Fighting Sequence Previs: Week 01

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Regarding the theme of the cooperation project, it was originally the idea Sean and I came up with when watching the spell return battle. This is a popular animation recently, which contains some very cool fighting scenes. We all liked the fighting scenes and soon decided to make a previs with fighting as the theme

Before convening the cooperative members, in order to ensure that the participants are interested, we first need to set some visual styles and background stories. Our idea is to merge according to the points of interest. For example, Sean likes mechanical design, and I prefer the action performance of human characters. So after searching many references, we decided to use cyberpunk as the main visual style. For reference, refer to the rules of Overwatch in the design of characters and scenes.

So soon we have a basic concept.

Concept overview:

In a street, a masked girl fights a cyborg man.

It’s an open collaborative project where you can add whatever you want to create. You can try all kinds of work in the project and have unique research content.

At present, it includes the research points of stylized rendering(like overwatch) stylized visual effects, simulated 2D motion blur in 3D, and programmed modeling.

The ultimate goal is to create a previs for 1-3min. It is still in the concept stage. Here are some styles so far.

For this concept, I also used PS to make two concept pictures to show the general idea:

After the project was released, we soon received contact from some students. They are from 3d computer animation, VFX and illustration. So far we have eight students participating in this project.

In the first week, all of us had a short meeting. After discussing the learning direction we were interested in and our thoughts on this short film, I made a more detailed setting draft.

Time:Near future, related words: postmodern, science fiction, cyberpunk

On a clear night, the light of the moon when it is not blocked by clouds can cause shadows to objects.

Location: A deserted alley in a modern city with several small stores or signs.

Characters: A girl whose profession is a bounty hunter and a cyborg man whose profession is a killer.

Event:

The cyborg man was destroying the robot in the alley, hitting it vigorously and smashing the wall out of the hole.

Then the man threw it into the trash can. There were some robot limbs scattered around the trash can.

The mechanical man took out a cigar and lit it, took a deep breath, and then raised his head to puff out smoke. Looking up, she saw a masked girl holding a short knife standing on the roof. The girl squatted and rushed towards the mechanical man. The man dodged hurriedly, and the cigar was cut into two pieces.

The girl fell and rolled, her back turned to the man.

The man stabilized his flustered figure and spit his cigar aside.

The girl slowly got up, revealing the sign behind her.

After seeing this, the man showed an expression of disdain and said: “bounty hunter.”

The two faced each other in a stance, calm before the battle.

…

Background:

In the future era of high-tech and low-life, the emergence of smart machines will bring new contradictions to society. The renewal of the government’s judicial system can hardly match the development of technology. The solidification of social class further leads to chaos, and excessive chaos brings new order. The intrigue among the upper-class society has also been brought to the table, and professional killers seem to have become an indispensable role for every upper-class power. And the bounty hunter system acquiesced by the government has given the people at the bottom a new way out, allowing society to maintain a stable but cold state to a certain extent.

The masked girl is a bounty hunter, eccentric and agile. She grew up in a slum and was influenced by hip-hop culture. Dress more freely, there will be many cultural elements on her clothes, and she uses a short knife. When performing tasks, the attire is more capable, and she wears a mask to hide her face and does not speak.

The cyborg man is a professional killer with a strong body and a cold face. He is usually responsible for handling some people or robots that they hate for the upper-class people. Frequent killings made him brutal, and while this job brought him money, it also took his arm, but fortunately, he could use a high-tech metal arm instead. The metal arm has stronger strength and defense.

Character and scene design:

Pay attention to the shape and silhouette, the color purity is high, and the texture expresses the details. A few Asian elements such as China and Japan.

According to the points that everyone wants to learn or participate in, I divide everyone into five groups and discuss and share with each other to ensure the cooperation smooth.

After the first meeting, we decided to work out our own design drawings or reference drawings in groups and communicate with relevant personnel in time. We will have a collective meeting next Friday to discuss the progress and the next idea.

Houdini: week 01

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I have learned Houdini 16.5 before, but I don’t know enough. I haven’t been able to understand Houdini’s production ideas thoroughly. At the time, I just thought it was a very powerful software, and I still didn’t understand the inner logic. Now I have the opportunity to learn again. I hope to learn Houdini thoroughly through this course.

I will record the process of learning Houdini here and try to be as clear as possible so that I can review it later.

Houdini’s software ideas are very procedural, which not only provides clear production ideas but also increases the difficulty of learning. I have studied programming for a while, and the process of learning Houdini is very similar. If you want to learn code, you must first learn its basic language, and the vocabulary of the language is a very important part.

In Houdini, there are a few main vocabularies to understand first: (Thanks Tina for sorting out, much better than what I wrote)

SOPs = Surface OPerators or geometry nodes that are inside an object folder. These are used to construct and modify geometry. Any kind of geometry from polygons to volumes.

DOPs = Dynamic OPerators or simulation/solver nodes that are used to construct simulations. Simulations read in geometry from SOPs and pass this data into the DOP solvers.

ROPs = Render OPerators in side ROP Output directories which are used to create render output dependency graphs for automating output of any type of data and for triggering external processes like rendering. Commonly used to generate sequences of geometry, simulation data and trigger Render tasks that generate sequences of images to disk.

VOPs = Vector OPerators inside VOP network nodes are used for everything from building shaders to modifying geometry, volumes, pixels, and more.

VEX = Vector Expression Language. The code language used to write shaders. VOPs are wrappers around VEX code snippets.

And there are also some operations on nodes:

bypass，which can be used to turn off or turn on node effects
display/render
template/selectable template, which can display the wireframe of the model for reference, etc.
information
lock

There are other contents, I plan to learn the relevant and then record, the main content that I have come into contact with is these.

This week’s task is to build a wood cabin in Houdini. The operation of modeling is basically the same as other 3D software, such as boolean, extrude and reverse.

However, the Houdini node-style method allows each step to be clearly saved, and when there is a problem, you can check the problem step by step.

In this part, I am most concerned about the Delete node. It is a bit similar to the extract face function in Maya, but it is more programmatic. It can filter out what we need or don’t need through the normal value. But this is a more commonly used function.

This is the basic structure of the wood cabin:

We can build a model of the wooden board to replace this frame. Here I need to use the copy node, which can quickly copy the model and arrange it in a certain rule.

Here I also used the Polybevel node, which can increase the corner details of the model to make the model less sharp. I learned how to use this node by looking at Houdini’s official documentation. This required selecting the edge we wish to modify.

After the whole process of making a woodcabin, the biggest touch to me is the way of thinking in Houdini. When I want to make another wooden wall, I will not directly copy an already-made wooden wall like in Maya, but recreate a transform node. The model is still the same, but with different positions and sizes. Although the result looks the same as copying, this way of thinking is very helpful to me, clear and logical.

This is the wood cabin I finally made:

Performance Animation：Week 4

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I made polish animation this week, this is my playblast:

The most important part of this part is to make the broken windows at the end. I referred to this tutorial on youtube.

Using Maya’s own plug-in called bullet,I can quickly create the effect of objects being crushed.

First I copied the window glass model, and in FX->Effects->Shatter, I can divided the glass model into multiple pieces. This part is automatically calculated and generated.

Then I added collision components to the ground, wall, and some props in the scene. the glass fragment model is added the rigid body component so that the glass can be affected by gravity and collide with the surrounding environment.

Considering the complexity of the character model, I created a sphere to simulate the character’s body. Add a rigid body component to the sphere and give it an initial velocity. Adjust the number of the simulation start frames to ensure that the sphere and the character reach the window at the same time.

During this process, I encountered many problems, such as collisions between objects but still through the model, the mass and initial velocity of the rigid body could not achieve the effect of impact, the position of the collision body was wrong, and so on. Of course, the most serious problem is that when I complete the simulation, the rendering sequence pictures are inconsistent with the picture I see in the viewport. In the end, I had no way to render only part by part, which took me a lot of time.

After reading some information, I think if I need to make a broken effect next time, I should try Houdini or other plugins.

This is my final animation:

Performance Animation：Week 3

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This week I made some environmental models based on my dormitory., I used the reference project for convenience. Adding a model to the initial ENV project can ensure that subsequent animation projects have models and the correct positions.

This is the environment I created,

Regarding the textures and materials, I found them on the quixel website. And I added some lights.

These are the final rendering images,

In addition, I thought about the whole story. I used this animation to record the process of thinking about how to perform animation, and plan to make an exaggerated ending.

In order to tell the story better, I made the camera animation. Here I used the Camera Sequencer, where I can make it like editing a video. And the number of frames of each camera can overlap, which allows me to observe the effect of my animation in the lens more clearly.

After that, I modified the timing and pose of the blocking action, and added some changes in expressions.

Here is the spline animation I created.

the research of the design of interactive narrative for storytelling

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I first came into contact with interactive film work in 2017, called “Late Shift”, which was shot by a real person and required the audience to choose various plots with different endings. At that time, I was really attracted. After that, I began to pay attention to the interactive film works, and also experienced various interactive narrative styles. There are excellent pictures of “Detroit: Become Human” and the unique interactive form of “Her Story” and “Last Day of June”, even the small work “Father and Son” on the phone. The experience brought by the combination of interaction and narration deeply attracted me.

I searched for some papers on Google Scholar. After reading their opinions, I think I can discuss two directions. One is the narrative design method under interactive works, and the other is the appropriate interaction in the narrative design. It can be understood as the relationship between narrative design and interactive design.

Recently I experienced Quantic Dream’s old work “Heavy Rain” again, and I began to think about the relationship between interactive design and narrative design. Sometimes the interaction gives the audience a more immersive experience, but sometimes it seems that inappropriate interaction design makes it difficult for the audience to focus on the story.

In the interactive movie “Heavy Rain”, there is a scene that I am very impressed with. The protagonist’s child is lost in a crowded shopping mall. The only thing the player knows is that the child is holding a red balloon. At this time, the player needs to control the protagonist to walk around in the mall. , But because there are too many people around, it is difficult for the player to control. At this time the player will naturally put themselves into the protagonist and will have a kind of anxiety. And this is the emotion that the director wants the player to experience. This emotion is conveyed through the simplest form of interaction. This is also the difference between interactive works and traditional film works. In addition to visual and auditory, interactive works can also arouse the audience’s emotions inside from another dimension.

In addition to interactive movies based on real-time rendering, there are also interactive works shot by real people, such as “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”. I have heard about it for a long time but only recently have I experienced the complete process on Netflix. The form of this work is very similar to the 2017 “Late Shift”, but the black mirror has carried out a deeper exploration of interactive narrative in the plot. From the very beginning, players were given the goal of developing a game, and then some designs of “breaking the four walls”, this is a story without a so-called perfect ending. But at the same time, I noticed that purely selective interaction can easily break the coherence of the narrative, and in the process of repeated selection, the audience’s own consciousness is gradually suppressed, and the entire selection behavior has become a process for the audience to consider the creator’s logic. This easily brings fatigue to the audience.

I have also tried an interactive form based on real-time rendering, which uses the multi-line narrative structure of traditional movies. each story is connected by shots or props. The audience can trigger the switch Story by controlling the camera or clicking the props while watching. The purpose of this experiment is not to substitute the audience into any role, to maintain their identity as a bystander, and to observe the audience’s experience in this form. But during the actual exhibition, I noticed that some audiences would not try to operate the works of this kind of movie lens, even if they knew it could be operated. When some audiences try to operate, their attention is easily distracted and it is difficult for them to focus on the plot. As an observer, the viewer has no entity in the work, no role to be substituted into. And they do not know who they need to watch.

In conclusion, the relationship between narrative design and interactive design is very important in interactive works. A narrative structure suitable for interaction and an interactive form that provides more immersion. At present, I can think of some text adventure games or text decryption games that are better at these two points. For example, the independent work “sally face” or “escape cube” series. Next, I want to continue to try to design interactive works based on real-time rendering, maybe write a little story or something first.

Performance Animation：Week 2

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This week I found a good model of a swivel chair on Sketchfab and remade the binding in Maya. In order to facilitate the animation, I made separate controllers for the upper, middle, and lower chairs. Each wheel can also be rotated independently and there is a master controller to ensure the same direction of the wheels.

In addition, I also learned how to bind the wheel so that it can rotate itself according to displacement. Here you need to use keyframe expressions.

Because the formula for the circumference of a circle is C=πR, if the distance the chair moves is S and the angle of the wheel is x, the formula can be obtained:

x=(S/πR)*360. From this, we can know the degree of wheel rotation. Considering that the chair will move in the x-axis and z-axis directions, add the following expression to the x-axis rotation of the wheel:

(Use negative values ​​to control the direction of wheel rotation)

I also made simple props, such as tables and walls, based on the Reference I shot.

And I made the blocking animation. According to the changes in the constraints, I divided the whole animation into two parts.

These are my blocking animations:

Performance Animation：Week 1

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I want to use the knowledge I learned this term as much as possible in this task, but it’s a little hard to start. So firstly I watched some performance animation videos on Youtube. What I mainly watch is the showcase of animation mentor, their works can show a storyline in a few seconds, with or without dialogue.

After watching some other people’s works, I was more interested in the works without dialogue, because they can express somethings or some emotions only through actions and expressions. This makes the animation more interesting.

After thinking about it in my room for a week, I realized, why don’t I just animate my own life? Because of the epidemic, I stayed in my room for a long time, and boredom became my main emotion every day. But it is also very interesting to find some fun in the boredom. Combining the knowledge of body mechanics, I decided to make an animation to tell an embarrassment about a person turning a swivel chair when he is bored.

I watched some animations of swivel chairs, although they were not too many, I still found some good works.

This will be a short animation, so I want to determine the rhythm of the entire animation first. Because it is from boring to finding the fun of the swivel chair, this should be an animation from static to dynamic, from slow to fast. I wrote a simple script from this thought.

Then I drew a simple storyboard in PS to ensure some shots and positions. The process of turning text into images was also a process of conception,, which allows me to have a more accurate imagination of the final picture.

Shooting reference is a bit difficult for me now, because I don’t have a gimbal or tripod to hold the phone, and I haven’t found a very suitable place to shoot. So I first took a video in my kitchen with the laptop camera. The picture was ok, but my acting skill was too awkward. I think this can only be used as a reference for motion. My expressions and actions may need to be shot separately later. And I haven’t thought about the ending action, so I haven’t shot it yet.

This is the reference video I took:

Week9： Phonemes and audio

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The task is to make Phonemes animation based on audio. One of the difficulties for me is the handling of some English continuous speaking, it is difficult for me to say it myself as a reference. So I found a video of a cover singer, her lip shape of the song In the name of love is relatively clear, which makes it easy to observe and determine the key pose.

But because the video is a side view, it is difficult to observe a clear frontal lip shape, so I searched for a lip shape diagram for reference.

In this task, I mainly focused on the changes of the tongue, because in many situations a simple change of mouth shape cannot accurately represent a voice, and the audience needs to see the movement of the character’s tongue, such as L of Love.

This is the aniamtion of mouth:

After making the mouth shape, I added some facial expressions and body shaking to make the character seem more engaged in the singing performance. The expression animation mainly focuses on the character’s eyebrows, because there are many parts that require strength when singing, and the changes in the eyebrows at this time can best reflect the strength.

different sense of strength

This is my final aniamtion: