Final Movie!

17/2/2012 - 29/2/2012

For the first week of the studio  project, Ive been assisting with the editing of the footage as well as the modelling of the stairs. There were many issues with the model of the stairs. This includes several mesh problems becasue I had modelled the steps individually. Thus when I duplicate and merge them together, many problems occur. Its was necessary to model the stairs perfectly because , samson was going to fracture it in houdini. Therefore i ended up modelling the stairs 7 times.  There were several other issues too, like when the model was imported into mudbox, the faces were intersecting with each other, hence I had them triangulated.


Further Into the studio project, the stairs was passed to samson for the golem forming animation. Soon after, I had the animated stairs exported into fbs and textured. There were may issues with the texturing too. First for example, The UVs of the stairs kept moving, even after 5 whole days of textuing it. One of the other issues includes the fact that the stairs cannot be auto-mapped. Even still, There are some parts of the mesh where the UVs are continue to move. The third other problem faced is that the animation of the stairs was not correct. There was a major frame skip in the middle of the animation even though I tested it many times and there were parts where the stairs ahd no shadow at all.

After all the texturing is done, I had the stairs lit in mayausing image based lighting and a directional light for the shadows. I found out that there were many issues with the lighting, for example the overall color did not match the actual one, hence I had the textures of the stairs desaturated and decrease the diffuse for several other textures, to match the color of the acctual stairs.

In addition, I contributed a lot in shot 1 where the stairs break apart and pieces of it form together. I had the scene, matchmoved with about 40+ trackers. Even still, the shot was not matchmoved perfectly and the objects were sliding. But after I tracked several other objects, I maanged to get it done. Soon after, I had the stairs fit the perspective of the scene. there were also many issues with it, firstly , there were many distortions and the stairs were constantly moving out of perspective after a few seconds. Hence I had it animated to fit the scene,

Finally after adding the CG, texturing and lighting, I rendered all the passes and composited them in nuke. I found the the lighting was off after turing off the shadows for the beauty pass. thus I had it color-corrected
there were a total of 5 passes that I composited in. these includes the beauty, diffuse color, shadows matte and several other. I also had a color pass for the wood textures because I realize that the color of the wood was off.

Studio Project!!

Week 1

I was unable to blog for the past few weeks due to the lack of time. Hence I shall try my best to fill this post with as much details as possible. We started off the first day by presenting our idea to MR Ron. Our idea was almost immediately approved and we started planning out the shots, storyboards and looking for reference images. Initially we were thinking of having the Golem form out of pieces from the field but we realised that it would be very tedious to do as well. As we searched for reference images for Golems we also realised that the materials of the Golem should reflect those found in its surroundings so we took some pictures to use as textures on location.

On the second day we finalised the story board and I proceeded to make a Leica reel.

On the third day we tried doing some test shots to plan out marker placement and camera angles. However, we ended up having a slow SD card and the only way we could record video was to shoot at 640x480 in a 4:3 ratio. we were thus unable to perfectly plan out the shot angles on this day due to the wrong aspect ratio. At the end of the day we tried to match-move the footage but the quality was too low and the markers were being blurred out way too much and we had a very difficult time getting any working track.

On the 4th day we tried to shoot the final footage but we were unable to finish our shoot due to bad weather. The light angle and shadows were changing rapidly between shots as well and in the end we had an unfruitful day. We also managed to capture our Mocap footage today thanks to Mr Leong and his his help in setting up the shot and software. 

Finally on Friday of the first week we shot the actual footage and I took over as cameraman on this day. I started trying to Match-move the second main shot we were focusing on but Match mover was having a lot of trouble solving a nodal pan despite having 32 tracking markers. Mr Ron came down and suggested using NukeX to Match-Move but all of us had trouble exporting the tracking data to Maya and we did not manage to figure out how to do so.

Meanwhile the Golem was slowly taking shape though there were a few conflicts on whether to use a high poly, procedurally displaced mesh from from Houdini or to use Mudbox and sculpt in the fine details on a low poly base mesh. We ended up using the former option as Samson found a way to have the geometry displace only at render time and managed to reduce the load of the scene.

Week 2

On Monday, we were still trying our luck with match mover to try and get the Match-Moving done. We managed to solve the camera for the third cg shot we were focusing on but the other 2 were having lots of problems as they were nodal pans. I helped out to texture a couple of pieces of the Golem after Danial taught me the basics of Mudbox. It was a fun experience and I see myself using it more often now after having witnessed its power in texturing. I havent explored the aspects of sculpting yet but I intend to do so in the near future. We were unable to solve the shots at the end of the day and we had no choice but to reshoot again. This time I suggested using red and white tape instead of the regular printed trackers we were using as the contrast was too low and when it was too far in the distance the quality was too low for tracking.

On Tuesday, we reshot the two main CG shots again and we used red and white tape in place of the trackers this time around. I started match-moving my shot and immediately there was a big difference in the ease of tracking. I still had to manually track every 4-5 frames for certain tracks but other tracks were going much more smoothly.

For the rest of the week we started doing the layouts for the shots and started integrating the cg into the shots. While waiting for Samson's simulations, I started Rotoscoping some of the shots so that we would have less things to worry about later. The 3rd match move shot in particular was especially tough Roto-ing Afiq's hair as he was running was very tedious. I ended up doing a rough Roto as I had other tasks to attend to as well.

Week3

We started assigning materials and lighting and started to prepare for rendering. I helped to assign the materials and bump channels for the golem for the 3^rd match move shot. The mesh of the golem also seeps into the ground and I fixed this by grouping the mesh and animating it off the floor on a separate animation layer. I also fixed the same problem for some of the other shots. Finally on Wednesday night I managed to light and add materials for the second match move shot and rendered it. However the following day I found that the render went wrong because the pixel aspect changed by itself due to some Maya bug. I tried locking the attributes and this created a whole new problem where I couldnt view my render settings anymore. After lot of deleting preferences and trying to reopen the scene, I tried to import the scene instead and this time I managed to get it to work and after having made some of the passes again I started rendering only to realise after 40 frames of rendering that the whole animation was no longer playing due to some cache problem. I then reimported it again and luckily everything worked out fine this time. However I was left with very little time to composite at this point as it was in the wee early hours of friday morning. I managed to pull through somehow in the end fortunately.


This was by far the most stressful project I have done and there was always constant pressure piled on my shoulders. Though still with quite a few problems, Im glad we managed to pull through somehow and we could have worked better if we found ways to improve the compatibility between maya and houdini and had more time to tweak the simulations and other aspects of this project.

Compositing

Past two days filled with compositing work, since I have nothing more to do after my simulation is out of Houdini. The shot of the golem running towards the camera is pretty much done (shot 17), and I also finished up on 3 other minor shots, the one of the rock shaking, the rock hitting the actor and the shot of the golem landing.

For shot 17, I used the basic passes like beauty, diffuse, shadow, ambient occlusion, etc, for compositing. There were some problems with the shadows, namely, the shadows falling on the ground were of a slightly different "intensity" than those falling on the stairs. Colour correction was done to the stairs to have them look similar to the actual ones. In order to create a depth of field look without a depth pass, I faked it by keyframing the defocus node.

Some problems faced were that the ambient occlusion was not affected by the detail in the bump channel of the shaders. Hence, the ambient occlusion pass was not able to bring out the detail in the models, so it had to be compensate for with colour correction and motion blur. The motion blur was also used to cover up some discrepancies in the rotoscope.

We also decided to go for a more desaturated and darker look so the environment would not distract the audience from the main subject.

Golem Forming (Houdini)

 Ground fracturing

 Stairs fracturing

And lastly, my awesome Node graph!

Overall Contribution to the Group

For the past few days, I didn't blog due to the lack of free time to do it. So today, I will post everything that I've contributed to the group for the past 2 weeks(starting 2nd week of sp). My job was to do texturing for the golem and also the stairs for the first few day. Using mudbox i find a few textures on the net.

First Week

The top textures is one of the base rocks I used to texture it and also add a few moss and dirt to it to make aged a bit. The Final touch up is that i use bump map to give th last detail to the rock to make it look real. Here is the screenshot of of rock I painted in mudbox. We have a total of 66 rocks to texture individually.

Second Week
After painting the rock in mudbox i start to transport all the uv texture into maya and Afiq start rigging the golem and attached it with the mocap. For 3 days i did the texture for the golem and then when im done with it, I did the perspective right after I match move the 3rd tracking shot.

As for the last Tracking shot, I first import the golem which is rigged and mocap into the scene. Then I transport the stairs and crater to the cg scene as well. From there i textured the stairs and also the crater using the texture I've posted earlier. Before I actually textured the stairs, I went to the stadium to take a few shots of the stair's texture.

 

Third Week

After texturing the stairs, I start texturing the crater that i was given from samson. Then I start to do the lighting for that shot and also uses ibl for the lighting. For the tracking shot, I created a directional light as the key light and cast shadow. And a few other directional light as a bounce light to light up the golem. After tweaking it for a few days, finally I start doing render passes for that shot and pass it to Praveen for him to start composite it inside nuke.

In total we have 7 cg shot that need to be done and 3 of it was the tracking shot. Im in-charge of doing the lighting for the last tracking shot and 2 other cg shot and also its render passes.

Day Twelve

Problems problems. New problem today. The UVs of the exported simulation kept moving  about, resulting in the textures swimming around. After trying all manner of weird things trying to solve it, like deleting all the attributes, exporting the inside and outside groups separately, for the whole afternoon, I finally found the solution! It was to place a UVtexture node just after the voronoi fracture, before it went into DOPs. I suddenly thought of this solution when I realised the UVs only moved when the objects were moving around in the simulation. Hence it must have been caused by DOPs. AND it worked! FINALLY! Hopefully there won't be anymore problems tomorrow and we'll still be able to make the deadline. :D

Day11

Finally got the simulations out of Houdini and into Maya! To do this, I Roped the simulations out, read them back in and arranged the 3 simulations (for shot 17) to fit the shot. After that, the baked simulation was exported to Maya via the FBX. The stairs and ground were fine, however the golem kept giving an index out of range error. Mr Ron suggested deleting all the piece groups and import the outside and inside group separately. By doing this I found out the error was due to the inside faces.

After doing some googling, I found out that dividing the mesh would solve the problem. I did it, and sure enough, it imported nicely into Maya.  There was also a normals problem with the pieces created by the voronoi fracture. To solve this I did a harden edge on the edges. Mr Leong also suggested using the set to face option for an instance where the harden edge didn't resolve the problem.

All that's left is to texture the inside faces and it'll be rendering time!

For another shot, a close up of the rock on the ground vibrating, I used a sine expression on the rotate channels to get some nice shaking going without needing to keyframe it. Expressions for the win!

DOP dop dop

From DOP, I tried POP, now it's back to DOP again, with some POP thrown in. The cracking simply couldn't be done in POP, it looked way too bad.

In order to control which pieces would move and which would remain static, I modified the method Mr Ron taught for getting the centers of each piece of the voronoi fracture. In the for each node, I added a group node, creating a "static" group. I then used the move and static groups to copy the moving and static pieces separately, then creating primitive groups for them, and finally merging both nodes together. This was required as the group coming into the foreach node was a point group. I could then feed the groups into the dopnet as different types of rbd objects.

In order to maintain the inside and outside groups after exporting to Maya, I assigned separate constant shaders to the inside and outside groups, so the faces could be selected based on shaders. The rop and time tools were pretty useful for reversing the simulation of the golem breaking apart so it would look like it was forming instead.

The simulations are pretty much done, all that's left is to combine them nicely according to the live plate. Then it's off the Maya for rendering!

Day Nine

Where do I start? So many things happened today. Some things have been completed. First, the Golem mesh has been finalised. Thanks a lot to Mr Leong, who suggested using the polyreduce node to downres the mesh. This maintained the rough shape of the geometry but with a lower poly count.

I've also managed to get the simulation of the golem forming more or less working, using a particle system and a few groups to divide the particles into left and right groups. They would then be blown in different directions and affected by two different orbit nodes. I got the first group easily. This group, called fly, would group particles with a moving bounding box. I then created a second group with another bounding box, called fly_right, with fly as the source group. In order to get the left group, I had to jump through some hoops. I couldn't use not equals to fly_right, as that would give me the non-flying particles too. I then created a nonfly group on the first group node, and did an intersect with not equals to fly_right on the second group node. This gave me the fly_left group. I could then manipulate them as I liked.

This simulation would then be cached out and read back in backwards, then blended with the ones with the stairs and ground cracking and chunks rising.

Day..... eight?

The shots have been matchmoved! At last! Albeit with some jittering. Progressed has also been made on the golem and fracturing.

For the golem, Mr Ron showed how my rockgen asset could be used on all the pieces of the golem at once. the displacement could then be baked onto a texture (using an asset from the Exchange) that would be applied to the model at render time. All this to allow me to work without my viewport hanging for a minute everytime I press spacebar. However, the baking did not turn out as expected. The UVs were all stacked on top of each other! To solve this, I separated the pieces into different groups corresponding to the arm, leg, etc, and merged and auto-mapped them in Maya before importing them to Houdini. They were then displaced and baked out individually. I guess there's no escaping these tedious tasks.. :(

More progress has been made on the ground and stair fracturing simulations. The RBD sim was going way too slowly to be usable, so Mr Ron recommended using particles to drive the effect instead and set up a rough network using the foreach node.

So basically, what the network does is doing a for loop on each of the pieces created by the voronoi fracture, creating a point at its center. It also generates a stamp index ID, associating the piece with that particular point. These particles are then grouped and piped into a particle network. the output is then fed into another for each node which pairs each piece back to its respective point. And voila! We have our fracture, 100 times faster! However it's not as accurate, that's the price to pay. I tried to get back the same cracking effect by using a sphere to collide with the particles, so the pieces wouldn't just fall together.

This method also allows multiple particle systems to be combined together. I used the second system to raise the pieces out of the ground and have them in a sort of swarm, encircling each other. An orbit node was used, with a custom axis and radius generated for each particle based on its ID. This introduces a lot of randomness into the behaviour, without which they would all orbit in only one axis.

Thanks to Mr Ron for all the help!

Day 6

Reshot the matchmove shots, hopefully they can be matchmoved. Also, did smore experimentation with the Voronoi Fracture to create the Golem forming effect.

Friday!

Most of today was spent attempting the matchmove for the first shot. It didn't work out, even though I tried it in SynthEyes instead of Matchmover. We have deduced that the problem lies in the nature of the shot, the nodal pan, as many matchmoving software have trouble with nodal panning. As a result, we have decided to reshoot the 2 shots. This time, we will ensure that there will be enough change in the parallax of the video. I've also realised that the markers are not very helpful in tracking. We might use coloured tape instead.

On a positive note, I've imported the mocap rig into Maya and adjusted it to fit the model. The animation seems to be pretty good!

-
I've also figured out how to use the Voronoi fracture in Houdini, with the help of Tanner. I'll experiment more with it.

16 and 17 February 2012

For the past two days, I match move my shot and manage to get it working. I then import it to maya to test out wheather its moving or not. The i recreate the stadium by putting the benches and stairs and tested the ibl. We seem to have a problem with the ibl so we got no choice but to reshoot on mon and retry it.

13/2/2012 - 16/2/2012

16/2/2012
      For the past three days, I have been assisting with the edit, making sure the continuity is perfect , or at least close to perfect. It is continuity that is important in the world of editing. the second important factor is probably the timing. The edit have to be played continuously to make sure the timing is perfect.
     Moreover, I guess i have started modeling the stadium or somehow tried to model. the problem is i cant find the dimsensions of the width and height of the CG object. The only option now is to use the measure tools to calculate the distance, which is pretty tedious.



15/2/2012
      Today Ron Bernard taught us the basics of motion tracking with nuke by using a camera tracker node. There were many problems that occur in the tracking and the import. Automatic tracking wasn't a problem. But correcting them was.After tracking, I tried to import the fbx file into maya and found that there were a lot of problems with the tracking CG seems to be continuously sliding about in the scene. Moreover, the size of the trackers are huge, as there wasn't an option to tweak in nuke. The other problem is the grid, It was vertical and there wasn't an option to shift the grid in nuke.

Day Four

So today we went to reshoot, yet again. This time, we shot the matchmove and VFX shots first, so we wouldn't run out of time. like yesterday. However, the tracking doesn't seem to be going very well. Even NukeX couldn't track it well. This time I'll try using syntheyes to track it instead. Hopefully it'll give a better matchmove. The stitching doesn't seem to be going well too. The horizontal angles stitch fine, but the 45 degree up and down ones aren't stitching properly.

We finally had our first mocap session! It was fun!

I also did some work on the rocks for the Golem mesh.It was imported and fed into the network, however the initial settings which worked for a simple box did not work quite as well for the Golem mesh. The edges were too sharp and had too much displacement. The settings were tweaked, and a turbulence noise was multiplied onto the worley and voronoi to soften the edges. I've also created a digital asset out of the network.

Day Three: Even More Rocks!

So today we went to reshoot the entire movie, but with a fast SD card this time! There were some problems during the shoot today, like the sun randomly getting blocked by clouds, and some depth of field problems with the matchmove shots. For those shots, I increased the shutter speed and had to open the aperture wider to compensate, however this resulted in the markers being blurred out of focus. And it starting raining when we were almost done. And so we'll have to reshoot, again. Fun times. I was the director of photography for these two days but Praveen would be taking over tomorrow.

After giving some feedback to improve the shots, Mr Ron introduced us to camera tracking with Nuke. At last! No more Matchmover!

Some progress on the rock generator. I've added a crackle multiplied with turbulence noise for the little details. I was also experimenting with ways to have a flat top for the rocks. At first I tried grouping the top points together and exclude them from the subdivide and VOP SOP. However, I had encountered some strange stretching problems and it wasn't procedural. I then tried using a cookie, which kind of gave me what I wanted, but Mr Ron suggested a better, which was to use a clip , then group the unshared edges together and applying a polycap. This gave the stretching problem too, and we discovered that it was due to the face not having a normal. A group geometry node was used to procedurally select the last face, and add a normal to it in the Y direction. This gave me exactly what I needed.

HEHE

13, 14 and 15 february 2012

For the past three days, I did the story board and touch up on the storyboard to get the thing finalize. Then i find textures for the golem. On the 2nd day of studio project we went shooting for the test shot and im in charge of tracking the shutter speed, aperture and also focal length of the camera. When we reshooting and shots we have a brief settings to follow and use it. The third day we went to shoot again but due to the weather we have to reshoot it tmr. But for today i did abit of matchmove to test out the perspective but it didnt work so we have no choice but to reshoot.

:) Danial

Day Two: More Rocks! and test shots

After getting the animatic approved by Mr Ron, we carried out our test shots, to lock down the camera angles and carry out some matchmove tests. We were quite lucky to have decided to carry out the tests, as we realised that for some shots, Matchmover wasn't able to calculate the 3D points accurately due to the nodal panning. To solve this, we would need to have some helper images shot from another angle. I've decided to record from another angle as well just to be on the safe side. Determining the size of the golem and framing the shot to accommodate it is also proving to be tricky.

Some rock tests were also carried out today, refining the network and look further.
I ended up multiplying the voronoi and vorley noises together for the main shape (thanks to Mr Ron for patiently explaining the functions of the add, subtract and multiply nodes!). The turbulence and curl noises were added on to create the subtler deformations on the surface.

Worley

Multiplied Voronoi

Add Turbulence

 

 Add Curl Noise

Closer and closer!

Week 1 Day 1

Today, I find references.




REFERENCES


Rock Golem References

Rock References

Rock density is very sensitive to the minerals that compose a particular rock type. Sedimentary rocks (and granite), which are rich in quartz and feldspar, tend to be less dense than volcanic rocks. And if you know your igneous petrology, you'll see that the more mafic a rock is, the greater its density.

Andesite	2.5 - 2.8
Basalt	2.8 - 3.0
Coal	1.1 - 1.4
Diabase	2.6 - 3.0
Diorite	2.8 - 3.0
Dolomite	2.8 - 2.9
Gabbro	2.7 - 3.3
Gneiss	2.6 - 2.9
Granite	2.6 - 2.7
Gypsum	2.3 - 2.8
Limestone	2.3 - 2.7
Marble	2.4 - 2.7
Mica schist	2.5 - 2.9
Peridotite	3.1 - 3.4
Quartzite	2.6 - 2.8
Rhyolite	2.4 - 2.6
Rock salt	2.5 - 2.6
Sandstone	2.2 - 2.8
Shale	2.4 - 2.8
Slate	2.7 - 2.8

Day One

We started off today by pitching our idea to Mr Ron, our mentor, and planning the rough schedule for the different phases of our project. Mr Ron recommended us to create a story around the 3 VFX shots.Danial was then assigned to draw up the storyboards and Afiq to create the concept art for the Golem. The rest of us did some look development/research for the rocks, the golem and fracturing ground, gathering relevant photos/pictures/art from around the internet. We also worked out the different shots with Danial, trying to ensure shot continuity.

Later, I did some tests for the procedural generation of rocks and populating a mesh with them.A mountain node was used to deform the sphere to create the sharp edges and corners. Mr Ron then gave some feedback and suggested using the VOP SOP to generate the rocks using different types of noise instead.

Some shot references: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG_F9uZxOKg
http://vimeo.com/13678930
http://vimeo.com/13136012
http://vimeo.com/13131812
http://vimeo.com/13123864

Rockgen: http://lghsh202.blogspot.com

Hello World