By phs | November 30, 2009
This week was spent adjusting the scenes mood via lighting and working on the hero animations. I wrote an ambient light to pull in color information from an HDR image map. I then experimented with different HDR images I shot while in flagstaff over the summer. The shaders had to be adjusted to account for the added ambient light, but it’s looking really good. I worked in massive to get the animated plants into the main scene, all is working well. I decided to ditch the cloth sim, as I it looked to jerky. I tweaked the look of the plant shader to get the displacement to look like an Echinacea flower. It looks amazing, if I do say so myself. I spent a few days working on the hero animations of the flowers getting caught on the cactus spikes, as well as the protagonist flower coming to life and convincing the others to attempt the migration. I baked out the point clouds for all the scene geometry. The primary issue i’m hitting is that the lab machines don’t have enough RAM to load the point clouds and produce the brickmaps. I discovered that the grad machines don’t actually have a swap partition on the Linux side, which is absolutely insane, and explains why they are so unstable. I’ll be talking to Pat and Jay about this tomorrow. I’m hoping it’s just not showing up in the system monitor, but i’ve had numerous dual boot machines, and the swap space has always shown up. Very serious. Other than that, things are moving along well, my render times are very good without the cactus spikes (less than a minute with 300 plants and raytracing on), but with cactus spikes done as geometry and not brick maps, the renders are around 4 minutes. All the shaders are adjusted and ready to go. All I need is to figure out the how to render the needles and i’ll be able to start the magic.
By phs | November 23, 2009
I had intended to get a storyboard together for last week, the main thing that i decided to hold off for, was to see if dynamics were going to work with my character. I spent two full days this week trying to get the characters to rag doll, and I had absolutely no luck. While I’m a little dissappointed that it’s not working, I’m excited about what I’ll be doing instead (more on that later), I did however get the cloth simulation working (kind of), and will be able to have floppy petals in the simulation. I tweaked the shaders a bit more (I know i keep mentioning the shaders, it’s just that every time i think they are done, i realize they need something else) to output separate Ambient, Diffuse, and Specular passes. I also wrote a shadow pass shader, all it outputs is greyscale shadow information and alpha. Ideally, this will make it so that i can do my shadow passes with displacement off, and the color passes with displacement on and shadows off. I wrote my water surface animation and grass blowing animation to disk, so the read times are very fast now. I fixed all my trees, apparently PRman and Houdini don’t agree on how trees shold be made. I’ve begun assigning all my shaders and lights in houdini. And, now that i know what i can pull off successfully, I was able to create a final animatic. Basically, the big change is going to be in the volume of characters. I’m thinking about doing a flower patch of around 200 or 300. It’s going to be amazing. Anyway, they’ll flood down the hill and hit the cactus patch, where they’ll be filtered into. I’ll have successive shots from within the patch of smaller and smaller bands of flowers weaving through the maze. Between each maze shot, i’ll do a quick cut to dead flowers impailed on cacts spikes. Anyway, the animatic will help explain what i’m thinking. I think it’s a good compromise between the time i have and what i have working.
By phs | November 16, 2009
This week was mostly about figuring out the different aspects of how houdini interfaces with Renderman Pro server. Additionally, I worked on more massive animations. I tweaked the walk cycles and added upperbody movement which has really improved the look of the simulations. I worked out the brain setup for the intro sequence, the plants waking up, looking around, and jumping up to the ground plane. All of which is editable to adjust for reaction to the hero animation. I plan on doing the final animatic tomorrow (in time for class). Once that is done, i can fine tune the timing of the massive “awakening” sequence and begin outputting the sims. I did alot ofwork on the plant shaders, particularly the flower head. Using a fibonacci sequence and displacement, I’ve created an excellent flower head shader. I’ve very happy with it. I also continued work on the TexAndDispBlender shader, which now has the ability to flip the texture in S or T (or both) space to account for houdini’s ST space being reversed compared with PRmans or Mayas. The shader also has the ability to bake out point cloud files with occlusion, color bleed, subsurface scattering, and surface color/opacity data. I’ve output occlusion and color bleed point clouds, and written shaders to render from them. The final step is to sort out how to combine all the filtered point clouds into a single brick map that is able to function as a brickmap geometric primitive for all the high res landscape geometry, as well as serving as a map for the occlusion, color bleed, and SSS lookups. I feel i can get that going tomorrow, the texture3d() call is a bit confusing to me, but i think with some time and experimentation i can get the final brickmap reading shaders written tomorrow. I worked out how to output matte passes from houdini/PRman, which will be helpful. I finalized the parameters for the cactus body and needle shaders and finished the texture and displacement maps. The cactus looks excellent. I worked out how to stamp material attributes in houdini on renderman shaders, which allows me to vary settings based on the copy number, so the cactii and needles will have varying color saturation levels. I wrote a few light shaders: a distant light, ambient light (with built in fake occlusion option), and a spotlight. Each of these lights ouputs shadow maps or really well optimized raytrace shadows using the transmission() call. In fact, the light shaders are so fast, i am thinking about rendering all my scenes with raytrace shadows. I’ll have to see how long the brickmap takes to raytrace, but if it’s faster or the same speed as the normal geometry is taking, i think it’s feasable to rayrace the shadows. I have also done some export tests for the hero animation, I think the fbx export will work, but it’s going to require some tweaking once it arrives in houdini. The other options are to export an obj sequence (which rules out being able to generate motion blur, and would be undersirable) or outputting an MDD file which describes vertex positions at each frame of an animation. The problem with these files is shader assignment and the size of the MDD files, which can be HUGE. Despite the issues inherent with fbx imports, i think they will provide the highest quality final renders and are therefore worth the trouble. It was a busy week, and alot of time was spent helping other kids in the class work out how to integrate custom shaders into their scenes and use houdini/prman in general. Many of the other students are going to be using the shaders i’ve written, which is fine with me, as long as it doesn’t violate the rules of the assignment. I’m glad to help, and all the preinstalled shaders that come with houdini/renderman/maya etc are written by other people, so theoretically, it seems ok to me, but ultimately it’s a call for the course instructors.
By phs | November 8, 2009
This week has primarily been about massive. I have the agents following the terrain, adjusting their body angle to remain vertical and keeping their feet planted on the ground. They are also able to avoid bumping into each other, while jumping, as well as walking. I implemented a speed control and a random variable within a set range to keep their movements from being synchronized. The plants are also able to navigate the cactus patch, and do a great job at avoiding the needles, they are able to avoid the cactii as well as each other. Their general movement (while not avoiding cactii) is controlled by a goal agent that i’m able to position at different points on the terrain to get the flowers to explore other sections of the cactus patch. I finished the in-ground plant animations, and will be setting up the massive scene tomorrow. I still have to do the final walk cycle, for when they are pushing through the wind storm, but that should only take an hour or two. I spent Sunday working on getting a handle on how to convert my renderman shaders to houdini otl files so i can import them and adjust their parameters from within houdini. I have PRman and houdini playing well together. I wrote a test shader to output a point cloud from houdini through PRman, the point cloud baked into a geometry brickmap properly, and everything seems to be working on the baking/converting end. Unfortunately, while I have houdini/PRman recognizing the geometry brick map, it’s unable to open it. Not sure what the deal is, but it’s at a point where i can ask Chris about it. My goal for this week is to get the final Massive scenes set up, and the dynamics figured out. Once that is done, I’m at a point where I can actually begin rendering, and working on the particle effects while waiting for renders to finish up. Hopefully things willl keep going smoothly. Oh, I’ve also adjusted my story a tiny bit. I’m going to have to do an edit of my animatic to get all the final timings sorted out before i start rendering.
By phs | November 2, 2009
This week I finished up all the environment modeling. I worked mostly in massive, got alot of my actions looping smoothly, began building the motion tree, and experimenting with the brain. I’m a little unsure how to get the animated characters to follow the ground, so hopefully Chris will have some input on that. I uv mapped most of my objects, and began the texturing process. I wrote the rock shaders, and the sand shader, as well as a really powerful texture mapping shader that allows the user to tile the texture, calculate a displacement surface through the luminance values of the diffuse map, allows for a procedural color noise layer to be blended over the tiled texture, as well as a procedural displacement noise layer to be blended on the image based displacement, and finally, the user is able to toggle between bump and displacement. I figured out the lighting image to use for the ambient. I also setup a wire based grass patch that features really gentle swaying of the grass blades. I also setup a point expression that deforms the water plane to look as if it’s rippling. It was a productive week.
By phs | October 26, 2009
This week I had to go back and rebuild my character rig as Massive can’t see root joints if they are in a nested hierarchy. So, the character was rerigged, I have all the jump animations set up, as well as the idle and shift. I still need to do the walk animation. Once the character was more or less caught up, I resumed work on the environment. I created a really handy procedural rock generator HDA, and began distributing rocks across the environment. I also finished up the cactus model and will be adding the cactus patch soon. The shaders are moving along and I’m really starting to like the feel of the piece. The sand is going to be tricky to write a shader for, but I’m sure i’ll come up with something.
By phs | October 12, 2009
This week I continued work on the animatic, finishing roughly 2/3 of it (i hope to finish it completely on monday, so it’ll be ready before class). While a good deal of time has been spent on it, I think it’ll ultimately prove worthwhile. By working through the set blocking and rough animation, I’ve sorted out a lot of aspects of the final animation. I’ll also be able to only model what is going to be visible to the camera. I’ve done R&D on the water surface procedural animation, the fur system grass and soft wind effect, created a rock distribution HDA, worked on CHOPS driven animation for the main character, particle systems for the blowing dust, and worked on wire object dynamic sims which will hopefully be used for secondary animation of the smaller roots and petals. This coming week I am aiming to finish the animatic as well as all the asset modeling and UV layouts and begin the HDA setups.
This week, I have been working on refining the story line of the Advanced CGI/AI Paricles project. I got dual approval on Saturday, and proceeded with working on storyboards and some preliminary modeling of the plant character. I also spent some time gathering reference imagery and going over Massive instruction videos. The coming week will be dedicated to finishing the storyboards, developing an asset list, work schedule, and putting together an animatic with a timing sheet so i can pass it off to an audio designer friend to begin the sound work.
Textual Storyboard v1.7
Plant Migration (working title)
Opening shot: close up of sun, camera slowly pulls back.
cut to: medium shot of barren sand and rocks
cut to: close up of cactus spines
cut to: close up of patch of wilted flowers growing in the meager shade of a small boulder atop a sand dune, one wakes up,
looks at other flowers, then up in to sky.
cut to: close up of sun, distorted by heat
cut to: plant climbing out of soil, dry earth cracks as he pulls up, plant stretches and peers out at horizon
cut to: POV pan of barren landscape around base of dune, camera passes over a patch of green and reverses pan direction
and focuses on the mini-oasis.
cut to: close up of oasis, green plants and a little puddle in shadow of some massive boulders.
cut to: medium shot of cracked earth with tips of cactus spikes in foreground, puddle, looking smaller, in background
cut to: medium long distance shot of massive cactus patch, and cracked mud flat before even smaller looking oasis.
cut to: long shot with plant in foreground with the expanse of dune, cactus patch, cracked mud flat, and finally the tiny little
puddle in the distance. Plant shifts his weight and looks up at sky.
cut to: close up of sun, distorted by heat
fade to: black
fade in: POV shot of ground, camera tilts up to see the backs of the wilted flowers, all slowly stirring and looking up to see the
hero plant jumping up and down and waving his leaves wildly to get the patches attention.
cut to: close up of plant pointing at the puddle oasis
cut to: quick shot of the oasis
cut to: front shot of the patch shaking their heads “no”
cut to: close up of plant pointing and looking up at sun
cut to: quick shot of glaring sun
cut to: front shot of the patch shaking their heads “no”
cut to: close up of plant pointing at the ground to his right
cut to: hitchcock dolly zoom of a dead plant on the sand
cut to: plants looking back and forth at each other
fade to: plants all uprooted, standing around, doing stretches, preparing for the migration.
cut to: shot looking up dune toward the sky, the herd of plants comes rushing over the edge, hopping quickly from one foot to
the other, engulfing the camera, and leaving a wake of dust behind them. Here and there a plant strips and falls, steam rises from their
lifeless bodies as they settle on the hot sand.
cut to: POV shot of running plant in mid pack with heading for cactus tangle. A few other plants trip and fall out of sight.
cut to: shot from cactus tangle of the plants rushing in.
cut to: shot from above cactii of the plants beginning to try and navigate the maze. Some wander off edges of the cameras
field of view.
cut to: black
cut to: outer edge of cactus tangle and a small group of plants standing around, looking at the other survivors.
cut to: POV shot oasis with mud flat separating the plants from it. The wind picks up, blowing the foreground plants
petals, a massive tumbleweed comes bouncing past.
cut to: front shot of plant herd pushing headlong into the wind, crossing the mudflats. Dust blows around their legs, and a
tumbleweed comes crashing into them, obliterating a large swath of the plants. Slow fade to black.
cut to: top shot of a lone plant, tattered and torn, crawling across the mud flats, a few blades of grass become visible at the top
edge of the screen. But, the plant collapses just inches before it. The camera very slowly pans in toward the dead plant and the bright
sun begins to be broken up but cloud cover. Thunder rolls in the distance, and a few drops of rain begin to fall.
cut to: black.