Roses VFX Blog
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Month: December 2022

Categories
Design For Animation

Week 10: Research

Addition of the video presentation

Over the first term of classes, we learned how to create our research topic and got shown many different examples of 3D animation over. For the last class, we got introduced to The video presentation we have to do to give an audio-visual presentation of our critical report that we did over the last few weeks. for the audio visual presentation we need to create a visual presentation of all the important parts we talked about during our critical report. After we created our visual presentation you have to point out the parts u want to talk about in your presentation and make a short speech.

First of all, I will present my critical report below:

Uncanny-Valley-1Download

For my audio visual presentation I added images and text of the parts I want to talk about in this presentation. I tried to make it around 5 minutes so it is not too much information and the viewer will understand what i will be talking about in my research. I talked about a few topics in the video, these small topics are about what the uncanny valley is, a few examples of animation and film where you can see the uncanny valley effect happening, and how the movie fast and the furious goes down in history for doing a great job on a digital double. This all together concludes everything in short for my critical research.

video presentation
Categories
Maya

Week 10: Lipsincing

This is the last week of this term. This week we finished the 3D lip-syncing face model we worked on over the last few weeks. Over these weeks we modeled, textured, rigged, and shape-blended this model to get a lip-sync to a video that we were allowed to choose ourselves. I choose this video of this actor saying: ‘THE BIGGER THEY ARE…. THE BIGGER… THEY… ARE…’ This was the first ‘quote’ I could think of and thought it would be fun.

I realized while creating the rig for the lip-syncing animation that I choose a rather difficult thing to create a lip-sync over. In the video, the man is screaming a lot because of this a lot of the frames are blurry. Also, a screaming face makes a lot of the skin stretched which makes me use a lot of blend shapes to get the right facial expressions.

Looking back on this I think I could have done a little bit better. The render of the face is a little bit too matted for my taste and not really like good skin and the facial expressions are not expressed enough, I am missing a few wrinkles at some parts and some more eye movement. For the movement of the face I think it lines up quite well with the yelling that is going on and all around it is a good try for my first try but it still needs a lot of improvement.

Categories
Nuke

Week 10: Final Hot air balloon

Hot air balloon festival final video

For the last few weeks, we worked on the hot air balloon festival. This is a project where we used the balloons we made in Maya (I recreated the hot air balloon from scratch) in a template given to us (the background everybody uses) We were told to add our own composition to this, for example, we were told to add a spaceship or some rockets.

For my composition, I went with the sea life above ground. this idea I got this from Coldplay’s Up & Up video. I found these green screen images of different sea animals and added these to my project. The last time I showed a composition of my idea for the hot air balloon festival it was still a very basic overview of my idea. throughout the weeks I added my recreated hot air balloon that in my opinion is more to my liking for a hot air balloon. I think it also fits better in the scene than the hot air balloon I made before. Also when you look in the background you still see the building that will fall to the ground due to the particle force created by the orca. But now I also added the different buildings around it so it won’t be looking like a weird lonely building. After adding everything I needed to color correct everything so it all fitted a bit better into the image.

sea animal and building
particles and extra buildings

In the nodes, you can see how I added the different files that I found and a part where the particles have been put into the nuke file. I had to work with keylight to remove the green screen background and Rotoscope out different parts of the buildings so it would fit the mountain. As for the particles that move together with the orca swimming through the sky. In the end, I did these particles in Maya since it is still too difficult to create this in Nuke. I created a particle trail in the exact shape I wanted it to go in the video. I added the hot air balloon video in Maya to see the right path the orca would go in.

Particle trail in maya
Balloons

Categories
Design For Animation

Week 9: Uncanny Valley

For this week I did a little bit of research on the Uncanny Valley effect, what is this effect? when does this effect take place? what are prominent features for this effect? The Uncanny Valley effect is an unpleasant feeling that people get when they see a realistic humanoid robot. This effect can also work with things like masks, dolls or 3D characters in movies (etc).

While researching about this effect I came across one of the most talked about Animated movies that has this uncanny valley effect. This Animated movie is The polar express. In the movie the polar express they had the actors use Motion capture to get digital copies of them. After the movie came out they had many different reviews that go from ‘creepy’ to being praised.

Bibliography:

Seyama, J. and Nagayama, R.S. (2007). The Uncanny Valley: Effect of Realism on the Impression of Artificial Human Faces. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 16(4), pp.337–351. doi:10.1162/pres.16.4.337.

Geller, T. (2008). Overcoming the Uncanny Valley. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 28(4), pp.11–17. doi:10.1109/mcg.2008.79.

Collins, J. and Jervis, J. (2008). Document: ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906): Ernst Jentsch. Uncanny Modernity, pp.216–228. doi:10.1057/9780230582828_12.

Categories
Nuke

Week 9: Classroom

In this week’s class, we got extra material to work with. Gonzalo gave us a nuke file where we got an example of the different techniques we did over the last few weeks. He gave us this video where he removed and added different parts. On the left, you see a word added on the heater, in the top middle the emergency exit gets removed and on the lockers you see the yellow poster getting removed. and lastly, a paper on the board gets removed. I removed the only paper that is still on the wall and added a different poster on the lockers. In the video, you will see these changes happening. Even though we got given these different tools to erase or add different things, I still had a littlest of a difficult time. I feel that over these weeks we learned a lot of different things and I feel myself growing in the understanding of this new program I learn to work with called nuke. Even though I learned a lot I still feel that I am not nearly as good as I want to be. I have to practice more of these kinds of things so I can create whatever I like.