I added more to the environment, including throwing a (bad) texture onto the road. That will have to be changed. I still like my ground shader, though, and it is really easy to render. Trees still need to be tweaked. I want to have a nice cartoony moon in the sky, but I've been playing with filters and trying to get a nice look but haven't had much success. I watched some old tv episodes of Aladdin, and there are some great shots of gigantic, stylized moons against a bright blue Arabian night sky. The secret seems to be mixing the bluish light of the sky and the yellowish glow of the moon without ending up with an unsightly shade of green. I'll play with that a bit more this week.
I fixed the dragon model up a bit, smoothing out the patches and converting to polygons, but I have since deferred to Adrian de la Mora for the modeling details. One of the major comments I got at the thesis critique was how and when to pass off work. Also, I'm having Cidalia Costa do the textures for the book. She wants to do oil paintings, which will end up looking fantastic. As soon as I nail my style of the book, I know it will look great.
I spent a couple days playing with the Laddoo rig, understanding how it works and how the nodes are connected. Just for reference, this is the rig itself in the hypergraph, which was what I was trying to understand:
There are several blendshape nodes that feed into one master blendshape called parallelBlender. This node controls the face and eyebrows. The parallelBlender then feeds into the joint clusters, which makes sense since the face deformation should occur before joint deformation. All this is piped through a smooth node, and then outputted to the actual geometry. Of course, I didn't notice that this smooth node had it's attributes connected to a control, and tried to create my own smooth attribute. I smoothed all the geo, then attempted to write an expression to control the number of divisions in those smooths. As it turns out, just being able to select all those new smooths was a pain. It took an unfortunate amount of time to come up with the following script:
int $i;
for ($i = 35; $i < 45; $i++) {
$pick = "polySmoothFace" + $i;
select -tgl $pick;
}
I then used a driven key to connect a smooth attribute on the master control to the division levels of the selected smooth nodes. Only after I did this did I realize there is a big S control curve behind laddoo that does this very same thing:
Luckily, this practice of adding a smooth control was not in vain, because using the rig's built in smooth control destroyed the UV transfer map I created to prevent the UVs from swimming. This was because the rigged geometry takes its UVs from the texture reference, and doesn't know how to interpret the UVs when it is smoothed and the texture reference isn't. So the solution, of course, was to smooth the texture reference simultaneously. I used the driven key to drive the smooth of the texture reference, and, lo and behold, it smoothed the UVs. I was really happy because I had no idea whether that would actually work, Maya can be very picky when it comes to UVs.
Other laddoo rig issues: there were a lot of blendshapes that looked like they were part of the modeling history and not really built into the rig. Most of them were duplicates, so I ended up deleting a bunch of head models. This ended up removing almost a third of the entire file size, cutting it down from 30 MB to about 22 MB. I learned how the eyebrows work: getting deformations both from the blendshape nodes as well as extra cluster nodes used to deform the eyebrows independently. It's quite weird. There's also some different geo for the hair, but I don't know how to change the hair to use those pieces of geometry. My guess is they haven't actually been built into the rig. The hair dynamics is cute but slightly overkill, in my opinion, not sure if I'll use it.
In summary, laddoo has a lot of extra weight in the form of extraneous blendshapes, a weird eyebrow setup, and ONLY THREE FRICKIN FINGERS, and some of the attributes are unnecessarily clamped (though the keys can be pushed in the graph editor), but is otherwise quite a versatile rig that can achieve a decent range of poses and expressions. I'm probably going to add only a single blendshape to the mix, a squint blendshape to allow laddoo to make a "what-the-hell-is-going-on" face. As you can see, it's not exactly wtf-ish, as of yet:
Up next is nCloth. Ah, what can I say. nCloth is totally cool. It's really easy to learn, too. After going through Duncan Brinsmead's tutorial a couple times I got the hang if it: http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/blogs_duncan/blog_detail/animating_a_book_with_ncloth/
Right now, I'm using a lot of transform constraints to open the cover and turn a page. I'm getting some nice animation, except in the binding area of the book. There's also dmap shadow problems, I assume its a self-shadowing issue because my bias is too low. But it's exciting to see the pages turn and the binding of the book actually follow where the page goes.
The nCloth cache is also really easy to use, just like fluids. Now if only I could remember how to do it for particles -- I remember there is an extra step somewhere. Oh well, I'll get to particles soon enough.
I've been showing the animatic to more and more people, and getting better and better reactions. I showed it to my parents, who represent to me the target audience: non-industry folk seeing the piece for the first time. Everything really has to be spoonfed, the story may seem clear to me but be confusing for someone watching for the first time. And most of the people who see it will only see it once.
Most importantly, I showed it to Patricia Heard-Greene, the other thesis advisor, and she had some good suggestions on cutting it down. She had a lot of lighting tips, and a lot of comments on the animation which was funny because I really haven't spent much more than a couple weeks animating.
So that brings me to the thesis panel, I'll document everything they said because I feel it's pretty important: it's like reading through the comments you get on your first exam in a class. My panel included Boaz Livny, my lighting instructor (and all-around super genius), Adam Meyers (genius), Myles Tanaka (genius), and Patricia (genius). A great panel, all with very worthwhile comments:
-Adam says less is more, and clarity is much more significant than razzle dazzle. Subtle effects are much more impressive than big, over the top effects.
-Pan and scan is a definite possbility for background matte paintings
-Boaz stressed screen gamma, especially from the projector, which tends to make everything dark and flat, and clips the brightest whites and darkest blacks. The projector render thus needs to be super hi res, super-saturated, slightly brighter, within a range of 15% gray to 85% gray. UGH!
-Oh, and also another gentle reminder from Boaz, regular renders from Maya are physically wrong because they output texture colors in linear space. DOUBLE UGH!
-Adam mentioned that viewers are stupid, and if you bet on your audience to cleverly get the idea of your piece you're probably gonna lose.
-Patricia did not outright say it but implicitly suggested that I need a much better thesis statement and synopsis, one that I can read off a piece of paper to the panel.
-Boaz told me to get help with animation, since it isn't my focus and without good animation the piece will fall flat, regardless of how good the effects are.
-Myles mentioned something that I have written down as "ad cuts" little graphic blurbs used to sell services, like ACME company from looney toons. Something to look up, I guess.
-Boaz strongly suggested DragonHeart as reference for some of the dragon and water interaction.
-Patricia reminded me to strongly prioritize my time. Spend the majority of it making the visual effects look really spot on.
The rest of the comments were directed specifically at the work I had done in my piece, which I've organized by person:
Patricia:
-first few shots could be cut in favor of foley sounds that occur during the title shot.
-Light the well during the book shots darker on the left side if you don't want the audience to read through the whole text
-Make the book a brighter, more obvious color than the well so the audience is focused on the book
-The overhead street light is fine
-Add a moon to get nice rim lighting on the dragon, glint of moonlight on the book cover from bump
-Watch out for the beginning with action starting and stopping -- try to cut on action a little better
-Step 3, add fennel, start with the page already half turned, and hold on the Step 2 image a little longer
-Need 3 ingredients for the montage sequence: steps 3, 6, 10?
-The warning page is really boring
-Patricia likes the 3D animatic bottles!
-The explosion out of well shot needs to be much more dramatic -- consider having the dragon fly toward the camera a little bit
-Play with the zdepth of the dragon, it's a little too static during the upward motion
-Drag on the wings and tail, possibly nCloth for the wings
-Maybe the shadow of the dragon falls over Billy's face when it cuts to Billy surprised
-For light come back on shot, again play with dragon's zdepth
-For the great dragon is tiny shot, Billy should be leaning back or stepping back or doing something, not just standing
-Tree leaves need to be rustling. As a visual effects artist this will be pointed out if it is overlooked.
Myles:
-Give the dragon some teeth and angry eyes, exaggerate it for the big shot where he comes out of the well
-Angle the camera to see the dragon higher more quickly. Have the dragon come out toward the camera, filling up more than the frame: tips of wings, some of head, and legs and tail out of frame (saves on animation, yay!)
-Possibly during that shot switch to an aerial view above with the dragon surging toward the frame. You want its head to look big, mean, and scary
-Play up the warning in the shot where Billy reads about the final ingredient, maybe slightly zoom toward the warning. A subtle camera move.
Adam:
-Treat the title better, do something with it. Integrate it into the piece instead of just title and fade up from black.
-Be more aggressive with the title font.
-A lot is going to depend on how the book is stylized. Textures need to be spot on.
-You can use Billy's finger to animate and show how fast and where he is reading on the book.
-The background is a bit flat and could use some depth of field blur and fog effects
-Texture the lightfog to give the whole scene a really eerie look.
Boaz:
-watch the smoothness of Laddoo's hair. That's easy to fix because Laddoo was unsmoothed at the time I rendered him for the animatic.
-For the bubble effect you can use the bubble texture not only as displacement but also as a mask for the glow
-You can use a lens shader to distort shot 23 when the dragon comes out of the well. You can also use a 2D filter.
-The dragon texture is non-existent. (So is the final model, I wanted to say, but didn't).
-The dragon should be reflected in Laddoo's eyes. You can fake this with a reflection map, if necessary.
-Motion blur is super necessary, but don't be a fool and try to get mental ray to render motion blur and depth of field at the same time, it will kill your render times. Instead, render out a separate z depth pass and composite in z depth fog -- an effect I am quite familiar with, having done it twice for his assignments. It's a great effect!
-Read Boaz's book chapter on paint effects for the trees. Yay, Boaz wrote a whole Maya book chapter on paint effects. Guess what's just moved to the front of my reading list.
-Use the rasterizer to render motion blur. I'm a little bit hesitant on this one because I do want raytraced reflections in the well water. And the rasterizer scrunches up its face and gets constipated whenever it tries to render a raytraced scene. Plus I've never really gotten a good render out of the rasterizer, even without raytracing. It's just my incompetence, I'm sure, but it's another thing I have to learn if I use it.
Whew!
Onward to the next task: somehow figuring out how to transfer the animation from my 3D animatic over to the final shot scenes.
Yay, I'm starting to animate! Yay, I'm on schedule! Mostly, probably, sort of, hopefully ... ?
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