit behind on the project now. The entirety of yesterday and today was spent building up a massive online web of documents, forms and spreadsheets for the end of year show. I consolidated all of the information about what people need to do to submit their content and get ready for the show using Google Docs. It’s taken a lot of time to get these documents out complete with full explanations for what people need to do but it should ultimately save me time in the long run. Hopefully this helps everyone (tutors included) organise themselves more effectively, which in turn makes my job as the show coordinator easier. 

I haven’t discussed the show on this blog up until now but I thought it was worth mentioning due to how it affects the project. By the end of the day I would like to finish animating all of the 2D scenes for Scene 5.