Nira's VFX Blog
A journey through my master

Month: February 2023

Categories
Collaborative

Week 5: Second Team Meeting – ‘The Departure Lounge’ sequence

In the second meeting of this project, we already started to discuss how the characters, objects, animals, environment, lighting, colour, and interactivity would look like.

Characters

We started the meeting discussing how the ghosts characters would look like. These characters should be faceless figures or they can even have some eyes, mouth, and nose but showing very vaguely.

These models will need to be modelled by 3D modellers to then be rigged and animated by 3D animators, therefore, we will need a clear break down of both processes so the models are created and exported correctly. Also, VR will need to let us know how do they include elements in Unity, and what format do they need for compatibility. Later on, we clarified that they will prefer us to export in FBX but we could also export on OBJ. Also we will need to use simple materials such as colours, reflections, etc, but never use shaders as these are completely ignored by Unity when imported into the programme.

  • Male ghost. This should be the father that is trying to stop the mother to euthanise their child, so he should look threatening initially, but he should also transmit his love and desired to keep his child.
  • Mother ghost. She has chosen to euthanise her child to then kill herself, so she should look like conflicted and desperate.
  • Child ghost. Running from mother? Is he aware of the situation?
  • Main character (POV). One tourist is looking for evidence of life 300 years after the global disaster, (with limited resources as most of technology is lost).
Characters moodboard in Miro

Artefacts

The main character could be receiving hints of what happened in that place with the objects they are finding and the possible interactions they can have with these:

  • Posters/propaganda. Like warning signs, posters (showing health, political, or global warming propaganda), holograms (with instructions or a message)
  • Oxygen bottles. Rusty and empty.
  • Space like suits. To protect from gas/fog and radiation? (thin atmosphere due to global warming lets harmful sun radiation in so can cause skin cancer or really bad sun burns).
  • Futuristic tablet devices. Showing holograms with departure lounge scape procedures, or euthanasia options?
  • Sunk or floating objects. Like books, helmets, bags, clothes, children toys (everyday objects so viewer empathises with story – emotional response).
  • Photographs. Showing ghosts from past memories (happy memories)?
  • CCTV footage. Would this show too much of the story? Would it be too obvious?

Animals/Plants/insects

These remains of nature could show both the extinction of live on Earth and at the same time the new rise of life in the planet with only survivors (it would give hope).

  • Dead fish in water. This could be part of past memory. In the present it would look decomposed.
  • Moss. This could help to minimise number of objects angles such as bricks, broken walls, or other environmental assets.
  • Deer. Showing at the end cell to transmit the new rise of life in the planet (hope).
  • Bugs. Such as cockroaches, which are resilient to extreme conditions.

Environment

The environment would look like an airport terminal like an open space, tall ceilings, and big windows, but this area would be the waiting room for people that has consent to be euthanised. It would also be a half collapsed building with the following features:

  • Broken walls, ceilings, and windows. covered with moss and dirt.
  • Flood. Partly flooded floor with animated ripples and little waves. Can add the floating objects and decomposed fish here.
  • Water drops from ceiling. From condensation as it would be a really warm environment.
  • Fog. As CO2 levels are extreme, this dense fog covers the whole scene giving a monochrome colour feeling.
  • Broken bricks. From collapsed walls and ceilings.
  • Rusty pipelines. Coming out of walls or floor.
  • Door covered on dried blood (stains). It can be one of the cells’ door?
  • Euthanising beds. Inside of cells.
  • Mother and child’s skeletons. In final room, skeletons of mother hugging child.
Environment moodboard in Miro

Lighting/Colour palette

  • Natural light. Coming through broken walls, ceilings, and windows.
  • Flickering lights. Would they be working yet after 300 years?
  • Hologram light.
  • Monochrome palette. With desaturated colours, like a sepia photograph.

Interactions

  • Site specific. So it will trigger glitch memory when reaching certain area.
  • Grabbing objects. Memory will be triggered.

Testing

This week I have also been testing some hologram effects in Maya following this tutorial in YouTube:

Hologram tutorial using MASH tool in Maya (CG Artist Academy, 2020)

The final result I got was this:

Hologram effect test in Maya

Despite the result was good, after speaking with VR, they confirmed to me that these effects cannot be transferred from Maya to Unity, so it would be better to create this effect in Unity directly.

Miro board

We also organised in Miro the tasks to be done, the role of each member of the group, the assets we needed, the timeline with targets of each week, and links to important shared spaces from the group (like Trello, Google Slides, and OneDrive).

Miro board

References


CG Artist Academy (2020). Maya MASH Holographic HUD Procedural Tutorial (online). Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8He2bcS6ao [Accessed 11 February 2023]

Categories
VFX Careers Research

VFX Careers Research – Job 1

Environment Artist

I find really satisfying to create scenes from scratch and step by step turn it into something that can be part of a real world or may look like it is a real place. Therefore, I think the role of Environment Artist would be a good option for me when trying to find a job in the VFX industry.

I consider that a video game company such as Frontier, it would be a good start point for this role as they look for realistic landscapes, but they do not require the grade of detail that the film industry usually demands. However, since I overall enjoy the most photorealistic models of environments following a steampunk, cyberpunk, art nouveau styles, or even futuristic sci-fi space or 80’s neon aesthetics, my main goal is to one day make it to a good VFX company that focuses on the filmmaking of movies with these styles. 

‘Blade Runner 2049’ (Framestore, 2023)
‘The Expanse’ series, city concept art environment (Jim Thacker, 2016)
‘The Expanse’ series, space ship concept art environment (Jim Thacker, 2016)

Researching about the role’s characteristics, I found that the environment artists are required when the actual environment is too difficult or impossible to film in real life (e.g. post-apocalyptic cities, a space environment, a completely different world, etc). The brief starts with a 2D or 3D digital art made by concept artists to be taken as a reference material (it could also be photographs of similar places or sketches). Then the environment artist would create the ‘wireframe’ or mesh of the landscape to then sculpt the different characteristics of the scene to make it as accurate and realistic as possible to what is fitting. Once the model is done, in big companies where these roles are more specialised, this is passed on to the texturing artist to add texture and make the surfaces look realistic, but in smaller companies, environment artists can be doing both modelling and texturing or even lighting the scene. 

What I like from modelling overall is the fact that it can be made from a studio as an internal employee, or as a freelancer. I think that to start in a studio as an internal employee would give me a bit more stability and security at the beginning of my career, as well as being an opportunity to see how more experienced people do the job and take some useful tips from them.

I also found two example videos in YouTube that shows examples of the role of an environment artist in a video game and in a film. 

In the first example below, it shows how for video games the environments are modelled from scratched, textured, and layered later with the objects and characters of the scene. They also must set colliders on each object or component of the environment so the character that is being used by the player interacts with the scene. Despite with the years, the game industry has been becoming more realistic following the development of new and more powerful software, it still does not reach the photorealism of films. It the game design it is needed a balance between immersive design and fluid gameplay, so it is difficult to be perfectly photorealistic.

Video Game Environment Artist Job (InspirationTuts, 2022)

The second example below shows an environment reel made by MPC artists. It is visible that the environments are not 100% modelled and they are a mixture of green/blue screen, modelling, texturing, environment shots from other places (rotoscoped), and colour correction. It is a more difficult task in my opinion but it has a more satisfying result.

MPC Film Environmental Reel (MPC, 2021)

References

Framestore (2023). Blade Runner 2049: Art Department (online). Available at: https://www.framestore.com/work/blade-runner-2049-art-department?language=en [Accessed 10 February 2023]

InspirationTuts (2022). Video Game Environment Artist Job (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opn3mhFjDyI [Accessed 10 February 2023]

MPC (2021). MPC Film Environment Reel (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47GcYCoBHpw [Accessed 10 February 2023]

Thacker, J (2016). Behind the scenes: the concept art of The Expanse (online). Available at: https://magazine.artstation.com/2016/02/scenes-concept-art-expanse/ [Accessed 10 February 2023]

Categories
Advanced & Experimental Advanced Nuke

Week 4: CG Compositing in Nuke

This week, we studied how to do a CG beauty rebuild, using channels or passes of our CG to see its layers to then adjust them separately, relight them, and put them back together.

To start with the CG beauty rebuild, first we need our CG layers (usually the CG has already been exported like this). We can see all these layers separated in the ‘layer contact sheet‘ which contains a view of passes in EXR (e.g. diffuse, specular, reflection, etc). The separation of the EXR in layers or passes (channels) is used for adjusting each pass separately to match the lighting and colour conditions of the background. In order to adjust each pass, we first need a ‘shuffle‘ node set with the specific pass (input layer) we need to then ‘merge (plus)‘ (+) for the lights (diffuse, indirect, specular, and reflections) and ‘merge (multiply)‘ (*) for shadows (AO or ambient occlusion, and shadow). Every pass must be graded separately and then we could add a final ‘grade’ or/and ‘colour correct’ to the entire asset if needed.

There are several types of ‘render passes’ or ‘AOVs’ (Arbitrary Output Variable):

  1. Beauty Rebuilt Passes:
    • Material AOVs. To adjust material attributes (shader).
    • Light Groups. To adjust individual lights of a scene.
  2. Data Passes:
    • Utilities. Combined with tools to get various effects (e.g. motion blur, defocus, etc.).
    • IDs. To create alphas or mattes for different areas of the render.

There are some elements that can be used to double check or improve our CG beauty rebuild quality:

  • Cryptomatte. To see different parts of the scene colours.
  • KeyID. To create a mask of the ID pass.
  • AO pass. It creates a fake shadow, produced by proximity of geometry to other geometry or background.
  • Motion pass. It let us see the blur of the motion clearly.

The process to subtract a pass to edit it is the following:

  1. Unpremult (all)
  2. Link to ‘shuffle’ node (set with pass needed)
  3. ‘Grade’ and make adjustments needed
  4. Add back with ‘merge (plus)’ or ‘merge (multiply)’
  5. ‘Remove (keep)’ node
  6. ‘Permult’

Once we have our colour correction and grading made, we can relight the scene with ‘position pass’ which is the 3D scene but in colour values (red=X, green=Y, blue=Z). In order to have a reference of the 3D space, we could use a ‘position to points’ node set with ‘surface point’ to ‘position’ and ‘surface normal’ to ‘normal’. We then adjust the point size how we want and we will see a 3D representation of colour values. Once the representation is made we can start to add lights with ‘points’ nodes linked to the ‘scene’ node to put them together. This scene is then connected to a ‘relight’ node which puts light, colour, material, and camera together (use alpha, and link ‘normal vector’ to ‘normal’ and ‘point positions’ to ‘point’). To merge over original background, we then ‘shuffle’ and ‘merge’.

As a homework of the week, we need to composite a 3D modelled car in a background of out choice:

Diffuse grade
‘Diffuse’ pass and ‘grade’ node
Specular grade
‘Specular’ pass and ‘grade’ node merged (plus) to main line
Specular indirect grade
‘Specular indirect’ pass and ‘grade’ node merged (plus) to main line
Transmission grade
‘Transmission’ pass and ‘grade’ node merged (plus) to main line
Direct light grade
‘Direct’ pass and ‘grade’ node merged (plus) with ‘indirect’ pass and to another ‘merge (from)’ node that will take features from ‘transmission’ pass too
Indirect light grade
‘Indirect’ pass and ‘grade’ node merged (plus) with ‘direct’ pass and to another ‘merge (from)’ node that will take features from ‘transmission’ pass too
Direct and indirect grade together
‘Merge (from)’ node connecting ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ passes with ‘transmission’ to then be graded together
Shadow grade
Shadow stencil created with a ‘merge (stencil)’ connecting main plate and car matte so it only takes the casted shadow of the CG. Then a mask grade is connected to the background and merged (over) to main line
Overall grading
‘Exposure’ and ‘Grade’ nodes to correct all passes at the same time
Overall colour correction
‘Color correction’ node to correct all passes at the same time
Final car compositing

I feel like this practice was simpler than last week’s homework, however, I still encountered some challenges that I would like to research and study, such as the addition of ‘fake’ lights to the car lights to look like they are turned on, and also to get rid of a specific area glow like the one on the right door of the car which does not really make sense it shows there.

Categories
Collaborative

Week 4: First Team Meeting – ‘Before the Fall’ VR Experience Project

In this week, we finally had our first team meeting to received a detailed brief of the project and to agree which sequence are we going to focus on.

We all met through Teams to start discussing this project.

Teams meeting with lecturers and external studio partner

The project is based in a post global warming VR experience where the user walks through a dystopian London environment.

The viewer starts in a landing craft from where they get out with a protective suit, as the environment is surrounded by a dense mist (it could be due to the increase of CO2 caused by an excess of noxious gases produced by humans over the years). In this part we are thinking to add a projection of what happened reflected in the visor of the viewer’s helmet.

The viewer can interact with objects found in their way that would trigger some flashes of past memories from the same place. It should show vague suggestions of what happened but never give the full information.

It could also be shown the story of a mother that has decided to euthanise her child to then kill herself since they could not get into the spaceship that is taking the most fortunate humans to leave the already destroyed planet Earth. Also, it can be shown a father that is trying to stop the mother to kill the child as he does not agree with this measure. These stories can be triggered when the viewer suddenly finds the ghosts of these persons crossing their way. These flashes of ghostly images should be more like blurry and unfocused images (ghosts from the past) mixed with sounds and effects to add to the experience. The viewer could hear the voice of the ghosts from the moment they get out of the craft until they find their dead bodies inside a building (the voices could guide the viewer through the environment).

The aesthetic of the scenery would be like the Eastern European buildings that are collapsed or unfinished, with some brutalist (naked concrete) look.

The lecturers made a Miro board so we can keep every update there and have a place where we can all share our thoughts and progress.

Moodboard added in Miro by the lecturers

Some aesthetic materials the professors recommended were Alien, were they have some static interference that can be taken as example for the glitches that happen in between memories.

(add example images)

Also Blade Runner 2049 arid and apocalyptic scenography mixed with Solaris & Stalker decade Soviet Union mood can be a notion of how the environment could look like.

Blade Runner 2049 post-apocalyptic environment (Framestore, 2023)
Solaris & Stalker Soviet Union landscape (Godwin, 2017)

An aesthetic that I also found interesting and inspiring is the one found in Alien Covenant. I found the following video showing the CGI and VFX breakdowns of the different sequences created by MPC.

Inspiration from Alien Covenant aesthetic and VFX made by MPC (TheCGBros, 2017)

We also decided to focus only in one section of the story as time wise it is impossible to get the whole experience done. This scene we are going to focus on will be like a beta version of the experience and not a finished piece. After another meeting separately with the MA members only, we decided that the part of the story we want to focus on would be the end scene as it would take place inside a building so it would be easier to model than the whole outside London scenery. Also, we found interesting the interaction of the user with objects found around in the building until they discover the dead bodies in the final room.

References

Framestore (2023). Blade Runner 2049: Art Department (online). Available at: https://www.framestore.com/work/blade-runner-2049-art-department?language=en [Accessed 4 February 2023]

Godwin, K. G. (2017). Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979): Criterion Blu-ray review (online). Available at: https://www.cageyfilms.com/2017/07/andrei-tarkovskys-stalker-1979-criterion-blu-ray-review/ [Accessed 4 February 2023]

TheCGBros (2017). CGI & VFX Breakdowns: “Alien Covenant” – by MPC (Online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv5FyBK_u5Q. [Accessed 4 February 2023]

Categories
Advanced & Experimental Advanced Maya

Week 4: Rube Goldberg machine camera set and render in Maya

In this lecture, we focused on finishing our Rube Goldberg machine texturing, camera set up, and rendering the final outcome.

I continued adding the last textures and finishing touches of the design, such as the finish lines numbers, and some more neon lights in the edges of the planks and of other components. I also modelled the light bulbs’ buttons to switch them on and textured them with glow.

Neon glow added to the rotating and fixed planks
Neon glow added to parts of the domino pieces and rest of features
Number 1 and 2 textures added to domino pieces at finish lines
Buttons modelling and texturing
Final look of finish lines when balls arrive and light bulbs are switched on

Moreover, I decided to animate some arrow lights on the top of the initial ramp to add another point of interest in the animation:

Arrow lights animated on ramp

After I finished with the texturing, I continued to set the camera movement using ‘camera and aim’. This way, I only have to set the ‘translate’ of the camera since the ‘rotation’ is adjusted with the aim. I tried to follow both balls switching priority between one and the other depending on the point of the animation and which one was more important to follow each time. Therefore, I not only framed the scene from the front view but I also made the camera rotate 360 degrees around the machine, showing its back too.

Camera and aim set up with keyframes on ‘translate’

In the last bit of the scene when the second ball has to reach the finish line, I had to reduce the duration of this since it was way too slow. Therefore, I selected all the elements of the scene and in the ‘graph editor’ I scaled down the number of frames required for this last movement. I reduced from 800 to 700 frames. The following video shows a preview of the camera movement I set:

Camera movement preview

When I had my animation fully set, I proceeded to set the render. Thought of adding a chrome textured background with the lighting of the skydome I had previously, however, it turned out to be problematic as there were too many reflections so the render would take too much time to finish. Maya also started to crash every time I tried to preview the render. Therefore, I decided to get rid of this chrome background and leave it with the original workshop background. I just lowered the light a bit so the glows added were more pronounced.

Disregarded dark chrome background
Render settings
Render preview with render settings adjusted

I was playing around with ‘Camera (AA)’, ‘Diffuse’, ‘Specular’, and ‘Transmission’ to get the best result without having to render for too long.

After two days rendering, this is the final result:

Final render

I really enjoyed this project and I feel enthusiastic about 3D modelling and animation. I also feel like I could improve the render, amending some details like adding a dark and reflective background to darken the scene and to make the neon lights more visible. However, due to limited time I was not able to do this (but I definitely will if I find some spare time before the end of term 2).