UPDATED: Final Cut (minus urchin shot), Added Breakdown Reel Below

Again, thanks to Max Bickley for the HDR’s, Sam Ortiz for the animation, and Patrick Warner for the rigging, and of course a big thanks to Scott Johnson and Jason Osterday for providing our beautiful plates, couldn’t of done it without y’all. The next cut with credits should be up in the next few days, had to slam this out for class.

Dave: Awesome quarter. We didn’t get to everything we had planned, but we got a considerable amount of it done. We knocked out just about everything we had planned, just not the optionals. We still have a few assets that we would like to incorporate (or make more visible), with a little more time at some point. From my end, I’m more or less done with the crab, there’s only a few things I would like to do to it, but I’m not dead set. I personally lost a little bit of speed towards the end because I wasn’t happy with how the crab looked on the tree, but I got a little more excited at the very last minute. Now, after I cut it to some music it’s a little more exciting for me again, and I would like to have this become a more polished piece.

On another note, I had an awesome time working together with Kurt and Jesse. They both had quick ingenious solutions to some of our hurdles. It was also wonderful working in a group who has as much passion and work ethic as they did. This cut was kind of a quick cut, so I didn’t get to typing up the appropriate credits or adding in the breakdowns yet, just a title card and music.

Kurt: Awaiting Entry to Grid…

Jesse: Waiting for Nodes…

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I haven’t posted in a while.  My crab was in the hands of my animator Sam Ortiz for 1 1/2 weeks, and I was busy doing up the Houdini final.  However, I do have a nice animation now, I have all my layers setup, and my shake script setup.  I have everything rendered out with the exception of the beauty pass (as of 11:46PM EST, 03/07/2008 is on the farm) then I should have a comp shortly.  So here it is,  I’ll be much more pumped about writing on this blog once it’s all done and together.

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Initially I thought that the eel system was going to be an easy port from the fish but, as it turned out, that was not the case. Because an eel’s body is not rigid like a fish there needed to be another dimension of motion. I first animated a point along a curve, then copied a line to the point. I then brought the line into DOPS as a wire opbject and used a pin constraint on the first point, I tweaked the physical properties of the wire and added a drag force to make it look like it was being drug through water. Then I brought the line back to SOP level and applied a modified version of the CHOPS-based animation I used on the fish to the line, this is what controls the IK solver for the rig. I used a separate chopnet to pull the transformation data for the first point on the line and exported that to the chain root so the bones travel with their controller.

This movie shows the progression from Curve on path to DOPS sim to final animation.

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We are working, trust me. The blog has been subject to an undeserved time-out; its parents have largely forgotten and abandoned it. But daddy is here. Pep-pep will make it all better.

Here are the fish, back from the dead. This shot has turned into a genuine collaborative effort- Jesse added some SWEET math to make the movement much more natural, Dave was a trooper and modeled all the proxy geometry of the boards, and I’m bringing it home with shading and compositing.

It’s not quite finished. Dave has tweaked and added boards which, might I say, now perfectly match the shot (you’ll notice there’s some gaps of nothingness, especially on the left side). As per Max’s suggestion, I’m going to do an occlusion pass for the boards so we get some interactive shadows on them. And of course, the flicker. I hate flicker. Other than that it’s just a bunch of nitty gritty stuff until this shines.

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I haven’t posted in a while, but there’s two movies here to make up for it. I’ve been doing a lot of baby steps in various areas of the project with not much to show for it until now. First is the circuit breakers shot, which I actually did a composite of last week to throw on my demo reel as an in-progress clip. This is the updated one which is starting to look better. Using Dave’s awesome matchmove, I modeled the proxy geometry, set up render layers for mia_material_x, and tweaked the textures, shaders and hdr.

I’m using a technique for the indirect pass which involves projecting the footage as a texture onto the proxy geometry so Final Gather picks it up in the secondary diffuse bounce. This gives me a pass with some colorful bounce light which I toned down a lot in shake, but still contributes to how well they’re blending. They need some more work, like more glossy samples to reduce that crackling, but it’s getting there.

Next is the first render of the barnacles in the living room. This shot gave me the chance to use my geometry placement MEL script I wrote in Ken Huff’s class. The script will look at the grayscale value of a texture and duplicate geometry randomly, but with higher chances where the texture is black and progressively lower chances as it approaches white. I changed it so it only instanced geometry instead of duplicating it (3000 barnacles and it’s only 2mb), and added a scaling feature that makes the geometry smaller the more white the texture is. The result is accurate placement with natural looking randomness. This has a lot of flicker from final gather but it’s only on the indirect layer, I was messing with overdriving some of the secondary diffuse bounce values in both the shader and the render settings which is what’s causing it.

I’ve also been working on the fish with Jesse and plan on having a test comp of it by Wednesday.

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I’ve been doing a lot of little things as well. Setup the Houdini scenes that needed the camera matchmoves. Got a decent start on the eel model/textures. Sent it all off to Jesse for animation testing.

Finalized the crab model (ack!), to send off to our rigger Liz Hersee. Wasn’t able to use the autorigged version from Patrick. Setup machine overkilled it, and everything was so buried it was hard for my unexperienced eyes to edit it efficiently. I’ve uploaded a screeny from zbrush to show where I’m freezing the model, and a fresh render showing the legs (almost done texturing), and some of accent geometry (the antennae, and leg flaps). The displacements should still be tweaked a notch or two, cause I still can’t get those spikes to sharpen up! The textures are almost done, I’m still not happy with the legs, and I need to do some new textures for the hairy flaps on the legs, and the antennae. I suppose this all means it’s time to start breaking it up into appropriate layers and figuring out the composite.

I looked into doing some sky replacement for one or two of the shots, and it’s not looking very good, but if I can pretty it up at all I ‘ll try and do it.

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Two urchin posts in a row, but significant progress has been made on the li’l guy. The motion is 4x slower so it looks much more realistic now, I also fattened up the spines and furs, added a mouth, and introduced more variety into the spine and fur length. I added a fan under the mouth so the spikes don’t fold in on themselves so much and painted scales on the mouth spines so they drop off more drastically.

I rendered one pass with just a spotlight and deep shadows through the micropolygon renderer and another pass through PBR with an environment light and HDR map. As you can see from the split image below the PBR render took significantly longer but the HDR introduced a lot more color variation and brought occlusion into play.

The movie below is a hybrid of the two passes, in Shake I did an Add/Mix with 25% deep shadow and 75% PBR, this enabled me to keep most of the color and occlusion information of the PBR render while introducing the directionality and light modeling that I got in the deep shadow pass, it also reduces the feel of tranlucency slightly. It’s a subtle difference but I think it is effective. There is still the issue of geometry interpenetration but since these won’t be as large as this in the frame and there is so much motion going on I don’t think it’s something we will need to deal with at this point. Next up: Spec pass and reflectivity.

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