For this week I continued on the doll part of the project as well as the toys. I finished the spinning top and kendama toy that will be used for the simulation with texturing done too using Substance Painter.

I also decided to animate the blood splatter of the doll. To begin with, I wanted to learn to use something like RealFlow or Houdini to fully simulate this effect of blood spraying onto the model. However, after speaking with a tutor about this, as the blood splatter effect is so fast that it can be done over the course of 5 frames, spending a long time learning Houdini just for a very short part of the animation seemed like a bad allocation of time. Instead I eventually decided instead to make it in substance with an animated shader, initially painting the blood on the model and saving copies of texture 5 times with less blood each time. This gave me 5 different texture sets that I could order as image sequences in Maya and as I played across the frames I could switch textures each frame. Maya had some issues with this however, so I instead had to manually create 5 texture sets, then apply the first, render, then the second and render a frame, then the third and render a frame and so forth. This lead to the effect of blood splattering on the model, even though it is just a quick texture switch.

I then saved 5 different versions with progressively less and less blood, leaving me with 5 materials for 5 frames of blood quickly splattering up the model. I first tried to set this up in Arnold with image sequencing.

This looked ok, but did not look right; I wanted the blood to look less like an overlayed dull texture and more as if a shiny liquid had stuck to the model. I rendered using a different material and lighting setup with this result.

During this time I also started thinking about how I would do the scene where the tree is on fire. I looked around for several different methods of creating fire in different software, such as in Blender, Houdini, C4D, Maya (BiFrost and fluid systems). I initially wanted to use Blender and rendered out a test sample on a sphere shown below.

However when I imported the tree model that I wanted to add fire too, when I recreated the steps I used to make the spherical fire, it looked strange and there was too much fire being emitted from the shape making it look odd, as if the tree was exploding with fire. Shown below is the nodes I used in Blender to create the fire, as well as a rendered shot of the fire.

Later, I realised this was because you need to add a density map onto where you want the fire to be emitted from, with a black and white map showing areas you do and do not want fire to come from. This was useful when I used Maya’s fluid system to create the fire, creating a fluid box around the tree and changing parameters until the fire and smoke looked how I wanted it to.

Incandescence was a useful tool in helping the fire and smoke to look the way I wanted it to. As the emitter is responsible for both emitting the fire as well as the smoke, creating a black bit at the end made the edges of the fire look like they were emitting black smoke. Realistic fire has lots of different colours in it so this really helped to add to the realism.

Creating a density map allowed for me to only emit fire and smoke from certain areas of the tree, making the fire look far more realistic. Only having certain chunks of alpha on the tree emit fire made the fire look a lot less uniform.

I cached this simulation, but the render times were still very high due to the processing required.

I further developed the Torii gate scene this week too, starting with basic lighting and adding a few more Quixel assets to the scene.

We also updated our storyboard for this week and assigned tasks to complete. Our sound design students wanted a previsualisation for this week after we met with them online, so I roughly created one using playblasts and some filler images for renders that were not created yet.

For this week I setup my tree scene in Maya and thought about which angles I wanted to show the tree growth from. I decided overall that I wanted to have initially several cameras showing the trunk, larger branches and smaller branches growing, followed by an overall shot of the tree, surrounded by animated grass. I experimented with several different angles to see what might look good in terms of showing the growth, as well as different focal lengths. I tested basic lighting on this scene.

I decided to use Unreal Engine to simulate the grass movement as I had found an online tutorial that allowed you to create animated grass. As Unreal would be a better renderer for this task than Arnold, but still wanting to use Arnold for the other elements of the tree, I decided that I should composite the grass and tree together from separate renders, and try and blend the two with lighting. I didn’t end up using this Unreal scene as I thought it would take too much time and with not much experience in Unreal it would not be a quick process. To make this grass I created a plane and animated a texture on top of it with an opacity map, so that the texture would sway and animate it’s real life position while also not just being visible planes due to the opacity map. Duplicating these planes makes the effect look like the grass is very dense and sways in the wind.

During this week I also put my gate into a scene and began to think about building the scene around it. I used several models from Quixel Megascans to fill out the scene, such as stairs, walls, and two pillars. These objects helped to make the scene feel more realistic.

This week we met with our sound design collaborators as well as our art collaborator for the mask. We gave the sound design students some idea of what kind of project we were creating, and made sure that they had a good grasp of what it was that we were going for. We suggested some ideas for music that we might potentially want or certain themes (such as Japanese styled instruments).

During the talks with our art collaborator (Kame) we also discussed what kind of mask we would like to have in the scene and how we wanted it to be painted. Due to the process of creating the mask this lead to some limitations but we were able to get a decent idea of what we could have by the time it came to scanning objects. We presented an image board for inspiration on the masks.

Summary of your work 

Our project is a TV opening sequence in the style of Daredevil, Westworld, Game of Thrones openings.

The purpose of it is to give a brief introduction to a theoretical TV series based on a man from a historical Japanese village in medieval times. The overall story of the opening will be a precursor to the overarching story of the TV series – explaining how the main character became how he is.

The key features of the project will mostly be using 3D models and lighting to tell a story, with minor animation using dynamic particle systems. Instead of the traditional way of telling a story, this will use objects to symbolize different parts of the story – for example instead of showing a character dying showing a grave with flowers on it.

The role assignments are that Antonio and I will both be doing some modelling and texture work, he will do more in the lighting area and I will do more in the environmental and animation areas. Other students in our group will work with us to help get more design ideas, and potentially some kind of music/sound design student will be able to help us with that area.

What does the work aim to achieve? 

The concept is novel in that it requires the audience to do some work in interpreting what is happening and what the overall story is. Although some effort on our part will be made to make sure that there is a cohesive understandable story, the audience will need to make some judgements on what is happening.

The narrative is driven by mostly the order of objects being shown – using rapidly changing scenes at times to drive home the connections between the objects/scenes – for example showing a tree growing to represent a family growing, but adding a scene that represents a baby (such as an object like a crib, or a baby toy) to help the audience understand that the tree is not just representative of a tree. After establishing this connection different things can be done with the tree such as having it destroyed, which can use the audiences previous understanding to allow them to understand this destruction is also representative of the destruction of the main character’s family.

The developmental process began with thinking of different areas of 3D that we had not yet explored and were interesting in attempting. As we both admired the TV openings of the shows I mentioned in the beginning, trying to go for a work inspired by these would be an interesting challenge, and mostly focus on areas we were not greatly confident in such as in particle systems and narrative through symbolism. Considering options such as what different objects can mean, especially when connected together was interesting and exercises such as saying a word and writing down what instantly comes to mind was useful to help think about what we subconsciously associate objects with.

Practical scope of the project requires a fairly generalised knowledge of different areas of 3D. We will be using modelling, texturing, lighting, rendering, compositing, dynamic systems and animation skills to complete the project.

Target users/audience

The target audience for this project will mostly be adults or more mature audiences as it deals with adult themes unsuitable for children such as violence.

Aspects of the work that are affected by this are that we decided to make the project look realistic – without much in terms of stylised models/animation. Putting in mind that children will not be the audience for this project also allows for more freedom in the limits of what can be shown.

We chose this audience and demographic because the shows that we drew inspiration are also mostly for this demographic. As we are attempting to make media that is similar to these shows we are inspired by whilst still being different enough to make it it’s own thing, we thought that choosing the same audience would make sense, as people who enjoyed that which inspired us will hopefully also enjoying a similar piece of media.

Technical

Techniques used to achieve our goal are mostly 3D CGI software, including Houdini, Maya, SpeedTree, Substance Painter, Arnold, etc.

Plans and timelines

We are aiming to finish our project by the deadline.

Testing aspects of our progress as we progress included making test renders/videos of effect. For example, for the tree animation I made previewing it inside SpeedTree before I export it to Maya, or previewing fluid dynamics inside Houdini before exporting.

I also began working on the gate section of my animation on this week, modelling and texturing a Torii gate. I wasn’t entirely sure how I would use it at this point, but I thought that it would be a good way of symbolically showing the audience what is happening in the story.

I also worked on my SpeedTree tree, building the tree from scratch instead of using presets. This process involves a step process using a node system to develop the tree. It starts with drawing out a trunk using points to begin with a lot of control. Further branches can then be add parented to the level above, getting smaller and smaller as well as more numerous. Eventually, you can also add roots as well as decorations such as leaves.

You can also create materials in this software for the tree bark and the flowers. There is a lot of customisation options available to further change your tree, including parameters to change how the bark looks, how much the tree twists, how much height the tree extrudes, etc. Further changes such as having the tree animate as well as adding forces to the tree such as wind can also be applied to animate your tree. I applied these and exported as an alembic cache.