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.

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

 

Rendering with 3dsMAX on amazon EC2 cloud

I’m looking to boost my rendering power Amazon EC2 may be the way forward.

Hunting around the web I found Jud Pratt had made a bunch of videos on the subject of build your own render cloud. Alas Jud’s homepage seems to be down but here are the links to his Vimeo channel. Note that It has been some time since he made these videos, and some aspects of Amazon’s EC2 set-ups may have changed since then…

As well as creating your own virtual machines by hand you can also use an off the self solution from Thinkbox Software to manage it for you.
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Words of wisdom from Neil Gaimen

‘When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.’ ( Neil Gaimen )

I found this quote in the guardians article ten rules for writing fiction. In it several well known authors listed their personal do’s and don’ts for writing in a few paragraphs. There are some gems of wisdom for any artist. Philip Pullman simply says.

‘My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.’

Which is kind of a cheeky way of saying don’t get distracted. For him it’s about rhythm. He writes 3 pages a day, no more, no less, and keeps going until it’s done. As an animator I appreciate this point of view.

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.

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