Render & Light Effect Test

Rabbit: Render & Light Effect Test from Alessandra Waste on Vimeo.

Here's another look at my favorite sequence. Rendered it out all pretty with Final Gather and tried out a little glow effect in After Effects to make the cave floor breaking seem a little more Matrix-y, like it's something more tech-related. A friend had a good point, though, that with the glow that thin it could be misconstrued as a shoddy composite job. I'm going to mess around with it a little more. I think I have a few options:

1. Increase the amount of initial glow so there's no question that it's intentional.
2. Get rid of glow entirely and leave black transparent background as-is
3. Duplicate layer in AfterEffects, hide that layer's original composite, and mask around the area where the glow would line the edges of the rabbit while leaving it around the edges of the floor. The environment's geometry is glowing and breaking at this point, not the rabbit, so he shouldn't glow.

Hmm. Back to work, back to work!

My bunny broke Maya

Rabbit fall test 2 from Alessandra Waste on Vimeo.

Sorry I've only updated once in the last week. Been busy busy busy, as is to be expected.

Here's the sequence I've been working on the last two days. Most of one, however, was spent trying to figure out how to break the floor. First I tried to run a shatter effect, then have a gravity field just pull the pieces down. It went terribly for numerous reasons. I ended up just breaking up the pieces by hand and keying each individually. The look is a little different, but I've grown to like it. Before I was trying for a natural-looking crumble (and failing miserably). This looks more like the program itself is breaking, which fits in with the theme of the piece, so... great!

no sleep for computers

Yesterday I set two computers to render some sequences overnight. When I came in this morning, one was done and one wasn't. I cancelled the unfinished batch and set it up on another computer where it's been going all day so far. I had to redo the whole sequence anyway because the UVs on the ground were messed up for some unknown reason, so I would have had to redo it anyway. Hopefully it'll be done by the time I come in tomorrow...!

Above is the sequence that actually finished rendering. I used mental ray & Preview: Final Gather because it makes the sand and stones look really nice; I just couldn't get it quite right otherwise, also the trees looked off and this softens them a little bit.

When I render individual frames from Maya, the sky appears blue as it does in the program with physical sun and sky. When I batch render, however, it interprets the sky as transparency. At first this irked me, but then I realized I could composite in one of the Joshua Tree sky panoramas that I wanted to use in the first place but looked stretched, pixelated, or a little too Uncanny Valley when I placed it in Maya as an image plane or environment sphere. I think it looks better this way, actually! Unexpected silver lining!

hopping along

Today is all about animation, much like tomorrow and the next few weeks. Here's a screen grab of all the windows that I juggle while getting this little dude to jump around. He's running off toward the rocks. I'll pop out a playblast at the end of the day since, as we discovered last night, rendering takes so long.

Python and Rendering

I set out to play with scripting in Python this morning and explore some possibilities for the cave sequence where reality is revealed to be broken and sort of "Matrix"-like. Unfortunately, it started seeming like a lot of trouble and after a little while I relented. Maybe I'll just do those backgrounds in AfterEffects and then add in the characters when compositing. That could add some interesting layers to the reality of the piece, while also keeping render time down from Maya. Speaking of rendering, I don't have much to show you right now because I've been sitting here for the last two hours waiting for a sequence to render. I wanted to do a 70-frame shot fully rendered out just to see how long it would take. I'm glad I did! Knowing it takes so long to render will definitely help me determine whether or not to do more or less of the cave sequence in AfterEffects and also plan out my final render in a month's time. Hopefully I'll be more able to render scenes as they're completed, leaving them to work overnight and then moving on to the next in the morning. That way I (hopefully) won't get caught out at the end.

save the environments

I kept tweaking the sets today. Here's a render with mental ray and a physical sun and sky.

 

 

I tried a few versions first with Image Based Lighting but something just looked... off...

The difference between the photorealistic HDRI behind the almost-sort-of-real-looking rocks was a little too jarring for me. I also tried one with a fixed image plane, but that had the same problem. This was a really pretty landscape I wish had worked:

rabbit in the rocks

jeepers creepers

Where's you get those peepers?

 

problems fixed and snake painted

I had some problems with the rabbit rig yesterday that carried over into today. But I fixed it this morning! Weird things were happening with the combination of the rig, blend shapes, and other cluster deformers. Ended up being a combination of the hip pole vectors going insane (as they do) and one of the clusters on the spline spine whacking out. The pole vectors were straightforward enough to fix once I figured out that they were to blame, but I still don't know what went wrong with the highest spine cluster. I just had to detach the skin, delete history, and reattach it. So now one spine cluster is a little lower than the others, but it still functions the same way and doesn't effect the rig in any noticeable way. After that, the new blend shape I made (for the millionth time) from a newly duplicated skin mesh worked fine.

After giving up yesterday, though, I instead spent time painting the snake and it looks FABULOUS. I think there will be two snake puppets: one for slithering/sidewinding and one for posing and more nuanced movements. The slithering snake uses two nonlinear sine deformers and was surprisingly simple with beautiful results. Right now I'm working on the posing snake. It has a joint skeleton and a retractable mouthpiece with some killer fangs that swing out when the jaw opens.

 I'll put up some pictures at the end of the day.

Edit: Look! A picture!
The colors look a little off, but that's just from the default render settings...

ssssnakes

I thought it would be worth noting in case someone was antsy. NO, THIS IS NOT HOW MY STORY ENDS!:

 

My rabbit does escape the snake, but we don't really know where he's going instead.

 

Side note, this site is absolutely indispensable when it comes to identifying potential snake or lizard problems in California. We've had our fair share of rattlesnake encounters all up and down the state, though currently my mother is waging war against some particularly territorial western fence lizards in Sonoma. www.californiaherps.com

Here's a really good example of a sidewinding rattlesnake in Arizona. I really like how muscular this snake is. Even though it's moving slowly, you can still see how strong it is.


Decided to go for broke and fully model and rig up the snake. There will be two puppets: one for sidewinding and slithering quickly; one for more articulated poses, strikes, and subtle movements.

Here's a playblast of some quick and exaggerated sidewinding in place. I'm REALLY happy with how this turned out. He still needs his teeth, facial detail, and eyeballs, but I think he still looks pretty menacing anyway! It loops, not sure how to make the player do that automatically...

Lots of things today

1. I NEED TO DO THIS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrmDftTd434
The cascade that drops from cyan to red and settles at the bottom is PERFECT for when reality breaks inside the hole/cave/tunnel. Would love to have some sort of "crash" effect, like a computer just gave up. So excited!! I should play with Python more often than I have (which is, like, once...)

2. Animating a run cycle today. So far it's working, I'll pop out a playblast before I leave this afternoon. Hoping to use Clips and the Clip Editor since there running away is definitely an action that will be repeated in this project and animating it again in each sequence could get tedious.

3. Tomorrow is the Fourth of July! Being an American in Scotland, I will make my own holiday, not come into the lab, have corn on the cob and burgers and strawberries and apple pie and sit outside in the park reading my research stuff. YES.

4. Ok, so not actually a lot of things. Eh.

rabbit facepainting

Things I have learned about 3D Paint Tool: it is MAGICAL, as long as you're UVs are pretty. I ended up having to redo the UVs along the spine, they were all stretched out and as a result his back was striped. Looked cool, but not quite what this project calls for, I think...

Here's a preview of how the paint looked at the end of today. And it's actually RENDERED, not just a screencap!! Mmm, mental ray... so shiny and smooth.

rabbit skin coats

Weeeeeell, while painting the texture file for the unwrapped UVs in Photoshop over the weekend, I remembered something: it's MISERABLE! Especially when I didn't have the model with me to stick in back onto to check progress and that edges match up.

So today, instead of wrestling with that, I decided to try out the 3D Paint Tool. So far it seems alright. I'm not sure if I'm going to give him actual "fur", might just put a teeny bump map with some hatching. Fur would increase render time and might just be a can of worms I don't want to open.

There's a little bit of stretching over his back, I might need to make that a separate piece, I just really don't want to have another UV seam in such a visible place. Might be unavoidable, though, if the texture doesn't turn out perfectly. I should know by the end of the day.

What a day

Rainy walk over to the lab only to rediscover that there's an all-student meeting this afternoon about planning our graduate degree show and it's over in one of the other buildings. Ugh. Not much time to work over here today so I'm going to block out some of the backgrounds and environmental stuff. Here are some shots from yesterday. I was trying out a pose that the rabbit will end up in pretty often to make sure I had the skin weights alright, especially that his underside didn't fold into itself.

Day off & UVs

I took a little break yesterday and didn't come in to the lab. My eyes and brain were fried from solving Monday's problems and I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and deal with unwrapping UVs. Instead, I stayed at home, read some of the research materials for the written component of this project, and saw a movie. Let's call it researching camera moves and angles...

Anyway, this morning I unwrapped and messed around with the rabbit UVs. Think they're all right, I'll throw some color on it this weekend. The checkerboard doesn't seem too stretched out. We'll see.

Did some fine-tuning with the skin weights. Getting there...

Painting weights:

Testing some checkerboard:

UVs:

spline conundrum -> binding skin

We had some technical difficulties this morning with the spline spine that started a little domino-effect down the hierarchy of controllers and manipulators. I didn't get around to actually binding the skin and starting to paint weights until this afternoon. Here are a few fun poses. Shaping up well!

Bunched up:


Stretched out:


Run away!

rig-a-rig-a-rabbit

To the tune of Ring Around the Rosie:

Rig a random rabbit;
make naming joints a habit;
if you didn't orient,
they all fall down!


(alternate ending: if you didn't orient... well, you're f*#%d!)




Legs are fine. Arms are fine (fingers to be dealt with later, need be). Tail is fine. Neck is... hopefully fine. Spine is ANNOYING. He's too bendy for his own good. I'm just not super comfortable with spline IK, but it should be alright as long as I deal with the clusters correctly...

I think I'm just going to give the ears a few controllers. Don't want to mess with more splines and clusters, so it'll just be rotating the joints. Eh, should be fine. I wasn't totally sure what to do with the neck, since it's nearly as flexible as the back and needs to be able to puff out when crouched down/bunched up, but also stretch forward and out when running quickly. I added an RPsolver IK as you would ordinarily use in any old character from the neck to the head joint, but I left one more joint between those two so it's more flexible and has a little reactive bend in it. It's all under the head controller circle. Seems OK so far. We'll see...

lagomorphic cleft palate surgery x 3

This morning was rough. I modelled the mouth and ears and tweaked the head a little bit overall. It's a little narrower. Domestic rabbits have wider heads, but desert cottontails are a bit "sportier", though not nearly as lanky as hares. When it came to the mouth I kept adding detail to one side with the knowledge that I would mirror the geometry as a final step. This went fantastically, until I realized that the points on the inside and underside of the lip were so close together that they puckered into one star vertex with a million edges. I ended up doing rabbit "cleft palate surgery" around three times. Finally, I just decided to forget about it, continue modelling, and move on to the ears. Ears then finished, I came back at the end to mirror it all one last time. In the interim I kind of forgot what the inner lip/mouth/nose geometry had originally looked like, so he looks a little now different than intended. It's like rhinoplasty that came out a little too subtle. Something has changed, I just don't know what. Oh well. Here's blockhead:


Here's a smoother version from the front:


And the whole blocky body. Still need to attach the neck. Ho-hum.

EDIT: Connected head to body. There's a seam just at the base of the skull that REALLY bugs me but once I texture him it probably won't show up. I think I've just stared at it for too long. I thought the wireframe from the side looked pretty:

Mouth Update

I'm trying to work out the mechanics of rabbits' lips when they open and close their mouths. After looking up pictures, I can assuredly say that rabbit mouths are TERRIFYING! They seem very cute and cuddly when closed, but when opened wide the lips SPLIT right up to the nose! It looks like an unmasked Predator! Let's compare:

Cute, unassuming desert cottontail:


Then suddenly.... ROAR!

Predator for comparison:

The lip split under the nose:


"Oh my...."

We Are Already Cyborgs -Jason Silva

We Are Already Cyborgs -Jason Silva

CLICK THAT LINK!! This is exactly my cup of tea. Jason Silva strikes again! Follow him on Twitter. Your brain will be very happy.

I have a bunch to say on this topic since it is close to the core of my written piece. I'll let this simmer in my head on the long walk home.

The mental image when one hears "cyborg" or "augmented reality" is one of robots and high science fiction. Silva does a great job of quickly and simply explaining that technology is an extension of ourselves and technology can be as basic as tool use. Anything we use to supplement the function of our own body is a technological advantage, be it a paintbrush or a haptic glove. The reality is that we are already cyborgs in a sense, just not the ones you might think.

Note to self: look up tools for conviviality. Simplest tools to enhance abilities -> tools for futuring.

Digital Digits & Blockhead the Bunny

First thing I did when I came in this morning was copy the whole body, delete the paws, and completely remodel them with actual fingers. MUCH better, I think. The back feet stayed the way they were as one solid piece. I'm ok with that.

He kind of looks cool, actually, down at the unsmoothed poly level. I like his new little blocky toes.

Blocked out (hah) his head. I'm not super confident in modelling eyes and eyelids, but after wresting with it for a little over an hour I think it's passable. I was super careful to avoid vertices with more than 4 edges. No weird pointy or puckered bits allowed! I want to sketch up some mouth ideas and specific shapes/poses before I model the nose/mouth muzzle area. All that's left, then, are some big ears and connecting the head and body.

Lucky Rabbit Feet

Spent yesterday in the lab starting to model the rabbit. In my head I saw him a little more stylized and angular, but these screengrabs show the smoothed version. We'll see how it progresses. He's still currently headless, but I'm really happy with the pelvis-to-leg geometry. Smooth, simple, and should deform really nicely. The front legs were a little messier, I'll probably tweak them a little more. It was strange modeling the rabbit because his range of motion is so extreme. He's very bouncy and can bunch up into a very compact ball, or stretch out quite long while running. The back needs to be very flexible and the back legs need to be able to fold up almost completely without weird geometry folding in the skin, but also stretch out behind him without being whittled away into skinny nothingness.



I love the back feet, but the front paws give me pause (haha). Part of me wants to remodel the front paws with actual little fingers. That might make for a nice detail in a few shots. I wouldn't animate each separately, but probably add a slider between open/splayed and closed/together. Wouldn't be too difficult...

I boarded a couple sequences over the weekend, too. Worked out a few things for the snake character regarding what is possible/impossible for it to do in the weird surreality of the tunnels.

bouncing along

I don't have access to a scanner when I'm not at the lab or the library, but I held some sketches up to my laptop's built-in camera. These are from earlier this week when I was looking into which kind of rabbit or hare to use as reference. Settled on the desert cottontail. They don't actually live in warrens or holes as deep as the one in my story, but let's just imagine the snake warps reality a little bit or makes the ground collapse into a larger system of tunnels.



The legs on the bottom two are a little longer than I'd like. I just wanted to explore the bone structure a little bit. I also found a good link to a locomotion study to help me figure out how to make him move: http://seanlowse.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/rabbit-locomotion-study.html

Rough Gameplan

This is an extremely loose and basic timeline of things to do:

JUNE
Week 1: Make sure all books are procured. Animation ideation.
Week 2: Finalize animation script. Board or write beats for sequences.
Week 3: Model assets. Revise boarded/beat sequences.
Week 4: All character models done by midweek.

JULY
Week 1: ANIMATE. Bullet outline of written research.
Week 2: ANIMATE and write
Week 3: ANIMATE and write
Week 4: ANIMATE and write. Collect ambient sounds from library/database.


AUGUST
Week 1: Begin rendering. Acquire sounds for rendered scenes as completed. Write.
Week 2: All scenes rendered by midweek. Write.
Week 3: Composite. Final Mix. Edit written work.
Week 4: TURN IN

Hamlet on the Holodeck

Last week I pulled a TON of books from the library. I'm slowly blocking out all light coming from my window with stacks and stacks of books. Most of them are only tangentially related so I probably wont end up reading them cover-to-cover. In my wanderings through the library I kept getting drawn toward books with a more philosophical leaning. While I'm absolutely fascinated by the brain chemistry behind our perception of reality and how we interact with technology, that would open up a whole new can of worms. In the approximate words of Bones McCoy, "I'm an animator, Jim, not a neuroscientist/philosopher." Same goes for robots. I love all debates regarding the singularity, but I don't plan on doing any heavy programming and building myself a little friend. I will, however, touch on the singularity as a potential extreme future prospect regarding what we define as augmented reality.

Anyway, back to the books. There are a few gems that I think compare/contrast nicely. Their strange synergy kind of shows the direction that my research is starting to take. They are Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet H. Murray and Hand's End: Technology and the Limits of Nature by David Rothenberg. I'm in the middle of H.o.t.H. right now and loving it. I thought it would be a good place to launch into my project not only because of the content but because prior to becoming a programmer the author had a background in English and the humanities. This multidisciplinary approach is very relevant not only to my research, but to nearly all technology today since it is so broadly prevalent in almost every arena of modern life.

What is this?

Hi there! This is a rough journal of my research and production notes while working on my Master of Design in Animation at the Glasgow School of Art. For my final project I have to conduct independent research and present a written piece on a topic of my choice and also create a related piece of animation.

This is the original research proposal from last month. It has morphed a considerable bit since then, but I think it's good to know where it started:

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17 May 2013

Research Proposal
Mediating Reality: Seeing the Unseen Augmentations

When faced with the term “augmented reality” many might envision holographic displays hovering mid-air as a science fiction hero interacts with it directly using hand motions. Others might point out the yellow line indicating a “first down” on an American football broadcast or flags following Olympic swimmers in their lanes indicating their current standing and time elapsed. It is commonly understood as experiencing a physical, real-world environment possessing elements that are supplemented by computer-generated input. It does not necessarily seek to duplicate the world’s environment in a computer or create an entirely separate iteration as does virtual reality. We live in a digital age where interacting with hardware and seeing results appear on a screen are so commonplace that it is nigh impossible to avoid in day-to-day life.

Because of the way we now inherently accept the digital, where does this place the boundaries for what is augmented from our daily experienced world? Are we even aware of this acceptance? Car commercials feature what seem to be actual vehicles moving through country roads or cities at night, but really they are more often than not computer-generated imagery meant to enhance our perception of the actual car. Have we been deceived, or have we merely accepted that what we are shown must be real and created for ourselves a “real” perceived world? The same concept can be applied to cinema. When we watch a movie, we are willfully suspending disbelief and entering the world that is shown to us on the screen. Advances in the technology of filmmaking have greatly increased the scope of worlds that we are able to enter. What started with manually compositing images with mattes then became green screen and chroma-keying. Really, though, is there so much different between Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Avatar insofar that each takes our interaction and augments it not once through the mere watching of a motion picture, but twice through creating another layer, a world within that cinematic world, that we are asked to believe is whole and experience it as such? So much today is processed with digital cameras that the claim to create a commercial film with “no CGI” is laughable. I love the tangibility and character of traditional film as much as the next cineaste, but today's industrialized approach to filmmaking heavily tends toward the computerized, though I will not call it automated. There is definitely still an art to digital fabrication, and visual effects artists create explosions, the aforementioned cars, and fantastical creatures that we are asked to accept as physical and real, and, more often than not, we do. When a character exists as a physical puppet, digital double, voice actor, and countless animators, though, in what space does the character truly exist and become, as we experience her, real? Most effects are invisible to us since they are designed to be so; they are not meant to distract from the world we are shown, but to augment it.

I posit that the scope of what we describe as augmented reality is, in actuality, far broader than the common description. In a way, it is much more basic, and strangely enough the increased technological literacy of our world has led me to realize that even rudimentary tools have augmented our reality a very long time. I want to examine the blurry intersection between what we will accept as reality and those experiences that we hold at arms length and explain away as bits of code flying through an imagined space. At what point does a scene created in Maya stop being a simulation of 3D space and start being an actual environment that, due to our physical fleshy limitations, we must interact with through a computer? Haptics let us interact with digitally created objects, but at what point does the suggestion of an object become a “real”?

This research will be largely textual. I will create an accompanying animated short, but it will complement the written research rather than be a direct application of the research’s outcome, as that would require technology and skills to which I just do not have access. (Hopefully, though, my research could lead to eventual later application of principles learned.) The animated piece will allude to the boundary between what is perceived and experienced and what is real, though that is really all dependent upon the viewer. I would like to combine numerous media for animation, like projecting 2D image sequences onto 3D surfaces in Maya, as it adds further dimensions of augmentation and composite pieces of reality that we as the audience must synthesize in our brains into the experienced world.

As far as text goes, the main question I want to answer is because of the way we now accept the digital, is all digital cinematic interaction, then, augmented reality? Or has the digital merely become an extension of ourselves in a sort of transhumanist ‘cyborg’ kind of way? In a twist of etymological irony, we call something “digital” because it is numerically based coded information, and numbers are “digits” because we count them on our own digits, our fingers. So really, we’re just coming full circle and re-accepting our artifice back into ourselves. Additionally, what is a brain but a switch that turns muscles on or off in rapid succession to produce movement, electrical impulses, and other chemical responses? So, then, we are now re-learning how to interface with computers, our out-of-body brains, which turn on or off binary switches telling a computer what to execute next. I will supplement my more artistic take of the cinematic world of augmented reality by looking at the work of Steve Mann, applications of Natural User Interface, and work published at the MIT Media Lab in Fluid Interfaces and the Center for Future Storytelling. With luck, I will also be permitted to shadow the research being conducted upstairs at the DDS.