Nira's VFX Blog
A journey through my master

Month: November 2022

Categories
Design For Animation

Week 8: Developing a Research Topic

In this lecture, we reviewed the process of researching a topic and how to structured it for our critical report.

Before start our research of our topic, it is important to consider why this research is relevant to the field of study and how it informs the audience. We also could consider what do we want to focus on when graduating, why skills we want to develop, and how are we going to show case our final major project (FMP).

The aspects that we could explore are if our topic is:

  • Experimental or commercial
  • Emergent
  • Screen based
  • Expanded cinema
  • Installation
  • Interactive
  • Studio/cinema/games

Also, our research should show enquiry (engagement, analysis, evaluation), knowledge (analysis, synthesis), process (methods, practical work, experimentation), communication (arguments), and realisation (improvement). There are several resources to do our research like Google Scholar, JSTOR, EBSCO, Animation studies 2.0, UAL Library, etc.

Once we have done our research, it is time to start thinking in the structure of our critical report. The standard structure that a critical report should have is the following:

  1. Title: subtitle
  2. Acknowledgements (optional)
  3. Abstract (short summary of dissertation: question, methods, results)
  4. Key words
  5. Contents page
  6. Introduction (to orientate, inform, and attract the reader’s attention to the topic, along along with stating focused topic and context)
  7. Literature review (synthesis of books’ topics and why they have been used in the critical report – presentation of sources)
  8. Main body of text (can split contents in chapters, and the arguments and statements should be supported with proof or references)
  9. Conclusion (add findings and position – summarise points made in main body)
  10. Appendix (optional)
  11. Bibliography/Reference list/Filmography
  12. Image list (optional)

It is also important to establish the audience and the purpose of the critical report along with the topic and structure.

After this class, I decided to restructure my critical report, adding the sections that we have reviewed today and separating the main body into chapters. Currently my critical report structure looks like this (the coloured text are personal annotations of possible arguments to add):

How CGI has enhanced or affected the stop motion production and result, taking as reference The Nightmare before Christmas and The Boxtrolls stop motion animations.

  • Abstract
  • Key words
  • Contents page
  • Introduction

The world evolves with the pass of time and the technology with it. Some original practices get perfectioned and others are replaced by more suitable ones. This critical report is going to be an analysis of how stop motion is still being used to create great animation movies such as The nightmare before Christmas by Henry Selick and Tim Burton, which has a unique and more refined aesthetic, but it could also be a more expensive process. It will also evaluate how CGI has taken more presence in the animation and VFX industry because of its lower cost of production and its faster creative process. Lastly, it will be also studied how stop motion and CGI are being mixed to achieve even greater and more effective results shown in movies like The Boxtrolls by LAIKA Films.

  • Literature review

Explain what each source says or explains (TNBC documentary, The Boxtrolls documentary, stop motion books).

  • A brief story of stop motion and CGI

Where did stop motion come from and when and why CGI made its appearance in this discipline?

Stop motion was discovered due to an accident that turned out into a discovery. 

Pros and cons from both techniques separately.

  1. Stop motion pros: aesthetic, refined result, high quality, unique, adds more value to the final product.
  2. Stop motion cons: costly, time consuming as made frame by frame, no motion blur (Phil Tippett).
  3. CGI pros: cost effective, less time consuming, can correct errors without having to reshoot a whole scene, can be more precise.
  4. CGI cons: digital aesthetic (errors or mistakes done are what makes our work ‘ours’ and unique, and sometimes we can create something different or never done before – with CGI this can hard to achieve as we can correct errors easily)
  • Traditional stop motion: The Nightmare Before Christmas (395)

The Making of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (BbaGumpSkrimp, 2012) shows how Tim Burton and Henry Selick spent three years and recruited a team of over a hundred artists and technicians to finish this film, only using traditional handmade stop motion animation frame by frame. They needed to hire animators, artists, puppet makers, set builders, prop makers, and specially trained camera operators. All of them had to create and build hundreds of sets and individual puppet characters, since shooting at 24 fps (frames per second) meant that the character needed to be posed 24 times in one second. All this work and attention to detail involves that one minute of finished film, would take an entire week of shooting. Moreover, every facial expression of each puppet meant that a different head needed to be sculpted and, in this case, they used over 400 different heads. In this film, they also had to take in consideration ambience effects such as fire, smoke, snow, lighting bolts, shadows, and flying objects. These effects were added in post-production with rotoscoping techniques or hand-drawing directly on the physical film a frame at the time. Burton and Selick’s animation had also the inconvenience of being shot with analogue cameras, which put a lot of pressure in the animators: if a single frame had a mistake that could not be corrected in post-production, they had to retake the whole sequence from the beginning. As Tim Burton said in the previously mentioned documentary, “stop motion is like making a live action movie in slow motion really”.

According to Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation by Peter Lord & Brian Sibley (2015, p. 43), “The nightmare Before Christmas was the first stop-motion feature film to receive worldwide distribution”. The unique, grotesque, and imperfect style of Tim Burton’s characters was created by some of the best stop motion animators in the world. They needed the best professionals they could find to elaborate that detailed world with imperfect angles, shapes, and textured materials to recreate the cross-hatched style drawings that Burton designed in his original drawings. An example of a masterpiece model design is Jack Skellington, the main character of the film, with a skeleton-like look, a black suit, and long and skinny legs and arms. Despite the creepy look of this character, the stop motion animation of it was elegant and neat. 

  • Stop motion and CGI: The Boxtrolls (400)

Nowadays, with digital cameras and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery), animators have less pressure when shooting a stop motion sequence since they can preview it in real time and replace specific frames that have any errors by new corrected frames. Taking The Boxtrolls as reference by LAIKA Studios, there are certain elements of a scene like floating hair or cloth, that are achieved with the help of CGI. To make a dance scene with both cloth and hair moving, first they had to take a real dance scene as reference to see how they moved. They also asked the dancers to create a choreography and movements so they also could include them in the scene with the puppets. Since the puppet’s cloth is not rigid, they had to attach the dress fabric to a joined mesh which was articulated and let the animators to move and fix the desired position to take the shots of the sequence. However, since the scene consisted in a room full of dancing characters, and to create an articulated puppet for each one would be costly and time consuming, they decided to only use traditional stop motion with the main characters and add the rest with CGI (taking as reference the hand-made puppets). This scene has four hand-made puppets and around 50 to 60 CGI characters to fill gaps. The aesthetic of the hand-made puppet was reproduced digitally, and its mistakes and imperfections were transferred to the CGI puppet, making it look more realistic than it would have been by simple designing the characters in digital 3D without a reference. This is a clear example of how CGI and stop motion can be beneficial to each other and better results can be achieved.

How can CGI help stop motion to be more cost and time effective?

How are stop motion and CGI techniques put together to achieve a better result?

How is the mix of these two techniques affecting the quality and aesthetic of the animation, and how nostalgia can influence when taking the decision of using traditional stop motion? (The Nightmare Before Christmas)

Is traditional stop motion becoming obsolete as CGI is developing into more refined techniques to reach and match the quality and aesthetic from traditional stop motion?

How are animation studios approaching stop motion animation like LAIKA Studios in The Boxtrolls?

  • Conclusion
  • References

Name of person or organisation posting video (Year video posted) Title of film or programme. Date uploaded. Available at: DOI or name of streaming service/app or URL (Accessed: date).

BbaGumpSkrimp (2012) The Making of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. 30 January.  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLw-Fo8uhis (Accessed: 16 November 2022)

LAIKA Studios (2018) Making the Dance: A Look Behind the Scenes at The Boxtrolls | LAIKA Studios. 27 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxexaE4Ge70 (Accessed: 16 November 2022).

Lord, P. and Sibley, B. (2015, p.43) Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation. 4th edn. London: Thames & Hudson. 

  • Bibliography

Anderson, W., Specter, M. and Lewis, R. (2009) The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.

Purves, B. (2010) Basics Animation C4: Stop-Motion. Switzerland: AVA Publishing SA.

Lord, P. and Sibley, B. (2015) Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation. 4th edn. London: Thames & Hudson. 

Shaw, S. (2017) Stop Motion: Craft Skills for Model Animation. 3rd edn. Florida: CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group.

  • Filmography

BbaGumpSkrimp (2012) The Making of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. 30 January.  Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLw-Fo8uhis (Accessed: 16 November 2022).

LAIKA Studios (2018) Making the Dance: A Look Behind the Scenes at The Boxtrolls | LAIKA Studios. 27 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxexaE4Ge70 (Accessed: 16 November 2022).


AT&T Developer Program (2018) The Art and Science of Laika. 5 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NGeGcV9dXw (Accessed: 23 November 2022).

  • List of figures
Categories
Nuke VFX Fundamentals

Week 8: Planar Tracking in Nuke

In this lesson, we checked further nodes in Nuke and we learnt how to use a planar track to add a flat image to a sequence.

We reviewed nodes such as ‘Reformat’ (to change sequence format to match main plate), ‘Crop’ (to crop an image or a video as required), ‘Merge’ (we saw how to use it to fix the size of the bounding box of a sequence to the Alpha layer or the Background layer), and ‘Shuffle’ (to add or remove channels – R, G, B, Alpha, and Depth).

We also learnt how important is the concatenation in a Nuke comp. Concatenation is the process of moving pictures/frames in a sequence. Nuke does calculations that need to follow a logic and if this logic is broken, the final result will not work. Following on this, we analysed several ways to organise the nodes in Nuke so they follow an order and, therefore, we achieve the desired result without any error.

Finally, we also studied how to use the ‘Planar trackers’ to add a 2D image to a 3D space and how to make it follow the movement of the sequence. First we added the ‘Planar tracker’ node, select the area we want with tracking points and track like we do with a regular ‘Tracker’ node. Then we turn on and align the grid to the tracking points to create the perspective desired, and finally, we create a ‘CornerPin2D (absolute) to create the tracker node that we are going to link to the image that we want to add. We can track translation, scale, and rotation together or separately if desired. When there is an object in front of the area that we want to track, we can track the object separately with another ‘bezier’ in the same ‘Planar tracker’ node, so Nuke recognises that object as an area of exclusion (so it does not take it in consideration when tracking the area that we want to).

As a homework, this week we were asked to add an image to the following sequence using what we learnt today in class.

First poster planar tracker showing bezier and grid lines adjustment

I added both posters using a ‘planar track’ node to track the plane where I wanted to add the poster. For the left poster I just tracked it, adjusted the grid lines to the perspective plane I wanted, and then created a ‘corner pin 2D (relative)’ that will be linked to the poster. This node will let the poster or image added to follow the movement of the shot that we have tracked.

Second poster planar tracker showing both beziers and grid lines adjustment

For the second poster, it was necessary to add second bezier that tracks the pole that passes in front of the poster so the programme understands that the area of the second bezier does not have to be taking in consideration when tracking the first bezier area (it is excluded). The roto of the pole was already added in the comp by the professor so I just had to ‘merge’ the second poster ‘corner pin 2D’ to the main comp. I also adjusted the ‘grade’ and ‘saturation’ of the posters, skewed them a little bit with ‘transform’ node to fit 100% the perspective, and added some ‘blur’ to remove the sharp edges from the posters and blend them in to the comp.

My Nuke comp with both poster’s added
Poster’s in street added using ‘Planar tracking’ technique

This practice seemed pretty easy to me compared with other assignments as ‘Planar tracking’ is a straight forward tool. However, at the beginning I had a problem with the middle poster that has the pole obstructing part of the view in front of it. The ‘Planar tracker’ was not reading the area properly as the tracking points were jumping from the area selected to a completely different area and was not keeping the perspective I wanted to keep. I solved this making the tracking area bigger so the programme had more information to create the track along the frames. I also colour corrected the posters to blend them with the scene and make it more realistic. Overall, I am very happy with the result.

Categories
Maya VFX Fundamentals

Week 8: Facial Expressions with Blend Shapes in Maya

In this week’s lecture, we learnt how to edit blend shapes to create facial expressions and how to make those actions interact with each other so we achieve a natural movement when animating.

Creating blend shapes and targets inside these, we can animate our face’s expressions. One by one I created the expressions as full smile, half smile, frown, half frown, blinking eyes, and open mouth. I built up the expressions using the brush and relax tools. I also added a correction in the mouth for when it is opened to relax the sides of it and make it look more realistic. Since this correction is only needed when the mouth opens, I set the mouth correction target as a driven key and the jaw joint as driver and key framed the animation.

Mouth correction for open mouth movement using ‘set driven key’ tool
Mouth correction for closed mouth movement using ‘set driven key’ tool
Closed eyes target
Frown target
Right eye brow raised target
Left eye brow raised target
Smile target
Right half smile target
Left eye brow raised mixed with left half smile target
Right eye brow raised mixed with right half smile target
Open mouth animation with mouth correction target
Smile target with open mouth animation
Frown and smile targets with open mouth animation
Final expressions
Final expressions
Mouth opening with final frown animation experimentation

Initially, I struggle a bit creating the facial expressions as sometimes I forgot to switch the ‘Edit’ button of the target I was manipulating at the time and I had some errors when animating that affected previous targets. Also, I seemed to have a duplicated head node in the background and some other duplicated ‘set’ nodes that were giving me an error message all the time. After asking Nick for help, he found this duplicated nodes in the ‘Node Editor’, and after delete them, my face model started to work better. I had to delete all the targets and the blend shape I had and start from scratch. I did this numerous times before finding the real error, and it was really time consuming, but at the end of the day, it was a really good practice and I learnt how to solve the error myself for future projects.

Categories
Design For Animation

Week 7: Individual Tutorials

This week, we had individual tutorials with the professor to double check and ask question about our critical report ongoing work process.

After passing last week researching sources for my critical report, I found two documentaries in YouTube about the making of The Nightmare Before Christmas by Tim Burton and Henry Selick (BbaGumpSkrimp, 2012), and the making of The Boxtrolls’ dance scene by LAIKA Studios (LAIKA Studios, 2018), where it was really well explained the techniques and the process followed to make these two stop motion animations: one with traditional stop motion and the second mixing stop motion and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery).

Then I decided to go to the UAL Library and check some books related to stop motion animation and CGI. Digging into the animation section, I found two books: Basics Animation C4: Stop-Motion (Purves, 2010), and Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation (Lord and Sibley, 2015)

In Basics Animation C4: Stop-Motion book (Purves, 2010) it is explained the origins of stop motion animation and its development until today’s techniques. I chose this book for my critical report because it also analysed stop motion elements such as the lack of motion blur in this discipline and how it was solved, the texture, lighting, realism, and detail that can be achieved with the addition of CGI, and as counter argument to this last statement, the unique personality that traditional stop motion offers. 

Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation focuses in the process followed by Aardman to create his iconic clay animation, and also explains various 3D animation techniques, and the history and evolution of stop motion. I focused in the stop motion history and evolution section as it was really well explained and it also offers some insides about The Nightmare Before Christmas.

I also found some books I already own, like Stop Motion: Craft Skills for Model Animation (Shaw, 2017), which explains the different techniques that can be used in stop motion animation from modelling to filming tips.

This research plus a brief chat with the professor already gave me a rough idea of how the structure of my critical report is going to be and it also helped me to set the title: How CGI has enhanced or affected the stop motion production and result, taking as reference The Nightmare before Christmas and The Boxtrolls stop motion animations. The possible structure I out together looks like the following:

  1. Abstract
  2. Intro
    • What is the critical report going to explain?
  3. Main Body
    • Where did stop motion come from and when and why CGI made its appearance in this discipline?
    • Pros and cons from both techniques separately.
    • How can CGI help stop motion to be more cost and time effective?
    • How are stop motion and CGI techniques put together to achieve a better result?
    • How is the mix of these two techniques affecting the quality and aesthetic of the animation, and how nostalgia can influence when taking the decision of using traditional stop motion?
    • Is traditional stop motion becoming obsolete as CGI is developing into more refined techniques to reach and match the quality and aesthetic from traditional stop motion?
    • How are animation studios approaching stop motion animation like LAIKA Studios or Aardman Studios?
  4. Conclusion

References

BbaGumpSkrimp (2012) The Making of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas [online video]. 30 January. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLw-Fo8uhis [Accessed: 12 November 2022].

LAIKA Studios (2018) Making the Dance: A Look Behind the Scenes at The Boxtrolls | LAIKA Studios [online video]. 27 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxexaE4Ge70 [Accessed: 12 November 2022].

Lord, P. and Sibley, B. (2015) Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation. 4th edn. London: Thames & Hudson. 

Purves, B. (2010) Basics Animation C4: Stop-Motion. Switzerland: AVA Publishing SA.

Shaw, S. (2017) Stop Motion: Craft Skills for Model Animation. 3rd edn. Florida: CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group.

Categories
Nuke VFX Fundamentals

Week 7: Match moving – point tracking in Nuke

In this lesson, we learnt how to stabilise a shot using 2D tracks

With a ‘2D Track’ node, we can track the camera movement of a scene frame by frame to match it with another element. Then with a ‘Transform’ node we can change the translation, rotation, and scale of the frame to stabilise it. We can also create several tracking nodes from the main ‘2D Track’ node to automatically stabilize the scene, to match-move the scene, and to remove or add jitter.

Sometimes the scene has too much noise or grain and the 2D tracker is not able to track it properly.  In this case, we can use a ‘Denoise’ node to reduce the image noise or grain, so the camera tracker does not struggle the read the pixel sequence in between frames. We can also use ‘Laplacian’, ‘Median’, or ‘Grade Contrast’ to correct the grain.

As usual, it is important to set a Quality Control (QC) backdrop so we can check that the tracking or any rotoscoping added is properly done.

The assignment of this week is to stabilize the IPhone shot and to add the phone’s screen animation with ‘Rotoscoping’ and ‘Corner Pin’ nodes.

Full comp
Final result

Iphone comp improved: I tried to improve the fingers roto using the green despill set up that the professor sent to us and also improved the screen animation using the ‘curve editor’ to soften the starting and end points of the movement.

Improved comp with green despill
Improved comp

I struggled a bit with the fingers rotoscoping as when the fingers are moving faster, it is hard to roto the motion blur. The green despill set up we got from he professor helped a bit but I still do not fully understand how it works so I am sure that I could improve this comp once I learn how the green despill technique works.

Categories
Maya VFX Fundamentals

Week 7: Facial Animation Set Up, Hierarchies and Rigging

In this session, we reminded how to create blend shapes to animate the facial expressions and how to create a ‘rig’ or ‘skeleton’ to animated the head and the mouth of our model.

Using the ‘Shape Editor’ tool, we can create a blend shape or shape variation in order to set the facial expressions of our model. On each blend shape, we need to add ‘target’ points with which we could create our movements or reshapes, for example the eyes opening and closing, the mouth smile, or the eye brows frown.

In order to animate the head and the mouth opening, we created a ‘rig’ or ‘skeleton’ that will determine the joints of the neck and jaw. After setting the rig, we bound the skin of the model to our rig and painted the skin weights to add the influence parts of our model (the parts the will be more influence by the rig movement).

Lastly, we created the model’s set of teeth and added them to the rig influence.

Closed eyes
Open eyes
Mixed blend shapes – Smile with open eyes
Mixed blend shapes – Smile with closed eyes
Mixed blend shapes – Half smile with open eyes
Rigging
Jaw painted weights
Head painted wights
Neck painted weights
Mouth opening with adjustment of painted weights
Mouth opening with adjustment of painted weights
Mouth opening with adjustment of painted weights
Teeth wireframe
Teeth model
Facial expressions sequence
Mouth opening sequence

I struggled a bit with the painting of the weights to open the mouth of the model. I had to adjust my mesh with the ‘soft brush’ and ‘relax’ tools so it started to respond appropriately.

Categories
Design For Animation

Week 6: Critical Thinking for Research Topics

In this lecture we learnt how to structure a critical report or thesis, what type of language do we use, referencing and citations. We also approached the process to follow when developing the investigation of our topic and we analysed the different methods used in academic writing such as paraphrasing.

When researching information for our critical report, we will need to use trusted sources like peer reviewed texts (books or scholarly articles) or recognised academic material online (like academic journal articles on UAL Library or Google Scholar).

If we need to use any short sentence from these texts, this will need to be referenced. When quoting or paraphrasing we will use the Harvard referencing system to provide a list of citations and references at the end of our critical report or thesis. Citations can be in-text (adding quote marks to the cite) or, if longer than 40 words, separated around 1 cm from text main body and on each side. We will use formal language and we will avoid to use personal language (like ‘I’, ‘my opinion’, ‘I think’, etc).

In order to develop our argument, we can use our own point of view but it needs to have evidence that supports it. This argument will be structure with an introduction, main body, and the conclusion and in longer texts, such as thesis, we could structure the sections adding headings.

The steps to follow to develop an academic argument are:

  1. State the main point and argument to prove (topic) in the introduction.
  2. Analyse important reasons of your argument (evidence that supports the main point or contention).
  3. Identify the possible objections (evidence against main point).
  4. Research and gather evidence that supports main argument.
  5. Structure and connect paragraphs so they follow a logic lead to conclusion.
  6. State clear conclusion putting together statement and supporting points.

When paraphrasing, we need to reword the author’s idea using our own voice. We use paraphrasing to avoid plagiarism, to avoid overuse of quotes, to avoid problematic language, and to shorten long quotes. Summarising is often confused with paraphrasing, however, this is used when we want to state the overall or relevant points of an idea using our own words.

To practise paraphrasing, we were told to paraphrase the following passage in our own words:

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.

In my own words, this text would sound like this:

According to Honess Roe (2013, Animated Documentary), the authenticity of a documentary is connected to what we understand as ‘reality’ and the fact that the images in a documentary are connected to this ‘reality’ since they show events exactly how they happened.

Categories
Nuke VFX Fundamentals

Week 6: Merging and Colour Matching in Nuke

In this lecture, we learnt how to colour correct a sequence, the different colour spaces of a file, and how to import and export it.

We saw how to use ‘Grade, ‘ColourCorrect’, ‘Toe’, and ‘Blackmatch’ nodes to correct the colour of a sequence. These nodes can be used to correct specific parts of a sequence using rotos or to colour grade an alpha. Alphas need to be premultiplied to be added to the background plate, however, some alphas already come premultiplied, so in this case, we will add an ‘Unpremult’ node, then add the ‘Grade’ and/or ‘ColourCorrect’ nodes and then ‘Prebuilt’ node again.

It is also important to take in consideration the codec or colour space and linearization of the file imported as depending of what we are going to use the file for, we will need more information preserved in the file or a smaller size file. The files in a film production can be shared with compositors as LUTS, CDLs or graded footage. We also discovered the new ‘OCIOColorSpace’ node, which is used when the footage provided has already been graded.

And lastly, we saw proper ways to build up a map for grade and colour correct a footage, separating the primary and secondary colours correction, and then correcting the shadows in the last step. This way, if more amendments are requested, we can make the changes quicker.

The assignments of this week were to colour correct and airplane alpha to match its background and to carry on making some colour corrections in the previous mountains video using the roto created last week.

We also were asked to plan our air balloon sequence which we will be building up until the end of the term 1. My main idea for my air balloon video is to add a dark style, with neons and glowing lights, and add mist and thunders around the mountains.

Primary colours correction
Secondary colours correction
Shadows correction and QC
QC – Highlights
QC – Exposure
QC – Shadows
QC – Saturation
Final colour correction
Categories
Maya VFX Fundamentals

Week 6: Facial Detailing, Texturing and Animation Setup in Maya, and Texture Correction in Mudbox

This week, we learnt how to add a UV texture to an organic model, a human face in this case, using both Maya and Mudbox.

In Maya, we imported the skin texture to the project. Then we created a UV map from the model in the ‘UV Editor’, and using the ‘grab’ tool, we started to adjust the UV map to the texture imported. Since the texture imported was designed for models with opened eyes (ours had the eyes closed), we exported it to Mudbox and, using the stamp tool (similar tool to Photoshop stamp), we edited the texture to match the closed eyes of our model. Once finished, we imported the edited texture back to Maya and re-adjusted it. Since the texture was looking completely flat, we added a bump map using the ‘Hypershade’ to add the pores, marks, and facial lines effect to the skin. Finally, we also added a UV map texture to the eyes and, using the ‘Animation editor’ we opened the eyelids of the model so we could see the eyes’ texture.

UV map
Skin texture adjustment
Skin texture with open eyes
Eyes skin area adjusted to closed eyes
Eye animation (open/closed) using blend shapes
Eyes texture
Final texture sequence

I had some issues with the UV map as my model mesh needed to be adjusted in the middle part of the nose (I had some triangulated mesh there so needed to make it squared and follow the rows and columns of squares, to make it more symmetric). Once adjusted, the UV map started to respond better and I could adjust the skin texture more accurately.

Categories
Design For Animation

Week 5: Politics and Persuasion in Entertainment, and Animated Documentary

In this week’s lecture, we have discovered how animation can be political and influence or persuade the audience, and we also analysed if animated documentary can be considered and actual documentary or not.

It is possible to persuade or influence the audience through social media, broadcast news and events, film and animation, and television. There are media platforms that can be used for this such as broadcast, print media, mainstream film & animation, independent film & animation, games, podcast, etc. These influential messages in moving image don’t necessarily have to be political, they can also be subliminal or masked content, propaganda, persuasive commercials, documentaries, personal struggle (observation, experience).

The animated documentaries are used to explain, illustrate, or emphasise a story. It can be recorded or created frame by frame and it is presented as a documentary by producers and/or received as a documentary by the audience, festivals, or critics. This type of animation offers new alternative ways to see the world as it shifts and broadens the limits of what and how we can show reality. Its authenticity depends on how specific are the images that compounds it, and it is linked to notions of realism (how story was told and not an imaginary story). There is some controversy regarding these animated documentaries as some people disagrees that these can be classed as ‘documentaries’ as they have a lack of objectivity.

I found an animated documentary as a good example of this, called Nowhere line: voices from Manus Island by Lukas Schrank.

**Award Winning** CGI 2D/3D Documentary: “Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island” – by Lukas Schrank (TheCGBros, 2016)

This documentary is based in a phone called made to two asylum-seeking men detained in Manus Island, Australia, at the Offshore Processing Centre.

Since no images has been able to be recorded in this case, an animation can illustrate this story and search for an emotional connection with the audience. It doesn’t need to be considered fake information as the images are an interpretation of the facts narrated by these two men in Australia. However, it can be very informative and helpful to put things together in a story and keep the attention of the audience. I think animated documentaries are a very useful tool to draw the audience’s attention to important matters like this one in Manus Island and make them engage and empathise with the story.

References

TheCGBros (2016). **Award Winning** CGI 2D/3D Documentary: “Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island” – by Lukas Schrank (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D8B0o1aRcs [Accessed 8 November 2022]