Hit the ground running

Whew, I just had my first thesis class with Gavin, and it has only underscored how much work there is yet to be done. There really is no time to waste.

So for the past week and a half, I have been working to create the 3D animatic that should have been completed in Previz. Unwittingly, it has also served as a kind of test run for my project. I spent a little time modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, lighting, creating visual effects, and compositing the rendered frames. I'll go into more detail on the 3D animatic in a bit, but first a couple things this mini-project has taught me. Some I may have mentioned before.

-Always keep the character's rotations zeroed out in relation to the environment and the camera, not the other way around. Rotational disaster occurred when I referenced the character into the scene, and rotated him 45 degrees to get him in the correct spot. This messed up the rotational axes for nearly every joint. It took me nearly a day of painful animation before I decided to rotate the character back, rotate the entire environment instead, and re-reference the scene.

-Fluids are nearly impossible to simulate well. Yes, the focus of my project, fluids, turns out to be one of the hardest problems to solve in CG. And yet, there is something about well-rendered water that really excites me, so I'm happy to rise to the challenge. As it happens, Maya fluids are in fact really bad for liquids, and work much better for gases. I'm researching more ways to do fluids. Some possibly promising solutions are using Maya Hair dynamics, Maya particle simulations, and Realflow. My fellow students Tyquane Wright and Parthibahn Elangovan, and my dynamics professor, Adam Burr, the former effects supervisor for Blue Sky, have all offered to provide insight into these methods.

-Animation takes the most time, and lighting takes the least. For some reason, it is always very easy for me to set up lighting systems, even if it requires in-depth understanding of shadow casting, or complex light linking. Animation, on the other hand, really has no corners to cut. You really just have to spend a lot of time on it.

-The frickin Maya ocean shader doesn't rotate! What a pain in the ass! I rotated my liquid plane around and around and rendered out the frame sequence, only to be faced with completely still, non-rotating ocean waves. I tried all kinds of hacks with all kinds of nodes to try to rotate the ocean wave displacement but it just doesn't work. Perhaps this is question to pose to the all-knowing Maya god Duncan Brinsmead.

-After Effects is okay for the quick and dirty. I've always thought of After Effects as a quick and dirty program. I mean, for motion design or title design it's great, but as far as its usefulness as compositing or editing software, it's only good for simple tasks. Such as compositing and editing a 3D animatic. I did, however, use Final Cut Pro to edit in the sound. Why use AFX to edit when I could have used FCP, you ask? Because, and this irritates me to no end, FCP has no good way have handling frame sequences (that I know of). In the FCP help, one of the suggestions is to import the images one at a time and drag each of them into your sequence individually. How unhelpful.

-Rhythm and tempo are key in my piece. Today Gavin said he liked the "comic timing" of my piece, giving the audience a chance to react to one shot before cutting to the next one. It's really, in a nutshell, a cosmic punchline: We create something that's different than expected, but still just as good as what we intended to create. Omri mentioned that he thought there were too many beats at the end, where the kid is surprised by the smallness of the dragon, then content with it, then disappointed after seeing the mighty dragon image, then surprised by the fire, then happy with the dragon yet again. Perhaps this can be resolved by changing the "being content" beat to "being reluctantly accepting." This carries over into the disappointment of the next beat. On the other hand, to change this would be a little sad for me because the "being content" shot was one of my favorite shots while animating.

-Laddoo is fine. So it's a downloaded model and rig. Modeling and rigging are completely not my focus. And he's probably better than anything I could create in such a short period of time (according to last entry's schedule, I should be finished modeling by next week).

Against the judgment of several of my fellow students and professors, I am making the focus of this project visual effects, and character animation as the secondary focus. To those who still say, why are you doing a character animation if your focus is not character animation: leave me alone! I like my story. Animation is hard but I can do it. And, most importantly for me, visual effects are much more fun than animation, but only when used to augment the story. Actually, if I could make story the focus of the project, I would. We did, after all, spend nearly all of previz on it.

Coming up next: a more in-depth look at my 3D animatic, and goals for next week.