Compositing

Hopefully we can appreciate this screenshot. This is the shake node view for just one scene of Down the Line and it's actually quite concise.

Title and Credits

Titles - section where the caterpillar is going down the line...

{Fade in}

The Griffith Film School presents
A Team Composure film

{Fade Out/in}

Down the line...

Credits -

A film by

Sascha Fournel
Caryn Girardi
Damien Wong

Original Concept by Damien Wong


Character Modelling, Rigging, Shaders & Lighting

Sascha Fournel

Creature Modelling, Rigging & nCloth simulation

Caryn Girardi

Enivornment Modelling

Sascha Fournel

Environment Lighting

Sascha Fournel
Caryn Girardi

Asset Modelling

Damien Wong

Special Effects & Dynamics

Sascha Fournel

Editing & Composting

Sascha Fournel
Damien Wong


Music and Sound

Andrew McLellan


Animation

Sascha Fournel
Caryn Girardi
Damien wong


Asset Textures

Damien Wong


Asset Shaders

Caryn Girardi


We would like to give big squishy hugs for thanks to

Andrew Martin, Liam Hoskins & Chris Dai for Technical help
Our Mums, Families, Friends and GF/BF for their patience and encouragement.


GFS logo etc

The groups aim for the week

Today Damien and I discussed what we as a group really need to complete by the end of this week being Sunday 12th of October...

• Find a fix for the hair - Sascha
• Remember to set keys on the aim locator for the DOF camera (check that Caryn has this camera)
• Do test renders on the DOF to see its not too blurry
• Complete the sprites, flowers and black goo, cut clothesline for scene 9&10 - Sascha
• Textures to complete - Damien

- Interior and Exterior Walls

- roof

- windows - use shader form CGI assignment (Sascha has one)
- balcony
- potplant - Sascha
- cockroache - Sascha
- Fix Charlie texture

• Buildings for final scene and textures - Damien
• HDRI or environment sphere - Caryn is doing this we think?
• Day Lighting to be finalised hopefully by Wednesday - Caryn
• Finalise Scene 3 with lighting and textures and render out
• Give Fog Scene rest of group - Sascha

We are hoping to meet Wednesday after life drawing to finalise:-

• Scene 3 with fish, lights, textures and render layers
• Damien to give Sascha Buildings for final scene
• Sascha to give Caryn & Damien Cockroache, Fog and dynamic Clothesline
• Caryn to give us - Lights for environments and show us how to do the ncloth with fish
• Check that misenscene for all scenes is the same for everyone

WE can do it!

Saturday night with Andrew

Well this was the most interesting day of my year so far...a freaky caller at work, followed by a fire alarm at uni, followed by my scooter getting stolen...was nothing compared to seeing Andrew in action in front of the big mixing table thing.

He is good...he is real good and patient with us raucous animators...

I had just as much fun gathering all my junky bits and peices together for our night of recording as I did actually being able to make sounds with them. We had a rather very successful evening between the hours of 8pm and 4am the next morning...being able to record majority of the foley and also the music tracks.

It was way cool to see how Andrew works...its definately an art form in itself...and was alot more full on than i ever imagined.

eye CTRL issue

ok so i may have come across an issue with the eye CTRL...but all sorted...

If you look in the attribute editor for translate and rotate you'll see they are highlighted in green.

select all Translate X, Y, Z and Rotate X, Y, z and then right click once selected > break connections.

Voila...you will find you can now key and CTRL the eyes as per normal...not sure why that happened...All im glad about is I was able to fix it...

Damien next time you get that Head CTRL issue, see if its doin the same thing...and see if the above remedy works for it too...

out for now...

OH yeah...

Idea for climax scene

I was thinking while animating tonight that just as the rope gets cut we could have like a vingette of images to show what's happening rather than animate it out.  For example we could have a cut to Charlie shocked and then a cut to her in a running pose, hand outstretched with same look on her face, then another cut of her hand trying to grab the rope and then fade to black. Then fade in to her sitting on balcony with rope in her hand upset.

This is a cheat yes but it will cut the time of the film down as well as render time being single frames etc.

I have pretty much finished Scene 9 - just need to do some final refining of the animation and turn the clothesline into a dynamic to simulate it falling when cut.  Oh and decide on what would be the best resolution for the goo at the door.

I also did a test batch render today of 74 frames of teh camera truckin in to the balcony through the fog.  I haven't composited it yet... but did 3 render layers - Occlusion, software and mental ray, so will hopefully get around to that tomorrow.

Also tomorrow I want to:-

• Start animating Scene 8
  
• find a resolution for the music sprites and soft clothesline
  
• do flowers for scene 8
  
•  model flower pot and cockroache
  
• Titles
• Moon cutaway

We have foginess

Using 3D fluid containers I managed to get a hazy, cloudy, foggy sort of look. The cloud containers can be animated and colours can be changed.

Some feedback and new thoughts...

Showed animatic again tonight to Mark and Mum...they still are wandering about teh whole past and future thing as Peter, Andi and Anthony Lucas etc did/do/does...





So Im wandering if perhaps the image on the black card could use a universal symbol representing the past some how...Or a thought I had just like 2 seconds ago...What if the animated picture on the first black postcard re-enacted like a bad memory of Charlies...i.e something dramatic...like september 11 or a parent dying or seeing someone have a stroke..something real dramatic that would stop her from wanting to go outside and living...hmmm.





What I accomplished today...


I thought i had a fix for the eyebrows...well I guess i still could...but for some reason or another the shader wouldn't stick to the mesh on teh new eyebrow area once moved for the first time...It might be some kind of hierarchy thing...maybe Darren or Liam might know.

• I created the DOF camera and have had some interesting results see below...http://maya3dtutorial.com/blog/maya-tutorials/depth-of-field/ to find out more about how to get the most out of a DOF camera.

• Created a new lattice and motion paths for the door scene and started animating Charlie running into the door.

My Aim for Tomorrow...

• To finish rough animation of the scene


• Come to some agreement/fix on eyebrows


• add jiggle to hair spikes?


• See if Damien can finish bathroom scene


• Set up scene folders for everyone


• http://en.9jcg.com/comm_pages/blog_content-art-149.htm - test this for foggy background and paint effects

Little Composite

Just a composite of some of the renders that Sascha posted earlier, this stuff is just in photoshop but I am confident i can achieve a similar result in shake.

More researching stuff I did last night-

Fog/Cloud

WE have Charlies unit in a vast expanse of pretty much nothing for majority of the movie. We are sort of after a foggy look with shadows in them to suggest that they're could or couldn't be something else out there.

So I did some testing with spotlights and adding fog density...some nice effects, BUT i can't get it to scale up enough to look really volumous...even adding 3 more lights doesn't seem to create anymore fog or layers of it. I also tried enclosing it in a sphere...but just looked the same. Will add examples later as they are on my mac...

So I am considering perhaps having a look at the paint effects for clouds and seeing what that gives us and renders out and time etc. I know Damien was also thining of doin a matt painting for the background which would really look painterly and gorgeous...that in conjunction with the cloud effects could be an interesting look.

Another idea that just crossed my mind litereally just then was transparent image planes with Damien cloud paintings on them...ta da! that could be it...ill do some more tests.

Depth of Field and Z depth

Came across a couple of tutorials which may add some more realistic film feels to our short film, rather than it being completly stuck in 3D land...going to set a DOP camera up and render out teh differences between frames to see fi it would be worth it. Damien had an ingenious idea that we would just import it if it work and parent it to other camera so as not to loose original camera moves..wOOT WOOT!

Oh also came across this really good looking tutorial from highend 3D
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/rendering_lighting/general/Rendering-several-maya-scenes-and-cameras-261.html

It opens with this statement :-

You need your animation rendered by the morning. You have 3 scenes to render each scene is saved in a different maya file and one of the scenes you have two cameras, you need both of them rendered and you are a tired artist not a programmer.

IT could be very handy later on for us...

Getting a Workflow happening...

So I watched the animatic a few more times last night to see if there were any simple scenes that we could possibly just animate and get out of teh way now where we didn't have to worry about texture, much lighting etc etc...the most obvious ones that stand out straight away is the

1. Title/Credits
2. Bathroom Scene - no textures needed, very limited animation
3. Scene 1 - writing the first letter which leads into title scene.
4. There are obvioulsy alot of cut aways too to CU of charlie expression we could also do if we could lock off what we were after in each scene??

None of these really need textures...we could do a final render of these now and hence have less to worry about, render later. It also gives us a realistic project to work on to test compositing stuff etc i.e. animated letters, overall look of B&W part of film and other compositing stuff we wanted.

Are we still doin blue hearts???

MY aim for today is:

• Test DOP camera and add to scene
• Block out and add refined animation to my scene
• Sort out music sprites - Damien mentioned youtube ipod+coldplay for inspiration
• add growing flowers
• model cockroache

Over and Out - Coffee grabbin times

Testing with Render layers to avoid changing shaders

So after  lots of wind being expelled and brain cells burning out, I think we may have found a solution to our mental ray not liking our skin shader problem...but will it save time or add it t0 our already time short budget?

Bascially Chris Dai and Asian John Do overheard me in class today discussing my dilemma with Arash.  I queried with Arash whether we could use Render Layers from some tutorials I cam across on the net, I just wasn't sure I had the right understanding or know how to do it.  Arash believed it was not the way to go to resolve the problem as he thinks i should redo the shaders and lighting for Charlie.  I really didn't want to as we are completly happy with how she looks...

So Chris and "John" said that yes I was right in thinking that i could use render layers, but I would need to make sure it was set up in the render globals...so I came home to test it out...

So I set up 4 layers - selected the objects that could only be rendered out on Maya software, then did the same thing for mental ray and selected everything for Occlusion layers...the trick is you have to setup overrides before you batch render.  But it took about 5 minutes to render out 1 frame...but remember i was rendering out 4 different methods - software (charlie), Mental Ray (remaining Assets), Occlusion (everything) and the Masterlayer..which I probaby should have turned off, althougth it does have some nice reflections and major shadows from the harsh light, but also alot of artefacting...that may be more to do with the lights though...anyhoo after a bit of compositing in shake...and very basic mind u...i got this...

Ok so its a bit dirty looking in comparison to the photoshop manipulated one, but i also am not that proficient in Shake...yet.  Although, in the above image i did manage to roto around the eyes to brighten them up a bit and blur on of the images to make softer shadows...obviously we can do alot more as well...Oh and actually, I didn't plug in the shiny reflection one btw...i just used the software render of Charlie, mental Ray of everything and the Occlusion render.

P.s. whats the go with the eyebrows?  LOL thats the next thing i have to fix i guess.

Our Final Postcard image for Screening night

OK so i used the bluer image but also rendered out an occlusion layer. With Damien's help, we selected some highlights and adjusted them to simulate that of the sprites reflecting and the moon.

I went through and painted her lips a little more, added some glow on teh moon and teh fishy to give them some luminace which was lost in the layers.

I quite likey aloty and hope we can aim to do this for our final renders.

Test Renders for Screening Cards

So been muckin with paint effects to get stars and some glow shaders for teh moon.

This is rendered in Softward Render as I still haven't managed to get the shaders to work with mental ray...I dont think it looks that bad.

This is meant to be the scene where charlie follows the Music sprites into teh unit...i thought they would be illuminessent and so decided to add a blow light to the scene (top image) to try and act as the glow reflect off her sking...the bottom obviously is alot warmer...although i think the top blue one works with the night feel...meh...see what everyone else tinks.

Prob could add a halo or something to the moon to soften its edge.

Left Walls with teh material assigned as this scene will be fairly bland until the sprites start palying music through the gramophone.

Also gave Charlie a little smile which she is tryign to hold back..s.hould it be more...or even less?

Oh yeah suggestion for fishy is that it has the a blue reflective dot in the middle of its eye, matching scales on back...been studying my siamese...and both ahve that little pearly dot in there eye..might give it more character too...???

Also bump map for hair perhaps???

More colour on lips, finger nails and redo eyebrows?

Test occlusion render of the bathroom scene. Looks a bit dark on this monitor I'm using at the moment, but looks much brighter on the uni computer screens. Since no two screens are alike, it is hard to judge.

The environment is a disaster at the moment. It was recommended at the beginning of the semester to use referencing. I can see how it is meant to work and should work, but as with a lot of Maya it is incredibly buggy. Now I will have to dismantle the referencing system without having to retrace too many steps. It can be done, it will take an awful lot of time to do it.



The caterpillar is pretty much finished being animated. He just needs to be imported into his scenes and he's ready to go. No more caterpillar-rail.

Saturday 20th

So we met today and aimed to get textures finished....After my major night aiming to finish Charlie with shaders and lights...I came in today and we found out it doesn't work well with Mental Ray...so we spent 5 hours trying to relink shaders etc in order to work, but just couldnt' get it. So moved on.

Did some textures on shelves and scrabble board...and then gave up with Maya crashed...so moved onto the clothesline.

Used Soft bodies and springs and added an air field and keyed it to simulate wind.

Haven't textured it here as it would be better to do in the scene.

Moving on now to pose Charlie for Screening Cards to give to Mari on Monday.

Its Meeting Times...

So had our RUFF CUT review with Andi, Peter and Darren today....loads of stuff was mentioned...like keep an eye on cuts...use more classic cuts and more CU for reactions...

Overall the story is loved although we are a bit ambitious due to the nature of the story with symboloby etc...so we need to slow it down and be a bit more obvious with links i.e caterpillar-butterfly- metamorphisis etc. We have blocked everything except for half the last scene.

WE met after as a team and reedited the blocking and designated roles and prioritised what we need by next week.

So Damien is doing the following:

• Animations for Letters
• Zdepth test
• Textures - Bathroom - Rug

- Kitchen - Door Mat

- Walls - Scrabble Board
- Roof - books
- Wardrobe - shelves
- clock and alarm clock

• Animating Title, INTRO/Scene9 and Scene3&4
• Modelling of City for Scene 9

Caryn is:

• Designated Animator for fish and caterpiller in all scenes (Bar Titles)
• Lighting - Environment, Rooms (ceiling light), Charlie
• Texturing shiny objects i.e a/c unit, kettle, toaster etc.
• Animating Scenes 5,6&7

Sascha is

• Modelling Cockroache
• Special FX unit - softbody clothes

- clothesline

- music sprites

- flowers

- Moon

• Lighting of night scene (scene 8)
• Blends and set driven keys for eyelashes, fix smile blend, create extreme "im over it"blend

By Monday we are aiming to:

• have the lighting of the environment completed
• Night lighting of Scene 8
• textures
• blends for Charlie eyelashes
• and if we have time, changes to animatics.

Foley Sound - big day October 4th - 8pm

fish - symbolic sound - bubbles?

rope

breathing

ambient noises - room and verandah - night and day

crashing of buildings

toaster

crunch toast

footsteps

bad letter/scissors

music sprites

butterfly flaps ?

caterpillar crawl ?

sketchy noises ?

clothesline wheel squeak

flapping clothes/letters

water - tap - bathroom

pegs

door slam

record player scratch sound

hmms and hoos

couch spring sound

Update from Sascha...

Well...its been a while since i posted...and that would be cause of the charlie rig...i have never ever rigged anythign in my life. In hindsight...with next too no experience in this department, it was a HEUGE job to take on with such little time for us to complete the film.

To not hinder the production, i gave a basic basic rig to the group to start blockin the animation, quite a few weeks ago now, but there was an issue with teh referencing of the files, that meant animation wasn't getting copied across between rigs...so the blocking stopped until i finished the rig.

Even though I know its taken me a while, i have learnt so much and actually rather enjoyed this process. Considering my limited experience I am extremly happy with the outcome. There are still things that could be tweaked like more blends and refinement of some existing ones, figuring out how to get teh orthographic camera to follow just the face of teh character so as not to hinder animation. But all in all she does the job. I shall post a test animation of the controls later.

On the back of finishing the rig I have now been blocking of the entire film over the last week. The first couple of scenes i completed by last week end were handed over to Damien to start animating so we have something to show on Thursday for the RUFF CUT meeting...but IM not sso sure we will have 50% completed.

Things in the process of getting done:-

Texturing of assets - Caryn
Charlie texture - Damien
Test render of environment - Damien?
blocking and animating - sascha

Things to do still:-

animate
light environment
animate

We have some scratch sound from our musician Andrew Mclellan. A suggestiong from him though is that he is finding that the music needs more room to breathe. WE were tryign to keep the story as short as possible due to time constraints for animating, but with this feedback along with anthony Lucas, Kevin Geiger and randoms, I have lengthened most of the scenes out. This will hopefully also help with the biggest issue at this stage, that people are being able to follow or understand the story...

Assets, Assets, Assets

Damien here, I've been modeling like some sort of crazy model making model machine. Any way here are some of the results.

Changes

During our last meeting we agreed to cut a few scenes from the film. Instead of the night scene cutting to morning, it will instead go straight to the scissors invading the apartment. Because of this, our roles and responsibilities have been swapped around.

Damien will be animating scenes 1-4, Caryn will be animating scenes 5-8 and Sascha will animate from scene 9 to the end.

Also, our beloved Pot Plant Creature has been cut from the story. His flowers and wide-eyed expression will be missed.

More Models by Damien

Here are the other models I have been working on. I'm pretty proud of all of them really. I'm gonna try and get a few more of the minor things we need done while I'm not doing the major blocking and such.

Lotus flower

Here is a quick render of the origami lotus flower. Very simple geometry about 100 poly. Occulision render. :)

Production Breakdown

EDIT: Sorry, I should have verified my information before posting. I made a couple of errors and will try to break it down in a more clear manner. First, scene listing.

	1	EXT. BALCONY - Charlie Writing Letter, sending it off in the form of a caterpillar on the line
	2	TITLES
	3	INT. APARTMENT - Charlie leaves Bathroom to get toast
	4	EXT. BALCONY - Charlie eats toast, pulls down laundry, finds letter and responds
	5	INT. APARTMENT - Charlie plays scrabble, drawn outside by noise
	6	EXT. BALCONY - PPC brings attention to pencils on the line
	7	INT. APARTMENT - Charlie draws in sketchbook, first postcard arrives
	8	INT. APARTMENT - Charlie sleeping on chair, Fish draws Charlie outside
	9	EXT. BALCONY - Charlie finds package on the line, sprites flows into the apartment
	10	INT. APARTMENT - Sprites cause gramophone to play, music spreads through the room, door fights back
	11	EXT. BALCONY - Next morning Charlie sends off a dragonfly, a seed packet arrives on the line
	12	EXT. BALCONY - Charlie feeds the seeds to PPC and PPC grows flowers
	13	INT. APARTMENT - As vines enter the apartment causing the gramophone to play, scissors break through door and cue fight scene
	14	EXT. BALCONY - Line gets cut, Charlie cries, Charlie pulls on line, crash of buildings END
		CREDITS

Caryn will be animating Scenes 1, 2, 5, 6, & 7.
Damien will be animating Scenes 3, 4, 8, 9, & 10.
Sascha will be animating Scenes 11, 12, 13, & 14.

Hope this makes more sense.

---

I will be animating the beginning to the end of the title sequence, and the exterior scene Charlie discovers the first note on the line.
Damien will be animating the interior bathroom sequence until Charlie walks out onto the balcony with the toast, and the sequence starting with the first postcard to the end of the night.
Sascha will be animating from the morning until the credits.

I've volunteered to be the group Version Controller. At the moment I'm looking at ways to maximize file access.

Charlie model

partial set up of apartment and assets

Spin baby spin

Here is an occlusion turnaround for our potplant creature.

Moonlit Treatment

Here are some reference images for the moonlit scene as well as a treatment image I put together for the particular scene.

Test Render: Fish

I attached some fins to our fish body using the Maya utility nCloth. After some adjustments I put the fish on a motion path to do a test animation to see how the fins and tail flow through the scene and produced this test render.

Note: Spine is not animated. It will bend as the fish moves along. Also these are temporary textures.

Fish fish fish glub glub

Fishy fishy - we are going to deepen the scales, add fins and shiny up the eye. We will also add some actual texture to the skin as well as the bump map.

charlie occlusion

After chatting to Andrew he has suggested we make a few minor changes in the mesh:-

• bevel hard edges
• flatten out nose to cheek a bit more
• lose some fatness in cheeks to make look a bit older

Updated Asset List

Charlie - model completed - Sascha - currently in process of unwrapping and rigging test
Apartment - in progress - sascha - ill probably do most of the little aparmtent things as i go i.e bath, sink etc...
Fish - in progress -Caryn
Chest of drawers - Damien completed
Couch - in progress - Damien

caterpiller- experimental?
dragonfly- experimental?
butterfly- experimental?
lotus flower - experimental?
sun/moon
scrabble
gramophone
Bed
Wardrobe
scissors
Outdoor chair and table
old TV
tea cups/ saucers
plates
toaster
toast
kettle
dish rack
tea towel?
bottle with plant in it for on window sill
mirror
pedastal sink
bathroom floor cabinet
high slipper back bath
toothbrush
toothpaste tub
soap
towel rack and towel
bathmat
toilet
dirty clothes basket
laundry basket
pegs
various books
lamp
alarm clock
pictures for the walls
shelves
clock for kitchen
coffee table
magazine holder
coat rack
screen divider
sketchbook and pencils
seed packet
post card

Concepts

Colour tests

More like this toward end of film.

More like this colour palette below for the beginning of the film...

Modelling report on Charlie

Technical Aspects of Down the Line

Length: 3-4mins
Genre: Surreal Drama
Medium: 3D animated short film with mixed media compositing

Concepts we hope to achieve:-

• 3D backgrounds and assests which look like line art
• Stop Motion - origami folding letters (by Erin)
• writing overlays of letters onto screen as she writes

Programs we are using:

• Maya - all 3D modelling and animation
• After Effects for special effects such as the writing overlays and colour seepage aswell as compositing
• Photoshop for texturing, concept art
• Flash - Animatic
• Protools for sound editing

Down to the Musak...

Andrew McLellan is a 2nd year Music composer whom approached us after we desperately pitched our film idea on the cuff at the sound lecture we had combined with the film and sound students.

Originally we thought we would go for a Dirty Three feel to our music - organic and melodic which has both dark and light elements.

We have had one official meeting with Andrew so far where he bought along various examples of his work and other musicians which he feels would suit our film. Andrew seems rather keen to assist us with the music for our film, which is going to be VERY important being A. we have no dialogue and B. The script is driven musically as a suggestion to whats happening.

It was really exciting and intersting to watch and listen to Andrew as he went through our storyboards with his ideas and suggestions as far as stepping away a bit from the noise and more to the melodic. He has some really great examples of his work which he thinks will work well with our script. And some of his ideas for suggestions for character and story have really helped us alot. I very much look forward to working with him on this for both the collaborative experience as people ideas and for his experience. Sitting with Andrew, also really solidified this project for me, its a real thing...not just an assessment peice for our final project...its just real...its weird.

The Environment - inside out and furniture

Charlie is a solitary creature at present and lives in a very compact studio apartment, however, this apartment seems to be suspended in an unknown grey location with no other form of life around her. This is a suggestion of her shying away from the rest of the world and living in limbo as she tries to find herself.

Due to the lyrical nature of the story we felt that bohemian or french style apartment and furnishing would best suit the nature of the story and also add a bit of femininess to Charlie and her personality.

This is our rough layout so far of Charlies unit

Meet the characters

We have 3 characters in our film as follows:-

Charlie - Main character.

An early 20 something who has recently left a relationship to basically find herself. We wanted her to be attractive but not sexual. The design style was to have a rather stylised features and stay away from the realistic, realising that realism in 3D doesn't work to well. So we agreed on having a largish, squarish head and petite hands and feet in comparison. Influenced from Jean Seberg.

Fish - This is Charlies pet, who in the surreal world that charlie is currently living in, is able to float around her apartment etc.

Pot Plant Creature - A suggestion of her past life, or a hobby she used to be into but has since neglected. This creature came about when we decided that Charlie would receive seeds as a suggestion of a new love for herself and for the other person down the line.