Grasshoppers and 3D Paint
December 2nd, 2008
A couple weeks ago, I agreed to help a friend with a commercial project that he got. The project is to create a minute long animation of a grasshopper dancing to some pop song. I have no idea what the commercial is for, or why they need it to start dancing, but I figured this would be a great way to occupy my off hours, as well as make some extra cash.
My part in this project is to texture and shade the grasshopper. My friend Chris modeled the grasshopper and he’s having another friend rig and animate it. The client told us that he wants it photo-realistic, so that has influenced the modeling and texturing, but I’m quickly realizing that pretty much everyone wants “photo-realism”, but quickly backs off from that when they realize what it would cost.
Anyway, I’ve spent the past week and a half laying out UVs and painting textures. I did the UVs in maya, and the textures in Photoshop CS4. This was the exciting part, since CS4 saw the addition of 3D paint tools to Photoshop! 3D paint has been around a long time in Maya and I’m sure in other programs, but the best program for creating textures has always been Photoshop (in my opinion). The tricky part has always been hiding seams in the UV map. Adding 3D paint to Photoshop solves this problem handily.
Here’s a quick run down of the process…
Photoshop can now read .OBJ files and a small number of other 3D file formats. I exported each piece of geometry from maya as .OBJs individually and imported them as 3D layers in Photoshop. I could have loaded all of them into the same document, however that would have been quite memory intensive, so I did only one piece of geometry per file.
I then discovered that they’ve added a lot of 3d functionality to Photoshop. With geometry in the document, you can add lights (directional, spot and point lights), multiple cameras and various geometric primitives. Selecting the mesh itself reveals a host of texture maps that Photoshop is capable of interpreting. These include diffuse color, specular color, bump and a bunch more. The renderer built into Photoshop is capable of interpreting all of these elements, however it doesn’t do it particularly well. However, this doesn’t really matter since I’m using the maps in Maya anyway. The fact that it shows the texture on the model at all is more than enough.
Painting on the geometry was a breeze. You can use absolutely any brush, my favorite being the clone stamp tool. To see the 2D texture, you just double-click on it in the layer list. You can even paint in 2D the traditional way, and click back to your 3D comp to see the changes.
When you’re done, there’s a simple “Export 3D Layer” option that spits out another .OBJ (or whatever format you want) along with all the texture maps you created in whatever format you choose. Saving the source is simple. All the source material is stored in a single .psd file! Using the textures in Maya is exactly as it’s always been.
Here are some renders of the Grasshopper still in progress:
I think what I like best about this whole process is not the actual 3D painting. Yes, it is really useful for cleaning up seams and accounting for distortion, but the real value is the workflow problems it solves. Instead of having to manage a million separate photoshop files that have to be flattened before being used in Maya creates a serious gap in time between adjusting a texture and seeing the result in 3D. With this new functionality in Photoshop, it’s possible to preview a lot of things like color and alignment before having to bake everything out for use in Maya.
I’m really happy about this, and I hope others find it useful as well!
Where we live
November 9th, 2008
For a long time, I’ve been thinking about where I was brought up, where I have lived, where I live now, and where I want to live.
I was raised in suburbia. Since I was old enough to want to visit or go out with friends, I’ve felt trapped by the fact that any such activities required not only the day-in-advance approval of a parent, but also the transportation provided by said parent. I think it is sad that In my home town, the most popular hang out spot is the supermarket/strip mall on one of the busiest roads in the metro/west area of Boston. Sudbury is too far from Boston to provide frequent and reliable public transportation, and the residents (tax paying adults) of Sudbury wouldn’t want it anyway.
So what does this mean for young people? It means that unless you’re lucky enough to live within a mile of all of your friends, you’ll be confined to solitude or after school programs for most of your childhood. Once you’re old enough to drive you might be once again lucky enough to have your own car, but then again you’d have to pay for gas. Then again, once you’re that age, the only places you’ll want to go are in the city. And that is the most important part of all this. People who choose to live in suburbia want the best of both worlds because they can afford it. The “sanctity” of the country-side (or what’s left of it once that new housing development goes up) and the option of being a tourist for a weekend or a day in the closest city.
For some reason, people got scared of cities. Is it because of crime? Perhaps. However, those problems are symptom only exacerbated by mass-exodus of urban places. We’re now creating fake public spaces that municipalities spend crazy ammounts of money on to keep them free of “undesirable” people that the same municipality created in the first place. Cities are public spaces. Even small towns with blocks are public spaces. Public spaces are a good thing. They produce community and a sense of “Hey, I’m not the only person around here”.
I think my biggest problem with suburbia is that no one walks around. Everyone drives to get their groceries, or to go out to eat, or to go to a movie. No one looks at each other’s faces. The only community is a facade for the acquisition of status and self-preservation. I believe it is a symptom of the countries true problem in this new era: fear of the other. I believe we need to stop fearing what we do not understand and surround ourselves with things, places and people that may be different than what we’re used to.
Anyway, I got started on all this because of a video I saw online. Click here to view it, because this guy says everything much better than I ever could.
Good Game America
November 4th, 2008
I voted this morning. It was pretty uneventful. The cop that gave me a traffic ticket last year was the greeter. I saw my 3rd grade teacher, but didn’t really want to say hello since there’s no way she’d possibly know who I am now. The poll workers looked mostly like retired women in their seventies. Needless to say, it was a little surreal to walk into the Sudbury town hall.
Everyone writes and talks about small town America and the heart and soul of the country. I forgot that I grew up in a small town. In fact, I grew up in one of the original small towns. Incorporated in 1838, the towns oldest house dates back to before 1820. The Sudbury town hall looks a lot like a picture you’d see in a history book documenting the American Revolution. It’s got thick doric pillars in front of heavy wooden doors. Inside, is a long hall with a stage flanked by the Massachusetts and American flags. On one side is a torn, coffee colored map of the town as it appeared a hundred years ago.
All around the building and inside are posters reminding voters that campaigning within 150 feet of the town hall is against some town ordinance. It seemed to me an ironic sentiment that it’s acceptable to be bombarded by political commentary, ads, slogans, signs and ass holes right up until the point of actually voting. There was a kind of cheerful calm floating through the air as if everyone in the room was engaged in some cathartic release of emotion.
Now that I’m at work, all I want to do is find out what happened/is happening. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not as wrapped up as people say it is. Something crazy and annoying is going to happen and I’m not looking forward to hearing about it.
The Adventure continues
October 20th, 2008
I just got news today that the movie I’m working on will be going into February, so it looks like I’ll be working here and living around Boston for a while longer. I’m pretty sure most of the other compositors will be staying as well. It’s been pretty interesting finding out about how other people got started doing compositing work. Most of them are from either Massachusetts or New York, but there is one guy from LA. There was another from LA, but he only stayed for about a week. Let’s just say he and Brickyard didn’t really get along.
I am more curious about LA now. Apparently, you’ll always be able to get work there. Sounds good to me! However, I don’t think I’d really enjoy living there. For now, I’ll just go where the proverbial wind takes me. Right now, that place is here in Boston.
Long weekends
October 9th, 2008
No, not the good kind of long weekends. Working on movies is hard. You have to work a lot. last week was 12 days straight of 9am to 8 or 9pm. At night, your brain gets fried, but you still have to manage to crank out that last little bit before you go home. It’s hard work too. It has to be pretty much perfect. you have to nail it pixel by pixel, and that takes a lot of time and brutal attention to detail. I’m trying to get better at it. It’s taken me a long time to get my shots done… in the past two weeks, I’ve been working on three or four shots consistently. when i hand stuff back to the lead compositor, it takes a while for him to get back to me with fixes, so i start something new or come back to something else i need to fix. It’s a big revolving door until a shot gets finaled. Luckily, the only shot that I was allowed to composite from start to finish is finaled!
It’s a relatively simple one in which a boat driven by ryan reynolds, sandra bullock along for the ride, sails romantically into a clear blue ocean. Except they were really just motor boating in some harbor. I had to take out the islands in the background, littered with houses and antennae and replace them with horizon.
The absurdity of this movie has become a big joke at the office now. We keep getting feedback about making the mountains and scenery look more like Alaska. We’ve been matching the concept photography pretty closely and using 2nd unit footage and in-house footage all shot in Alaska, but we still have a long way to go. We keep asking ourselves: “why not shoot the movie again, but this time, in Alaska?”
Of course I wouldn’t have a job if that happened, so for the time being, I’m content.
Planar Tracking
September 15th, 2008
Since I’ve been here at Brickyard, I’ve been learning a lot about rotoscoping and composoting. I thought I knew a lot, but it turns out I knew just enough to get this job! I thought I’d share a few of the most interesting things I’ve learned so far.
The first, and most revolutionary thing to happen to my rotoscoping philosophy, has been planar tracking. I’ll admit, I’m not too sure of the theory and math behind it, but I’ll do my best to explain it based on observation and backwards engineering.
Last week, I was told that one of the shots I had roto’ed still had a jittering matte line. The line was clearly jumping up and down on the rock jetty that the camera pans by. I had tried pulling this matte a hundred different ways, so when I was told that it was still unsatisfactory, I couldn’t believe it. I had tried locking at rotoshape from between 1 and 4 tracking points, applying translation, rotation and scale, but my matte would not lock to the image. I also tried a series of overlapping chroma and luma keys, but the lighting and focus on the rocks produced an edge that buzzed like crazy. The only way I could think of was to rotoscope the jetty by hand, frame by frame.
I was not looking forward to this task, but I attacked it head on. Half way in to one frame, I was stopped by our director, Geoff, who asked me what the hell I was doing. He sat down with me while I went over what my issues were, and he suggested i do a series of planar tracks in Mocha. I looked at him blankly as I had never heard of planar tracking or Mocha. When I opened up the program and started using it, however, my head almost exploded.
Basically, planar tracking is basically tracking many points at once instead of tracking one point in particular. Many points means a polygon. A polygon means a rotoshape! I started by tracing small sections of the jetty. Just 5 to 10 rocks per shape, and after each one, I tracked it to the end. What happens is that each point automatically tracks based on its neighborhood of pixels. so as a rock moved, or a corner shifted, the point defining that edge would move along with it!
Of course I had to help it a long from time to time, but the whole process took me about two hours and produced the best matte I had yet. Mocha was the program I used to track my shapes, and I rendered out a single alpha channel for use in Nuke.
What puzzled me was how quickly and accurately it tracked all those points. When I was tracking some of those rocks in Nuke, it took me 3 or 4 tries to find a good rock that would track the whole way through. Even then, it would take 3 or minutes for that single point. Mocha took about 1 second per frame with the shape shown here. I can only guess that there is some corner cutting going on in the tracking algorithm. It must use the relationship between the points in the shape to guess where the next point is going to be, because sometimes I could see points slowly drift when the color of the point converged with the sky.
All in all, this was a pretty cool experience, and I hope to learn more cool things like this as I go along.
Travels and visits
September 6th, 2008
Last weekend, I traveled to San Diego to see my father and for my grandfather’s memorial service. To honor him, my dad had a plaque made to put on a veteran’s memorial on top of Mt. Soledad in San Diego. It was nice to see him in such a place next to admirals and privates a like. He was a Lt. Cmdr. in the U.S. Naval Reserves and survived the sinking of two aircraft carriers and a night-time water ditching. He served in the North Atlantic before the war, the Pacific Theater and finally, the European theater right before the invasion of southern France. It was pretty incredible hearing the oral history presented by my father who did a lot of research to prepare for the memorial. My family and I took some photos of the weekend, which I plan to append to this post soon.
This weekend, I am in New York at my friend Brianne’s apartment. She is working in a print shop here in the city and it’s her birthday this weekend. Our friends Katie, Sara and Jamie are supposed to come by tonight as well.
Taking the bus to New York was supposed to be painless except for the fact that my bus driver got lost in Hartford, so we had to take a round about way which took an extra hour. After that, however, finding the right train to her place was fairly simple.
I go back to MA tomorrow afternoon and straight into another week of rotoscoping and compositing.
rotoscoping
August 19th, 2008
My first week at Brickyard went pretty well. My job is complicated in its simplicity. My primary role is rotoscoping. For those of you that aren’t CG savy, rotoscoping is the process by which objects in a moving image are isolated in order to apply any number of visual effects to that image. As you can imagine, the process is not terribly exciting. It involves a lot of tracing and while technology has gone a long way in making the process more efficient, it is still largely a manual process.
Having said that, I’m enjoying myself very much. I’m working beside a lot of really cool people and in an exciting and productive environment. There are about 13 of us. 7 are leads, 5 are juniors (including myself) and there are several other people that work in capacities I have yet to determine. They all keep me quite busy with shots to roto and have been great about helping me adapt to using Nuke, our compositing software.
I hope that later on down the road, I’ll be able to take a more creative role on a shot in order to add to my portfolio of work. It’s one thing to say that I simply worked on this project. It’s another to be able to show a full shot that I created from start to finish.
Brickyard
August 12th, 2008
I started working at Brickyard VFX yesterday. It’s a pretty cool company. It’s located at 353 Newbury St. in Boston. The building is three stories, retail on the ground floor, commercial production on the first floor and film work on the second. I’m on on the top floor working on a Disney feature film.
At the moment, I’m rotoscoping a shot for use by one of the compositing artists. I have to remove the blue screen and part of the background behind two actors having a conversation. One of the actors is in perfect focus which makes pulling a matte quite simple. The other actor, however is in the foreground and thus quite blurry. With a little manual rotoscoping and blue screen matte pulling, I was able to isolate both actors in about 10 hours.
I really like working here so far. I’m paid well, and the company pays for lunch as well as pretty much all the snacks I can eat. The computer they supplied me with has no expense spared with eight processors, a pretty nice video card and two matching LCD monitors.
I wish I could post some screen shots of the stuff I’m working on, but that would definitely be a breach of the non-disclosure agreement!
Give a crap
November 25th, 2008
At work, everyone seems to be going through a rough period of not caring a whole lot about the project. Everyone is staying late, working hard and getting as much done as we can, but there doesn’t seem to be any passion. No one is enjoying the work. We simply grind through it all day.
I want to care. I want to be inspired to produce the best moving image I possibly can. I want to be part of something bigger than myself, and to have my personality shine through by the end.
I am falling victim to this bug of despair as well. I’m trying to excite myself with new personal projects and other things on the side, but it’s hard work to keep going and going and going when the actuality of life rears its ugly head.
I endeavor to become more than myself.
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