A New Update - Finally

So, as one part of my masters course work I've got to composite CG images into live-action and another part of work I've got to do is to composite (via chroma-keying) live-action into CG image (I'll do a seperate post on the latter of the two course works).  For my live-action footage I filmed outside and inside Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery which is provided a nice backdrop.

I just started placing my building into my live-action scene, here's the original image I was working from

Here's the mask I created for it in Photoshop using the Pen Tool

And here's my first render of my building objects placed in the scene

There's a few interesting things I've done:

I cheated quite a lot with the actual placment of m building objects in 3D space,they're in completely arbitrary locations, but if it looks good from the camera's perspective then it will work.

I used LookAt constraints to make my image plane always look at my camera wherever I moved it and I place my cameras target to the centre of the plane so it always looked at the plane - this allowed me to easily get the correct perspective.  If you need help working with the LookAt constraint just ask me.

I tried to model everything to what I thought was an accurate scale (my buildings are just over 5 metres high), this gives me nice, realistic soft shadows.

I took a concept from games design which to create your buildings in a modular way so that you can create one object and one texture map and duplicate it across a large area giving you a lot of detail in a very small space of time.

I'm using the QuickSilver renderer - this is a really nice hardware accelerated renderer which is halfway between Scanline and mental ray (both of which run off of your CPU); you can use the Arch & Design material along with many other mental ray materials and textures and even mental ray photometric lights.  The render parametres are very simple, you don't have to worry about final gather point density, rays per final gather point or anything like that - it's a simple check box for indirect illumination, shadows and ambient occlusion.  The first render you'll do will take a few seconds because it reads all the scene data including your materials and lights and stores it on your graphics card, this means the subsequent renders will be much faster, and the more times you render the faster it gets.  The better your graphics card, the faster it will render and to top it all off it's designed to be even further enhanced by nVidia's CUDA cores, so if you have a nVidia graphics card the quicker you'll be able to burn through your images.

I know I'm beginning to sound like a bit of salesman for QuickSilver, but (although it doesn't give quite as good a render as mental ray) when deadlines are fast approaching it very good to know how to use it.  Here's a link to the 3ds Max help documentation on QuickSilver:

http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-1EC7526C-A684-4D34-B351-C1B1123615C9.htm,topicNumber=d30e435245

and a video which covers the main features:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkwdAeZ2hEo

If you read all the way to here, congratulations!

I'll try to update my blog more often with some more work in progress images (I think i've said that before in prvious posts and it hasn't happened, but I'll try harder this time).

Moved To Glasgow and Started Uni

I thought it was time that I updated my blog and tried to get in to the habbit of updating it more frequently again...

I moved down to Glasgow on the 28th of August, almost two weeks before the start of my course at Glasgow Caledonian University.  I'm staying with a friend I've know since we were about 3 years and just across the road are three more friends who my flatmate and I went to school with - so it's nice being able to go round to their flat for a quiet drink now and again.

Before I started my course I was going to the library and looking over my old maths books - I still have a passion for maths and hope to be able tutor some secondary school students while I'm down here - and having a general wonder around trying to familiarize myself with the new surroundings and finding the room which my classes are in.

The first day was really just a getting-to-know-you day, the people who are on the course (only 7/8) are from varying undergraduate backgrounds: there's people from clothing, multimedia, product and interior design with only one person having completed the 3D animation degree at Glasgow Caledonian University.

One the first day we were told that for our Summer project, we could either do a 30,000 - 50,000 dissertation or a 3 - 5 minute animation.  I think it would better to create a 3 - 5 minute animation because you can also present it to prospective employees which might not be quite as easy with a large dissertation, so I've already started to think of a story and a character - I think I've got something quite good, but we'll see...

-Harry

Summer Update

So, I'm back from LA - I had a really good time and got the opportunity to go in to Disney Interactive Worlds which was very cool and pretty much how I imagined it to be; concept art and storyboards on the wall, loads of toys around people's work area and, yes, a Breakfast bar equipped with cereal and Starbucks coffee machines.  I was fortunate enough to sit in on some informal meetings between the staff as well as meeting the people I mentioned in a previous post that I'd been communicating via email with.  The best part was finally being in a working environment and getting a feel for the atmosphere.

Disneyland was another highlight, in particular the renewed Star Tours ride is absolutely fantastic; I got the Darth Vader - Boonta Eve - Coruscant combination which seems like one of the better ones.  I was fortunate that I went from 2pm to 10pm because it gave me the opportunity to see Disneyland's new World of Colors show and the fireworks above the Disney castle.  As well as that, I went up to Mammoth camping, saw a cheesy fourth of July parade and the fireworks at night, went on board the USS Iowa, saw some great sights from Griffith Observatory and ate some good burgers from In-N-Out and Five Guys.

So far this Summer I've completed three tutorial series': MAXScript 101, MAXScript Fundamentals 1 and MAXScript Fundamentals 2: MAXScript for the Masses and I'm just about to start MAXScript Advanced: Enter the Matrix.  The reason behind this overkill in learning MAXScript is that I want to push myself to the point where I can create rollouts, dialog boxes and macros which aid me when rigging; having the ability to rig is really good but you won't always have time to do all the repetitive tasks such as naming joints or creating and aligning every single controller object and this is where scripting comes in to play.  Hopefully I'll also have time to go over Paul Neale's Intermediate Rigging series which looks very good.

When I went down to GCU's open evening I was handed a flyer which had artwork on it created by previous students, one student that featured prominently was Lara Bendoris who created the excellent short film TIGERLILY as her masters dissertation, I emailed her to inquire about the course from a students point of view and she kindly replied and told me a bit about each semester, so now I know a little bit more of what to expect when I get down there.

Besides rigging I'm also casually looking in to modelling, so I downloaded some reference images of Hogarth from Iron Giant and had a shot at modelling his head, I probably spent about a day and a bit getting to where I am now, modelling around the eyes is quite annoying...  This is what I've got so far:

Until next time,
   -Harry

It's been a while, how are you?

So, I know it's been a while since I updated my blog but I'm going to continue using over summer and beyond.  Talking of "beyond", I'm very pleased to say that I was offered an unconditional place on GCU's master's course entitled "3D For Virtual Environments" which I greatly accepted, which means I'll be down in Glasgow towards the end of August and I'm looking forward to it - I have a lot of old school friends down there and will even be sharing a flat with one of them!

Something else which is exciting is that I'll be going to America in a week for 12 days to stay with my Cousin, her Husband and their Daughter which I'm looking forward to.  My Cousin works for Disney and introduced me very kindly (via email) to two people who work there in the games department (who are also exceptionally kind for taking time to talk with me) and I've been talking to them for a while now and maybe I'll even get the opportunity to meet them when I go over!

If you've read through some of my other blog posts then you'll know that I want to be a Rigger or Technical Director, I knew this would involve a certain amount of scripting so at the moment I'm dedicating around five hours a day trying to lean MAXScript which is the native scripting language in 3ds Max which what I'll be using at uni down in Glasgow.  One of the people I've been talking to at Disney is a Rigger and he's been telling me a bit about Python in Maya which he uses at work; I quite like Maya, although I'm much more familiar in Max, and I realise that it's the primary software for the vast majority of companies that produce films and cinematics for games, but not just that it's also becoming more popular for creating game content so it's something that I'm definitely go learn to use it along with MEL and Python.

At the start of the summer, just like last year, I sent out many CV's with covering letters to companies all over Scotland and followed them up with calls and emails, but still no luck.  However, I called Axis Animation in Glasgow (who produced the award winning opening cinematic for Dead Island) it was Sunday and, to be honest, I wasn't really expecting anyone to be in.  But to my surprise there was one person in, a Senior Producer, who was very pleasant and who I talked to for several minutes and she mentioned that they were moving to a larger premise in the near future and would be hiring some more staff and that I'd be in a good position after the course at GCU to get a job with them!

Anyway, that's a brief round up of the 3D related stuff I've been involved in recently.  A lot of exciting things happening in the near future and I'll be sure to keep you posted.

-Harry

Have A Look At MY Prezi's!

I've made all my Prezi's I've created so far Public so that anyone can view them; previously I've mentioned the client presentation, client pitch and my graded unit, now you can see the Prezi's I created for them, also you can see my latest Prezi which I created for Aberdeen College's student show which includes the majority of my work which is arranged chronologically.

Student Show Prezi:
http://prezi.com/yeusfksxcj5u/harry-houghton-3d-animation-work-for-aberdeen-colleges-student-show/

CGFX Client Presentation:
http://prezi.com/i97upc-dxn3k/nash-for-cgfx-presentation/

CGFX Client Pitch:
http://prezi.com/xelxi0ulnave/nash-for-cgfx-pitch/

Graded Unit Presentation:
http://prezi.com/wikmovzavtlr/aberdeen-college-hnc-3d-computer-animation-graded-unit-presentation-skateboard-character/

You'll notice that there's not a lot of text in my Prezi's, that's becase I don't think it handles text very well so instead you'll see lots of picture which I instead talk about.

Client Brief Helicopter Animation

After I had rigged the helicopter I began to animate it, in the end I had around 700 frames of animation at 25 frames per second.  Our brief said that our total animation (which also had included still shots and close-ups of certain areas of the helicopter) should be a minimum of 50 seconds and we already had a 10 second introduction featuring an animation which involved the CGFX company logo, so I cut out the first 200 or so frames of our animation so that it wouldn't go on too long (render times were also also something I was concerned about).  Once the animation was complete, I started experimenting with the rener settings - now, I feel as though I have to mention that this was on Tuesday evening and we had to make our presentation (which still hadn't been written) on Thursday, I knew we'd finish on time but I was unsure about how good the video quality would be (I was adament that we needed to include motion blur to really sell our animation).  Thankfully 3ds Max's QuickSilver renderer came to the rescue, allowing us to render at 720p and have really nice glossy reflections, AO, indirect illuination and motion blur with each frame only took approximately two and a half minutes to render.

In total, there were four memebers of the team working on this brief and I had positioned four cameras in the scene, so I saved scenes containing each individual camera and set the timeline to read the frames that the camera had to render and the next day distributed them among my other teammates and got the animation rendered out in a couple of hours.  Another member of the team, Aaron, was also rendering out the helicopter in the HDRI environment with mental ray and the close-ups, which included clay, wireframe and diffuse, with Vray.  After he had rendered out everything, I composited everything together in After Effects and since I was the only one who knew how to use Prezi, I created our presentation which included a lot of rendered stills.

The brief was a lot of fun, but I found communicating and sharing files over the internet to be quite challenging and looking back, we didn't give ourselves any room for error - distributing the scenes for individual rendering worked great but it would've been hard to get it all rendered if all four of us hadn't been doing it.

You can see the final animation here: https://vimeo.com/42083546
Below is a frame from the final composition.

Client Brief Rigging

Ultimately I'd like to one day be a rigger, so I put myself forward to be the one who would rig and animate our object, the rig is very simple, other than the landing gear where there's a piston rig, it's just basic linking.  I used spines as control objects to make the scene look a bit more clean and easier to animate.