Shot 38, 39 Dynamics

Shot 38 and 39 are Bagboy's 'Hero' Shots, the moment where he confidently proposes his love to Sofia with a heart shaped kite, with an abundance of swagger to boot!

Shot Layout:

I toyed with two similar yet different methods to achieve the effect of his tie waving and blowing in the wind. (This way the shot will not feel so bland)

So after the Tie is modelled and in position I applied the nCloth option to it as usual.

I then used the TRANSFORM nConstraint to Constrain the Tie around his Neck. This was very important.

Then I used Component to Component constraints on the separate parts of the Tie (The Tie is actually split into 3 separate meshes, the collar, the Triangular Knot, and the actual waving section.) This gives me total control over it.

So far:

The below video shows my progress, this is serviceable but it's still not really there, I need to get in there and tweak it a LOT.

I realised that the Tie was going all over the place, but I also realised the first 12 or so frames the wave looked pretty seamless, so I attempted to follow a tutorial for seamless nCloth simulation (this proved fruitless, but it was interesting)

In the below screenshots, I have used the Trax Editor to put out the first few frames of the nCloth simulation and attempted to just have those frames on repeat, in theory this saves render time and also gives you a lovely seamless loop

This method didn't quite work out for me, the movement of my Tie became automised almost and before I dwelled too long on this idea I had another. I decided to use a Force Field in Maya (Turbulence), to PUSH my nCloth in the direction of the wind, this would mean it would only flow in one direction.

After I set up my scene and applied the Force Field and also set that up I had to tweak my settings for a while, to achieve just the right effect and voila:

Learning new Animation Tools

To speed up my Animation Workflow I've been using three new tools that majorly speed up my workflow, the first of these is a plug in called 'bhGhost'

bhGhost Video HERE

This is an INCREDIBLE assistant to my animation workflow, because to put it simply Maya's 'Ghosting' Tool is completely broken! It's very temperamental and so I am unable to view previous/progressive frames in my viewport. However, with bhGhost, I can choose exactly which frames I want to see an outline of which can really help when posing and blocking.

bhGhost in practice, here I was trying to create a nice arc for the hand, and was successfully able to do so quickly using bhGhost.

The SECOND tool is Maya's Camera Sequencer. With the number of Cameras I have to manage in the film the Camera Sequencer makes it easier to view and play through all my shots.

So I took the liberty of learning how to use the Camera Sequencer. A lot like the Maya TRAX Editor, the Camera Sequencer uses the same sort of timeline feature to put clips together.

BUT... The camera sequencer is best used with the UberCam.

Which is the THIRD tool I have learnt to use in my workflow. The UberCam is a godsend. It's a fairly new feature that was bought into Maya.

I noticed that with my directorial and editing style there were many cutting points for some animation shots. It would've gotten very cumbersome then to have play blasted each camera out separately then to go into my editing suite and then edit the two clips together just to see what they will play like when put together.

So bring in the UberCam...

My UberCam Workflow, it looks a little complicated but it's really simple. The Top Left Window is my UberCam window. The Top right is my Active Camera. The Bottom Left is my Camera Sequencer and the Bottom Right is my Outliner.

With the UberCam and the Camera Sequencer working together I can convert my Active Camera's Time Range into Clips, add these to the UberCam and Trim and Edit them straight in Maya and finally put out a Playblast, greatly speeding up my workflow!

Grass, Grass, Grass

At this point the grass has come to a point where me and Mikey are both pretty happy with it and in terms of look we could tweak it slightly and it'd look great. There are some things in the back of my head though that keep bugging me.

1) I had a suggestion from my tutor to make it more stylised, I'm unsure of this but thought I might as well give it a whack.

2) I DEFINITELY want to do all I can to reduce render times, currently the scene takes 12-15 minutes with grass to render a single shot. This might not SEEM like much, but when you consider that render times without the grass is approximately 1-2 minutes, something can definitely be done.

At the moment Mikey has set up the scene to use Final Gather and Raytracing on full on each asset of the scene, we also have plenty of mia shaders in play. Now I have been doing some research and it occurs to me that we haven't tried any of the 'tricks' that are in use with the industry for fur.

STYLISE ATTEMPTS

RENDER TIME SAVING TECHNIQUES

I turned off Raytracing + Final Gather and switched to Rasterizer. However Physical Sun and Sky requires Raytracing + Final Gather, the Render time for this shot was 5 mins. But as you can see the lighting has failed.

I switched the Fur Render settings from Hair Primitive to Volume Shader, this is a quicker technique and saves time. Whilst Hair Primitive is more accurate, Volume Shader merely attempts to recreate the fur look. However Volume Shading fur does not work well with Sun and Sky as there are issues with Raytracing.

NURBS INSTEAD OF POLYS

Realising that Maya's Fur feature and it's density is linked to the Polygons or Divisions of a model, I felt that maybe I was going about this the wrong way. What I decided to do is to duplicate my Polygon geometry Hill and convert that into a Subdiv then into NURBS. NURBS is much quicker for Maya to utilise and Fur is also able to be used with NURBS better than with Polygons. I assigned my Grass System to the NURBS Hill and because of this it meant I could substantially lower down the density of my grass.

500,000 Density, the white area is the NURBS. 

My Render time has come down SUBSTANTIALLY.

500,000 Density, this time the NURBS Hill is in a Transparent Layer.

However the Hilltop renders with grass weren't very promising.

After some Gamma Correction using the Gamma Correction node, I was able to solve this.

Initial Gamma Correction.

After some tweaks to colour and Density. (Density at 2,000,000 for Hilltop)

This Hilltop Render only took 6 minutes!

Animation Testing 02

Admittedly, Sofia was more difficult for me to animate, as she does have some weight (muscle?) on her, but at the same time she's a young active girl. I needed to animate a cycle that got the free spirit of the character, but also pushed the Dynamics technically speaking.

The animation is ok but I felt it was a bit too much and could use more appeal, especially in the arms. I think it needs to feel more natural.

I really, really like the skirt movement, but I know the hair is totally off and needs fixing. I think the best course of option will be to paint weights on the hair, and solve the hair for each scene Sofia is in, right down to the detail.

Bagboy's Hill Grass Set up and Problem Solving

Now that the process of setting up grass on the Ranch was well under way, it's time to get the ball rolling for Bagboy's Hill too! This was actually fairly difficult and I ran into some new challenges, which introduced me to "Baldness Maps", "Ramp Maps" and creative UV Maps FOR the Maya Fur.

So the initial grass application was a bit of a failure, it was due to the: Fur Settings, the Geometry Settings and the UV Settings

Adjusting the Fur Settings

A bit more, also added more subdivisions to geometry.

Further Fur Settings adjustments. Created UV Map for Fur.

Further Fur Settings adjustments. Adjusted UV Map for Fur.

Further Fur Settings adjustments. Applied the "Relax" command to all UV's to allow and even distribution of grass density. (See following image)

Amped up Grass Density.

Now that I have gotten this far it's time to get into the details, the grass is too perfect right now and will need some imperfections, dirtying up and fitting with the original concept of the grass being slightly worn out where Bagboy comes down from the hill everyday. For this I will need to create "MAPS" for my Baldness setting, Length setting and possibly even Scraggle Setting. Many further adjustments to be made.

Finalizing Sofia Rig and fixing errors

As a Director I felt that Sofia's design was still off. My tutors agreed and I decided that the adjustments Laura made to the Eleven rig needed serious ammendments.

Here is Laura's version:

I thought it was very unappealing, I can understand that Laura was trying to make the character look as much like her original design as possible, but at the end of the day an unappealing character is an unappealing character.

Here are my changes;

I toned almost everything down as it was just far TOO much, now it just looked a little creepy but I feel this is more to do with the pose and the teeth + eye positioning. So more ammendments...

I found some errors in the Sofia Rig when I was attempting to create test animation;

Here you can see how the FK AND IK controls are showing even though I only need one of them to show, this problem seemed to be unfixable and occured during my tampering of the rig, luckily I had created many backups and was able to fix the issue..

Like so.

I added a "Dyn" Control for the Rig to be able to turn all the dynamics On and Off at will as well as turn the skirt and hair visibility on and off. This just makes things much easier for the future.

The Boots also underwent a change where the laces were taken out, this was to simplify the geometry as 

1) The Laces were a very detailed feature in a Character style where simplicity was the aim.

2) The Laces were too heavy in geometry and slowing down the use of the rig substantially, me and Laura both agreed that taking the Laces out and adjusting the Boot model to look a little more scrappy would actually aid the character's look if anything.

Finally solving the Kite String Rig!

After  much deliberation I was able to figure out a clever way in which I could create an effective String Rig for the film.

Create a NURBS Curve using the CV Curve Tool

Rebuild the Curve, with 200 Spans (Vertex's)

Making the selected Curve Dynamic as an nHair

Result

Extruding a Nurbs Circle along the Nurbs Curve

Making the Nurbs Curve Self Collide, and then adjusting the collision thickness

Results

Now I need a method in which I can create a controller at the bottom of the rope so that if attached to an object (in my case Bagboy's Spindle), it will automatically follow along.

Using a Script downloaded from LesterBanks called SoftClusterEX, I created a Cluster with Soft Selection at the bottom of the rope, this will be where the Rope will be attached to the Spindle.