We have an animated, textured, modeled, lit, and rendered shot. Its four seconds long, and its gorgeous. The push to get it ready for Friday's production meeting was intense to the point that I was wandering around hugging people for my own moral support, and losing my train of thought every 30 seconds. But get it done we did and I'm actually pretty proud of my team for knuckling down and everybody taking responsibility for their portion of the work load. Special mentions to Jake for getting the shed Leonard calls home into ship shape and jumping on all the odd jobs that popped up, and Nigel who rose to his new position of texture king with aplomb and finesse, even maintaining a digital presence in the studio on the last day through an all day skype video call as I monitored his texture progress in between putting out render brushfires, and Luke for managing the herculean feat of fixing Leonard's awkward wrists at the last moment. Dan finished up the animation and I threw in the remaining lights before clicking render at 10:30 the night before. I won't be posting the whole 84 frames because that would ruin the surprise and I don't want to end up posting the entire film in pieces on my blog. I will however, offer this single frame:
Please Fullscreen It.
Leading up to this mad rush I had been pre-occupied with blockthrough and getting the 'kernel' seed itself ready for its inclusion in this scene and it was also required for some dynamics tests. You can see it in the frame above filling the flasks in the corner on the shelf, nice and out of focus. Here's a better indication of them making up the shed's mis-en-scene.
You missed the final gather didn't you?
Test renders are great as they point out all the things left to fix, for example in this frame I need to turn on reflections for the fur on Leonard's beard and you can also see why we chose the shot we did as they pipe in the background hasn't been textured yet.
Youthful As Ever
The fun/tedious part of the blockthrough is putting Leonard in outrageous poses as me and Hugh layout the cinematography and poses in each shot of every scene. With the kernel I adapted the brain from before and retextured it to try and match a more organic looking haze nut exterior with moss filling the folds of the brain, then I wanted to give the stem the look of the white top to a conker as it merged in the sycamore seed style wings. These wings fold up or down according to whether its growing on the try or mid-flight.
Here it is folded, and it'll be hanging upside down from the branch, or perhaps growing upwards from the branch as per the design of the tree.
I kept redoing the moss to try to get it to actually look like moss rather than toxic waste splattered across the shell.
The simple sycamore seed model in their folded out flight mode.
Getting the translucence right for both the kernel and the wings was tricky but using the mia_material_x_passes I could control it pretty well using the existing diffuse textures and setting the advanced refractive settings to thin walled so that with a little bit of transparency the light scattered through the shader nicely, and much quicker than a sub surface scattering shader would have down. It also avoids sampling issues and grainy illumination inside the shader.
And then it was all done, probably at slightly too high or a resolution and poly count than was necessary for a background prop so I'll need to finesse it for other shots and keep this hero asset for the small number of close ups it features in. Maybe I'll even turn the displacement back on for those hero shots, if I'm feeling opulent.
Pixel Propaganda
Clint Hocking wrote another of his great columns this time addressing the standards by which game dialogue is often judged as awful and contrived, but that we are judging it against the wrong things because it serves a totally different function than it does in film or theatre.
This last week DICE took place, a convention akin to GDC but seemingly more holistic and people-centric. Bethesda's Todd Howard lead with a great keynote talk that's worth watching if only for the sizzle reel of cool stuff created in a game jam at Bethesda that was omitted from Skyrim but might yet see light in DLC or free patches.
Amazingly we got chosen to do the Animated Exeter intro trailer after the 3 groups presented their pitch documents. Kudos to Jake for coming up with the initial concept with Tom, and then doing the animatic on his own. I've begun modelling Exeter cathedral for what will be the centre piece of the animation as the robot emerges- Thunderbird's style, from the cathedral as it splits open. Here are some renders from the different stages of modelling.
I'm still not into the fine detail yet but it wont be long, I'm not sure whether I'm going to try and do displacement maps or create vectors to extrude geometry from for the intricate carvings but I certainly won't be trying to model them from the existing faces. Alan has been working on robot models based on the promotional illustrations for a while and its looking sweet.
I've been playing with final gather in mental ray and getting some great results from using just one light, and its not as slow as I remembered. It effectively calculates bounce light or "indirect" lighting, when combined with mental ray's sun light node (shown to great washed out effect in the final image) it starts looking really tasty. What I hadn't realised was final gather also calculates the colour of the bounced light so you get strong colours bleeding and reflecting onto nearby surfaces when brightly illuminated which really helps make the image feel cohesive and authentic. It also left me wondering what global illumination was, which I previously thought was for this colour bounce effect. Research time!
Click to enlarge:
I'm sure you also recognise our old friend ambient occlusion as well :)
I've been collecting interesting articles to share with you all, the mystery people who read my blog, and its been a while so there's quite a few.
The debut trailer for the pioneering That Game Company's "Journey". If its even half as evocative as Flower it'll be worth your time. And here is the creative director talking about a number of topics not usually covered in an developer interview.
BBC's Panorama created a sensationalist documentary that, while raising the dangers of addiction in certain personalities, attempted to pin the blame on videogames. While its probably not on iplayer any more there's plenty of outraged prose to browse on the blogosphere.
Discussion of viable ways of getting into the industry from going Indie to getting a job as part of a bigger developer.
The game whose tech everyone is talking about because of it's ridiculous accuracy when it comes to facial motion capture. L.A Noire looks to build on all the great detective gameplay and digital acting Heavy Rain started, and deliver in a slicker package that will appear to the less open minded majority.
An incredibly affecting flash game that only lasts about 10 minutes and does exactly what it says on the tin. You have once chance to play this game, no amount of refreshing your browser will change this, believe me: I tried, after massively screwing up. The permanence of consequence explored by this game mechanic is something rare in a small flash game, and a pleasant surprise.
A good talk from one of the creators of Narbacular Drop, the game student project that became Portal, that touches on the differences between education and the industry. Invaluable stuff.
A wonderfully diverse talk on innovation from a number of more prominent Indie game developers at a panel in 2007. Each says his piece before they discuss points from their respective presentations and generally cerebral debate follows.
On reaching my semicentennial (50th) blog post I am finally ready to post my modelled head.
Though not madnatory I really got into this assignment, it was the excuse I'd been long searching for to break out Mudbox, a high end sculpting peice of autodesk software. The process involves creating a basic model in Maya using the traditional polygonal stuff of translating, scaling and rotating stuff until it vaguely resembled the photographic reference Nigel had kindly shot for me:
Using the orthographic views I lined up the silhouettes of the models to the reference photos and slowly the face started to take shape. I was at this point only modelling one side of the face, which would later be mirrored.
To avoid an uncanny valley effect as much as possible I took this mirrored model and, using the reference photos, tried to match all the asymmetry in my face to create a more organic looking and authentic model. Apparently I have an innocent and evil side to my face, one side mirrored in Photoshop creates a maniacal sadist and the other a angel of purity.
Once this base model was made I imported it into Mudbox and began my first attempt at sculpting. I started with the ears as they required detail I wasn't willing to go into in Maya, then, due to the asymmetry, I did the other ear. Next I moved onto the hair, I detailed the fringe quite accurately and then did broad strokes for the tufts and strands on the head.
What Mudbox is really great for is texturing, It has the layering system of photoshop, but instead of painting over a UV snapshot after the unwrapping process you can paint textures straight onto the model using a projection brush which (ironically) projects an image or brush of your choice over the model and you paint away. You can even make separate bump or specular layers.
Not having reference photos for the back and top of the head I now have a pretty interesting hair style that involves pasting the sides of my hair all over the place.
As you can see by this point I was crawling somewhere in the horrorific trough of the uncanny valley struggling to scramble up the otherside, doesn't help he doesn't have eye textures yet.
Here is the final turn around. I struggled with displacement and sub surface scattering shaders til 2am and it still looks like latex but it doesn'et matter too much. No motion blur either, epic fail.
Here it is folded, and it'll be hanging upside down from the branch, or perhaps growing upwards from the branch as per the design of the tree.
I kept redoing the moss to try to get it to actually look like moss rather than toxic waste splattered across the shell.
The simple sycamore seed model in their folded out flight mode.
Getting the translucence right for both the kernel and the wings was tricky but using the mia_material_x_passes I could control it pretty well using the existing diffuse textures and setting the advanced refractive settings to thin walled so that with a little bit of transparency the light scattered through the shader nicely, and much quicker than a sub surface scattering shader would have down. It also avoids sampling issues and grainy illumination inside the shader.
And then it was all done, probably at slightly too high or a resolution and poly count than was necessary for a background prop so I'll need to finesse it for other shots and keep this hero asset for the small number of close ups it features in. Maybe I'll even turn the displacement back on for those hero shots, if I'm feeling opulent.
