Overview of a creature development process.

The creature creation process must encourage efficiency and facilitate exploration. Later decisions should build on earlier decisions rather than be hindered by them. 

This process helps make the right decisions at the right time.

Overview

As artists cycle through different industries, ideas and techniques cross pollinate. Games and film share a similar process. Although in later stages of development, High end film and high games require certain specialisations.

Stage 1: Concept development and asset creation.

  1. A mood board starts to turn words into pictures. It will give everyone a visual reference as they make decisions. ( Pictures speak a thousand words )
  2. Concept art explores and unifies the separate mood board elements to determine the overall look of the model.
  3. Once the concept is approved work begins on the high-res sculpture. All the visual elements are brought together, and everything must be detailed: fat, muscles, even wrinkles and skin pores.
  4. Once the client approves the sculpt look development beings. The model is textured, and shaders are created to define how the surface responds to light.
  5. At this point the creature cannot move. The model must be retopolgised to create a mathematical subdivision surface that can be rigged and animated. This subdivision surface is initially tested with a basic skeleton and then further refined with muscles and facial expressions.

Stage 2: Creating the shots

When the rigged character is signed off, work can start on the shots.

  1. Virtual cameras are carefully tracked to replicate the movement of their real counterparts. Proxy meshes are created match the real world so that light and physical interactions can be simulated.
  2. For each shot the animation blocked out and pre-visualised. Once it is signed of by the animation supervisor a low res render is set to the client for approval.
  3. Once the animation is finalised and approved , lighting and rendering begins. The virtual model is lit to match the real world.
  4. Finally a rendered sequence of the creature images are composited into the original background plates. Details like shadows, film grain, depth of field, motion blur, smoke etc are corrected until we full believe that our character really existed in that location.

Developing the concept

The Brief

Creatures start with words, and a purpose. Some of this written down. Some simply felt. Others need to teased from the directors imagination.

Verbal descriptions must be transformed into something we can see. What does “quick” look like? Abstract ideas are not enough. Questions must be answered so our limitless imagination can be distilled into a single form.

Mood boards.

Mood boards are an effective starting point for any design process, and can be quickly created from Internet images.

Anything that we ‘feel’ connects to the design is suitable.

We might look for specific individual features Like: Silhouette, colouring, skin or, materials. or just something that reflects the right tone.  Images do not need a direct correlation eg: for a robot we could include seashells or a for spaceship perhaps squids.

They give the team something to point at. While making visual decisions. It much quicker to point at something and say I like or don’t like that .

As the design progresses mood boards become the start of a visual reference that grounds the design in reality.

Note competing aesthetics.

It may not be possible to incorporate all the collected visual elements together. If different routes emerge for the design (e.g. fat vs thin ) then a decision need to be made on which route to follow before moving onto the next stage.

Initial concept and illustration.

Here we start to collate disparate mood board images into a coherent design.

Silhouettes

Silhouette_Robot
Silhouette_cartoon
Small thumbnails sketches or simple black and white silhouettes are very useful in the initial stages.
It can be a mistake to get distracted by details early on. The basic idea is enough.

Good thumbnails can be very suggestive of the final form. We can see that strong cartoon silhouettes are easily recognisable.

3D concept.

ZBrush-Creature-Concept

Soon we should have a sense of what works and what doesn’t work. At this point we can add some mid-level detail to one or two of our designs. Polished production illustrations always great to see. Modern 3-D sculpting tools like Z Brush enable artist to quickly concept models in 3-D. This can be a great timesaver when moving forward into the next age.

Check the 3D model in it’s environment.

Get something in game that resembles your character and have a look at it as soon as possible. It doesn’t need textures. It doesn’t need rigging or animation. Just drop it and have a look. Is it to big or too small. Is the silhouette distinct enough from other characters. Show it to the team and imagine how its going to move and what’s it going to do.


Creating the asset

Elements of a CG Creature

Hi resolution 3d sculpture.

Once the scale and form of the creature have been finalised and signed off. The final zbrush sculpt can begin. This process can take a very long time and it’s not something we want to redo. Ideally the main features have been made clear by the concept development, so all that is left is the finer details.

Retopologise to create a subdivision cage.

There no automatic method of going from a high res 3d sculpture to an animated creature. But there are a variety of tools that can help. Various tools allow us to paint new polygons over an hi resolution existing model. The new surface is sucked down and conforms to the old one. Slowly a new mesh is built up that follows the contours of the original.

Create an animation rig to test and finalise the mesh topology.

There’s no point creating a beautiful character model if it falls apart when it moves.

Texturing

Create UV layout

Export technical passes for the texture artist.

Project normal and ambient occlusion maps from the 3d sculpture to the animation model

Paint textures for diffuse colour and other material qualities.

Rough materials have little shine where as smooth metals can be almost perfect mirrors. CG methods are constantly evolving and with latest tools we can now paint with materials rather than just colour.

Watermarks and copyright

Morel vs AFP copyright verdict.

Just read an interesting article on copyright of photos http://www.pdnonline.com/news/Morel-v-AFP-Copyrig-9598.shtml

Essentially the key point is that although images uploaded to Twitter are freely available for re-distribution by other Twitter users under their terms of service. This does not make the image public domain and freely distributable.  So Getty were break the Law by selling the images to other people outside of Twitter.

Whilst this relates to American Law I’d be interested to see if a similar case can be made in England.

Additionally reading through the comment thread. Alfonso Bresciani makes a good point.

You don’t have to put a watermark But if you do: Section 1202 of the U.S. Copyright Act makes it illegal for someone to remove the watermark from your photo so that it can disguise the infringement when used. The fines start at $2500 and go to $25,000 in addition to attorneys’ fees and any damages for the infringement.

You can read the copyright act yourself here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202

Watermark images to make copyright clear.

In this day and age publishing our work online is essential. If someone steals an image then we may have a fight on our hands to prove the image wasn’t public domain. However by watermarking each image the copyright becomes clear and it’s illegal for someone to remove it.

 

Costing animation: good ideas with a good stories win

Da_n_flowersThe art of budget animation is much like the art of budget live action movies. Can we create something compelling with a small cast of characters in a single location? The answer is of course ‘yes we can’ given a good idea and a good script.

With animation I find there are three categories of cost

  • Cost to plan
  • Cost per asset
  • Cost per shot

Cost to plan

  • Script
  • mood boards and concept art.
  • storyboards
  • Management and scheduling

Cost per asset

(per character , per environment , per prop )

  • Modelling
  • Rigging ( connecting the model to a skeleton for animation
  • texturing ( The colour of the surface )
  • material shaders ( how the surface responds to light … is reflective, dusty, matte transparent etc… )

Cost per shot

  • Animation time
  • special FX expositions etc
  • Lighting and rendering
  • Compositing (layering different images and movies together to create the final shot )
  • Sound design
  • Music
  • Editing

For a fully CG animation literally every blade off grass must be made and placed in our virtual world, and every hair on a characters head must be combed into place. We must be virtual makeup artists, carpenters, hairdresser, tailors, photographers etc.. All the jobs of a liveaction movie are recreated virtually.

Photoreal CG is a lot of work. Costs will add up into thousands of pounds per character and per shot. With games costing many millions to create there are huge marketing budgets, and we have been wowed by many epic animations costing hundreds of thousands.

So the art of budget animation is to minimise the number of locations and the size of the cast. But With animation we also have the advantage of creating simplified styles (like southpark or monty pythons cutout animation ) and this can greatly reduce costs.

We have a range of styles to chose from. Here they are in order of cost

  • Stills with sound and music ( like a moving comic )
  • 2d Animated Cartoon Cutouts
  • 3d Animation in a cartoon style
  • 3d Characters composited into photographed environments
  • 3d characters in fully 3d worlds

… good ideas with a good stories win

With a good script all of these styles can deliver a compelling story. We can blind our audience with stunning visual FX. But a good idea with a good story will do the job just as well, and we can get the message across  for considerably less money.

On the flip side holes in the script only get worse as the production develops. Its very hard to fix a bad story in post…

A good production methodology helps.

The deeper into the production we get the longer everything takes. There’s no point polishing a shot if it’s not needed. Good story boards and previs will save time in the long run.

This process is beautiful described in this short  The story of animation

 

VFX Post-production tips.

These are our top tips for managing the post-production process. Essentially we’re trying to control these truisms.

  • How do we check everyone imagines the same thing?
  • Stuff never turns out quite the way we imagined it.

Continue reading

The creative cycle.

Recently I was listening to a radio show. A panel of profession artists were talking about there work.

Asked about the creative process. She described it as:

Observe,Observe,Observe,Create.

There is a natural pattern to the way we tease solid ideas out of feelings and concepts. Many people have written about this.

I like to summarize my process as.

Consume, Collate, Copy, Create, Compare.

It reflects my first inspiration because consuming copying, and comparing are all ways of observing.

  1. Observe / Consume
  2. Collate
  3. Observe / Copy
  4. Create
  5. Observe / Compare.

Consume

First I consume the world around me. Actively collecting ideas from the books, galleys and Internet or passively noting things as I go around my daily life. My ideas germinate as I observe the world around me. I subconsciously absorb the information, and consciously seek out things that feel right.
Feeling right  is the key here. Our Brains are pattern matching trying to find things that fit new concept. I don’t need to justify the choices with too much reason. That will just get in the way. I need to promote the right frame of mind to help the subconscious process the information.

Soon I’ll have a pile of images which are a mixture of mood, style, overall design and interesting details.

Collate

Whilst I may like the feel of the ideas I’ve created. Not all of them are compatible. This may lead to different strands of design being developed. However if these two strands cannot be integrated a choice must soon be made over which route to follow. So while consuming I’m also sorting and categorizing.

UFO … example industrial vs alien

Copy

Eventually I start trying things.