EMAIL: rich@brickbots.com NAME: Richard Sutherland TOPIC: The end of... COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: That's the end of that. COUNTRY: United States WEBPAGE: http://supermegamulti.com RENDERER USED: Maya 5.0 TOOLS USED: Maya, Photoshop, After Effects, Audition (Cool Edit), Premier, TMPGenc, LenseCare (AE Plugin), ReelFX:MotionBlur (AE Plugin) CREATION TIME: Rendering: 28hours (~920 frames, ~1:30 per frame, 5 min per scene background, 8 scenes), Compositing: 30minutes (~2s per frame to composite) HARDWARE USED: P4 2.4ghz, 2gb Ram VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: This animation has sound. I recommend the Quicktime viewer, not because I am biased, Microsoft Media player sometimes displays this animation darker than it should (actually any MPEG1 file). Quicktime always plays MPEG1 correctly. For reference it should look like the poster image, bright. For MS Media Player: I have found that if you select the file in a folder with web content enabled (the default, it shows a preview in the left hand side) then play it through Media Player (which also has generated the small preview on the side) it has a much, much higher chance of playing correctly (bright with the right contrast). I have seen this on several machines and lots of MPG's but never figured out how to avoid it. If you know anything about this, please drop me a line. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: Man + Woman + The End Of 'That' = Funny Animation I've been looking forward to entering the IRTC animation contest for a while. I was finally ready for this one, and then the topic was released. It's a fine topic, and will probably bring in some great entries, but it was really counter to the style I like to work in. I like funny, cartoony type work. Then it hit me, how I could have the end of something be funny! Aha! Hopefully people will see how it fits the theme. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: This description will be a bit sparse, just enough to help the judges judge. Mainly because I gotta get my entry in. There is a good chance that by the time you read this I will have all my 'making of' materials posted on my website at http://supermegamulti.com/teot, most or all of the pre-production art, much better descriptions of the processes described below and mini-tutorials should be there if you are interested. Also full size (720x216) versions with more sophisticated codecs. This was my first attempt at a full production pipeline... Concept -> Script -> Dialog Recording -> Storyboards -> Modeling/Rigging/Texturing/Environments/Lighting -> Animatics and Layout -> Animation -> Rendering -> Compositing/Effects It all looks nice and linear on paper.. I went back and forth quite a bit. Probably my inexperience. Following are some technical notes on each computer related step, and then a few notes about scene 6. Modeling/Rigging/Texturing: Characters - Not much to say, polygon modeling with joint/skin rigging. The faces were done with a combination of clusters (groups of translatable vertices) and blend-shapes (morph targets). The skin and hair materials both have a special setup that links their incandescence (self-illumination) with the face normals. Faces that are almost perpendicular to the camera have a glow to them. This is meant to soften things up and to simulate to some extent the light that refracts off of the small hairs that cover our bodies. This effect is much more pronounced on both characters heads. A side benefit is that is helps to define the character silhouette so a backlite is not needed, and I did not use one. Background - I wanted a simple background, so I could actually finish the project. I also wanted everything to be a bit more primitive than reality, so I used geometric shapes as a starting point for the trees and just deformed them. There are some simple house size boulders and a large structure I imagined was a gym in the distance. All very simple. The textures are all procedural (fractal and noise), with several layers. I love using one procedure to control the blending of two others. This gives both small scale texture and large scale changes. You can see this on the grass and concrete where some large patches look different than others. Sky - The sky is a sphere with a procedural texture. I used a gradient with the cloud color to make them get fainter the closer to the horizon they are. This helps give the illusion of a much larger space. At the same time, I think the background covers most of that up, so it might have been overkill. Lighting - I love to simulate sunlight, but it is so challenging. Clearly real global illumination and skylighting would just take too long to render. I have had a lot of success with a script called GI_Joe, which basically just sets up a whole bunch of lights arranged in a sphere. I used this script with very high values for the individual shadow map resolution. It took longer to render (~30 seconds a frame just for the shadow maps) but the subtle shadows are nice and the illumination has depth even in the sunlight shadow areas. Since there was such a large amount of 'space' consumed by the background there was no way I could get the subtlety on the characters that I wanted if I rendered it all at once. The scale of the shadow maps would be all wrong. Rendering the background and foreground separately meant that the shadow maps only had to cover the bench area for the foreground shots so I could get the effect I wanted with reasonable sized shadow maps. The skylight is pure white, the sunlight is yellow. The sunlight shadows are not black, but are more purpleish to compliment the yellow sun. Animation: I blocked out all the shots to match the storyboard and then started adjusting everything until it flowed right. Lots of playblast (openGL viewports saved to disk for a quick render) renders cut together in premier to see that everything worked okay. Then I started scene by scene doing the animation. Whenever I would advance one scene, I would cut it again with all the rest to continue to check for continuity and flow. I wanted to refine things further, but I ran out of time. I got all the big changes that I wanted done, but I could have worked on the motion curves some more. The woman's hair is dynamic, but I had to hand tune it in parts with the help of a couple of cluster deformers to get it to lay right when she looks down/away in scene 7 (the crash scene). Rendering: There was a single frame sky render and background render for each shot. I generated a depth map (z-map) for the background pass. Then the foreground, basically the two characters, the bench and the concrete pad the bench is on, were rendered as a series of TGA stills. Compositing/Effects: These elements were brought into After Effects for compositing. I applied a DOF effect (the LenseCare plugin, which is great and inexpensive BTW) for the background and sky. The foreground had the motion blur applied (the ReelFX plugin, also fantastic and inexpensive). I could have done these in the renderer, but I never would have been able to render the whole thing. I suspect it would have take upwards of 10 minutes per frame as I would need to render everything for each frame and the DOF takes a long time. Having everything separated also gave me the opportunity to do color/brightness/gamma/contrast correction on each element, turns out in this case I did not need it. Oh and doing the DOF and motion blur in post let me fine tune it quickly. A little more DOF, little less motion blur, all without hours and hours of re-rendering. On top of the actual laying of the pieces and the DOF and motion blur I applied two effects layers. The first was a very blurred version of the scene composited in screen mode. Screen just lightens everything.. it is sort of an addition of the luminance of the layers. This has a very low opacity and gave a soft sort of blown out look like a camera in a very bright environment. Everything just sort of glows. The second pass was very much like the first, but not nearly as blurred and selecting just the brightest colors. This makes any bright spot (like the man's shirt, or the woman's arms/hands at some points) bloom. Since it is not blurred much the bloom is very localized. It is a nice set of effects and I like to use them a lot. Finally I added my watermark to the lower right. Sound: I suppose I should mention something about this. Yep, that's my voice (the man), and an old friend of mine voiced the woman. I recorded it straight to my computer with the best mic I have, which is not very good. Only after I was almost done did I learn one of my friends has access to a recording studio. Ahh well... next time I will have better quality sound. All the effects (the kids playing, water splash, bang, crash, birds chirping, wings flapping) are from http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/. I recorded the 'thud, thud, thud' myself by beating on the mic in various ways. Some of the sounds were mixed in Audition, others right in Premier while I was editing the video. Scene 6 - "Well! I don't know where you went to college..." - Diagonal shot of bench, man in foreground, woman in background This scene was extra tough. I wanted the man to be out of focus, then as he sees what is going on and exclaims to come into focus. All the other shots I only rendered and DOF'd the background. Since the characters were in the same focal plane, they were just in focus. For scene 6 I needed to render a depthmap for the foreground and background in one pass and DOF the whole thing. So there was a sky pass, background pass, foreground pass, and then the depthmap pass with both foreground and background. Then I could animate the focus on the LenseCare plugin. Whew, all that and the effect is very subtle, not sure anyone but me will notice it. If you have read this far, I hope you enjoyed it. Visit my website at http://supermegamulti.com/teot for videos of the various stages and more explanation and example frames.