Rendering and Post Processing

Firstly, I'd like to advise not to render projects the day before they are due. I painstakingly waited for hours as four of the university's computers sluggishly rendered my animation in Maya. I used the Mental Ray rendering software with production quality motion blur settings. Mental Ray seemed the be the best rendering software available for me to use and is great for creating cartoon style animations due to its heavily saturated colours and bright lighting. I regret leaving rendering to the last minute as I had planned to add a toon shader to the characters, but ran out of time.
Prior to this project, I had been rendering my frames to the targa file format, giving each of the frames a green background to key out in After effects. However, I learnt to render out to the PNG file format for an already transparent background. After hours of pacing and cursing the computers finished rendering and I moved onto post processing in Adobe After Effects.

Below is a screenshot of my project during its final steps before rendering in Adobe After Effects.



Once in After Effects I didn't need to do much other than place each animation scene on top of its respective video background and place in a few masks. Once all of the six scenes of my animation were all lined up properly in the timeline I used masks to cut out the characters and they came from or went behind walls and doors. Once this was all done I rendered the file out to the AVI file format, compressing it with the Xvid MPEG-4 codec. After watching this first render of the compiled VFX project, I realised it was playing through too fast. To fix this I just went back to the After Effects project and enabled time remapping. After adjusting it to the speed I desired I rendered it once again and that video is now ready for the final submission.

check out the final render at http://www.vimeo.com/16298300

Lighting and Cameras

Below is the basic layout I used for each of my scenes (this particular one being for the first)

I used a reasonably simple scene layout in Autodesk Maya when animating my characters, lighting the scene and setting up cameras. In each scene, I created a ground plane for shadows to be cast onto and applied 'use background' shaders to them in order to make them transparent in the renders. I also had a plane in the background with a single frame of the video background intended for that particular scene. This was for animation reference and this plane was left out from the renders as the video backgrounds are to be put in during the post processing in Adobe After Effects.

As I am going to render using Mental Ray, I used an image based lighting sphere to illuminate the scene and give it some natural lighting. I then applied 3 point lighting to the characters in the scenes to highlight them and fill out some darkness around them that the image based lighting sphere couldn't light up. I do, however. use the term '3 point lighting' loosely. In many of the scenes a main light, rim light and fill light didn't collectively do the job. I then had to add more point lights (used as the 'fill' lights) to illuminate the characters properly.

Each of my scenes counted for one still camera shot and so each separate Maya scene had the one renderable camera. I just used the standard maya camera (no aim cameras or anything fancy like that) and set a keyframe for it in the one spot it was to film the animation from.

Video Footage

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm going to be integrating my CG assets into an augmented video background. I'm not very well equipped for recording video footage but I managed to find a friend who had a video camera for me. The only downside was that this video camera is a few years old and doesn't shoot in any sort of high definition quality. Although, the footage didn't blur too badly when I stretched it to the 1024 x 576 resolution needed. The camera also output its videos to the .MOD format, which was very annoying as it isn't a widely recognized format by any post processing software. After a couple of hours of painfully sifting through the internet for free file converter's that didn't watermark, I was informed that Adobe Media Encoder CS4, a program I had handy all along, can convert it.

Above is the camera and tripod I used for all of the footage.

All of the footage I recorded were still frame videos. I chose to have no panning or zooming, etc to make the footage fit my cartoony style. In most cartoons there is next to no camera movement, rather, the cameras stays perfectly still as the cartoon switches between shots. A good example of this is Seth Macfarlane's "Family Guy".

Characters

Below are some screenshots of my hamburger character for the project. This guy is the protagonist of the animation and is the escapee of the evil robot's kitchen. I have personified it with legs and a tomato 'tongue' and I've given it a cheeky attitude. To display this cheekiness, it pokes it 'tongue' out at the antagonist and the like. It took me roughly an hour to create the model, another hour to texture and then another hour and a half or so to rig it. Not a bad effort seeing as this is probably the fastest I've ever put a character together in Autodesk Maya. I've gone for a very cartoony style with this character as I do with most art I create. I plan to add a toon shader to this character after I complete the animating process. This should give a finishing touch to the cartoon feel I want for this character. Hopefully it will fit into the video composition without too much trouble without looking too out of place.

Here is the robot character I originally created for the first two projects for CG Toolkit. He is the antagonist and is your run of the mill evil robot. It is a cold chunk of steel with no emotion, no feelings and is only programmed to do one thing; waste disposal (i.e. to kill unwanted leftover hamburgers). I've gradually added to this character as the semester has progressed through previous assignments so I'm not entirely sure how long I've spent creating it. Like the hamburger, I've gone for a catoony style for this guy and plan to apply a toon shader to him. To reiterate, I'm hoping these cartoony characters will fit the video composition, not in a realistic fashion, but in a way in which they stand out against the background.

Choice Of Medium

This project gave me a choice between integrating 3D assemblies into either augmented video or animated matte painting. I've been a bit indecisive as to which medium, but finally have a decision. My decision was originally leaning towards animated matte paintings, allowing me to create whatever world I please with the tip of my Wacom tablet pen. However, this idea turned out to be more work than I had thought it would be. When I sat down to try and start drawing the first of these animated matte paintings, I noticed it was going to take much longer than I had anticipated and, to be honest, my drawing strengths lie in characters, not backgrounds. I was also finding it difficult to come up with a background that would fit the 3D characters I had made for this project, as my test drawing didn't have much depth of field. After deliberating these factors I've decided to go with augmented video backgrounds. Once I set up the shots I want for the project, filming each of the sequences I need is an almost effortless process compared to drawing them. I know from prior experience (the previous assignment) that it will look at least alright (and not terrible like the drawn backgrounds). Also, if I screw up a video shot, its not much trouble to do it again, while with drawing, screw up and its hours of work lost forever.

The only problem I have now is that filming within a fast food restaurant (and one with a vegan restaurant across the street) is very unlikely. Instead, I'm going to replace it with a regular household kitchen (that has its own personal robot chef). I'll also cut the vegan restaurant from the end now and have the burger escape, running down the street, on its way to the vegan restaurant (that the audience never sees). Also, at the start when the burger is sitting on the kitchen counter, before it runs away, I'll have the burger thinking of the vegan restaurant (within a thought bubble). To do this, I'll just photoshop a regular restaurant to have some sort of stupid vegan related name ("Hungry Hungry Hippies" maybe?).

Storyboard

Below, is my storyboard for this VFX project. Click on it to take a closer look and then I'll elaborate on it a bit.

This is a very simple storyboard, as I always do when it comes to projects such as this. I never bother with an overly detailed storyboard as my ideas are always subject to change, especially when I'm in the middle of animating for them. This storyboard is basically just a simple guideline for me to follow when I go to set up my shots for the video or animated matte painting (haven't made a choice between the two just yet) and animate the characters. Basically, the idea of the animation is that the hamburger wants to escape the fast food restaurant before it can be served up and eaten. It runs for it while the robot worker is out back preparing a mountain of burgers and proceeds to pursue the escapee burger. The burger then evades the robot and runs across the street to a vegan restaurant, where it is safe. This is exploring the utopia/dystopia theme through the evil fast food joint, where innocent, delicious burgers are massacred (dystopia) and the vegan restaurant, where these innocent, delicious burgers won't be eaten (utopia).