Nuke!!!

Super super super tired these days.  As usual, work has taken over my life.  Even my Japanese studies, doramas, anime, music, photography and Bones have to take a back seat.  But I'm not complaining. :)  This time, unlike the previous times when I was frustrated because I didn't see myself going anywhere, I am really quite happy to put in OT... at least for now... and probably for quite some time yet.

Currently, we are getting some on the job training on The Foundry's Nuke and this software is awesome.  It was really intimidating at first because my background is all layer base software like Avid, Adobe Premier Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro etc etc.  Nuke is a node base compositing software and at the end of the day, the script looks like a flowchart and looks complicated and confusing.  Jumping from AE to Nuke was not easy at all, especially in the beginning.

I literally spent nights at the office in the past month trying to understand the principles behind node base compositing and at one point I was so frustrated... I think I would have sold my soul to "kyubey" for genius type competency in Nuke.  Hahahahaha... ... ... altho' this reminds me that I have yet to watch ep 11 and 12 of Mahou Shoujo Madoka. :(  I think I just don't want the anime to end. :)

Anyway.... last week, one of my seniors gave me a series of really good lessons on patching and camera projection and I really enjoy this kind of one-on-one session because after that... after I tried to do what he thought me etc, I finally think I understand the basics.

Today, I handed in my first clean-up shot.  It's so exciting!!!  Hahahaha... sounds silly but seriously, this is way more challenging then roto and altho' I don't dislike roto, still... sometimes, I want something that will stretch me further and Nuke is doing that right now.  Armed with the principles my supervisor and my senior taught me, I was able to work my way through the shot and I think it was a decent effort.

This afternoon, I tried to work my way through some example scripts my supervisor and given us and I was also relieve and really happy that I was able to figure out channel shifting from just messing with his script.  =)

K... that's if from me for now... I m tired and I'm contemplating if I should just call it a night and forget about "edge mattes" and 6 weeks worth of Japanese homework and just go to sleep. :)

Final Project - Breakdown AND other stuff

My internal time clock is totally screwed up.  Crashed out on the couch from approx 830pm and only just woke up an hour ago at approx 230am.  Grrrrrr....  need to work on trying to regain a more normal sleep pattern. :)

Anyway, the above is the breakdown of the Final Project.  I also used this in my demo reel.  I've taken away all the names and phone numbers etc because I don't really feel comfortable with giving out too much information on the internet.

I've been taking a break from doing any meaningful VFX, 3D etc work for about a week as I needed the break away from all homework related stuff.  Now though, I am thinking I should slowly ease back into it this week because I still have things I would like to try to fix and stuff I would like to learn. 

I'm not sure what I would start with yet but I don't want to kill myself over it for now because I really need/like to get a lot of non-work related things done like:
1) cleaning my room (it now looks just slightly better than Neo's room in the Matrix). :)
2) I really want to meet up with some friends that I've neglected for months.
3) I would like to complete work on a computer I've been putting together from parts.  If I can figure out which component is causing this computer to keep shuttting down without warning, I will be able to use it is a gaming computer and then I can start playing Civilization on it. :D  I think it's a faulty power supply and I already have a spare supply that I can put in but for some reason... I feel so unmotivated to mess with it right now.
4) Work on my Japanese homework.  In order to work on this Final Project for school, I am way behind on my Japanese homework.  Tomorrow, I will sign up for my Pre-Advance class so I will need to try and finish this homework and revise as much as possible before classes start again in December.
5) Starting to draw or do digital painting again.  I really would like to get better at drawing but admittedly I have more patience with rotoscoping than with drawing. :)  So it's been a start-stop-start-stop process for me.  I did like digital painting quite a bit and there is this one photo I would like to digital paint... so may start doing that next week.
6) Get a haircut.
7) Work on organizing and uploading tons of photos.
8) Play video games.
9) Start swimming again.
10) Read.
11) Watch anime, Japanese dramas and that ATV drama I've been wanting to finish.
12) Work on models - my Mini-Cooper and other unopened or unfinished kits I have lying around my room.

Anyway, there are a couple of things I could do as well that are VFX related:

1) Trying to get that bin to sit in better in my Final Project.  But I must admit... I am a little sick of the Final Project so am not sure if I really want to mess with it immediately.  But I'm in two minds... if I'm going to mess with it some more, I suppose I should do it now while it's still fresh in my mind.

2) Fix two of my previous projects which have some problems.  I'll upload them so that you guys can take a look at it.

a) baby shot



This shot is called the Baby Shot because we only had 2 weeks to complete this shot from pre-production to delivery date.  This was a difficult shot to accomplish because Shatter and Particles in Maya were very taxing on my computer and there were some other issues with some settings in the Shatter effect that I wasn't sure how to key in correctly that caused Shatter to really stumble during rendering etc.
There are several things I would like to work on in this shot:
- The way the particles interact with the objects on the table can definitely be improved.  I should probably create a dummy keyboard, mouse, monitor etc so that the particles can interact with it in a better way.
- I think I may need to re-track this shot if I want to get the particles to interact better with the objects on the table.
- There are also some masking and shadow problems on the wall that will need to be fixed.
- The coke bottle is tracked okay but not perfectly as it is sliding very slightly.  Will need to fix that too.
- Try and get that coke bottle and that 3d arm to look better in the footage, now they still scream out "I am a 3d object" very loudly.
- And I also think the texture of the wall can be improved as well.  The shatter bits and the particles look kind of crappy to me mostly because the texture looks kind of yuckky to me too.

b) hero shot



This is the second shot that I worked on during my 3rd semester and it's called the Hero Shot because the bulk of the semester was spent working on it.  I've not done the breakdown for this shot either.  Basically, the actor and the table were rotoscoped and separated from the original footage.  The walls, floor and chair are all 3D elements.
There are several things that I want to work on in this shot.
- Replace the material of the floor to a non-reflective material.  While I can still recreate the shadow somewhat better than what I did, the reflection is way too difficult and perhaps even virtually impossible.  Hence, the best solution is not to even do it at all.  If I wanted to try it, my lecturer said I could try just having a puddle of water on the floor and then have half the body reflect in the water rather then try and do a full body reflection because that would be very, very difficult to do.
- Move the wall back and change the material of the wall.  Basically, my bump mapping in that wall texture is way too much and kind of ugly.  Also, since the entire environment save for the table is 3D, I don't have to be constrained to simply replacing the wall from the original footage with the 3D wall.  In fact, I could actually create an entirely new environment if I wanted and would like to do more than just simply moving the wall back.  Actually, this was one of my intentions but I could not finish it in time, so even though I did start on making an entirely new environment, I actually stopped so that I could get the shot ready by delivery date.  In the end, I did deliver on time but with quite a few imperfections. :(
- Fix the shadows.  Basically the shadow that I faked for my actor and the shadow under the table are not good enough.  It shifts at points and is just unacceptable.
- Fix the roto.  The roto on the actor isn't bad in my opinion. =)  I really slaved over this roto because the footage quality is really bad as the school camera is pretty crappy so rotoscoping this shot was very trying and time consuming.  Also, the actor's hair was really hard to roto.  In the end, even though I roto-ed for weeks and weeks, I still failed to roto the last section when she sits down well enough, so I will need to fix that.  Also, the roto of the table is not very good at all.  I had a lot of problem with the table too because I think I made a few fundamental roto mistakes in the beginning and I had to rush to try and fix it in time to hand in towards the end.  Also, the quality of this footage is really not very good at all, so rotoscoping that table turned out to be unexpectedly difficult as sometimes the pixels will shift and then I can't tell table from wall.  Given that this was the first time I rotoscoped anything, I'm actually quite pleased with my initial results for the actor but now I feel I do need to clean it up better.

3) Also, I would like to improve my AE skills so I would like to work through some of the Video CoPilot tutorials that are available online.

4) Work though some video tutorials especially ones on Lighting, compositing, rotoscoping and effects in Maya.  As well as watch some video tutorials on drawing and digital painting.  And although I am unlikely to have time, I would also like to go through some tutorials on 3d modeling.

5) And finally, I would like to learn how to use a node based compositing software.  I think Nuke is the one I would like to learn right now.  So may try and learn some of the basics of how to use Nuke as well.

Okie dokes... end of my very long post which is probably riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, all of which I'm too lazy to fix right now and will most likely never get around to fixing. :)  Of course the chances of me finishing everything I would like to accomplish are completely zero but still, I wanted to write it all down so that I can remind myself of the things I would like to work on.  Also, writing this long post has made me kind of tired, so now I can go and try and sleep again and work on getting my internal time clock back to a more normal one. :)

Good night ya all. :)

Final Project - finished [I think =) ]

Hi guys, I think I'm pretty much done with the final project. =)  I was thinking of cutting out to a wide shot but I think I'll just end it on the CU for now.

Finally, it is done.  I'll be working on the breakdown after this.  So will keep this post very short.

Hope you guys enjoyed it. =)

Final Project - WIP 13

Okie dokes... I have completed Shot 1. :)  I've improved on the clean up of the 3 markers on the left wall and I've also done the colour correction.  It's pretty much done.  Yay!!!  Although... I'm not sure if I should still brighten the shot more.  Or perhaps the bin is too bright.... hmmmm.  I'll leave it for now but may change my mind later and tweak the colour correction.

Now, I'm of to ready the other shots. :)

Later. :)

p.s.  While QC-ing the clip one more time, I realised I made a mistake in the color correction on one section of the newspapers.  I've corrected it in the AE file but won't spit out a new render just yet because it'll take at least 1 - 1 1/2 hours to render and I may still make further changes to the color correction so won't bother to change it for now.  I'll be working on the other shots first.

Final Project - WIP12

Oh joy joy joy joy!!!!  I finally found a way to fix my masking problem and now the newspapers fly out of the bin properly.  After approximately 3 weeks and countless attempts and various methods, I was still unable to mask it in such a way that would make it seem like newspapers fly out of the bin properly.

My problem was that in AE, the bin had to be both on a layer that was in front of the hidden sheets of newspapers, yet also be on a layer that was behind the sheets of newspapers because as the newspapers fly out, they would cover parts of the bin.  I tried everything I knew from using travelling mattes, to painstakingly masking it frame by frame, to turning "primary visibility" off and trying to animate "visibility" of the individual sheets but none of it was satisfactory.

I'm not sure how apparent it was to you guys when you watched the previous renders but I knew that although I was able to get it kind-of sort-of in the render I handed in that Friday, it was still unacceptable both to me and I'm sure to anyone who does vfx.  I spent hours on Sunday night attempting to fix my problem when I finally found the solution on the internet.  I don't know why I didn't see this solution earlier but this solution was exactly what I needed and I am SOOOOO happy it works.  If only I had known about this earlier, it would have saved me so much time.... but I'm still really happy that I found it and am really happy that I learnt something again. :)

The solution to my problem came from this website:
http://www.onoff.ch/2008/06/21/using-the-black-hole/

All fellow friends who use Maya and AE, now do you understand why I say that that was really, really simple compared to all the methods I attempted in the last 3 weeks? =)

When I have the time, I think I would like to write in greater detail about this in another post so that I don't forget why I had to do this and how to do this again if I needed to do it again.

After improving on the rotoscope and using the new method on the newspapers, Shot 1 is pretty much good to go except for 2 things.  I still feel I can improve how I cleaned up the 3 markers on the left wall.   Actually, I think it kind of sucks right now even though I did spend quite a bit of time on it.  So today, I will take a different approach and see if that works better.  And the other thing I need to do is to fix color correction which I will get to hopefully by the end of today.

Oh... and here is the latest render of Shot 1, enjoy. =)

p.s. For some reason youtube is giving me problems, so I will use blogger video even though I prefer youtube.  Will probably replace the video later when youtube works for me again.
UPDATE - replaced with the youtube vid.

Final Project - WIP 11

In case you guys have been wondering if I've been slacking, I thought I should make a post. :)  Well... actually, I did end up no doing much work on Monday because the part-time job over the previous weekend really sucked up all my energy.  :)  I have been working on the project though and I thought I should put up what I have been doing.
Here is a render of the last section of the project.  I still have to colour correct and roto out parts of the actors body but the shot itself is tracking properly sort of.



Actually, I would like to hold this shot longer but it doesn't track too well towards the end of the shot so I thought I would cut to a close-up before cutting out.  But unfortunately, after 3 days of work on the CU, I think I will abandon it because the CU just doesn't track well at all.  There isn't enough trackers and parralex for the shot to track well.  I think I will have to end on the wide shot after all.



Will concentrate on fixing all the other problems in the roto and will colour correct everything as best as I can.  I really want to try and finish this by the end of next week so that I can move on to fixing my previous project.

Okay, that's if for now.  When I have time, I will try and put up pix of a modelling project I've started working on as well as a little trip with the family to the museum.

cheers :)

Final Project - WIP 10

This is going to be super short cuz I am really, really tired.  I practically didn't sleep last night and then had to go to school this morning before I went to a part-time job which I just returned from... so I really need some sleep like soon.

Anyway, the above is the lastest composite.  I have already rendered the layers in hi-res and composited them.  I still need to try and figure out one problem with the masking and layering in Shot 1.  Am thinking I may need to render out the layers differently.

Also, the color correction on this is TOTALLY horrible but I was rushing towards handing it in in time for the Friday dateline and hence, I cheated by using a one size fit all setting for color correction.  So as you can tell, it totally sucks.  My lecturer looked at it after I handed it in and gave me some help regarding color correction which I needed anyway since color correction isn't my strongest suit right now.

Will continue to work on this since I cut the sequence short in order to make the Friday dateline.  Will have to work on color correction too and I haven't completely removed the markers yet.

Anyway... i really am going to go crash now... I have to work full day tomorrow and Sunday so need to go to bed soon.  Good night. :)

Final Project - WIP 9

Okay, this is the latest update on Shot 3.  I fixed the crashing polygons in Maya and also changed the animation a little.  I also finished rotoscoping and masking.  Took all of last night and all of today but it's done.  Actually, I still don't like the animation very much but I think I will have to work towards my delivery dateline first, then go back and work on the animation on my own time after that.

Lighting hasn't been done and colour correction will also need to be worked on.  Will start working more on lighting tomorrow.  I experimented with it for one whole night the other day but I couldn't get it to a point that I was satisfied with.  Will work more on lighting the scene tomorrow.

Actually, I also have to do Shot 5 but Shot 5 is pretty much similar to Shot 3 and doesn't require a lot of animation or rotoscoping so that shouldn't be too difficult.



Here is a very rough cut of what the final project is suppose to look like.  The original bin isn't suppose to pop up in the first shot, I just haven't rendered out that section of the bin yet.  Also, haven't rendered out the bins in the final shot.  I cut a rough cut together so that I can tell what other problems I may have and I can already tell that I will have at least one very glaring continuity problem with will need me to figure out how to fix

Anyway, I am really, really, really tired.  So will go sleep now.  Later. :)

Final Project - WIP 8

This is another quick update.  I've finally gotten the animation of Shot 3 more or less down.  For some reason, the rigging and skin painting on one of the polygons got totally screwed up and I couldn't fix it.  So it meant that I had to re-do that entire polygon from scratch. =(  That meant too that me fixing that UV texture problem in the previous post proved to be a waste of time since I had to re-do that entire polygon from scratch. =(

I had a few more problems with importing both this polygon and the other newspaper polygons into the Shot 3 project which took me what seemed like forever to fix as well.  But it's all good now and I was able to complete the animation of Shot 3.

The above is a draft render.  Lighting still hasn't been done and I will need to work very hard and very fast on the rotoscoping.  Lucky this shot isn't as long as Shot 2 and the arms don't swing around so fast as well which would make roto a little easier.

I would like to tweak the animation some more later but probably only after I finish roto and masking.
Okay, will be jumping straight into roto after this post.  Hopefully will have some more for viewing later today.

cheers

Final Project - WIP 7

This sheet of paper will go on top of the recycle bin in
shot 3.  Unlike the other sheets, I used joints to rig this.
The other sheets used deformers.

This is a really quick post.  This is an image of one of the sheets of newspapers.  I forgot to texture this earlier.  I can't believe this took me something like 2+ hours to do early this morning.  =(

ARRRGGGHHH.... must remember to texture or at the very least do the UV thing before I do any kind of deformation.  Even though I used the previous method that I mentioned in an earlier post, for some reason it just refused to work.  I had to be very, very patient and after many attempts I finally have this sheet textured and bump mapped.

Okay, off to work on this some more.  I experimented with lighting Shot 2 throughout most of last night without much success.  =(  Am just going to do that later and move on to Shot 3 first and try and plow through it ASAP then light and render all the CG shots at one go once I figure out just what kind of lighting I should use.

On a side note, I'm kind of in a good mood today.  =)  That's because a good friend in Japan helped me to pre-order the Kalafina concert blu-ray and Kajiura Yuki's The Works for Soundtrack 3-CD album.  Yay!!!!  Okay break time over... hopefully this good mood would translate into good work in my Final Project. =)

Final Project - WIP 6

This is another test render of Shot 2.  I fixed the crashing polygons, although I still think I can animate this better and will probably make more changes to the animation.  The biggest change I did to shot 2 in this render is that I worked even more on the rotoscoping.

I didn't think that the rotoscoping in Shot 2 in the previous render was clean enough so I went back in and changed the method of rotoscoping for parts of the character's body which meant that I had to re-rotoscope the entire Shot 2.  That sucked up quite a bit of time but I couldn't live with the previous roto problems and I don't think I'm being overly particular about it.  I think if anyone watched the previous render carefully, they would know it just isn't rotoscoped well enough at all.  Now I am really quite happy with it and will not touch the roto for Shot 2 anymore, unless I spot another problem.  I also blured out the background so that the character and the newspapers stand out more.

Alrighty, that is it for now... I will be going back to working even more on the project after making a drink... probably a cup of coffee or maybe ice green tea... hahahaha... I can't decide. :)

Final Project - WIP 5

 

Hello, here is yet another test composite render.  Looks like I still need to work on the animation as some of the newspapers are still clashing. :( I'm actually not that happy with the 2nd shot's animation too because I kind of want it to slow down more as he is pretending to read the papers but am running out of time so I may have to just leave it for now so that I can work on the final shot.

I think I need to work on the continuity from Shot 1 to Shot 2 as well.  It's definitely off, not just the newspapers but also the character.  I probably should cut out of Shot 1 a little later... need to remember to check on that, as well as the newspapers later today.

I still need to work on the animation and the rotoscoping of Shot 3 which will definitely take time.  Then will have to do the lighting and render layers.  So still lots and lots to do because I haven't even lit and rendered layers for Shot 1 and 2 yet.

Anyway, I am relatively happy with how most of it looks for now.  I keep learning more and more the more I work on this project and that alone makes me happy. :)

Okie dokes.... gotta go and try and catch some sleep.  Am pretty tired today with working on the final project, running maintaneance software on my old and dying laptop and trying to remember Transitive and Intransitive Verbs in Japanese... my brain is fried and I still have to get up to play table tennis tomorrow.

That's it for now... cheers.

Final Project - WIP 4

This is yet another draft render.  This time this is a render of the first shot of the project.  The 3d models are rendered out in as an iff sequence in draft quality so they don't look that good.  Also, I haven't set up the render layers yet, nor have I done the lighting, so the whole thing still looks very rough.

I need to fix some of the animating, some of the pieces of paper are crashing into each other and there is a small fix that I will need to do for the masking in AE.

Will need to check the rotoscoping when I don't feel so tired.  For now, it looks okay to me.  So now, I have finished rotoscoping Shot 1 and Shot 2.  I haven't started on the animation or the rotoscoping for Shot 3.  Yikes... must work faster.

Also, will need to remember to fiddle some more with the Mental Ray Depth of Field for the cameras.  I still think that I have too much DOP.

I brought home my school computer two days ago.  So part of tomorrow will have to be devoted to clearing the room and making space for the second workstation.  I'm hoping this will help speed things up later down the road.  This way, I can start to render out layers on one computer, while I work on the other.

Okay, that's all for now... I need to sleep real bad.  Need to wake up tomorrow morning to play table tennis too... so will sleep immediately after this post.

cheers
p.s. hmmmm... the quality of this Blogger streaming video doesn't seem to be that good... I think I'll return to using youtube next time.

Final Project - WIP 3

Here is a very short update of my Final Project.  I'm still in the middle of animating it but I did take a break from animating to do some rotoscoping.

This is a screen capture of a test composite of the newspaper surrounding the character.

The final composite won't look like that.  This is just a draft render of the newspapers and a rough composite so that I can test somethings out.

This was a rather useful exercise because I learnt that with the previous way I was animating, compositing will be quite a bit of pain and will require a lot of masking to make it work. So after this test, I decided to change the way I was animating to make it easier and more organised.

Because of the test I have to go back to change the animation for the second shot. :-(  Sigh... and I may need to fix some of the animation in the first shot.  Still... I'm glad I did the test because it's better to change it at this stage.

Okay... that's it for now.  Good night. :-)

Final Project - WIP 2

The above is a test render of what I've been working on. This took me a lot longer than I anticipated because I didn't count on having to texture so many separate polygons when I planned my schedule initially. Also, I made one very crucial error which made me panic and took me a few days to solve. So for all you Maya users... TEXTURE your models before you deform and animate because if you don't, you may get swimming UVs which was what I faced.

Luckily for me after a lot of searching, I found a solution on someone's blog and it seems to work for now. Hopefully this solution doesn't lead to more problems. I found it on this guy's blog, if anyone is interested. http://animbiz.blogspot.com/ Read his post titled "Transferring UVs AFTER rigging...."

Anyway, ignore the blue block in the middle of the video. That's just a stand-in polygon so that I kind of have an idea where the polygons are flying infront or behind the actor. I will need to rotoscope the actor out in AE later on. For now, I'm just concentrating on the Maya portion of things.

Also, here is a pix of what the textured recycle bin looks like. I think I should add bump mapping to it too... but I don't feel like messing with that yet since I think I want to tweak the textures a bit.

I still have quite a lot more to animate... so I need to work faster so that I can start spitting out layers and get to the rotoscoping which would be quite a bit of work.

Anyway, that's it from me for now... I need to sleep. Gotta go to school tomorrow so can't sleep in.

Good night. :)

Final project - wip

One of the things my lecturer for vfx said we should do was keeo a blog tracking our progress. Actually, all my lecturers said the same thing but I never got around to doing it cuz the foundation section and software section of the course was really killing us. Now that we are in our final months, I have a little more time which is partly why I have returned to blogging.

The above is just a little jpg showing some of the models I will use later when I try and incorporate them with live footage in the final project. They have not been properly textured and I have not finished rigging them.  The model on the right is supposed to be made up from sheets of newspapers.  After a few days of experimentation, I decided to use a bend deformer to get the shape. I am currently setting up the rig using "set driven key" and will experiment with both a "lattice deformer" and "ncloth" later to try and make it look softer and less uniform.

I have been slacking a lot lately and am feeling kind of guilty about it. Will have to really focus now as I am a little behind schedule. Can't start being complacent now.  Perhaps blogging is a good thing.  If I want to keep updating the blog, I gotta have stuff for it. :)

That's it for now. Will sleep a little earlier today. Will have to do family stuff tomorrow and work more on the project late into the night tomorrow. Good night.