Last time we had to play around with this same file we played around with last time. But this time instead creating the grid and point to the tracker nodes as we did last time this time we worked with as I said the same plate but we had to clean up the tracker pads that are visible in the scene and we had to create a Rotoscope for around the hole in the wall. This will be our terms project, The Idea is that we get a machine in the background of this plate. This is why we have to Rotoscope the wall.
Staring plate
First I started by removing the tracker nodes on the ground and on the wall. In total there are 15 trackers in this scene. 9 on the ground and 6 on the wall. I removed this using a technique Gonzalo told us during his classes. Looking at the image below this text (left) you can see the structure I used to remove the trackers. I used the Rotopaint technique where I could use the clone tool to copy the surrounding area around the trackers. I tracked the scene so I could create a card of a tracking point of the trackers. This card will move through the 3D space and will calculate the Rotoscope relying on the FrameHold where I produced my Rotoscope.
Clean up nodesRemoval of the trackers
After removing all the Trackers from the scene I had to Rotoscope around the hole in the wall. For this I quite did the same as the clean up above. Hold a frame in where you can Rotoscope the part you need and then place this in a card that I created from one of the tracks that we calculated. I had to Rotoscope many different parts of the scene so that the calculation would work separably for the different parts.
nodes RotoRotoscopeTotal for Clean up and Roto
Here you see my first version of the clean up I did and how I did my Rotoscope. The clean up in my opinion looks very good. You don’t see the trackers that were once on the ground anymore. But as for the Rotoscope I need to spend a littlebit more time on creating a better Rotoscope. You can see that at some parts it will move off of the bricks that it is suppose to be on. I will be working on this for the next week’s class.
This is the final product on the Rude Goldberg Machine made during our Maya classes. Reflecting back on this project I had Quite a few struggles during this whole process. Bullet is a dynamic system that I found not always easy to use. I have a feeling that it has a few bugs in it since sometimes it would shift through the object even though I made it an passive object and the other an active one. I also used the shatter mechanic on some part which did not really combine that well with the bullet dynamics. In the end I created something I really like but it still feels like some things are not really working how they suppose to work. To give it my own style I created a Background with a lot of gears and a clock. This clock is activated at the end of the video and will speed up the time.
As A group we had a meeting on Thursday the 26th, In this meeting, we would all come to discuss what kind of idea we have for our project. Before going to the meeting I had done a bit of research on the topic that we are doing and see if I could come up with a story for our animated movie. During the meeting we decided what our story would be and structure a timeline of a broad overview of the idea and who gets which roles.
Roles/tasks
Lee – Storyboard, 2D animator
Fan – Character model, Color correct/texture
Eddie – Environment, 3D props, Compositing
Masi – Character animation, 3D props
Phoebe – Character concept art, 2D animator
Roos – Environment, 3D props, Texture, FX
Jesse – Environment, Texture, Color correction
We went with the small story/idea that I put together for the meeting. for this I did research on the topic that we would enhance, you can see this research down below.
Research:
Cyberpunk is a futuristic subgenre that focuses on high-tech technology and low lives. For my idea in this part, I thought a little about what Jesse said about ayahuasca and how it is shown as quite an opposite of cyberpunk. Ayahuasca is a plant-based psychedelic that alters all the senses of a human, such as thinking, time, and emotion. They can also cause a person to hallucinate by seeing or hearing things that do not exist or are distorted.
Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, a ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.
Cyberpunk plots often center on conflict among AI, hackers, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors (“the street finds its uses for things”).Â
Ayahuasca is a plant-based psychedelic that alters all the senses of a human, such as thinking, time, and emotion. They can also cause a person to hallucinate by seeing or hearing things that do not exist or are distorted.
Ayahuasca is culturally used as a traditional brew used for spiritual and healing purposes. For cultural purposes, it can be seen as vegetalismo which is a religion that says they receive their knowledge and power to heal from their special relationship with the spirits of the rainforest.Â
Not going too deep into that subject matter it is quite an opposite of the cyberpunk scenery. For a story, I think it is good to match these two together. Not ayahuasca as a direct form of the idea but more in a way where as humans we tend to go back to the forest and to our nature. Since if u think about it we as humans aren’t meant to live in such a society that is why we can relate to birds in the city, we feel bad for these birds because it is not their living environment. In this futuristic cyberpunk world, there will still be people that search for this natural nature world. But as they live in the city they won’t be able to find this natural place these ‘low lives’ are searching for. So for my Idea I think of a character living in the cyberpunk city live that feels sad/out of place. While walking around in hit cyber aesthetic he finds a hidden place of the city. In this place he finds a weird different kind of aura coming from (for example) an alleyway. Here he finds this small selective area where there grows one flower (the lotus flower)
Lotus flower have different meanings across cultures, in general the lotus flower is commonly used as a sacred for purity, rebirth and strength. Because lotuses rise from the mud without stains, they are often viewed as a symbol of purity. As seen this meaning of the lotus connects with the cyberpunk [man] trying to go back and be reborn but one other meaning of the lotus is transcending; to rise above or go beyond the limits of. Which may be linked back to how far we go in this futuristic view of the cyberpunk world and aesthetic and go beyond this.
While living a low life in a futuristic cyberpunk environment thinking about what this high-tech world has to offer to someone that can not afford anything. Slanting through the streets of the enclosed built-in city that you live in throughout your whole living days. I stumbled upon A street I have never seen. Forcing me to change direction from my usual path, following a glow out of this world. In front of me is something that went extinct a while ago, a flower, but not any flower, a flower that will give rebirth to our society.
This week we had self study due to Nick being sick. During this time I worked on my Rude Goldberg machine, I searched some inspiration to make in one cohesive thing, so I looked for how I wanted to do my background. I decided to go with moving gears and a clock in the middle. This clock will add to the Rude Goldberg machine at the end of my simulation. I searched for references for my clock and gears and tried to shape these objects by these references.
For the clock I also followed a tutorial. In this tutorial I tried to recreate a basic but interesting shape and get the seconds, minutes, and hour marks and the numbers. This tutorial was a bit fast but in the end I was able to follow it quite a good amount.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kliXsAz6GEM
Tutorial
See below a few of the references I used to create the different gears and the clock as well (the mixture of the gears and the clock). I decided to create 3 types of gears so that it does not all look the same. Then I copied and pasted these gears to create a wall like pattern for my background. Then I grabbed every individual gear and rotated these as close as I could to make them look aligned, I did this by using the Z rotate key.
Reference image 1Reference image 2reference image 3Gear modelClock model
Example of the gears spinning
After this I decided to create a little bit more realism by adding some pillars to my build to hold up a few of my bullet rails and such. I google searched some images as reference to a stable metal pillar and placed these under my platform and under my first slider rails. Below you will see 2 of the reference images I used to create the pillars on my build.
I also decided to replace my ramp idea I had last week by doing a funnel slide, This slide will give more direction and will give the machine a little bit of a twist. This slide will be textured transparent so you will be able to see through it and see the sphere roll down the tube. Also for this part I needed some kind of support beams otherwise the slide would just be floating. I added these spy glass looking things to create the support beams for the slide.
Slide modelside view buttonbutton model
At the end of my Rude Goldberg Machine there will be this button that gets pressed by the newtons cradle that I made last week. When this button gets pushed the time will start going really fast on the clock. this will be the end frame of my Rude Goldberg Machine.
I’m still having a little bit of problems connecting all these different parts. One of the spheres of Newtons cradle is suppose to get hold up by this tube until the ball will smash this tube in to pieces and lets go of this sphere. I have not yet figured out how to do this. the tube I made with the shatter effect will shatter from the start of the video due to the force of the sphere of Newtons cradle pulling downwards. In the video below you can see a small example of how far I am with this part but yet to get the timing right.
Starting off this collaborative unit we had to find a group by using the topics on the padlet sent to us or topics that were created by ourselves. After 2 weeks of searching, I ended up being interested in a topic called: Cyberpunk, fashion, and AI. I sat down with this group during the second week’s meeting up and we decided on our group members. which beings two 3D animators, two 2D animators, and three visual effects. Our idea of the topic still was kind of broad and indecisive, talking about cyberpunk as the aesthetic and wanting to create our own view of the fashion idealogy of cyberpunk as a plot. We decided to meet up again the next Thursday and all come up with an idea for what our story would be so that we could further discuss this topic.
For our collaborative project, we will focus on cyberpunk’s futuristic aesthetic. We have linked this aesthetic to making an environmental scene and integrating this with the cyberpunk fashion style. This style has many different views, and as a group, we want to discover how we can interpret this style in our own creation. This will be visualized in a 3D animated movie.
For the start of this class we again looked at working in the 3D scene and worked a little bit with the 3D environment by placing a card to represent the wall and see if we could add something to the wall. We added a color-wheel, I moved this in the 3D environment to the card that will be in the same place as the wall in the video.
3D scene2D scene
We also woked with the RotoPaint to patch up things that we want to remove out of our scene. This is also what we did last term but now we conclude this with the 3D camera we use. As shown in the images below we put an framehold on the video and the camera we added and Roto out the parts we want to remove. As an example he showed us how he removed a pole that is shown on the scene, I adapted to this and try the same but then with the red door. This door had what I assume are emergency exits plates on them and got rid of these
Nodes usedDoor without emergency platesDoor with emergency plates
After this he also showed us how to create a 3D mesh for our 3D scene so we can get a clear vision of how we move through the 3D space in the video. For this we use the Point cloud generator node which crates a calculated number of points that track how the camera moves through the space. After using this we add the possion mesh node under this This leaves us with a almost completely closed off mesh of the 3D scene. (see images below)
We can also create our 3D mesh scene by tracking the points and creating a baked group. The bake will pop up as its own node called baked mesh, The is in my opinion a little clearer for the eye since this wont be a almost solid mesh but will show us an open mesh of where the streets would be and where the buildings are. (see images below)
Point cloud generatorBaked groupPossion mesh
As you see in the 2 meshes above that they are both quite rough sketches and this not always works for the best. You can also just use the camera tracker tool and create your own 3D cards to fill up different elements in your scene. As shown below I have tried this for the different doors. the right door was shown in class as an example and I added 2 extra examples on the left side to understand what I was doing.
For the homework we had to start on the scene he gave us. In this scene we kind of had to recreate an example he had shown us during class. This was to add 2 floors, one for the foreground and one for the background and also a wall for the background. In his example he also added some 3D objects, so for mine I added 2 cubes in the foreground and a circle in the background as a example as well. and lastly I added the red tracker pointers to the walls and the ground directing at the already physical placed in the scene.
With all these new techniques learned we got given another example of a scene were had to work with the camera tracker. In this scene Gonzalo showed us some examples he did which were creating the different cards in the scene and a door replacement. He told us to play around with this scene and see what we would be able to implement in the area that we think would work in the scene.
I searched online and found 2 different animal images that I thought would fit in the scene. I also went on my Ipad in procreate to create a graffiti like text to add to the total image.
Nodes
Below this text you see how I made the scene in Nuke. I created a camera track and used the camera to implement the cards in the right places. I color correct and graded the 2 images to where it would fit better in the scene. I also gave the images some cracks with the rotoscope to give it a little bit more of a raw edge. I used corner pin to slide the image to the right position and put them next to each other on the wall. To give the scene a little bit more of a story I wrote down ‘People are animals’ and placed this text over the two posters.
We have to make a Rude Goldberg Machine by week 4, This is a machine with our own design that portrays a reaction of events that collide with each other. In this class we had to work on our own Rude Goldberg machine and Nick was there to help us with any questions we had.
One of the ideas I got for this Rude Goldberg Machine is to use the Newtons cradle in my machine. So I searched for a reference images and started to model my own version of this (shown in the 2 images below). For it to work I searched on Youtube to get a basic guideline. I used the tutorial video you see above this text and started to connect this to my work. There is one problem with this: the video was an older version of Maya (2015) which did not include the bullet effect we were working with. The nail in this video is still in the new Maya software but it is not connected to the bullet effect. So I had to ask nick how to do it differently. He showed me a way in the new software which was basically the same as the video shown above but then in the Bullet drop down menu.
Reference image of Newtons CradleMy work of Newtons CradleRude Goldberg Machine 1Rude Goldberg Machine 2
For the Rude Goldberg Machine I did not really know where I was going through my process yet. So I started off with just making a begin to my project of parts I already would be able to do. These are the things we learned during the last class, as shown in the images above I made a slide using the spline tool and made a ball bullet over this slide. It then hits these domino cards that go smaller into a smaller ball. This ball rolls to another slide part and ends in the ramp. This is till how far I designed my Rude Goldberg Machine, I still have to connect the end of this scene to my Newtons Cradle.
Match-movement is used in nuke to track a camera movement of a video. This is used so that we the software understands where the camera is going based on a camera tracker. This tracker calculates all the movements the camera makes based on different points throughout your scene. When you track the movements you will be able to add 3D objects into your scene as desired. In nuke you can change from your 2D scene to your 3D scene using your TAB button on your keyboard.
3D view in NukeNodes used
In class we added the 3D camera tracker and removed all the tracks that were not tracking correctly. You will end up with a lot of green lines that show the path of the track. in your scene you will be able to visualize the floor selecting the different floor dots and connecting this to it being a floor. After this you can add different 3D objects into your 3D scene.
Scene 1Scene 2
We played around with it during he class and got this added to our homework to play around with. I added a flooring to the base of the image and 2 cylinders. I connected this to a checkerboard grid so you can see it visibly in the scene. The card I used is representing the road through the scene and the 2 cylinder blocks I placed on this are shown to really get a clear image of the movement of the scene and where these objects are suppose to stay put in place.
This week we had a fresh start on the new term starting with our first class being Maya’s class on a Monday. We got explained what we would be doing over the next few weeks. he gave us examples of 2 different things, one being different views on oddly satisfying 3D animated videos. The other and most important one is the Rube Goldberg machines that he showed also different examples of.
We started the class by looking into dynamic animations, so we started by making a simple animation of a ball bouncing and falling down stairs. so we first started animating the bouncing ball after that we also made a ball that in real life has a bit more mass to it, it falls off the stairs instead of bouncing. (scroll down to see a video example)
Side viewGraphexampleexample 2video example
As I said before we got introduced to the Goldberg machine which is a machine of cause and effect, where if the machine gets activated there is a chain reaction. In Maya, we got introduced to the bullet effect, which is something to use to define for example gravity of a certain object. We started by creating a simple domino effect as shown in the video below.
