There are also a few technical difficulties of other groups that I helped to solve during the project:
Optimization for Ogre Rig
Problem: Due to use of Set Driven Keys in the Controllers of Facial Blendshapes, the rig becomes too heavy to animate and it can't scroll through the frames smoothly.
Solution: Changing SDK to Expressions made the rig a lot faster, since Expressions are fastest to calculate.
Reconnecting Facial Blendshapes to a New Model for Dragon
Problem: Connecting Model with Blendshapes and Skinned Model
Solution: Prepare a new Mesh that is ready for Rigging and Blendshapes, connect the Blendshapes to the new mesh through a bridge Mesh and Copy the skin weights to the new mesh.
Problem: The skinned and blendshapes geometry has the wrong UV.
Solution: Use Transfer Attributes to transfer the UV from the model with correct UV.
SDK for Robotic Arm Transformation
Problem: Linking up a Transformation Animation of multiple objects to an attribute of a single controller with an SDK. (How?)
Solution: Create a Set Driven Key from the new Attribute to an animated object and open the Node Editor. Connect the Attribute to the input of the animation graphs of the objects. The node editor will automatically create a unitConversion Node. This node will convert the Attribute value into Frame number of the animation.
The default conversion (250) will convert 1 attribute value into 1 frame of animation. Since the animation is 64 frames in total and the attribute's maximum value is 1, the conversion should be 250*64, which is 16000. And then 1 attribute value will count as 64 frames of animation.
The output of this Conversion Node is linked to the input of every single animation graphs of the animated objects in the Node Editor. Therefore when the attribute value changes, it affects all of the multiple objects' animation simultaneously.
This can still be optimized with Expressions, but the SDK works just fine.
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Thursday, April 24, 2014
Technical Difficulties faced during the Fluffymallow Project
There are a few problems that we encounter throughout the Fluffymallow Project:
Taking the HDRI Lighting in the morning (7.00 a.m.)
The lighting changes dramatically when we were shooting. The 0 exposure of the 7.00 a.m. sky is 2 stops darker than the 0 exposure of the 7.15 a.m. sky.
Solution: We took our footage and HDRI lighting at 10 a.m., which has a more stable exposure level.
Paint Weighting the Spikes of Marsh
The spikes on Marsh's Back are painful to paint weight. And only after 1 week of paint weighting, I realized the spikes are supposed to not deform. (They are supposed to be hard.)
However, the spikes in the model was prepared for a soft-mesh deformation, and there was no time to readjust the design or the model.
Failed Solution: Create a lot of controllable joints to paint weight the spikes separately.
Solution: Limit all spine animation in the shots showing his back to avoid spike extreme deformations or intersections. Most of the shots are low angle front view shots that can't focus on the back, so the spikes deformations are not urgently important.
Referencing Files for Textures
Textures can't load because of wrong path directory, C:\Users\Desktop\...etc.
Solution:
The texture files are supposed to link from sourceimages\
so that it will follow the project instead of the path in each individual computers.
Making the rig scale-able
There are many things to look out for when making the scale of the rig adjustable.
1. Connecting the controller scale attributes to the correct attributes: For the case of global scale, group all the joints together and connect the scale of the Main controller to the Joint group. A scaling group is needed because connecting the scale attribute to an individual joint will not affect the children joints, and connecting to all joints separately will cause the rig to be inflexible for individual joint modifications.
2. Only skinned Geometries are following the Joint Scale. Geometries with Parent Constraint will need their Scale attributes connected.
3. Geometries with IKSpline Joints will need an additional group for the control joints controlling the curve.
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Taking the HDRI Lighting in the morning (7.00 a.m.)
The lighting changes dramatically when we were shooting. The 0 exposure of the 7.00 a.m. sky is 2 stops darker than the 0 exposure of the 7.15 a.m. sky.
Solution: We took our footage and HDRI lighting at 10 a.m., which has a more stable exposure level.
Paint Weighting the Spikes of Marsh
The spikes on Marsh's Back are painful to paint weight. And only after 1 week of paint weighting, I realized the spikes are supposed to not deform. (They are supposed to be hard.)
However, the spikes in the model was prepared for a soft-mesh deformation, and there was no time to readjust the design or the model.
Failed Solution: Create a lot of controllable joints to paint weight the spikes separately.
Solution: Limit all spine animation in the shots showing his back to avoid spike extreme deformations or intersections. Most of the shots are low angle front view shots that can't focus on the back, so the spikes deformations are not urgently important.
Referencing Files for Textures
Textures can't load because of wrong path directory, C:\Users\Desktop\...etc.
Solution:
The texture files are supposed to link from sourceimages\
so that it will follow the project instead of the path in each individual computers.
Making the rig scale-able
There are many things to look out for when making the scale of the rig adjustable.
1. Connecting the controller scale attributes to the correct attributes: For the case of global scale, group all the joints together and connect the scale of the Main controller to the Joint group. A scaling group is needed because connecting the scale attribute to an individual joint will not affect the children joints, and connecting to all joints separately will cause the rig to be inflexible for individual joint modifications.
2. Only skinned Geometries are following the Joint Scale. Geometries with Parent Constraint will need their Scale attributes connected.
3. Geometries with IKSpline Joints will need an additional group for the control joints controlling the curve.
___________________________________
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Conveying Messages Through Senses: Visual and Sound
This week, I learned more in depth about the importance of sound in movies. The sounds are divided to Music, Sound Effects, and Voices. The volume of each sound will depend on the genre of the movie and the focus of the scene, sometimes it also depends on what the director is trying to tell the audiences.
For example, in Drama genre, voice is important in the delivery of storyline. Thank You For Smoking (2005) and Juno (2007) directed by Jason Reitman have similar sound design; the voices of the actors and actresses play a huge role, and background music or sounds are considered less important, except for some certain scenes. This also applied to Perks of Being A Wallflower (2012) by Stephen Chbosky and Her (2013) by Spike Jonze.
While in Action genre, the use of sound effects are more prominent because they have to make some scenes focus on the events that are happening, like explosions, hitting sounds, glass breaking, etc. Sometimes they don't even focus on the character's voices, so the sound will mostly be filled with action music and action sounds to bring up the atmosphere. The example would be Elysium (2013), Pacific Rim (2013).
Some movies with a lot of action scenes and drama scenes will use different sound design for different scenes. The example would be in The Matrix (1999) or Cloud Atlas (2012)
I think the sound designs are supposed to help in delivering what the director is trying to tell to the audience. Only recently I saw a documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) by David Gelb. And I listen on how they synchronize the music and the sound with the characters talking and the cinematography as well. It is to be designed as if we are experiencing the reality of the movie itself.
In the end, what makes the audience engaged in movies are 50% visual, and 50% sound, and it is interesting how they are trying to convey the message of 'smell and flavor' in this documentary, only by using images and sound. It is as if our brain is connecting all the senses together and linking them up to our emotions.
That is what a good director should do in a movie; to make sure the audience experiences the message that the movie is trying to convey.
For example, in Drama genre, voice is important in the delivery of storyline. Thank You For Smoking (2005) and Juno (2007) directed by Jason Reitman have similar sound design; the voices of the actors and actresses play a huge role, and background music or sounds are considered less important, except for some certain scenes. This also applied to Perks of Being A Wallflower (2012) by Stephen Chbosky and Her (2013) by Spike Jonze.
While in Action genre, the use of sound effects are more prominent because they have to make some scenes focus on the events that are happening, like explosions, hitting sounds, glass breaking, etc. Sometimes they don't even focus on the character's voices, so the sound will mostly be filled with action music and action sounds to bring up the atmosphere. The example would be Elysium (2013), Pacific Rim (2013).
Some movies with a lot of action scenes and drama scenes will use different sound design for different scenes. The example would be in The Matrix (1999) or Cloud Atlas (2012)
I think the sound designs are supposed to help in delivering what the director is trying to tell to the audience. Only recently I saw a documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) by David Gelb. And I listen on how they synchronize the music and the sound with the characters talking and the cinematography as well. It is to be designed as if we are experiencing the reality of the movie itself.
In the end, what makes the audience engaged in movies are 50% visual, and 50% sound, and it is interesting how they are trying to convey the message of 'smell and flavor' in this documentary, only by using images and sound. It is as if our brain is connecting all the senses together and linking them up to our emotions.
That is what a good director should do in a movie; to make sure the audience experiences the message that the movie is trying to convey.
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