PHOTOSHOP

In Photoshop, I opened a new psd document that was 200×300 pixels and preserved the transparency. I then created two buttons on the document of two different colors. I then made another psd document at 720 by 480 pixels. This document will be used as two different menu screens.  After the buttons and menu screens have been created and saved as .psds, I saved out screenshots of the green screen environment project as  jpegs to be used later.

DVD STUDIO PRO

DVD Studio Pro will allow us to easily set up a DVD for our demo reel!

When DVD Studio Pro first opened up, I went to DVD Studio Pro>Preferences>General and Encoding and make sure that Display is set to 4:3, Mode is set to 2 Pass UBR (in both MPEG-SD and HD), and Method is set to Background Encoding. Apply and ok.

Right click on the menu 1 icon. Under the assets tab, click import and bring in all the files that will be used on the DVD. I brought in the buttons, menu screens, screenshots, and the title animation I created earlier. Grab one menu .psd and drag to the “menu 1″ work area, hold over for a second forthe options menu to pop up, and set as Background. Repeat for the button, except set it as “button”.

Click on Track 1 and drag in an .avi or quicktime movie. On the menu 1 button, go to Target>menu 2> [Menu]. Add a menu and a button. In the slideshow tab, drag over the images that will be used in the slideshow and, in the general tab, check “Manual Advance”. Go back to menu 2 and right click on the button. Target>Slideshow>Slideshow 1.

When the DVD interface is finally setup, it is time to build an iso image of the interface. Click on build and create a seperate “Build Folder” saved in the same area as the .dspproj. In the build options make sure to name the DVD (it is a good idea just to name the DVD your name) and change the output device to Hard Drive.

A quick note on imported .avis: When using an avi in DVD Studio Pro (or any DVD creation program), it is a good idea to leave the file uncompressed and allow the DVD hardware to do inhouse compression. This guarentees that the file will play on a larger range of DVD players.

THE FINAL

It is finally time to bring all of these seemingly random assignments together! The final is to set up a DVD interface with a title animation, functioning buttons and menus, and a slideshow of the final green screen environment at various stages of production.

DVD Studio Pro file: http://www.mediafire.com/?mhdngdzzzyu

After Effects file: http://www.mediafire.com/?thty23ozomt

Final Cut Pro file: http://www.mediafire.com/?jvu55umynw1

TITLE ANIMATION

For the title, I will need a 3D rendering of my name and contact information keeping in mind that this will play at the beginning of my demo reel. Start by opening Maya. For the text, I will use the in-Maya text creation. Go to Create>Text Options. In the Text option, you can type in your name and play with other options, like text style, beveling, etc., in the gooey.

After the text is completed, select it in the perspective window and go to Modify>Convert>Displacement to Polygons so we can play with the text. Delete the original text plane and rename the displacement copy to whatever the text is. Now, go into the Animation window, Skeleton>Joint Tool.

In the Front window, create a joint chain down the text polygon. In the hierarchy, select all of the joints and shift select the text polygon. We will now bind the joint to the actual polygon so we can change the configuration of the text without selecting each individual letter. Go to Skin>Bind>Smooth Bind Options and make sure that max influences are set to at least 3.

With the joints bound to the “skin”, you can now have fun with the polygon and shape it to whatever you desire! I used a transfer key along the y-rotation axis in order to wrap up the text into a spiral. To smooth out my animation and give it some life, I messed with joints in the Graph Editor.

I selected all of the joints in the hierarchy again and highlighted their points in the graph editor. I moved the points down the graph editor’s timeline in order to offset some of their actions.

AFTER AFFECTS

All I had to do for the comp was import my files into the bin, play them in the timeline, and go to Composition>Make Movie. I put output as a quicktime movie with a .png compression and rendered out the movie.

FINAL PRODUCT

And, finally, the finished animation!

Maya:http://www.mediafire.com/?nimmogt4uz4

After Effects: http://www.mediafire.com/?umajzvkmlit

Title Animation Movie:  http://www.mediafire.com/?orihnwzkm2z

ENVIRONMENT

I decided to do things a little differently than the rest of the class. My matte paintings were coming out completely dreadful so I tried to think of something else. During my Background Design and Layout class it dawned on me, I have already created a completely modeled, textured, and lit scene from scratch! Why not showcase how the environment could be used under real world circumstances like the background environment for a visual effects movie?Of course, the scene had to be changed to fit the VFX project we are constructing in our DMP2 class. First of all was scale. Using the tracked footage from After Effects, I imported the clip into maya by going to View>Import Image and made sure that I selected “Import Sequence”. I was also able to get the right perspective by doing this.

FORE, MIDDLE, AND BACKGROUND

I still used the same techniques for the matte paintings to convey a sense of depth in the scene. I broke the scene down into fore, middle, and background.

Fore:

Middle:

Back:

Put Together:

LIGHTING

Another major aspect that needed to be changed was the lighting. Using the HDRI that I created earlier, I went into the render settings of the scene,  the Indirect Lighting tab, and created an Image Based Lighting. I then attached the HDR file to the sphere.

COMP

We will eventually put our environment in the footage we have already keyed in After Effects! Unfortanetly, due the size of the Maya file, I cannot upload it here, but look out for the final rendered footage in a couple weeks!

Until Later!

AFTER EFFECTS

We cna now take  the footage that we have already edited in Final Cut and After Effects prior and attach a tracker to it in After Effects. Begin by placing the clip into the timeline. Go to Layer>New>Null Object and rename as “Track One”. Highlight the footage and go to Window>Tracker (Tracker will open in a new dialogue box):

Highlight footage and hit the “track Motion” button. Move the newly opened tracker box in the comp window over the characters face (adjust as needed). When you are ready hit “Edit Target”, making sure the tracker is set to Track One (the null object) and finish by pressing “Analyze: Play Button”. If you are happy with the track, you can apply and ok the tracker on the x and y dimensions!  

We will now take this step a little farther by adding a camera. First, create a box shape over the character’s torso and parent the shape to the null object. Go to Layer>New>Camera and make sure that the camera is set to a 36mm (standard size). Click on the 3D layer button in the timeline for the solid object to set it as a proxy track layer. Your timeline should now look like this:

 Now, go to After Effects>Preferences>General and make sure that the allow script button option is checked on. Highlight the proxy track and camera.   Got to File>Scripts>Run Script File and select the file that the Professor supplied. In the export options, make sure that the “Add 4 views” option is selected and save the file before exporting.

The final step is creating a secondary comp. In the project window, highlight the first comp and drap it down into the “Create New Comp” button at the bottom of the window. Hide the proxy track on the new comp by clicking the eye next to the name of the layer. Go to Layer>Keying>Keylight 1.2. Toggle the alpha channel box, go the eye dropper in the effect window and click near the character in the comp window. The background will now be an alpha channel. In the “Final Result” drop down window go to “Screen Matte”, which will invert the colors of the comp window to black and white, like this:

 Use the White and Black Color Correct nodes to make a cleaner looking character, like above.  Render out the comp (use the second comp) with a Lossless Format set to Targa Sequence and the Channels set to RGB+Alpha. Be sure to rename the file so that the underscore is changed to a period so Maya can recognize the sequence.

MAYA

Whoo! That was a lot of AE, which will make the Maya pipeline a lot smoother! Open the newly saved scene and look the the camera (Perspective>Look Through Selected) that has been imported from AE. Import the image plane (View>Image Plane>Import Image) and make that the “Use Image Sequence” button is on.  The Tracker that we created in AE should now show up as a little cross on the image plane:

SETTING UP THE ENVIRONMENT

With the newly tracked timeline, we can now set up the scene! Create a ground plane, walls that will represent the doorway the character will walk through, and a “world” beyond the doors. Put each of the corresponding objects on one of three render layers: Close Up (CU), Medium (Med, or middle ground), and Back Plane (BP, or Background). You want to make that the objects match up with the image plane’s perspective and then you can render each image out. Be sure to save them as .psds so we can open them in Photoshop.

PHOTOSHOP

Now that we have done all the hard work, we can now begin matte painting! Open up the saved .psd you are ready to work on. We already made sure that the “sets” match the character and are in the same perspective, so you can now let your creative juices flow and create a really gorgeous “world” for the character to explore!

HW

Homework now is to just finish tracking the rest of the shots and continue construction of the environment in Maya that we began in class! his environment will be due a couple weeks from now

WIP of scene: http://www.mediafire.com/?tn5m1yyij4m

Until Later!

HDRI

HDRI, or high dynamic range imaging, is a set of techniques that can be used to allow for a much greater range between the dark and light images in a photograph. This will come in handy for our After Effect’s built set for the movie that we a continually working on. Using the keyed up footage from last week, we are able to insert an image into the alpha channel of the movie. But first comes choosing a movie. This is the image I went with:

I then opened it in photoshop and, after making a seperate layer, went to Image>Adjustments>Brighten/Contrast. After lowering the contrast, I then saved the image as a seperate document, re-opened the original, then created an image with a higher contrast and saved. With these two images, we will create an HDRI. Go to File>Automate>(choose the two files)>Merge HDRI and press “ok”.

A window will then open up that will allow you to adjust the now HDR image even further. After all is done, you must save as either a bitmap or TIFF.

AFTER EFFECTS

With the movie open, you are able to just import the image and drop it into the timeline. And here is the final outcome:

.aep File:

.flv File:

IMAGE BASED LIGHTING

So now, with the environment in place, we are ready to set up the cameras for our VFX movie! Open up maya and go into render settings. Under the Mental Ray option, go to Indirect Lighting>Create Image Based Lighting. You can then load the HDR image into the load prompt. Now, open the hypershade. Create a mental ray node>Lenses>mia_exposure_simple. With the rendering camera’s attributes editor open, drag and drop the newly created  lense into the lens shader. With the new exposure set to the lens, you can delete the sphere created by the image based lighting and create a new surface sphere. And, WALLAH!, you have image based lighting.

HOMEWORK

As far as the substitute could tell, we are to create an environment for the footage and ready the inner maya HDRI.

HDRI Maya file: http://www.mediafire.com/?mivxm3t4mzi

Until Later!

PRE-VISUALS

The pre-vis for a project is along the same line as a storyboard or script; it delegates the actions that will play out in a frame. The class was given a Maya file that had four different scenes:

1. Character walking onto screen and discovering a doorway

2. A close-up of the character entering the doorway into a different world

3. A POV of the strange land

4. The character walking away from the door into the world

STAGING AND SHOOTING

This week complete control was handed over to the class with little input from the professor. Using the lessons from last week, which can be found on this page http://lochnesspiper.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/enter-the-green-screen/, it was up to us to make the pre-vis happen in live action.  And, like last week, lighting and set-up took the longest. Professor Glover definitely wasn’t joking when he explained that shooting was a “hurry up and wait” affair. The actions in the actual shots were more comlpex than last week which called for more lights to cover the extra shadows and more involvment with the actor on the various directors’ part. All-in-all it was definitely an enlightening experience.

An HDRI image of our lighting scheme from the stage’s perspective

LESSONS LEARNED

Although there wasn’t any real “disaster”, there were plenty of near misses. During an open discussion at the end of the class period some compelling points were brought up about the process. The most  apparent aspect we were missing was leadership. Everything else branched off from there; such as people not staying on lights or not remembering to consult the pre-vis. This resulted in a tremendous amount of wasted time. In the end though, the aim of the class was to allow each person to complete each of the jobs, (director, person ”on screen”, the clacker, and lights) so this was to be expected.

FINAL CUT PRO

After transferring the clips over from the tape deck into Final Cut Pro, the time in’s and out’s were entered and each clip named to make cutting a lot easier. We are using Final Cut Pro as our editing software for this class. For now, we are using Easy Setup, which is found under the File tab and DV-NTSC in the Set-up Window. Start a new project by importing the folder with the clips saved in it by going to File>Import>Folder. We created “shot” bins in the project bin work area by right clicking>New Files>Bin and dragging and dropping each corresponding clip into the right folder.

.fcp File: http://www.mediafire.com/?ttjqxjklmmz

EDITING

Now for the fun stuff! It is smart to take notes of each clip as it plays through in the bin to make this process go faster. When you have decided which clips you want, you can drag each clip over to the work area for trimming. Short cut “i” will make a trim in and “o” will make a trim out. Drag trimmed clips down to the timeline. The timeline in Final Cut acts much the same as the timeline in After Effects. When trimming, it is much more “believable” to make cuts on actions. If you want to refine clips even further so they play into each other easier, you can use the razor tool to slice out parts of a clip and the select tool to move a clip.

EXPORT

There are pros and cons to using Final Cut. It is at exporting that the biggest con rears its ugly head. Unfortanetly, this program doesn’t play so nicely with After Effects, our compositing software. Unlike Premier, in which you can just copy and paste the edited clips or even create a live link between the two programs, you will need to actually export the files from Final Cut. Begin the process by going to File>Quicktime Movie. You must change the following options:

-Current Setting: Custom

- Compressor: .png

-Setting: 8 bit NTSC

-Check include video

and the movie  must be self-contained or it won’t work.

AFTER EFFECTS

After that editing is completed, now it is time for some simple vid correction and compositing. After importing the created .mov file that was exported out of Final Cut, use the Key Light 1.2 Effect to edit out the background and convert it to an alpha channel.

HOMEWORK AND UPCOMING CLASSES

This footage will be an ongoing project for the following weeks. For homework, we were to choose the clips we want, edit them together, and take out the background in After Effects. A wip of the movie will be uploaded shortly!

The .aep file: http://www.mediafire.com/?irrmdnwngzm

The .flv clip: http://www.mediafire.com/?mjallzidhzz

Until Later!

UNDERSTANDING SET-UP

Waaay before you can turn on a camera and start shooting comes the set-up, or pre-production. We ran over the various components of the control room, from audio board to the text editing program used in news shows. We then entered the actual green screen room and began set-up for the camera. We ran over the basics, from mounting and the importance of someone always being with the camera, to what each button did. Onto the stage!

STAGING IT

You cannot even comprehend how long it takes to get a few seconds of shot! First, we had to actually decide what we were going to shoot. Next, came placing the actor, so we could begin lighting. This was the most intensive part. After a quick demo of the “basic” lighting techniques, mainly a three point lighting system with additional detail lights, came the laborious task of moving the actual lights. Safety is definitely numero uno at this point in production. One false move and a person can go tumbling down a ladder with a 15 pound REF light following! We ended up using 2 Vit-Kit lights and a spot light on the ground with 2 REF lights and 3 larger lights hanging from above. The final step, which the entire class forgot about whoops!, is “whiting out” the camera. This basically entails placing a white card in front of the actor and color correcting the camera.

SHOOTING

Finally came the shooting. This went relatively fast compared to set-up. We caught four different actions with everyone in the class using the camera at least once and standing in front of the camera at least once. The most difficult thing I found was remembering to leave the film running after a shot to create a buffer zone inbetween each take.

FINAL CUT AND AFTER EFFECTS

Now that the physical part was over, it was time to get to editing! For this class, we will be editing in Final Cut and compositing in After Effects. First, we opened the raw footage into a new composition and dragged it down into the timeline. We trimmed it down to one “scene”, a girl pulling apart an invisible paper. You can also edit the audio track in a movie with Final Cut, but we didn’t have to today as there was no recorded sounds. Finally, we saved the individual scene out and opened it in After Effects. It was a bit free choice today in playing around with the footage. I decided to repeat some of the steps from the first assignment and delete the background out from the scene and correcting some of the matteing with Key Light. Eventually, after further instructions from next weeks class, I will probably put in my name being stretched out in between the girl’s hands.  

Example of messing around with the footage:

-Shortened the timeline to the exact action and changed background color to back. Also corrected “character” with Key Light 1.2′s black and white matte feature.

HOMEWORK

Being as today was pretty much just demo, homework is taking the film we shot and playing around with it in Final Cut and After Effects. Next week comes the real action!

Until Later!

DYNAMICS

Did you know that you can animate without key frames? Using Rigid Bodies within Maya’s Dynamics Window will allow you to change a polygonal object into an object with mass. There needs to be at least 2 polygonal objects on scene so they can interact with each other. An example of this animating technique is creating a ball that bounces down stairs. Start by creating a poly sphere, a ground plane, and poly cubes in the shape of stairs. Place the sphere a little above the top of the “stairs” and keep the sphere highlighted. Go to Soft/Rigid Bodies>Create Passive Body. Repeat this step with the stairs and, in the Field menu, toggle on Gravity.  TA DA! You now have a ball that will bounce down stairs. Being that the objects are still technically polygons, you can edit changes in the object’s attribute editor for a more realistic bouncing ball.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/wgmhdzhczv2/Piperdmp2_102309.avi (combined with a particle emitter for added effect!)

ANIMATING ON CURVES

Paint Effects in Maya have the capability of being animated along a curve.  First, create an EP Curve by going to Create>EP Curve and draw a spiral like shape. Smooth the curve in the Surfaces Window and stretch out the spiral in the Smooth Curves option. Now, create a paint effect. By opening the Visor in the Windows drop down menu, you can choose any effect that you want. You can also increase the brush with “b”. Under the render Window, create a single paint effect and then go to Paint Effects>Curve Utilities> Attach Brush to Curve. The paint effect can be edited in its attributes editor.

You can apply this knowledge towards actual objects and polygonal shapes. After creating your EP Curve, create a NURBS circle and snap to the end of the EP curve with the “c” button. Next, go to Surfaces>Extrude>Options in the Surfaces Window and change the options to the zero for rotation and and one for scale. Now, create the polygon that is to be animated and snap the polygon to the NURBS path via a motion trail.

PARTICLES

Particles in Maya are a wacky way to achieve a bunch of different effects. First, create an emitter Under the Particles drop down menu in the Dynamics Window. In the emitters attributes editor, you can change everything about the emitter from how many particles are thrown to the shape and mass of each particle. You can sub in polygonal objects as particles by going to the Instance Replacement in the Particles drop down menu.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/ynt1zvniyyz/Particle_Emitter.ma

Now on to homework. The assignment is to combine all of these new lessons into a scene and incorporate my name somehow. My idea that I am working on is a polygonal ball falling down my name, which is in the shape of stairs, while emitting a paint brush effect. Wish me luck!

Until later!

TA DA! In the movie and maya binary file below, you can see the above techniques applied into a text based animation. Enjoy!

http://www.mediafire.com/file/diwyzt05gij/Piperdmp2_100909.avi

http://www.mediafire.com/file/mi5wdtnmywn/piperdmp2_100909.mb

Until later!

Edit: So, the website is a no go at this point. The school’s AiServers are being incredibly unreliable and just plain impossible right now. Instead, in order to post hw and movie samples of my work, I will be going through mediafire.com. Thank you