For this assignment the task was to replace the posters on the wall with different designs. This task took me a fair amount of time to understand the nodes and how they worked together. One particular issue I had was scaling the picture down to the correct size but after some research I found the solution: using corner pin trackers and transform tools.
Personal Visual Effects Blog & Portfolio
Month: November 2022
Categories
Balloon Festival Project
In this revised scene, I wanted to have the balloon move more realistically, whilst still maintaining a sci-fi aesthetic and style. I changed the background of the scene to a night sky which slightly rotates. I used colour grading throughout to try and make different elements either stand out or blend in. I used an exr file to create the ray which expands from the ship, and I used rotoscoping to change the opacity of the balloon as it gets “absorbed” by the UFO. I also rendered a separate pass from the balloon model with an ‘X-Ray’ material applied as the balloon dissipates. I also added some sound effects from YouTube and slight dynamic glow to the x-ray plate.
This was inspired by several science-fiction films, namely Star Trek, Star Wars, and Independence Day. The contrast between a sci-fi scene and a 1900’s hot air balloon may have been slightly difficult to achieve, I attempted to balance the colour grading by keeping the UFO and its movements to the top half of the frame, and the hot air balloons to the lower, mountainous region with a dulled hue.
I generally wanted this project to be comprised of as many original assets as possible. To this effect, I did use a video clip from YouTube for the rotational stars, but other than the original plate and what was given to us to create this sequece I developed several key elements based on the genre of science-fiction for the final render. The portal and firing particles, the UFO, and of course the balloon.
I wanted to change the scene to make it more interesting and realistic. I created a portal effect in Maya using particles and 3D fluid containers, to simulate an alien beam ray which absorbs the balloon.
For this (unfinished) short sequence, I used several different nodes such as colour correction & grading, rotoscoping, keyframe transforms, OFlow time adjustment and other time adjustment nodes. I also used Maya and Substance Painter to model and texture a quick UFO, and I also used Maya’s fluid and particles system to render a fire simulation.
Initially, I wanted to create a fast-moving animation so I could utilize some of the nodes I had learned to use. As well as the tools, I also wanted to incorporate some of what I had studied in 3D Animation just with general transforms and keyframing. Despite this version being unrealistic due to the speed of the balloon, this short sequence taught me a fair amount about how to use merge nodes, the general layer-stacking in Nuke, how to animate and sequence different plates, and further knowledge of rotoscoping.
For this weeks task, we were asked to replace the screen’s image and rotoscope the fingers moving over the screen. While the rotoscoping was understandable, I found the tracking of the corners of the screen to be quite difficult to understand. For the image, I chose a short playlist from Spotify which was an appropriate size, and tried to match the movement of the hand to the screen scrolling. From an animation standpoint this process was recognizable, but otherwise I think there is a lot of understanding to be had with Nuke and how everything works in conjuction with each node and their placements.
For this task we were asked to match a model to a background plate through colour grading and colour correction. I did not find this task especially difficult as the gray textures of the plane were a good starting point to match the bluish tone of the background. Through working on this task, I developed a basic understanding of the colour-grading and correction nodes, and how each colour can balanced against another, combined with brightness, gamma, highlights, and shadows. By boosting the blue hue, shadowed areas, and toning down the gamma, I attemped to bring a cool hue to both the airplane and the backdrop, whilst trying to maintain the warmness of the horizon. Through this task and others, Nukes ability to combine effective colour grading, rotoscoping, and clean-up tools is very apparent and effective. As for a composition standpoint this was a good task to work on, as there were no extreme changes in colour or lighting, which made balancing the scene simpler, and also easier to understand the toolset.
Categories
Paraphrasing Week 06
Original Quote
The authenticity of a documentary is ‘deeply linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images are linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images bear evidence of events that actually happened, by virtue of the indexical relationship between image and reality’
Horness Roe. A. (2013) Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Paraphrased Quote
How a documentary presents its topic authentically can be dependent on the factual basis of the imagery used throughout, and also dependent on how reality is depicted in the images shown in the documentary.
We learned how to use Blendshapes and the animation editor to create different mouth shapes and expressions. We also learned how to constrain other parts of our model to different joints and manipulators. Additionally, we learned of Driven Keys, which are used to drive blendshapes from the movement of a joint. An issue I was repeatedly having using the Driven Keys was Maya crashing repeatedly due to invalid saves (which wasn’t the case), and also blendshapes resetting whenever I would attempt to edit the shape. Disabling cached playback resolved the issue some of the time, but not always.
In this project we were tasked with retopologizing a human head using Maya’s Quad Draw and Live Mesh toolkit. Despite having done this a few times before (mainly in 3dCoat) it was still somewhat of a struggle to get a mesh prepared not only for texturing, but for animation as well. After 3 attempts this is the version I’m most happy with as the others became too dense and unmanageable.
For this project we were tasked with rotoscoping the bridge area of the short clip. By using trackers the rotoscope follows the minor camera movements and shakes, which would be very difficult to match with keyframed transforms.
Overall this went relatively well, yet a little time-consuming due to the amount of points in the rotoscope, but quicker than matching the movement of the running character, which necessitated changing the shape of the rotoscope for each frame.
Categories
Experimental Short Film
Impossible Figures II, created in 2016, is an animated short film directed by Marta Pajek.
The film begins with a wide frame of a woman returning home with a bag of groceries. What becomes immediately apparent is the use of space in this animation, as she walks through a seemingly borderless world until she gets inside her house, which in itself sets it’s own borders with an aerial blueprint. The film creates a sense of a well-tread routine as the characters behaviour is coordinated and deliberate. Only at the point where the eggs roll out of the bag and smash on the floor below is where the routine becomes interrupted, and the desperate plight to protect this one egg from being broken becomes the womans primary purpose. Throughout the film, various patterns emerge and disappear, the sense of perception becomes increasingly warped, and the use of space and colour changes dramatically.
Categorisation: Surrealist Animation. The use of blending shapes and patterns, a synaesthetic dream sequence, and the visual storytelling created appear to fit within this category of short films.
Form & Function: How the film presents it’s narrative seems to rely heavily on the use of symbolism and interpretation, as the meaning behind several elements are not made apparently clear, even as the film draws to a close. The audience can interpret her character in several ways: one who yearns for the scenarios created in this sequence, one who has lived and lost these memories, or as a character who has put these human needs in the background as she prioritizes other objectives.
Process: The film relies on simplistic shapes and outlines with limited details. This process works well as the patterns and shapes blend between frames, and the illusion of depth is used effectively to convey the characters altered mental state. Seemingly straight planes become angled, furniture changes shape and size dramatically, and the striking imagery of an ever expanding and contracting house convey the characters mindset throughout.
Formal Elements: The main element which is utilized throughout the film is the use of space. How the woman finds herself in ever changing environments reflects her state of mind. When she is curiously searching for reason, the space expands and widens. When she becomes focused on a particular element, such as a husband and child, the space shrinks to a singular box. This use of space is thoroughly effective and allows for more surreal scenarios, such as opening the closet and discovering a room of several lifestyle scenarios which she may be longing for.
The film uses a very limited set of colours, mainly a mixture of reds and blues on the characters makeup and earrings. A dull green filter is applied during the characters dream sequence, which effectively removes the colour from the scene. This indicates to the audience that she is experiencing an altered state, perpetuated further by the constant forming of shapes into humans dancing and audio track.
The pacing of the film, at first, illustrates a fast-paced and determined character completing her usual routine. This pacing slows dramatically as the film progresses, spending more time in each shot with slower and more elaborate transitions. The pacing follows the mindset of the character as she makes her way through the house, inquisitively for some time, and becoming longer the more surreal the experience becomes. This combined with the synaesthetic dream sequence and changing environments and patterns around her assist in driving the story forwards.
The audio maintains a somewhat industrial soundtrack, reminiscent of Inception (2010), creating a sense that things are not quite as they seem with shifting rooms accompanied by foley sounds, such as the scraping of bricks, and an ever present guitar grunge giving the sense of uncertainty. The audio changes tone once she enters the dream sequence, with a slow, romantic ballad replacing the distorted guitar and echoed sounds outside. As she leaves the dream sequence, and the film begins to draw to a close, the audio is replaced with the sound of chirping crickets in an outdoor space. This creates an unsettling atmosphere, and is quickly added to by the animalistic sounds of the creature revealed to be contained in the egg.
Categories
Rotoscoping in Nuke
For this Nuke project we were tasked with rotoscoping someone running towards the camera. Here we used the Roto node and added curves and points to mask his figure throughout the short clip. This was the first time I have used any type of rotoscoping tool so understanding the process was new to me. I struggled slightly with the smaller shapes such as shoelaces because of the amount of points and interpolation but for the larger shapes I was more able to match his movements.