mi5018tomberry

[mi5018tomberry]

Final Reflection

Sound On

I've learnt a lot throughout this module and I feel much more confident in my ability to bring my ideas to reality. Despite the difficulties of this process I managed to learn new two new pieces of software (Houdini and Nuke) and I developed lots of skills, new and old, in Maya (Modelling, Rigging, Animating, Physics Simulations and Bullet Dynamics). I have a better understanding of the compositing process and I'm glad I got the chance to add some VFX to my footage. It's been a lot of work to finish this off an I'm glad its all wrapped up so I can move onto something new. Although the idea changed a lot along the way and diverted from the initial premise I'm glad that I got to bring to life a conceptualisation of what the near future could look like with the rate of technological expansion and development all explored through the lens of silly little robots selling themselves and blowing each other up. I thought that my previous ideas were bogged down as they were much more serious in tone so I added a bit of levity to the project so that I wasn't taking myself too seriously. The final result is a light hearted exploration of the near future created through the medium of compositing and animation.

[mi5018tomberry]

Final Video

Here's the final video with all of the graphics applied I think the layout and colours of everything work really well. I managed to mask in an explosion in Premiere using the video below, I'm glad I got a chance to come to grips with how Premiere works because in the past I have used it exclusively for trimming footage and organising audio without ever really making use of its own editing capabilities. The text itself is a load of random slop to fill things out and make it all come together, I think things all mesh well with one another.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shopping Channel Reference

I recorded a few bits of shopping channels to figure out what sort of layout to use for the graphic overlay.

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Final Maya Only

Here's the raw version with only Maya footage.

[mi5018tomberry]

Final No Graphics

I've managed to finish all of the work in Maya and Nuke so all that's left now is to overlay the text and graphics in After effects. I'm proud that I managed to get this far because there were a lot of times where I wasn't sure if it was possible for me to make what I set out create but I've managed it and I enjoyed spending some time bringing this environment to life with my own character, rigged, animated and comped into my footage.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 7 New

I remade the 7th shot so that the rotation wasn't so dark and I moved the smaller robot to the front so that it could break up some of the graphic overlay with the rolling text at the bottom moving with the robot.

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Shot 8 Roto

When I had previously tried to roto out mistakes for this project I really struggled to make things work but this tutorial was great and I realised where I was going wrong previously. Turns out the roto process is fairly simple and once you figure it out its just a little tedious.

Here's the nuke node tree, bezier settings and bezier shapes. I couldn't initially remove the shadows on the pillars in the back because when I inverted both beziers it would hide everything and when I inverted neither it would show everything. I could only get one shadow hidden at a time but I found that a work around was to have only one inverted and the rest could be set to minus and this worked great for the roto.

Here's the final render of the last shot, I trimmed down the end a little bit because in the original animatic, the explosion dragged on for a while.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 8

This is the final shot at each stage of animation, it took a bit of trial and error to figure out what looked right and to sync the movement with the music. I'm happy with how it ended up, now I just need to add the finishing touches: roto out mistakes, add graphic overlay and, add explosion in the hole at the end. I froze the final positions of the wall shards and deleted quite a few of the ones which were floating of were sat on the floor as the same place as the room decor behind the table. The lighting was a bit fiddly to figure out but the final render looks alright.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 5 Wall Smash 2

I managed to separate the wall into segments as you can see above and I was fairly optimistic with how things were going as each stage of the tutorial was working smoothly.

Unfortunately later on I started to come across a plethora of issues and I was struggling to get the ball rolling. Every time I managed to successfully smash the wall all it would take was to change one innocuous parameter for the entire wall to stop working. It crashed time and time again but I kept fiddling around with the parameters until it finally worked.

This is the final set that I made in Maya, the white squares are the collider boxes for the floor (which is hidden) the table and, the funnel I created so that shards would fall in the areas I wanted them.

These are all the passive bodies, you can see all the shards which blew backwards which were initially scattering far and wide to the point that roto-ing it all would've been a nightmare. Aside from the numerous crashes or unexplained stoppage to the wall shatter, the funnel was a great solution. This was a really complex process and I definitely bit off more than I could chew here but I'm happy that I managed to get through it and make my plans come to fruition.

You can also see here the arm detached from the rest of the body to exaggerate the wall smash which I'm happy didn't break the rig.

Different angles of the smash in the viewport.

Here are the final smash renders, I had to use the render it a second time because if you look above the head of the smaller robot at the start of the first render there is a black hole in the wall before the smash took place. This was because I forgot to hide one of the wall of the funnel behind the wall so the lighting in Maya created a dark shadow in between the funnel wall and the smashed wall.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 5 Wall Smash

I watched this video all the way through to get a quicker refresher of how the wall shatter process will be done.

As I am doing this over summer I haven't been able to ask Gary how to do a lot of complex processes so when it came to some of the more niche issues I came across I tried a few times to ask ChatGPT how to solve the issue. A lot of the time it sent me on a wild goose chase which didn't really help me but on this occasion it came back with a really good response which will save me a lot of time. I had a lot of concerns in mind about the compositing process at the end because there were so many layers of foreground midground and background with a lot going on and I was concerned about have a lot of tedious and needlessly complex roto work but ChatGPT's response informed me that I can use an AIMatte texture to hide things in Maya so that the roto process would be much simpler.

I hadn't rendered a floor in the previous shots however when I had rendered an AIshadowmatte of the table I noticed that it changed the colour of the table slightly which I couldn't figure out how to prevent so if I added a floor AIShadowMatte half way through a shot it would be really obvious and jarring but I realised that I could make proper use of the AOV's and render the floor shadow matte seperately and just use the shadow_diff sequence for all of the shards that scatter and land on the floor from the smash.

I added these planes behind the wall with an AIMatte to hide the big robot from shot and a floor to be used later.

I tried making a start on the shatter process which I had a decent understanding of but I couldn't delete the history of the wall which was originally a plane which was gradually scaled, extruded and shaped until it filled the gap. The complexity of the extrusions and subdivisions with the cut tool prevented me from being able to delete the history and thus I couldn't use the solid shatter tool on the wall.

I spent some time researching for solutions and trying to figure things out and supposedly using a basic lambert/phong texture was a work around for this issue. The solid shatter would finally work but because of the fact that the history wouldn't properly delete, Maya still recognised the wall as a plane object and thus couldn't properly shatter and every time I did it it created a gigantic cube 1000 times larger than the entire set I made. The tiny little speck in the middle of the yellow is the set.

I checked in a new Maya file to see whether or not a plane could be extruded, have its faces inverted and its history deleted and this worked in these fresh files but no matter how many times I tried it would not work with the wall I made. I had to go back to square one and tediously match the irregular wall shape with a brand new cube, testing at each stage of the process whether the solid shatter tool would work. Eventually I managed to get to this stage and this process is above. The wall had been extruded every which way during the process but I managed to make as perfect as a match as I could manage so that hopefully there is no discernible difference between frame 298 and 299 with the wall.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 5 Playblasts

This is the longest shot in the animation so it took quite a few tries to get things right and here are all the playblasts I made whilst figuring out if the animation synced up with the music properly. There's a lot of corrections throughout from making sure hands aren't clipping through tables, correcting timings, making sure the eyes are looking at the camera and finally adding the antenna wobble at the end. I've got the majority of the shot rendered now which you can see at the end, I just need to figure out the wall smash and make sure it all works for the last couple of shots. After that I need to add the infographics on screen which the robot is pointing to so things are all tied up and finished.

SOUND ON

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 1

This is the opening shot of the animation, I might add a TV static transition before this as though the viewer is just randomly stumbling across this whilst scrolling through TV late at night in a future where robots run sales channels and apparently sell themselves. There's not really much to see here, I just matched the animation to the beat of the music and kept it simple.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 4

I tried altering things in nuke alone but I realised that I needed to tweak the lighting in Maya because there was too much light on the robot near the start of the shot and the colours felt a little too artificial. Here's the second render with the colour saturation more closely resembling the previous shot despite being a little darker.

This was the node tree from the first render, it got really messy and there's a noticeable difference in saturation.

Here's the final saturation match, it stands out the most in the orange and I did my best to get things to resemble one another as closely as I could and I also had to tweak the colour values of the spinning shot footage so that it matches those in the previous shot.

I did some comparison in Photoshop to check if the second version was a better match and it seems like it was, especially the base footage itself.

The animation itself took a few attempts on this shot because I was having issues with my keyframes making movement really robotic and I looked up whether or not you could keyframe translations separately from rotations and this video was great and taught me these shortcuts: 'Shift' + 'W' = Keyframe Translation, 'Shift' + 'E' = Keyframe Rotation, 'Shift' + 'R' = Keyframe Scale. I'm not sure how I haven't figured this out yet but I'm glad I can move forward knowing that 'S' isn't the only keyframe shortcut.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 4

I had to place a table into the scene for the fourth shot because the robot actually has to levitate to be seen at the table.

The little robot was far too big for the table when I first looked through the spinning shot camera and after rescaling the camera, lights and table shadow matte I noticed that the lighting was different to what it looked like in the test render.

I went back and used these orange boxes as a reference and tweaked each light individually until they all matched the original lighting.

After putting the render into nuke I noticed that I couldn't use the same colour correct network so I had to remake it so that the values matched better.

This was what I ended up with after doing all of the animation and color correction, graining, blurring, etc... I really like this video individually but unfortunately it doesn't match the lighting or colours of the previous shot. The lighting in each piece of footage is different so I knew that this shot would be a little different especially because my body cast shadows on the table whilst filming but it still felt too far from the colour scheme of the previous shot.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 7 Prep

This shot is mostly just flashing images to tell you to buy the special edition large robot, I tried to set something up in Maya with some interesting lighting to make a promotional; poster for it but I'm not really sure if this is what I want.

I tried figuring out what it could look like with a bunch of promotional lettering surrounding it but I feel like I'm overdoing this segment.

I also rendered a 360 rotation of the models side by side to show the size difference which is what I was initially planning for this shot. I think I'll have to revisit this shot later on because right now I just don't know if I like this.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 3 Animation

I went back into Maya to make sure that the hands didn't clip through the table at all and I also tweaked the colour of the robot. I think these colours are a better match as they are much richer despite being a little darker, I am aiming to get the colours to match the filmed footage first and once I have it all together I can tweak the colours as a whole to get the rights tone for the video.

[mi5018tomberry]

Shot 3 Animation

This is the playblast and first render of the animation, I really didn't like the way that the hands clipped through the table as they rested on them so I need to go back and tweak things. Although I do really like the colours in this video, it didn't feel like they matched the surrounding scenery, they felt a bit too desaturated and a little bit overexposed. I also need to sort out the timing at the end because reveal of the robot is slower than the initial turn which takes away from the drama of the robot reveal.