Final Film: Txcala (with a fancy new end credits board)

Honestly there's so, so much I could say at this point; I've gotten used to noting the major changes to uploads with each blog update, but it seems redundant for this final step. Not everything is 100% at the level I'd like it, there's niggling errors with animation; things I knew about before and things which have become more apparent having seen it a few times in the theatre. But at this stage I'm content with the level it's at, and can leave it to rest for a few months.

Since noone really follows this blog, I've liked using it to vent my thoughts, and I'll say it once, quietly, here, that I'm pretty proud of how everything turned out. I didn't know how much of a challenge it'd be to take a project from absolute zero, and turn it into a film, but I think for a student who three years ago knew fcking squat about 3D, this is a pretty decent effort.


When I joined Dawson, I was told it was "the other"  animation school in Montreal. You know, "the one-for-people-who-applied-for-CVM-but-didn't-get-in, resorted to." Had I been more confident and proficient in French, these blog entries would probably have been for a different course, for a different school, and in a different language.
A bunch of us googled the graduate's films when we were in our first year, and we understood where the Dawson reputation came from; there were definitely a lot of solid, technically proficient films; some really well crafted films, some with fantastic ambition, but the students didn't have time to polish these 4 minute long epics... Those with stunning animation, were stuck compromising, using Goon and Morpheus; while those with custom rigs were still stuck in animatic and block phases. There was nothing that rivalled stuff like Le cinquième jour, Swing, Il était encore une fois... when I'd first had aspirations to go into 3D, those had been the films I'd been told were the benchmark. If I wanted to get a job out of school, that I needed to rival those films. But our teachers here at Dawson would say that Dawson's programme ran circles around CVM in every aspect. I didn't see it, but I wanted to. I was really inspired by Valerie Lim, and the films done by Snowmen in 2013. Ian and Sam particularly, who'd really hit a new level of finish with their films. They had a look, an atmosphere; they were immersive. When I watched Sam's I just remember thinking "Holy shit, how is this a student film".

When I started work on my film, I kinda wanted to be that bar for future students; I wanted to be the David, the Karl, the Roxanne, the Val, or the Sam of the year. Someone who would make future students think "Holy shit, well if that was a student film, if they did it, there's nothing stopping me from doing it better." I was ambitious, I wanted to be part of that push that actually made this programme the uncontested best-of-Montreal. I think we can compete on an animation level, definitely. We've got some fantastic production teachers here at Dawson, but I think it's gonna take a few more generations before we have films that  really don't just look like student films. I have this vain desire to be remembered by future generation, so I don't want my stuff to be forgotten. If however in 3-4 years, Txcala just looks like an average Dawson student film, I'll be really happy for the programme. 

Txcala for me was a project that I went into kinda appreciating the challenges it would present. Omar's feedback on my animation had ignited something within me, and I knew that I would need to so something heavy animation if I wanted to go in that direction. But I didn't like the idea of using premade rigs for this film. I wasn't in a position financially to go for something like iAnimate who provided you with the pretty ones, and I didn't want to compromise, getting something cheap but kinda ugly, working on a project that I'd stop caring about because I knew that it wasn't really mine..

So I built my stuff from the ground up. I'd seen films with shitty rigs kinda fall flat in the past, but I wasn't a very proficient rigger, nor a modeller. So I did what I think any student in my position should do, take every available rig on the internet, and study the crap out of their topology. The terms and services of the rigs tell you not to, but I deconstructed every rig I could to find out why Bonnie's hands look like shit in every reel, to learn the differences between autorigging setups; A making-of Frozen s just come out? There's 3 frames where you can see Elsa's topology? I screencapped that shit and traced over them while I sculpted.
Charlene's model is this heinous mix and match of things I learned by breaking down LWS's Claire, about 4 other generic "female" rigs from online, some fanmade Elsa busts, and some Ahsoka Tano. I overlaid everything on a Digimon fan character that I made in 2009, I used autorigging softwares to lighten my load, but tried to understand why things were rigged the way they were. TheSetupMachine, which is used, got me about 60% of the way there, and then I went back and deleted stuff, and replaced with features that I needed. I added face, added dynamics, things that I thought would make my animation prettier and cut back one time hand animating a lot of secondary. 
I decided to pull inspiration for a story from something like Jurassic Park, because the Monster-in-the-Room genre spoke to me.  Little kids would hate my film, the same way I hated the scene in JP where the T-Rex attacks the LandRovers when I saw it as a 6 year old.. but that's my favourite film these days, so even if my story was nothing-nothing, it played on an emotion that would ensure it had some degree of success.

I modelled what I could for Character modelling, and used Charles' classes as an opportunity to start testing rigging setups. By the end of Semester 4 I'd retopollogised and re-rigged about 4 times. Over Summer I juggled fulltime work, Summer school, and remoddelling, rerigging, and working on an animatic.
By the time I hit school in Semester 5, it was time to really start working. 
I could probably count on my hands, the number of times I left school before 10pm in the final two semesters. There were days I was so tired I wanted to cry. There was one day at about 4am, after I'd been working continuously for 2 days trying to resolve one of my worst rigging issues, when everything broke so utterly and completely, that I ragequit and drew up a plan to go live in the woods as a lumberjack. I was discouraged because I knew that if I'd just gone for something simpler, that I wouldn't have gotten myself stuck with every rigging issue known to man. It was immensely satisfying to fix these arbitrary, abstract problem solving puzzles, but it was a mental strain the likes of which I've never faced before. I started talking aloud to my computer (I named her rustyBucketBay), trying to work through the issues. She didn't talk back, but it helped, and I pushed though, and broke through that barrier. Altogether I had about 3 moments like that over the past year, where I just felt like things were so dark, how would I ever be able to make it through to the end, but the only way forward, was forward. and I wasn't prepared to compromise.

Once I got to animating, things became easier. My first animation tests showed me that my 3 months of rigging was still awful, and I lost a chunk of my Christmas break working on film and doing French courses. By January 20th I think i'd finally solved the rigging nightmares, and felt confident going into semester 6 because it was animation! That's what I was gunning for so it should have been easy. Despite all the complications I had, I managed to stay ahead of the curve and got stuck into layout sooner than most people, but there was stuff I'd never attempted. Quadrupeds, ones with mayaHair simulation, held together by nConstraints and nCloth... that shit is nightmare fuel, not that I slept enough to have nightmares, mind <3

I had issues translating my animatic from 2D to 3D; but I had good advice to follow, and asked for help when I couldn't go forward alone. Maintaining a social presence in the class helped. I think if I had worked in a vacuum, left when class finished and skipped every second Tuesday, I'd have fared a lot worse. Forcing myself to make deadlines, to ALWAYS hand stuff in for critique, it made me better. Even when I knew what I was submitting was shit, when I already knew what wasn't finished and what needed improvement.. taking critique on the chin and getting torn apart, made my film better. 

I don't think enough people in the class really did that. 

But I cared, I was invested in this because we're privileged to learn what we're learning and I feel that the work ethic you develop working on something like this says a lot about you. People see who cares, who stays, who puts in 60% effort and who goes for 100%. We're told so, so many times that this is the one time in your life you get to make something that's totally your own, and you have an entire year to invest in it. 

Maybe my story is throwaway, my characters are silly, but I loved them and I cared about what they represented enough to invest every second of this last year towards them. I even wrote this obnoxiously long final blog post, which isn't worth any marks! because I felt like I kinda owed it to myself to really wrap things up properly. 

So that's kinda it; I've got more film stuff floating around, and I'll post that sometime too; but this is kinda it for the "keep track of progress" stuff. This year i've really come to appreciate the importance of pursuing something you're passionate about, and consciously working towards something. I've learned a lot about ambition and motivation and sacrifice from myself, and  I don't really know where I'm going with this but I feel that if I don't end on some psudo-Braveheart speech, then three years of invested energy will just fade into a weak sign off, and everyone reading this (all 2 people) will be let down. So do what you love, do what you're good at. Don't squander your opportunities, and make the most of the journey. The more difficult it is for you, the more you'll appreciate the destination.

I've never gone so long without making some stupid comedic remark in a blog post. 

Tomorrow I'll start sharing this film around; but because I love you little blog, I'm putting it here first <3

Ka kite anō

Maybe the most satisfying thing I've done in 6 months, locking in the last green square.

yes most of my scenes are named after Miley Cyrus songs. Come@me

Finished!

No preview here though. 

Screening on the 21st-22nd of May~

The first of May. It was like... March break 20 minutes ago, then Easter, now it's one week to go. 

Sound design implemented, requiring clean-up.

animation, needs clean-up

rendering slowly

omg.

bb don't hurt me

Polish

"POLISH" with emphasis on the sarcasm in the quotation marks.

Not full polish, but doing what I can; trying to juggle getting things into render stage while and polishing others simultaneously.

Without renderfarm available, it's kinda necessary at the moment to get as much stuff rendered on the available computers before it becomes a mad rush at the end. Working hard, but not as hard as the machines who are up 3 days straight churning out AO passes! lel~

Soyeah, scene#1 is at about 70% completion, still some work to do with shots #2 (just realized wrong playblast is there omfg) & #6; but it's just tweaking at this point. I can't afford to invest much more in there.

Scene#2 is a bit trickier; Brent's suggested a med-level change which would involve the creature crashing around after her, and shown to sorta KO itself to give the girl a bit more of a head start.  It'd justify why she has time to gaze up at least. It seemed like a good idea this time last week, but at the rate that time is flying by... not so sure. Smoothed out some more of the movements; two of the shots are ready for render, set one of them to light this afternoon, but the dynamics have spent the last six hours caching, which is a bit of a joke. 

Scene #3 is coming along; I'm pretty happy with where the movement of the bat is at the moment, so it'll be about bringing Charlene up to match it; and then fix all the kinks. I have at least 400,000 cases of polycollisions and shit breaking on every frame, so it'll be one of those scenes (there you turn motion blur & lens flare on to level 6, and relax with your homies while no one understands wtf is going on) 

The fall down the cliff needs some love. Somehow I just never want to work on this scene.

The final shot I've worked and worked on, but haven't seemed to make all that much progress. I think at this stage I just need to bite the bullet; let the character rig reference back into the scene, and just work with what I've got. Whoever's marking this milestone should probably ignore that the constraints aren't toggled on there.. but reimporting the character rig reference, caching the cloth, and setting up the clouds for that scene was taking too long, so you're stuck with an old stitched together playblast. yeah, probably better to skip ahead to the part in two weeks where I get to render out some more stuff;; ty merci

All this and homework for Don's sinister group project and French class! Where will I find the time~~~

Rough

Been a relatively unproductive week; just feeling so worn down, so production has halted in the past few days. Been busy with other commitments too, so this rough isn't where I'd like it to be at the moment. But, what can you do..?

A few budges here and there with timing, as things progress forward. Nothing too drastic but I had to slow down some of the falling, and hold on some of the stiller shots; it'll probably change around a bit more when I throw lights in too.

Feeling a bit unnerved by how free everything is, after having every single piece of animation we've done scrutinised at every stage in previous assignments, the silence now is just eerie. There's a few shots, -earlier ones with the lookout&as the bats flyby- which I've sorta brought to polish level? but I dunno if they really feel finished. There's other shots like the chase in the cave which feel messy, the timing in the block sucked, but noone's said anything so I've taken it into rough. I dunno, I'm pretty worn down and so I'm just going through the motions. It's not sitting right with me, but I kinda don't have the energy to chase, and it seems a bit late now to do anything but just get this finished, even if it sucks.

Anyways, it's Easter now. In three days I'll crawl out of this cave and look at everything again. But for now I'm dead to the world, I just need soup and to shut my aching eyes~~.
:)

Poster for my film~
shamelessly inspired by one of the Jurassic Park poster concepts; which I guess is fitting because that franchise is like 99% the reason I like film & monsters.

Mashup of Elementacular clouds, mentalRay lights and a few correction layers in AE

The giant void where my knowledge of Lights and Rendering in Maya should be is showing. I know how to do this in Max, but every light in Maya just makes stuff look/feel like plastic :/. The bats are pretty grainy too; only once I start Batch Rendering. 

Another issue too..  clouds require that I render them in Viewport2.0, and the lights need to be blown up to like... 200-300 intensity for it to register. This causes every other object in the scene turns into a white mess. When I have things which need to interact with clouds (Scenes with the temple/cliff wall), I dunno how I can isolate just the clouds, because the light linker doesn't wake up for view port stuff like 2.0. Maybe setting everything else to some surface shader and key them out in post? I dunno what the best workflow for this is. 

hmmmm oh well. another 4am on Sunday post, because there's still work to be done~

Elementacular test~

Test for Elementacular clouds in a proper scene
Some neat features in this plugin, which allows for subtle wisping, so that the clouds aren't just purely static. Some jittering in against stuff like the temple.. Partially down on that model being decimated to death to pull in a low poly model. Maybe in retrospect I should've kept it higher+quads or seomthing and just endured a slower render time. Ohwell, maybe when I stack stuff in post that strobing will be easy to fix. 

animation + lighting still in early phase


All in all though, happy with this test.
Wizard god Matt helped me get Elementacular working at school now too, leJoy.

Elementacular post #2. Wasn't sure about it at first, but I think this plug in was a kinda decent investment. Sure, I coulda done it all in post.. matte painting. But the 3 generated clouds mean I get to do stuff in 3D. Scene#4 becomes $$$.

Plus, they billow and can be animated. So wispy moving clouds will make shots a bit more alive.

"Block"

Coming along.

Was feeling pretty crappy coming off layout, but have had a few weeks to work on it and I'm feeling better about where things are going. There are scenes which are still only partially blocked, but others which are pretty far into rough. All in all though, it's feeling a lot tighter than two weeks ago when I threw the layout up here.

Tightened up all the stuff in the first scene. I've got a niggling issue with the timing of the dragon rushing her and kicking her off the cliff the first time, it may be a timing issue. Needs a hold somewhere? I dunno.

Everything in the cave is a lot looser; I have references for all the shots, but with the dragon it's so, so. The camera is also an issue I need to fix as I begin to refine this stuff, because as it is now, it's still pretty sloppy. 

The break onto the cliff is my scene I'm working with with Brent, but I've gone ahead and blocked it anyway. Camera needs to be reworked in the 2nd shot there, and I think I need to look at redoing the timing for it's bucking because it freezes.  It works in the references I have, but I think I want to favour it's time on the ground, before it throws it's neck back.

Also, my constraints fucked up and I only have one character there and it's bucking off nothing. thank god this shot's not being evaluated, right?

The final shot where they break through the clouds hasn't been touched in a while. I need to do a bit of work there, but it communicates what I want as is..

I really wanted to use a plug in for maya called Elementacular. I posted about it earlier this week I think; It'd be really handy in that final show with the whirly camera, because comping that in 3D with clouds all over the show will be a bit of a bitch. Unfortunately, school computer's don't like the plug in and it insta-crashes Maya if a scene has any cloud-related paraphernalia, so we'll see.

In better shape. Gotta keep on trucking. 

A classmate showed me a really neat Maya plugin, Elementacular, for simulating cloud based off geometry. I've been keen on it for a while, though I've been kinda put off by the $175 price tag in case it doesn't live up to the hype. I've seen a fair bit of criticism for it, because while their videos show it being played in seamless realtime with multiple lights and huge heavy cloud formations, in reality it's quite slow and clunky, 

Soyeah, a demo's been made available, and it's really nifty what you can do with a few spheres and point lights. Here's some of my trials~

The home PC's a bit sluggish for this GPU intensive stuff, so I'll need to check it out at school and see if I can operate it on the machines there~ If it works and can go onto the renderfarm, I'll be set! If not, I shall cry for stumbling upon another production hurdle~~

EDIT: school computers just crash when I even try to load a scene with the cloud simulations in them. Graphics card's compatible, so it's something to do with the GPU? I don't have the tech savy or the time to deal with this much ridiculousness..

Ohwell, perhaps best I decided to hold off before buying it? Maybe I'll just try rendering the clouds from home and compiling in AE.
I'll have a chat next week, see if I can get this working but ugghhhhhhhhhhhh why does this have to be complicated. 

"layout"

Obligatory 250 words::

Was looking through my files to find which layout was the one I was going to post. In the past 5 days I've recompiled 5 totally different versions with all sorts of changes in an attempt to find one that works and appeases the most people. Progress is soso. Most of the shots I'm happy with; the cameras are sloppy, but they're progress and at least I can feel that they're getting somewhere; the final showdown scene has been a steaming pile since August and continues to be so. Today's version is a chaotic wrestling match out of the cave that doesn't make much sense but it sets the board up for the tumble off the cliff; so it's not the perfect solution, but it's a compromise that I think will work with the right cameras.
One of the key critiques I've received is that cameras are a bit too sludgy, floating around and snapping in unrealistic ways. Something that I'll need to pay attention to is ensuring that the camera moves feel more realistic, and less 3D. In order for the animation to read convincingly, I need to "shoot the film as if I were shooting it in real life". Basically, I need to cut back on the big orbiting shots that I fall back on for any/every action scene.
Likely will spend this week accumulating more feedback, tightening up these shots and getting a version ready to be shipped for music;;;;

October

Revised Layout 22/02/2015

working on figuring out this ending. After 8 months of trial and error it's still seeing changes.  I'll never win

Animatic~

Final Animatic. Still a few meh moments. The intro doesn't read well, though that should hopefully come once stuff's rendered. I need to rework the sequence of shots around the map. The cave scene scares me because of the violent camera moves and how much poly collision I know I'm going to have, though the animation will be fun~
The ending (sequence on the ledge) is in its eighth or ninth iteration, and it still feels sloppy.

Basically, everything in this that I did right, I did it right my first try, while everything else has been a mess.