So here's another shot Eran brokeown for our enjoyement. So.. enjoy!
This video shows, in slow motion, the progress of the shot from layout to final animation.
This shot didn't have live reference, and because it only consisted of a few frames of action it was very important to get each pose exactly right as well as the timing.
The general feeling I wanted to get across was that Snap free falls from a protective pose which coveys what he went through in the previous round just before he died.
I didn't want him to move around during the fall since, besides the fact that there are few frames and the action comes as a surprise for the viewer, Snap himself isn't aware that he's falling yet.
The pose in which he hits the ground demonstrates that he is unaware that he is falling and not in control over it by hitting the floor with his lower back - which is the most painful and harsh way to hit.
From the moment he hits the floor he realizes he's fallen and so he doesn't hit his head on the ground and he raises his hands back up protectively in what is cut on action to the next shot.
A couple of points (click on animated GIFs to see large version):
Here we can see the work on the first pose where the first thing to do was to put him in a general position, and I thought it would work well if his hands were clutched into fists - as someone trying to defend himself.
In the second version I worked more on the silhouette of the hands and legs, and I opened his fingers back because I felt that it showed more of a helpless defense.
In the third version I made sure to break the symmetry between the legs, so I straightened his farther leg, which helped create the negative space between them. I also exposed his eyes a little bit from above the shield.
In this demonstration we can see I made the difference between the parts which hit first and those which hit last more extreme.
It was important to me that he hit the ground harshly, that's why he falls on his lower back.
In the final version the legs hit later, which helped the pose and the timing move in a more interesting way to the flat pose he next assumes on the floor.
I've finally had the time and means to make a video reverse engineering the material and texture creation for Snap's armor parts.
The only microphone I could find produced these annoying noises, so I apologize for that.
Hope you find it interesting!
This is our first animation post. We will have more coming during the week.
The animation in R6 was done manually. Motion capture was out of the question, since our animation department wanted to work on it manually for learning purposes and fun :)
In this post we'll cover the work process for shot 16, as well as the shot planning by the animator.
This post was prepared by our Animation lead, Eran Lazar, who animated this shot.
First of all, let's have a look at the progress of this shot. We start with the storyboard, where the general camera angle and action is determined, as well as rough timing. Then we make the layout in which the camera movement is finer & the timing starts getting more attention (in this case, we decided that merging two shots we had in the storyboard into this one shot worked better). After we have our layout, we shoot video reference for the parts of the shot we find relevant. The reference is used selectively by the animator as he plans the shot and animates it. As the animation progresses from blocking to final animation we fine tune the timing & the camera movements. When we're done we light, render, and composite the shot.
The animation starts with a layout scene & the video references. Before getting to it, this shot was planned out using thumbnails and notes. Here are the thumbnails for this shot:
Frame 0-64: Camera movement.
Frame 64-72: Snap enters frame and take a single step - the weapon leads the motion.
What I saw from the reference is that his foot should face inwards, and then, as he moves from frame 77 to 82 he shifts his weight over his left leg and lifts his right leg from the floor.
Frame 87-94: This is where Snap turns his left foot on it's heel inwards as his right foot takes the step.
Frame 94-100: Drift.
Frame 100-112: Lifts his left foot and takes a step forward as he lowers his weapon and starts to run.
I wanted him to do a quick scanning movement to the right of the frame and then back during frames 77-100, so he will start the shot vigilantly and survey the hallway alert to any movement or sound, and then when he starts running down it he will be able to lower his weapon and run forward with a little more confidence.
After I finished the animation I found out that the grass actually reaches his knees (and not his foot, as I thought), and some out of focus games were added to the camera :)
So these are a couple of the issues we've started paying more attention to - and generally we take more notice now in making sure that anything that affects the animation to this extent will be represented in the animation scene.
Here we can see the animation together with the video reference.
There are things that I've realized by watching the reference such as the arc the pelvis does as he takes the step and shifts his weight from one leg to the other, and the legs crossing that gives an X shapes silhouette. However, there are things happening in the reference that I exaggerated or completely ignored - the timing of the final animation, for example, is faster and snappier in order to create alertness and tension, while the body's lines of action have been exaggerated.
Shading department is the department I worked in and managed most of my time in Snowball. I did most of the shading work on R6, and had great help from Chen Hillel towards the end of the project.
In this stage we get the finished, rigged model, and do everything we need to prepare it for rendering - unwrapping > texturing (and sculpting) > shading (setting up the materials) > defining render settings. Sets get lit in this stage, too.
I plan on making some in depth posts about some of the shading in R6, but for now here's a basic walk through.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, we did all the rendering and shading in 3Ds Max 2010 and Mental Ray.
We had two other major applications we used, both of which were in beta stages when we started out, and both of which it's been a real pleasure to see develop across the course of the project and still.
Unwrapping:
The first one of these applications is Unwrella, which is an automatic unwrapping tool. This saved me A LOT of time, and we use it extensively for other projects as well. I used it to unwrap almost everything except for a few specific models I had trouble with at the time (the current version uses UV seams, but the beta version didn't).
If I wanted different parts of a model to be given more/less texture space, I'd capture a morph target of the model in its normal state, deform it so that its parts' sizes in relation to each other matched the relation I wanted to have UV space, unwrap it with Unwrella, and collapse the stack and apply the morph target to bring the XYZ space object back to its original form.
Texturing and Sculpting:
The second program is Mudbox. I decided early on that I want to avoid using ZBrush completely. I've used it a lot in the past and wanted to see how well we could manage without it, for various reasons. We managed well. We used Mudbox to create probably over 80% or 90% of the textures (with help from Photoshop), not to mention sculpting. The first version gave me a lot of grief, right after Autodesk bought it. It crashed occasionally, and didn't play nicely with meshes or UVs that weren't made to it's exact specifications (and the UVs were difficult to control because Unwrella worked automatically). But by the time I learned what I needed to do for Mudbox to like my meshes and UVs, Mudbox improved it's flexibility considerably, and it's stability. Today we use it for everything, alongside Photoshop.
Shading, Lighting and Rendering:
I did a lot of research before I decided to stay with MR for R6. I tried out Brazil, Final Render, VRay, and MR. Each had it's advantages and disadvantages:
Mental Ray is our default engine. MR has great materials, the Arch&Design material can do nearly anything, and the SSS+ material does most of the things it can't. They also just released then the new final gather system for flicker free GI (projecting along camera path, and capturing points' values per frame). However, the Anti-aliasing calculations were slow and gave bad results, the area lights were a pain to use, and render time in general was high.
Brazil had terrific anti-aliasing and filtering, as well as soft shadows. It renders quickly and gives wonderfully smooth and sharp results. However, it's materials arsenal is poor, and more importantly, it's pixel displacement wasn't good enough for what we needed.
Final Render had the fastest global illumination system. It was quick, accurate, easy to use, and flicker free. It even used MR Arch&Design materials. However, it too had less than satisfactory pixel displacement, the anti-aliasing was moderate, and it didn't have a proper SSS material. It also gave a slightly artificial look in it's renders I couldn't quite put my finger on.
VRay had the best lights I've tested. It was relatively fast, had very good anti-aliasing, and great pixel displacement (In modifier form! Like it's meant to be). However, we had a lot of issues with their floating licenses, and there was a poor material and memory management tools arsenal.
Eventually, with the help of the MR exposure control, the new photometric lights, and some other features, we decided to stay with MR.
Like I said, most of the materials were A&D materials. The rest were mostly SSS+ with disp. and SSS++, or scanline Matte/Shadow material for certain render passes later on.
The mental ray SSS materials are intrinsically very good. They behave well and are fast to render, and the SSS+ material, by Master Zap, introduces the A&D material's reflection channel. However, the biggest issue they presented is that they absent in render elements altogether - they simply output black. When I posted this in a relevant forum, Master Zap wrote the SSS++ material which allows for the material to show up in several render elements, and can have other elements such as reflection and specular made for it as well. But it to this day still doesn't have a displacement slot, nor does it apply exposure control to it's specific elements. Ah well...
The lighting was done using the MR Sunlight and a regular Skylight for the Hallway set and the Forest, and a host of photometric lights for the Flowers set. For extra lights I in the sun lit sets I used photometric lights as well, or spotlights with MR area shadows.
Rendering was done only later on during the production, but all of the render settings, rendering methods and render passes were defined here. We used MR final gathering for GI. The new system allows for flicker free GI with camera movement and object movement.
I defined the render passes with the render pass manager we've been using since the advent of the studio, Grant's RPmanager.
All the beauty passes were rendered with MR exposure control, and to 32bit float linear space images. That means we had to work with gamma correction for the textures and the final output.
This is a turntable of the Preacher after he was shaded. All the sculpting and texturing was done with Mudbox, Unwrella, and Photoshop. His skin is an SSS+ with disp. material. Rendered in MR with a Skylight and a couple of area lights.
I think I'd better straighten this out. Here are the major assets we had in R6 and their names, so that I can use the names from now without a problem.
Our main character, Snap:
Snap is number 17 in CLR clan (team). He has clan uniform/armor, and carries a standard issue clan weapon called Ashmedator (seen in the first image).
the Preacher:
The preacher's a large and strong animal. He guards the goal to which Snap's team is supposed to get the pigskin. His metal head has a shielding mask he can deploy to protects his eyes and ram people he doesn't like with. In this image the mask isn't deployed.
the Pigskin:
This is the game's ball.
the Hallway:
This is the spawn zone. When a player is fragged, respawns in the next round here. This is an early render.
the Flowers set:
The sets have lousy names. I'm aware of that. This set is part of an underground alternate route in the area which leads from the spawn zone to the forest, where the goal is.
This post will cover a few basics about our modeling process.
Most of our modeling was done by Igor Kreinin, with a little help from me. None of the art had orthographies, so much of the art interpretation was left to Igor. In certain places I did detail sketches by demand to fill in things that weren't clear enough from the art.
Modeling was done in Maya and Max.
We decided to have the models in need of sculpting, for which I used Mudbox, divided into two: the models that required sculpting for animation (such as the ground in the forest set and the Preacher's [the monster] anatomy), and models that didn't (such as cloth wrinkles in Snap's [the main character] shirt and dents in his armor).
We wanted to start with the layout and animation as soon as we could.
I started working on sculpting the models Igor finished while he worked on the rest of the modeling. The sculpting that wasn't relevant for animation was left for the shading stage.
Everything intended for heavy sculpting was kept strictly low-poly, and as quadrified as possible so that I'd have a cleaner, more evenly detailed mesh to work on.
The Preacher, for example, had his head properly modeled, and was given his basic bulk in low-res only. I took that into Mudbox, worked on it, took it back to Max for retopologizing - since Mudbox doesn't have retopologizing tools yet, and then back to Mudbox for projection and Displacement map creation.
Here are some of the clean models:
From Modeling assets went on to Rigging, and then to Animation and Shading.
2D Art and design was done at two phases of the production.
The first part was visualizing general ideas as we figured out our story. Based on the principles of the game (Fragball) R6 is based on and the world and feel I wanted to have in R6, I started threshing things out, comparing ideas with the synopsis, and trying to zero in on the design language and style I wanted. I decided eventually to go for a modern sports meets sci-fi soldier designs for the characters, and have something more surreal and aesthetic as far as the sets went (Steering clear of the usual industrial gray and brown colored gritty look). These are some of the early sketches:
After playing around within these guidelines (doing a lot of sketches, looking up references on the net, watching game trailers and cinematics, etc.), I ended up with the football derived design for the team players, the bulky and gritty design for the Preacher, and a host of sketches and ideas for the sets. Here are some of these:
We have a lot of left overs from this stage we still use to further develop the Fragball world.
The second part started after we had the synopsis and most of the storyboard done, and I needed to start fine tuning the designs to providing more accurate art for the 3D production to refer to.
Here I a) Figured out lighting and color schemes for the sets:
b) Collected photo references for materials, sports gear, anatomy etc.
c) Made detailed art for various parts of assets:
d) Generally made sure the next stages in the 3D production had all the resources they needed to be in sync with each other and with the artistic direction, which meant mainly collecting a lot of references from the net
(Some of them were also used for compositing and shot lighting reference later in the production).
We ended up starting the 3D production with a few dozen paintings and sketches and a few hundred reference images from the net.
In future posts I will show the artistic progress which lead to the final design for the team players.
There was also the art and graphic design for the whole frag-list (scoreboard) and timer shots, as well as the titles, but I'll keep that for another post, too.
Round 6 is a short 3D animated film by Snowball Studios. This blog has been built for the CG community. Here we intend to share whatever information about the project we can - tell about the production process, explain how things were done, etc.
It is recommended to start by reading the first posts.
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