Updates since the beginning of the month:
-finalized reference structure
-redid the final ingredient bottle
-outsourced animation and modeling
-animation splining for shots 1-7
-underwater fluid effect
-tests for fire and splash effects
-moon texture
-well procedural shader
I'm feeling pretty good about where I am -- I tend to alternate between feeling like I have all the time in the world and feeling like I have no time at all, which I guess on average means I'm about on track. The piece is about 35% done at this point, which is behind since technically I should be about 50% done. Half done! We should be half done!
The bane that was last week at least allowed me to break through one major problem, the problem of referencing. I love referencing when it works, but I hate it when setting it up. I have about 35 different shots, and each shot is getting its own scene file. Each scene file is referencing the elements needed in a modeling folder I labeled FINAL_MODELS.
So I had basically two choices: assemble the reference files from scratch and import my character animation from the 3D animatic files, or re-reference within the 3D animatic files and save out new reference files. After a couple shots of searching through nearly 100 channels of animation and trying to paste them onto laddoo, I figured it would be easier to use the 3D animatic files.
This turned out to be a great decision, at least I think it was. It changed a complicated but potentially shorter process into a long tedious one, but long and tedious is better because the shorter process really was a lot more complicated (getting animation curves off old Laddoo and onto new Laddoo).
I also decided to place all the ingredients (moving objects) in one reference file, all the environment objects (non-moving, set pieces) in another reference file, and the character in a third. At this point, the only model that is still using the old 3D animatic geometry is the manual, which has fast turned back into a book for issue simplification.
So then it was a matter of going into each 3D animatic file, changing the references, as well as the namespaces for the references. It's probably something I could have scripted, since all the files are .ma files. However, the files run across a network and I'm much more used to doing this kind of scripting in Unix / Mac OSX. Didn't want to chance network problems or my lack of scripting experience screw up the animation files.
So I opened each file (a minute to load references), changed the references (another minute), plus overhead (a minute of daydreaming, waiting for things to load, cutting and pasting paths to the reference files, the new save files, and the old animatic files).
While this seems easy, it really was a pain in the ass. It took a good one and a half days to get everything transfered over, but now everything is working perfectly. The animation on Laddoo transfered over perfectly, which I'm super happy about. The bottle animation didn't transfer over, but that's because the geometry is so different, so that was to be expected.
I redid the geometry of the final ingredient to look like a small scotch bottle. Another implicit joke, that the final ingredient is alcohol. This will remain implicit, however, I will still label the final ingredient as FINAL INGREDIENT. The rig is still the same, and it looks like I will definitely be able to make use of the meniscus rig. Gavin gave another possibility of using booleans, but I don't think that works out with the number of surfaces in a dielectric interface system. Each surface has an in-ior and an out-ior, depending on the materials. For the bottle, the interfaces are glass to air, glass to water, and water to air. The outside surface gets glass to air, the inside top surface gets glass to air, the inside bottom surface gets glass to water, and the meniscus itself gets water to air. This is how Boaz taught us to do dielectric interfacing, and it seems to work so I'll stick to that. Regarding the bottle, the next thing to figure out is caustics and where to include them within my composite layers.
John Tarnoof and Rachel Tiep-Daniels from Dreamworks came to give a presentation at CADA. The one thing I got from that presentation was a reiteration of how good you really have to be to get a good full-time job in this industry. Rachel mentioned that she modeled a really nice looking noodle cart in a day, half the day for research and half the day for modeling. That thing would probably take me a month to model, two weeks if I was lucky. I got some info on what Dreamworks is looking for in an effects artist, scripting, API programming, the ability to troubleshoot coding for a renderer. Very intimidating.
In that spirit I started doing tutorials on python. Python is a really weird language. It looks like visual BASIC to me, but feels like a flat version of Perl, if that makes any sense. Whereas Perl is quirky, Python seems to be its organized but informal brother. The only thing I don't like about Python so far is its lack of braces to define blocks of code (it uses tabs/white space instead), and the lack of for(i=0,i<10,i++) syntax. But it seems pretty powerful and pretty easy to code, and I've checked the interfacing with programs like Realflow and it seems pretty straightfoward.
Vanessa Weller is doing my foley sound effects, and Germono Bryant is doing my score. Germono got the first version of my score to me, and it was really nice. Whereas I expected just a sequence of notes, it was a full-on operatic piece. Did not fit completely, but he's really talented -- I was impressed.
Cidalia Costa is on board for textures for my manual, and I'll discuss those with her some time this week. Some of the animation 2 people have expressed interest in helping me animate.
I've started doing some splining and second pass animation for the beginning shots, and rendered out tests in mental ray. The stars are too bright and the well water waves are moving too fast. Everything looks pretty good, though. I showed it to Michael Hosenfeld, another professor, and he said the colors were too saturated for a night shot. The moon is also a strange color, it doesn't fit the palate. I think I'll make it a little more yellow, less orange.
And then, the effects tests. Effects are my focus so I have to start getting all this stuff planned out. Here are some of the tests I've been working on. They look better in motion, I swear.
This is a particle explosion I may use to simulate pieces of burning pages coming off the manual after the dragon burns it. It mixes the result of an rgbPP ramp with a rotating crater-based volume texture.
The fire is also a partile effect that uses a shader similar to the one above. The speed is controlled with scripting and a turbulence field creates the spreading out effect at the end.
This potion blur is actually a 2D fluid oriented to the camera angle. The fluid emitter is animated to camera. This is after I tried to do it with a 3D fluid and the computer failed. Adam Burr said the 2D fluid was a perfectly legitimate solution, and suggested the use of animated bounding planes to serve as collisions in the fluid system to represent the sides of the glass bottle.
This splash is controlled with forces. The shader is a facing ratio glow with geometry hidden on blobby surfaces.
Next to come: better animation, finalized textures, paint effects, finalized book
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