The solar system concept was to place the planets and moons into a warehouse. This naturally created problems, as Jupiter is big and difficult to transport. Therefore it was created digitally and scaled down somewhat.]]>

Solar System & Breakdown from Liam Major on Vimeo

While filming project Small Boy, I recorded some hand held footage to experiment match moving with. The footage was quite grainy and had low levels of light and contrast, so I wanted to try colour correcting and blurring a pixel or two to see if it would improve the track, and it did. With this, I decided to turn it into a short project with a couple of weeks spent on it.

Figure I & II: Raw plate (left) and after compositing (right)

Figure I, shows the original raw footage compared to the final composition, figure II. The process involved match moving, colour grading, mattes (lightwrap, edge blur & multimattes), 3D set creation, texturing, dynamics and rendering.

Process

Filming

As mentioned, this was and extra shot apart of the Small Boy project. The footage is all hand held walking through an abandoned factory mill. Shot at full 1080p, 24fps on a Panasonic AG-HPX171E.

Match Move

The pillars in the foreground and background provided a lot of parallax so the footage was simple to track. Pixel Farms PFTrack was used to recreate the camera digitally and then exported to Maya. I converted the HD footage into a low quality proxy JPEG sequence. This proxy sequence was edited with increased contrast and brightness to improve the track accuracy. This is because high contrast between pixel values are good points for the tracker to cling onto.

Figure III: PFTrack screenshot after solving the camera

Digital Set Recreation

After filming I measured the set in detail (too many measurements is better than too little). I used this information for reference while recreating the set. The set did not need to be inch perfect. After all, its purpose is to cause realistic reflections and shadows to and from the spheres. As the light was quite diffused, casting soft shadows, there was a larger margin of error.

The PFTrack camera was imported and locked (to prevent accidental movement). Primary shapes were used to mock out the set, shown below. The PFTrack camera projected the footage onto the geometry (as surface shaders that don’t react with light). A reflection rig was set up around the set (ceiling and walls out of shot). After all, this is what the spheres will reflect. One large area light was positioned across the windows. Using 1 large light source rather than 8 smaller ones reduced render time but achieved the same effect.

Figure IV: Modelled digital set with tracked camera

3D Modelling & Dynamics

Modelling spheres is quite the challenge, but I pulled it off. They were placed into different z-depth positions within the digital room to give the illusion of depth with parallax. Toward the end of the scene I wanted the planets to fall to the floor, like gravity had just been switched off. Within Maya a ‘gravity field’ was applied to the spheres and a set to activate at frame 120. To prevent them from falling through the floor a ‘uniform field’ was applied to the plane. I set the amount of bounce according to the size of the sphere, so smaller light planets bounced more.

Texturing

The textures were provided from Planet Pixel Emporium. I applied them to the diffuse of mental ray shaders (Mia_X_Passes). Because Maya operates with a linear flow, the images had a gamma correction applied (0.455) to convert them from monitor space to linear. The planets were textured to appear like big floating marbles rather than real atmospheric planets. This was just to make them something different and quirky rather than serious.

Rendering

The sequence was rendered as linear images and then gamma corrected (2.2) to monitor space to match the footage in post. Understanding the linear flow allowed me to produce CG images much more accurately lit and have greater control. Mental Ray rendered in passes (diffuse, specular, reflection and so on) at 32 bit depth. A multimatte was also produced with each channel applied to planets and moons of different sizes.

Figure V: RGB multimatte with each channel applied according to scale

Compositing

The passes were added together and then multiplied by the matte. The matte being the multimatte split into separate black and white bitmap masks and then added together. This left me with the final render with transparent background, which was merged as the foreground onto the background footage. I always like to get my renders to be over the top, being too reflection for example, and then bring it down in post. It gives more control without rendered again.

Figure VI: Rendered passes (diffuse, indirect, reflection & specular)

Something is worth noting because I had an problem with this. When imported into Fusion (at least up to version 5.2) EXRs have their red and blue channels swapped, which is most problematic at first glance. This can be quickly changed in the loader settings, but is annoying when the cause is unknown. This may not be an issue with newer versions.

Because 2 posts move on top of planets a matte was needed, and this was done with a rotoscope.

The floor shadow was rendered as a black and white matte. This was input into a colour corrector node. Shadows not only darken but also add saturation, which was put into the colour corrector node. To check the shadows are the same colour, I sampled shadows on the footage for reference. Because in this scene the shadows are diffused and soft, I rendered them at a lower resolution and lower samples (reducing file size and render time) and applied a couple of pixels blur to it.

An edge blur was applied around the edge (of course) of the planets. The matte for this was created by subtracting the matte by a scaled down version of itself (inverting and them multiplying would also work). This gave me control over the thickness of the edge (by changing the size of the smaller matte). The sorbel node, which finds edges, doesn’t allow for this control and was producing edges too thick on the smaller planets (with the multimatte I could separate them and do a less intense blur). The blur was applied after the CG had merged with the footage. Grain was applied after that with the same matte.

Lightwrap was also applied. Again, separated into three lightwraps (small, medium and large planets). Smaller planets had smaller wraps. The matte was multiplied by a blurred (feathered) inverted version of itself. The original footage was blurred 30 pixels, or so, and applied on top of the CG with the lightwrap matte as its mask. The purpose was to get some of the real life environment to bleed into the CG.

I played with the idea of having atmosphere around the planets. I wasn’t sure on the look, but decided to have it but keep it very subtle. I used a similar method to light wrapping to get a matte that glowed around the planets and applied it as a mask to a colour corrector node.

Figure VII: Fusion nodal flow

A simple nodal flow, as shown above. Flowing left to right, as the eye reads, all snapped in place with each node named correctly (I find spending some time keeping it organised saves a lot of time and stress towards crunch time). I also like to make each loader larger than other nodes and with a thumbnail so I can quickly see what each branch of the flow is doing. So that’s everything. Leave a comment below!

• Credit
  • Liam Major Filming, Dynamics, Tracking & Compositing
  • Planet Pixel Emporium Textures
• Software
  • Autodesk Maya 3D model, texturing, dynamics & animation
  • Eyeon Fusion Compositing
  • Pixel Farm PFTrack Match move
• Client
  • Personal portfolio development
• Duration
  • 2 weeks

1942, London, in a secure top secret underground bunker, a man works on his latest invention for the war effort; Small Boy. Small Boy is an automatic sentry gun, capable of identifying enemies using its onboard camera and radar. Once activate the gun can think for itself.]]> Full video coming here very soon!

1942, London, in a secure top secret underground bunker, a man works on his latest invention for the war effort; Small Boy. Small Boy is an automatic sentry gun, capable of identifying enemies using its onboard camera and radar. Once activate the gun can think for itself.

This project was undertaken by Ashley Blyth and myself. We based the project in a period that interested both of us; World War 2. After preproduction, Blyth worked on the 3D while I worked on the set and props. Then I moved on the post production compositing stage. Richard McEvoy-Crompton also contributed with props, costume and our actor. I only  breakdown my work flow, so for more information on their work visit their sites.

Figure I & II: Before & after shot 1

Figure III & IV: Before & after shot 2

Process

Concept & Research

The first thing I did was visit the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, which I recommend. It’s a great source for inspiration. I recorded photographs and videos of machinery, tools and propaganda especially from the 1940s period. I’ve published these files online, click to download [16mb rar].

Figure V: Colour grade mood board

Mood boards are great for finding inspiration and creating a clear vision of what the finished piece should look like. Essentially they’re a collage of artworks from photography, film, video games and paintings. Deviant Art is usually my favourite place for mood boards. The image above is a sample from my colour grading mood board. I created these for colours, objects, character and shot composition. They were printed and stuck on the wall just above my monitor as a constant reminder.

The next step was to collect images and watch historical videos (World War 2 Complete History is well worth a watch if you can find the British version). We collected images of the type of gun we wanted to create. We wanted to customise it but still fit in with the period. Malcolm Watts sketched some concept art, shown below.

Figure VI: Small Boy concept art by Malcolm Watts

Props

As Small Boy was in production, I created props to sell the period. Firstly the posters. These were created within Photoshop at A1 print size (300 dpi). These were then printed at A1 size using University printers. The posters were created using research images of propaganda posters from the period.

Figure VII & VIII: Propaganda posters created in Photoshop

The colours used in the posters matched the colour theme for the project (red & green). The colours weren’t very saturated because I wanted them to match the printing capabilities of technology in that time. The highlights were shades of yellow rather than white and the dark tones were greys.

Technically, the posters were made to be none destructively and with the intention of it being able to up scale them without quality loss. They were drawn with vector shapes (with the pen tool). I wanted the posters not to feel computer made but by hand with scratches, marks and colours to look hand painted, shown below.

I used masks to get the painted effect. The painted mask is multiplied to the layer. This means you can erase (by painting it black) parts of a layer without losing the data. Paint it white and it reappears. A graphics tablet was used to get the strokes, which is much more natural than a mouse. Marks and scratches were added on a separate layer on top.

If you fancy a print of the posters, or even a postcard, you can do that at Deviant Art.

Figure IX: Poster details to make the posters feel hand made

The second part of the props creation was ration packaging and papers. I began by buying cheap (Sainsburys basics) food jars, tins and bottles. I measured the packaging and receated it to scale in Photoshop. Again using the research images, I created my own rationing packaging. Because all rationing has the same basic structure and style, I copied the original template onto all the other packaging and tweaked it. I created packaging for paper, potatoes, teabags, tuna, jam, curd, salmon, cola, fruit drops and so on. Lastly I spray painted the lids and caps of the food black, which hid sell by dates but also matched the guns (Small Boy) colour palette. In case you’re wondering, I ate all the food after shooting.

Next was the papers, which included newspapers and ID papers. Again, measured to scale and styled from reference images. The newspaper is shown below in figure XI.

Figure X & XI: Printed props on set

3D

As mentioned the 3D process was undertaken by Blyth, so I won’t be going into detail on his process. One of the aims of working together was to allow both our processes, 3D and compositing, to over lap so we’d both learn new skills. We had intended to have a 3D vintage radio in shot, but it was eventually replaced with a can of beans (I’ll explain in the compositing breakdown). So I modelled the radio early on in production, Blyth investigate it and showed me better methods and how to work efficiently (with short cuts and working at lower poly). The radio, shown below, didn’t get past the modelling stage.

Figure XII: Render of 3D radio with Maya & Mental Ray

Filming

There was two parts to the filming process. First was the actual shoot with the actor. Second was creating dust particles, shown below. To sell the period, I wanted the room to shake and dust to fall from the ceiling, as if the Luftwaffe were bombarding above.

I used a sophisticated tool to pour dust above the camera (a plank of wood with a plant pot attached). I used soil and flours to make a concrete texture. I made different ratios so I had footage of light dust and solid clumpy concrete. I set it up outside firstly because it caused a lot of mess, but secondly because of the lighting. Outside was light but cloudy, meaning the light was diffused which prevent shadows on the screen. The green screen was independently lit by a light to brighten it.

Figure XIII: Filming dust particles

The main shoot was filmed in an old factory mill on University campus, which had lots of open space and hadn’t been touched in decades. The camera was locked on a tripod, meaning it didn’t move. It’s position and angle was recorded. The room was measured as well as furniture (desk & shelves). This data was used to recreate the room in Maya to get the correct angle of the gun, as well as the shadows and reflections around it.

Compositing

The first thing you may notice about shot 1, figure I, is that there is a man stood in the shot. He was a reference marker for the actor. He stood exactly where the gun should be. The marker man, as we’ll call him, walks in shot after 5 seconds. This means I have 5 seconds of clean plate. I looped this 5 seconds and merged it on top the raw plate, but with the right half masked. I looped 5 seconds rather than taking a still frame because this method left me with realistic film grain, rather than it being static.

After this the most important aspect was compositing 3D gun. Blyth rendered a wealth of passes, some shown below. These passes were added together (because light is additive) and then multiplied by a matte. This left them transparent, and able to merge as the foreground onto the footage. Before merging I converted the images from linear to monitor colour space (gamma correction at 2.2). Now with these passes separate, I was able to colour correct and lower the intensity (opacity) of each aspect. Edge blur and grain was applied after.

Figure XIV: Render passes (diffuse, specular, reflection, refraction, indirect & multimatte)

To really bond the object with the environment and make it believable it needed floor reflections and shadows. Both were rendered as passes in an image sequence. I matched the reflections to the real life floor reflections (I always use real objects on set as reference). They were very subtle but still present.

The shadows are added in a different method. The shadow appears to render inverted, in that the shadow is white and the environment black. But really that’s a matte and mattes are wonderful. I used the shadow matte to mask a colour corrector. The colour corrector matched the colour of the shadows by firstly decreasing brightness and secondly saturating. To get the shadow to look correct, I sampled the colours of the fake shadow against a real shadow until they matched RGB values. The shadow matte was diffused but the shadows on set had direction. I added to the matte with a polygon to follow the shadow direction.

I also had a multimatte, shown in figure XIV. In fact I had many multimattes breaking down the gun into each part. This meant I had control over every aspect of the gun with colour corrections. I also broke the multimatte down and added them back together depending on the size of the parts. For example, the thin legs and feet were added together, while the bigger ammo box and camera were added together. This left me with mattes depending on size, which I used to lightwrap. The bigger parts of the gun needed a bigger light wrap, while the thin legs needed it to be much more subtle to prevent them going transparent.

Figure XV: Fusion flow shot 1

I mentioned earlier the 3D radio was replaced with a tins of beans. Compositing the gun demonstrated the same techniques as the radio wouldn’t be beneficially for the project (because this was a University assignment). We wanted the gun to interact with the world though by shooting an object. Blyth took the packaging I made for the rationing beans and used it as a texture. The 3D beans were placed around the real beans. I composited them to look the same. So when the gun shot the beans, the viewer wouldn’t know if the beans were CGI or real. The 3D beans fall off the shelf, crumple and roll on the floor. I masked the shelves and placed it on top of the beans to make them vanish when they fell behind.

The dust footage, figure XIII, was keyed and merged into the composition. The last major steps were colour grading and camera shake. I desaturated and then tinted green the whole composition. I masked parts of the footage, such as the posters and items on the selves, that I wanted to stand out. I lifted the gain and saturation on these. Unimportant areas of the composition were darkened and desaturated slightly, while important parts were lifted. I used a line of colour corrector nodes, in this case 6, all with different effects masks doing different corrections.

Figure XVI: Fusion flow shot 2

The processes are mostly the same for shot 2 but I’ll briefly mention it. One thing I did to shot 2 was add a specular glow, like a sort of bloom. One method is to use the specular pass and blur it. For this one, I used a ‘glow’ effect with a mask around the area I wanted the bloom. This is fine when the camera is static. The glow removed some of the film grain so I added the bloom mask to the grain node to bring it back. Now I didn’t want to draw attention to just the 3D, so I added a bloom to real objects on set such as the typewriter, using the same method on the specular highlights. The bloom helped blend the CGI with the footage.

The last nodes were the 3D camera shake section. I’ve mentioned how to do the shake in other breakdowns, but the footage is input into a 3D plane and a 3D camera rotates to create a wobble. This saves time rotoscoping and tracking while achieving the same effect. I used an expression to get a gentle shake, which is the quickest way. Now, when the gun fires the camera dramatically moves. I animated this by hand with a series of key frames which effected numerical values in the expression.

Figure XVII & XVIII: Original composite & with specular glow

That should give a general over view to the project, if you want any more details comment below and thanks for taking interest.

• Credit
  • Liam Major Compositor, Props & Concept
  • Ashley Blyth 3D Modeller, Texturer, Unwrapper, Rigger & Animator
  • Richard McEvoy-Crompton Costume, Props & Actor
• Software
  • Autodesk Maya 3D modelling, rigging & animation
  • Adobe Photoshop Props & texturing
  • Eyeon Fusion Compositing
  • Pixologic ZBrush Texturing
• Client
  • Bolton University Final assignment
• Duration
  • 12 weeks (during 2 other projects)

The latest humanoid machine prototype is being tested on the production line for the first time. Basic response tests, such as open mouth and rotate head, are being performed. Of course some bugs still need to be fixed.]]>

Production Line & Breakdown from Liam Major on Vimeo

The latest humanoid machine prototype is being tested on the production line for the first time. Basic response tests, such as open mouth and rotate head, are being performed. Of course some bugs still need to be fixed.

Figure I & II: Raw plate & final composite

The brief was to demonstrate nodal compositing ability. This gave me full creative control but I planned the project to involve many advance compositing techniques for maximum marks. My technical concept was to replace parts on a human body with 3D parts, tracked into place. I felt a little weak when it came to keying, so decided to have it all filmed on green screen. Take the bull by the horns and all that. I also thought it’d be an interesting shot to have the camera static and locked onto the machine, which moved down a production line so the environment moved around the subject.

Process

Previsuals

To get an idea of timing, composition and what needed to be done I created a previs animation in After Effects using stock images. It gave me some direction and visual structure.

Figure III & IV: Previsual animation created within After Effects

Filming

I filmed on an green infinity curve, created by a group of final year BDes students at Bolton University SFX. My actor, Dan Twose, performed different movements at different speeds to give me extra control. I also shot without tracking markers and basic head movement as an alternative in case the 3D track failed.

I placed some markers on the actors head. Masking tape with pencil crosses (very technical stuff). Of course I could have just drawn on his head, but he may have not been so pleased. I deliberately chose an actor with no hair to avoid complications, what with such a short time. The marks were placed exactly where I wanted the CG to be. This removed the need of painting them out.

Match Move

With the markers I tracked the object movement (not the camera, which was locked) with PFTrack. The track wasn’t perfect which I put down to the movement being mostly rotation. There is very little sense of depth (without parallax), which made it difficult. Some frames turned out to cause twitches. To solve this, I delete these keyframes and allowed Maya to tween the accurate frames.

Figure V: Object match moved with PFTrack

I exported the track data to Maya. Rather than applying this data onto the 3D models themselves, I applied them to a group. All the models were then kept within this group. This gave them the tracked movement but still preserved independent control over their rotation, translation and scale.

3D

The modelling consisted of basic machinary/type writer styled objects. They were shaded (Mia_X_Passes) to appear like new, clean chrome straight out of the factory. I modelled a backplate for the machinery parts that roughly followed the shape of the inner head, shown below.

Figure VI: Final model with Maya & Mental Ray

I placed a proxy head within Maya to match the position of the actors head. This allowed me have reference to where the CG parts where placed. It also enabled me to place machinery outside the actors head too, which I did. Further more it allowed me to render shadows of the 3D on to the real head.

I used the head for another purpose too; generating a matte for the hole in the head. I used a surface shader, that don’t react with light, and filled it black with a white section for the hole (done with the ‘paint’ tool in Maya).

Figure VII: Proxy head screen shot from Maya

All the animations were created using script to save time. I created lots of movement to keep the machinery interesting. ‘rotation.X=frame’, for example, caused a rotation on the X axis based on the frame number. Some of the components were animated by hand to match with the actors movements.

Because the CG machinery was highly reflective a reflection rig was needed to create realistic reflections. I created a large plane and textured it with the same environment created within Fusion (which had been rendered without the actor and before colour corrections and blur). This caused the reflections to move with correctly.

It was rendered using Mental Ray with linear work flow in passes. I rendered it at 1065 x 600 pixels, even though the footage was 1080p. Because film isn’t perfectly sharp and clean like CG renders, it allowed me to render at a lower resolution and scale it up without noticeable loss of quality. There was no need to blur the render in post either.

Figure VIII: Render passes

CG Environment

I created the environment within Fusion. Most (or all I’d presume) compositing packages include some sort of 3D (or 2.5D, depending how you look at it) engine and when used correctly they can be very powerful. Of course, it’s not designed to replace a 3D package. I used it in this project to create parallax with basic camera movement. In this example, I managed to turn 10 images into a 3D environment.

Figure IX: Environment within Fusion

I used free textures from CG Textures. Most were applied to planes. I applied textures to cubes for the close up pillars. This created realistic perspective as they moved from right to left. All the objects were static and the camera moved through the scene. A slight wobble was applied to the Y axis position of the camera to make it feel less static and not completely locked onto the actor. This made the movement feel much more mechanical.

I put all the environments with similar z-depths through the same render nodes. The render node essentially flattens the 3D so it can be merged with 2D nodes, such as imported footage. This split each layer of 3D into its own flat sequence, which allowed me to place the footage below the CG foreground. The problem with this is I had four 3D environment layers that all needed the same camera. Although separate, the same 3D camera node was input into each layers scene. The beauty of nodes!

Figure X & XI: Before & after depth blur

Because each layer of the 3D scene was rendered separately, I had control over editing them separately. I applied blur to each layer, the blur amount depending on the distance from the camera. This transformed the scene in a positive way, demonstrated above.

Compositing

As mentioned, keying green screens was something I usually didn’t enjoy. Not until this project. The infinity curve gave me an instant great screen though. No creases, stitches, stains or various shades of green. For this reason, I was able to get an excellent matte using only 1 key. I checked for holes and crunching, but it was fine. I find it good practise, for many reasons, to split the key into its own flow and later in the flow multiply it to the original footage. Despill reduced some of the green channel caused by indirect illumination from the screen. The despill was subtle to avoid turning the footage magenta (compared against the raw plate to check).

For this project I used ’Ultra Keyer’. This key operates by calculating the different (subtracting)  between the red, green and blue channels. As a consequence, the key can only key a primary colour and as red isn’t used (due to skin pigment) so the user is limited to green and blue. To test the key its best to analysis the RGB levels of the image. Ideally, there will be high contrast between the key colour (in this example green) against the other two colour channels (red and blue). If the screen turns out a different colour, say cyan, it maybe best to use a chroma key.

I applied a light wrap and edge blur to the keyed actor and CG. I won’t go into much detail because I’ve mention the process in detail in my other projects. Essentially it helped blend the pixel values around the edges of the objects. Film grain was applied after using the same mattes.

Because I rendered the 3D as passes, I recombined them by adding them (light is additive). They were multiplied (using a boolean) by the rendered head hole matte. Now, I also rendered off a multimatte purely for colour correcting parts of the machine depending on the depth within the head. For example, close machinery was red and machinery at the back of the head was green. I used these mattes to colour correct the insides without having to render the machinery as 3 image sequences.

Figure XII: Head mattes after various mathematical processes

At this stage is was apparent there needed to be sort of edge with lighting on the skin around the hole in the head. I blurred the head matte and then subtracted it by itself (before the blur). This gave me a feathered matte for the outside of the hole (amazing what you can achieve with basic mathematics). I made multiple versions, by changing the blur amount, and input them as effect masks into a colour corrector node. I changed the colour to make the flesh look burned and bloody.

One of these mattes was multiplied by a linear black and white gradient (making it fall off) following the direction of the light sourse. I used this to increase the highlights. The same gradient was inverted (which gave an opposite matte) and input it into another colour corrector to create shadows. The pair created a fake lighting system. The beauty of this is both sides are effected by the same gradient, meaning I could manually change both highlight and shadow together. In essence, they were always opposite.

I used colour grading for three purposes; legality, composition & mood.

By legality, I mean making sure the colour values are safe to broadcast. Vectorscopes analyse the saturation of the sequence and waveforms the brightness. I like to keep the colours safe by keeping the brightness between 0.2 – 0.8 (rather than 0 – 1). I also made sure the darkest points on my actor were similar to the darkest points in the environment.

Figure XIII & XIV: Vectorscope and Waveform of the final scene

I used colour to effect the composition of the shot. The eye is naturally drawn to areas of high saturation, contrast or brightness. A good way to see where the audience will be attracted to is to blur the image, say around 20 pixels, and see what spots stand out (or if you’re anything like me, just take your glasses off). Back to this project, I darkened and slightly desaturated the outer edges of the shot. The windows caused very bright spots so I lowered the gain. I also, slightly, increased the gamma in the center (using an iverted matte) just to lift the saturation & brightness in the midtones.

Figure XV: Before colour correction

Figure XVI: After colour correction

This project only had 1 shot, so creating a unified scene over many shots with colour correction wasn’t an issue. However, I still used it to create a mood. I felt this scene needed to be dirty, unhealthy and slightly threatening. I reduced the blue and red channel to give it a slightly yellow tint. I also to increased the green, which over all gave an unhealthy vibe. There were many tweaks, but that’s the general principle behind it. Gradients are great for colour corrections and can make the colours a lot more interesting. You may notice, in the image above, the green/yellow haze that falls off out of the bottom left corner.

Figure XVII: Final Fusion flow

Probably a slightly more complicated flow, mainly due to the environment. Hopefully this breakdown will have made it simple to understand. Comment below any questions. Cheers.

• Credit
  • Liam Major Filming, Modelling, Texturing, Dynamics, Tracking & Compositing
  • Daniel Twose Actor
• Software
  • Autodesk Maya 3D modelling, texturing & animation
  • Eyeon Fusion Compositing & CG environment
  • Pixel Farm PFTrack Object match move
• Client
  • Bolton University Advance Visualisation assignment
• Duration
  • 4 weeks (during 2 other projects)

Years with badly behaved children and other charity shop toys pushed this robot over the edge. He will not stop until every other toy, and possibly naughty child, have been destroyed.]]> Full video coming here very soon!
Years with badly behaved children and other charity shop toys pushed this robot over the edge. He will not stop until every other toy, and possibly naughty child, have been destroyed.

Figure I & II: Raw plate & final composite

This project was an individual assignment that required demonstrating of rigging, dynamics & expressions within Maya to a 3D model. I tweaked the brief to include compositing also. If I’m going to spend time on a project then it may as well be relevant to my specialised subject.

Process

Concept

I wanted the project to be fun and childish and what better way then toys. So I did a sketch, below, which let’s face it is fantastic.

Figure III: Initial Sketch & final model

I wanted the toy to look battle warm, twisted and evil. I wasn’t keen on him walking, but rather blasting upward with his unstable jet pack. I used lots of red and yellow as danger warning colours. Parts of him are damaged and have been ripped off. As for his arm, I made multiple types of weapon fists that are shown below in figure IV.

Figure IV: Chainsaw, suction cup, cannon and boxing glove designs

Modelling

I identified that modelling isn’t my strongest attribute. Giving the amount of time and extra compositing I was doing, I decided to keep it simple. I bared this in mind when coming up with the concept design for the robot. While modelling I considered keeping things low poly and simple. Most of the parts are primary shapes with smoothed corners. I inserted an edge loop around the model to fillet the edges.

Texturing

Basic modelling makes texturing simpler. I used Mental Ray shaders (Mia_X_Passes) because of the rendering passes capability. I tweaked the plastic preset to get the desired look. A bump map was used of to add a bit of depth to the plastic shape. I used a grey scaled image of scratches as a matte for the reflectivity as well, to make it appear like its gloss coat was damaged. I like to get colours quite intense and then bring it down in post.

You may notice I also changed the plastic body from original gun metal colour to a black. This is because I felt it more typical in making it look ‘evil’, especially with the red. Because I rendered in passes I could change it if necessary without rerendering.

Figure V: Screen shot of set recreation within Maya

As you can see from the wire mesh image above, the reflection rig only needs to be simple. In fact, I’ve used too many polygons in this example. It needed to be in place due to the highly reflective nature of the model. Recreating the room also means the robot is at the right perspective and position to the camera.

Rigging

As the project was about rigging and dynamics, I’ll go into detail about it.

Figure VI: Arm rig within Maya

Firstly the models are placed within correct groups in a hierarchy. For example, all the components of the forearm are placed in the same group. This group is then placed within the whole arm group. I used joints on the groups and controlled them all with an IK handle. The IK handle gave one point for the animator to controlled the complete arm, shown in figure VI.

The second part of the arm is the hydraulics. Essentially two cylinders (but placed in groups so more parts could be added) are told to always point at each other. I used a measure tool between the arm and shoulder. This measurement controlled the Y scale of top cylinder group. When the arm contracts, the cylinder shrinks to stop it popping through the back.

The arm joins the body with a series of connecting cogs. Now, I told the first cog to have the negative rotation of the arm. So if the arm moved 20 degrees clockwise, the cog moved 20 degrees in the anti-clockwise. The next cog then had the opposite of that cog, and so on. If a cog was half the size of the cog before it, it would move twice as fast (multiplying the rotation by 2). Simple.

As for the animations I used a lot of expressions. Generally, this involved rotation added by the time, which creates a looping animation. I animated him to twitch and wobble to make him appear dangerous and out of control.

Compositing

Originally I composited with After Effects but later learned the error of my ways and converted to a nodal way of life. To understand the nodal process better I recreated it within Fusion. This allowed me to find all the relevant tools and tricks that I already knew from After Effects. And personally, I’ll never composite in After Effects again. Nodes just win. So I’ll break this down from a nodal point of view.

Figure VII: Final Fusion flow

You may notice from the raw shot and the final I scaled the footage up slightly. I shot at 1080p and delivered  the final render at 720p (over scanned). This gave me room to increase the scale without quality loss. I did this so I could have control over the composition and add a camera shake in post. Adding camera shakes after removes the need to match move or motion track and generally save a lot of time. It often avoids a lot of rotoscoping also.

I input the flow into a 3D plane, merged with a 3D camera, within Fusion (shown below). With this I can rotate the camera and create a camera shake. When you rotate the point of view, in this case the camera, there is no parallax. This means everything stays in line, all in the same relative position. So a rotation can simulate realistic shake without anyone noticing. I used some script to animate the camera, which produced natural movement and was quicker.

Figure VIII: Camera shake

Finally I colour corrected the whole composition. For this project I colour corrected each section individually. All the toy soldiers, each wall, floor and robot had their own correction. All the toys had different shades of greens and most of these were too dark. I lowered the contrast and gamma and increased the saturation in different amount to make them all level. As for the environment, I slightly desaturated and lowered the brightness in less important areas. Lastly I reduced a lot of the yellow tint on the raw footage and made it blue.

Leave a comment below and thanks for reading.

• Credit
  • Liam Major Filming, Modelling, Texturing, Rigging & Compositing
• Software
  • Autodesk Maya 3D modelling, texturing & animation
  • Eyeon Fusion Compositing & CG environment
• Client
  • Bolton University Dynamics & Motion 2 assignment
• Duration
  • 8 weeks (during 2 other projects)

Approximately 60 years in the future a meteorite has collided with planet Earth, covering it in a blanket of dust causing perpetual darkness. Life as we know it has been wiped out. The last human survivors communicate remotely. Jack's outpost, Station 13, is contacted from headquarters.]]> Full video coming here very soon!

Approximately 60 years in the future a meteorite has collided with planet Earth, covering it in a blanket of dust causing perpetual darkness. Life as we know it has been wiped out. The last human survivors communicate remotely. Jack’s outpost, Station 13, is contacted from headquarters.

Figure I & II: Raw plate & final composite of shot 1

Figure III & IV: Raw plate & final composite of shot 2

The project was apart of my degree. Three final year students (including myself) were placed together to lead three second years. The three final years have different specialised areas. In this example that was compositing (myself), 3D and physical props/set creator. This requires communication and team work. The team have never worked together.

Thankfully, I had an excellent team with great communication. From a compositing point of view, the team were very aware of what I needed and limitations and what problems could arise. I’ve credited them all at the bottom of the page. The aim was to create a 20 second piece in based in a decayed city. Some brain storming later, we came up with project Nibirus.

Process

Organisation

As a third year one of my roles was to organise the team and represent the compositors needs, so I’ll briefly mention the process. Weekly meetings were held so everyone knew what had been done, needed to be done and what problems had occurred. It was my role to prevent problems in  production that would create issues in post. Knowing clean plates would be needed, for example.

Concept

Figure V: Mood board

The team all contributed their own concept art and mood boards. The benefit was the group produced a group idea, but also allowed everyone imagine the final shot in their mind.

Figure VI: Colour theme swatches

Interface Design

While the team, especially the physical department, were in production for filming I had time to prepare for post production and create the computer interface. I began by researching different styles and fonts. I used the same orange and brown tones from the colour palette (while avoiding  trying to avoid coffee filter colours).

The actor had to interact with the interface. I calculated the sort of movements and created a rough animation. Then, once filmed, I moved key frames on the time line to align. The best way for me to break the interface down for you is to let you watch it. Take a look at the render below (watch on Vimeo for higher quality).

Nibirus Interface from Liam Major on Vimeo

The interface was made a 4:3 aspect ratio to match the physical screen on set. This would be composited onto the real screen by keying the green (to give the alpha of the actors hand). If you consider its size on screen, it only covers 100 pixels or so. I created at 1024×768 resolution, which again matched the real screen. I designed it to be able to loop by avoiding key frames and used expressions. To gain inspiration I investigated current interfaces, concept future interfaces and films such as Minority Report.

Figure VII: Keyboard design

I designed some interface sections, such as the keyboard shown above, within Photoshop. I created all these parts individually so I could bring them into after Effects, creation a composition and animated each part, such as individual keyboard keys. The interface included a keyboard, clock, bar charts, vital readings, map and other widgets. All these components animated, the clock in fact actually worked as a real clock (with script). Any desktop that was only briefly shown was just filled with lorem ipsum text.

The interface was designed to be the inside of a cube. The user flicks the touch screen to move to a different cube face, which is a different desktop. Each desktop had different software and information displayed. The user can also dock their smart phone, connected to their body, and monitor their vitals on screen. The user can also drag files from the computer screen to the smart phone visually.

Figure VIII: After Effects composition screenshots

I created a 3D space in After Effects and made a cube using 5 flat precompositions, all with the same background. I used a camera within the cube and animated its rotation to flick between faces. The cameras movement was smoothed using the curve editor to ease in and out. I created all the content and animated it, so comment for in depth detail.

Filming

With a lot of emphasis on team work, all the team was present for shooting.

I recorded all the information about the set to recreate it in 3D. While I was doing that, other members of the team were taking photographs for reference and textures. The camera was locked on a tripod (its position recorded & photographed) with the intention of adding shake in post.

We planned on making a hologram to come out of the computer. To get realistic lighting on the actor, we decided to place a monitor in the same position as the hologram to emit the orange light. This would need to be painted out. To get the right information needed to paint it out we removed the monitor and recorded a clean plate. I used this plate to cut out and place over the monitor in post. I also used the same clean plate to generate a matte of the whole actor using a difference key (more on this in the compositing section).

Figure IX: Clean plate & rig removal

The top monitor changed to green when the actor moved in front of it. This was so I could key it and get an alpha. I would say in hindsight using a light source as the green screen isn’t the best solution, at least for this project.  Because it emitted light it caused a lot of green spill. In fact it was hard to distinguish what was screen and what was the actor in parts. Maybe due to the age, quality or viewing angle of the monitor it often appeared more cyan than green. Moving the monitor further away from the subject would have reduced spill but wasn’t possible in this case.

Compositing

The first thing I did was remove the monitor rig, shown in figure IX. Next, I needed to create a matte for the actor, mainly his head, to place him on top of the painted out rig. For this I used a difference key. A difference key takes two images and generates a matte by calculating the difference (as the name suggests). Therefore it is best to get as much contrast with the foreground object and background. The key caused issues with white coat being too similar to the background and the shadow from the actor. The orange collar and head gave me a solid key for the head, which is what was needed.

Another thing I did was animate the shaft on the right of the composition. We couldn’t get it to move in real life, not at least with the time frame. I created a poly around the edge to separate it. I then used an expression to animate its position up and down. A second matte was used (that didn’t animate) to make it appear as if it was going into the bottom cylinder. Within Photoshop I cloned the environment around it to create the background wall.

I added other effects around the room. Firstly five monitors on the right wall. These were renders from the interface design but created to loop. Obviously there were no real monitors there which meant there was no lighting on the set. I created it with a colour correction. I considered specular highlights, reflections and shadows caused by the monitor. Text was added to the wall, which I masked to appear like it was pealing with the wall paint. I also animated some text (within After Effects) and positioned it on top of the calculator. The two metal pillars on either side of the computer were extended (cloned in Photoshop), shown in figure IX.

Figure X: Before & after colour grading

As for the hologram itself. This was made by building up layers of solid objects. Solid objects are their After Effects name, Fusion would call them backgrounds. They had varying hue, intensity and feathered edges building up out of the core. The same method was used to create lens flare from the emitter. The hologram emitter core is white, following the colour temperature rules.

This compositing had the heaviest amount of colour grading compared to most of my projects. I began with lighting. The room is meant to be dark with no natural light. I darkened the edges to make it feel like the hologram and monitors were the only light sources. I then lifted the gain and gamma around the area the hologram emitted. The corrections balanced the shot and drew the eye line to the center. Lastly I gave the composition the orange tint as envisioned in preproduction with the mood boards. I created 12 different variations of orange shade for the group to study to get the correct tone.

There’s probably more to say on the subject, but that should paint a general picture. Thanks and leave a comment below.

• Credit
  • Liam Major Lead compositor, VFX & motion graphics
  • Richard McEvoy Crompton Lead physical, props & set
  • Daniel Twose Lead 3D
  • Jack Myers Set, props & actor
  • Claire Ritchie Props & 3D
  • Chris Martin Set & props

• Software
  • Adobe Photoshop Interface design & concept art
  • Adobe After Effects Interface & motion graphics
  • Autodesk Maya 3D modelling, texturing, dynamics & animation
  • Eyeon Fusion Compositing
• Client
  • Bolton University Multiyear assignment (3rd year)
• Duration
  • 12 weeks (during 2 other projects)

Welcome to the big book of Bolton Special Effects! This is the all you need to know guide to studying. Which route is right for you? With such variety, you're sure to thing something to suit your personality.]]> Full video coming here very soon!

Welcome to the big book of Bolton Special Effects! This is the all you need to know guide to studying. Which route is right for you? With such variety, you’re sure to thing something to suit your personality.

This project was for Bolton University and involved creating a 45-60 second advert for the Special Effects Development course. So I needed to demonstrate not only just the University but the course. The criteria meant it had to be a motion graphics avert with other media thrown in.

Process

Research

The first step of research was into other University adverts. I had an idea of the style I wanted, so there wasn’t too much inspiration to gain. However, it gave me an idea of the structure, information provided, how long it was provided for and the general pace. It was clear how the adverts targeted the student audience.

The second step of research was about the actual Bolton University itself. The most notable thing was its colour scheme (a soft yellow and blue). With some new information, I contacted students on the course to provide their works to be placed in the advert. I figured the best way to demonstrate the capabilities of the SFX course was to demonstrate student portfolios.

Concept

My concept was to have a ‘big book of special effects’, which is an essential guide to all you need to know about the course like an instruction manual. It begins looking at a student desk, where the camera moves into the book and content reveals itself with attractive motion graphic animations. Within the book are stills and videos of students work. Because the course splits into two (physical & digital), the advert will divide and break the two sections down separately. To come full circle, the camera zooms back out of the book to reveal the contact details.

Figure I: Concept mood board snippet

Technically, it would begin as a 3D scene. Due to the short time of the project, the textured models would be acquired from free sources (Turbo Squid). Within the scene the camera animates into the book. The same movement was reversed for animating out the book. This is where the motion graphics begins. The motion graphics are styled around the theme (book/manual diagrams) and animate in various eye pleasing ways.

Motion Graphics

You’d spend your whole day reading the breakdown for this project, so I’ll keep it relatively simple. Here’s a big After Effects screen shot.

Figure II: After Effects composition screen shot

So as with nearly everything in After Effects, precompositions are your best friends. Get a good understanding of these and you can do just about anything. Precompositions allow you to essentially flatten many layers into one flat layer. This layer can be opened up and still edited, so is none destructive. Think of it as a fancy group. This might not seem that amazing, but it opens up the possibility for many things.

With so many layers and compositions it’s important  to keep organised. Everything named correctly, in the right order and easy to understand. Null objects are useful in breaking up the layers. See the image above, I’ve named my nulls ‘______’ and placed them in positions that separate layers by type.

Most of the animations were applied to position, rotation and scale. The dotted line was animated with a path applied to  the ‘write on’ effect. The line was used to give the viewer something to follow and some direction.

The most technical part was having different shots blend together. I broke the physical, digital and introduction into separate files. Within the files, sections were broken down into compositions. These compositions were placed within 3D space and a camera animated across a large area. The same camera zoomed in and out at the start and finish, roughly the same speed as other compositions. With motion blur turned it, the shots seamlessly blend together.

That’s all there was to it. Leave me a comment below if you have any questions or comments.

Still Renders

Figure III & IV: Renders from the digital section

Figure V & VI: Renders from the physical section

• Credit
  • Liam Major 3D Animation & Motion graphics;
  • Bolton Uni SFX Students portfolio works
  • Turbo Squid Free textured models
• Software
  • Autodesk 3Ds Max 3D modelling, texturing & animation
  • Adobe After Effects Motion graphics
• Client
  • Bolton University Video Effects Production assignment
• Duration
  • 4 Weeks (during 2 other projects)