Mar 162012
 

Find out how this atmospheric, painterly animated short was created using Maya, Photoshop and After Effects. Watch the film here too

For the Remainder depicts the last moments of a house cat who bids farewell to its home before leaving to perish. The short was a graduation project created by Omer Ben David while studying at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Israel. Ben David first began working on the plot in November last year.

“I was dwelling on a concept of a cat that leaves his house and searches for his final resting place for some time before then,” he says. “I pondered on that notion since hearing the rumour that old cats sometime leave their home to die somewhere else unseen by their beloved ones or enemies. I felt that this essence of a story is very poetic and thus should be treated as a song rather than a narrative.”

First impressions

After developing the main plot, the director carefully considered the importance of the film’s characters and what role each would play.

“From the beginning, the story was about a cat and a house,” Ben David explains. “The cat’s owner was also a main character but I wasn’t sure if he would be performing or his presence just suggested. The spider came somewhat in the middle of the storyboarding stage, when I was searching for a death motif to allow the cat to deal with.”

“I was greatly inspired by sketches and calligraphy, and some colour blocking when searching for the look of the characters. I figured the house, as a character, should be mostly colour blocked while the cat should be wired so they were in contrast.”

Creating perfect brush strokes

The film’s unique style was inspired by a number of sources. “I was very moved by a series of paintings by Lukasz Pazera called Postcards from the Zone and his brilliant Dog of Zone, which I figured would be awesome animated,” Ben David says.

While researching, the director also watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. “I thought it to be the exact poem-like atmosphere I was searching for both visually and musically. I love the ambiance and slow rhythm,” he says. “I was also greatly inspired by color block paintings such as Gerhard Mozsi’s, and the dreamy feel and pace in animated films such as Tekkonkinkreet or Ghost in the Shell which I adore.”

One of the film’s main influences was a series of paintings by Lukasz Pazera called Postcards from the Zone. You can see similarities in tone and style between them and For the Remainder

Ben David’s extensive research and inspirations helped him to develop the unique painterly style of the film. In order to achieve this in 3D, he turned to the powerful tools of Maya. 

“This software was vital to production,” he explains. “It was an inherent rendering method that got the look for my characters and objects, combined with the overlapping textures on the sets. Photoshop was of course crucial for painting the textures, but Maya allowed me to rig and control almost everything I needed.”

The film’s style, however, also presented some technical challenges. “The whole sketchiness and painterly look was the biggest technical issue,” says Ben David. “I did a lot of research about NPR (non photo realistic) rendering before developing the technique for creating it, and it was pretty much an experiment throughout the entire process. I didn’t have a clear point of reference on a technical level on how to achieve this look, and so I did a lot of testing until I reached a certain point where I knew that the composited render would satisfy me.”

Despite extensive research and testing, Ben David managed to complete the film within a fairly short time period. “It took me around nine months to finish the short,” he says. “I did some touch-ups, on and off, for a few months afterwards as I was not completely happy with some renders and I’ve worked some more on mastering the soundtrack with Onili. I’m very pleased with the final result. Both on the aesthetics and the feel of it.”

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Mar 142012
 

Find out how this ultra photorealistic film was pieced together using 3ds Max and V-Ray. Watch the animated short here too

The Accuracy of Time is a depiction of part of the process of building a watch, more specifically the ceramic crown. Created by art director Javi Martinez, the short was made as a case study for his upcoming CGI training roadshow TAOT2012.

The idea was to replicate a real advertisement and the entire production process behind it. The film will be used as part of the roadshow training to highlight some of specific challenges currently facing digital artists.

The project was created using a 3ds Max and V-Ray pipeline. “The decision to use this software was simply to make a technical demonstration of the many capabilities offered by the two working together,” explains Martinez.

3ds Max and V-Ray: an ideal combo

“3ds Max allowed us to develop the short very easily using the new MASSFX to perform physical dynamics and the ceramic particles and at the same time offered great performance in the modelling and animation of objects and cameras. The reason we chose V-Ray was the quality of representation of light, versatility, simplicity to recreate materials and the optimisation of production times.”

More-than-reasonable render times

Rather amazingly, The Accuracy of Time was created using only one workstation! It just goes to show what can be achieved if you’ve got the right amount of dedication: “The short includes the processing of raw materials [to create the watch], the material injection to obtain the piece itself, then it passes through the baking stage and ends with the exposure of the product with elegance and quality,” says Martinez. “But the whole film was in fact a very simple macro CG production playing with a basic geometric model, a virtual light and virtual camera. Given that the piece was produced using a single workstation, the render times were very manageable, ranging from five to 35 minutes per frame.”

Playing with the look

It wasn’t all plain sailing, however. Due to the style and close-up nature of the short, Martinez had to work out solutions in order to achieve the correct look. “The animation treatment and lens blurs were resolved by ZD channels and working on it in post,” Martinex explains. “The animation of the camera lens can easily change the meaning of a sequence so experimenting with this technique was very attractive to me.”

Overall, the short took Martinez approximately just under a year to complete from start to finish. “The 10-month production time was an amazing experience,” Martinez says. “But it led to a lot of sacrifice and [it was a] joy to finally get my work out to reach the community of artists in an industry which is so difficult and exquisite.”

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Watch The Accuracy of Time making of video:

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Mar 092012
 

Find out how this new short about a fascinating sensory condition was created using a combination of Maya, After Effects and Photoshop. Watch the film here too

Synaesthesia tells the life experience of a synaesthete; a person with a condition where two or more of the five senses that are normally experienced separately are involuntarily and automatically joined together. Synaesthetes can experience sounds, tastes, smells, shapes, or touches in almost any combination. Synaesthesia features a character as a small boy, an adult worker and a retired man, who can see and feel shapes and depicts his different reactions to the phenomenon.

The short was a final year project created by four students – Tien Hee, Kasumi Saito, Leo Chida and Nikko Hull – of Massey University, New Zealand. The quartet had to think of an idea to suit the brief of the school, which had a self-driven component as well as a pre-defined part. “This was basically to pick a topic and find a need or something that needs changing etc,” says Hull. “We chose Synaesthesia.”

Things shaped up nicely

In order to tackle such a complicated condition, the team spent a lot of time researching Synaesthesia and how it was going to affect their characters and set designs. “We decided during the research stage what we were going to do,” says Chida. “Each character was associated with a shape as were the environments. These were contrasting, for example, the first scene the kid was a circle, round and innocent and the environment was a triangle, sharp, scary and alert.”

The team also used many sources of inspiration to achieve the look and style they were after. “For the environments, I looked at lots of animations, Studio 4°C, Team Cerf, Tekkonkintreet etc and mixed them all together to get the end result,” says Saito. “It was hard to simplify the forms to get it right. We ended up mixing all of these with our own ideas to get the style we came up with.”

Added Layers

With set and character designs completed, the team began creating the film’s assets in Maya and UV layout tool, Headus. “This software is pretty awesome, I was really happy with how Headus sped things up,” says Chida. They also adopted a rendering technique which helped with production times.

“The process was quite simple, which also helped in a way,” says Hull. “Each layer was kind of easy, it was just a matter of putting it all together in After Effects. We found the technique demonstrated (kind of) on Deviant Art, I can’t remember the specific artist, but then we tried to figure it out in Maya and it worked quite well. But we didn’t choose that because of its ease, we chose it because of the style.”

The scenes were separated to make the whole process more manageable. “The old man walking down the hall is a good example,” says Hull. “We had the walls, which were all on different render layers. The background and walls were a single layer and frame. Then anything which was moving, so the phone and the character, were on their own layers and were the only sequences. There also had to be a sequence for the shadows so they could cast on the walls. Then we had diffuse, shadows, highlight, AO and particle layers. This all went into After Effects with some lights and colour correction.”

After two semesters worth of work, the student team completed the film and are pleased with the final result considering their prior experience in animation. “Up until the end, you have no idea what it’s going to turn out like,” says Chida. “But it was so rewarding finding out that all the effort wasn’t wasted and the film actually looked OK. I mean, some was wasted but we’re learning so it’s all good. Our degree consisted of lots of general design and even fine art so we’ve only really had about a year of animation training (in total). With this in mind, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.”

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Mar 022012
 

Watch two children’s imagination race away in this short animation and find out how it was created using 3ds Max, ZBrush, Photoshop and a bunch of third-party plugins

Insert Coin is a story about the playful nature of two children, Lucas and Theo, who imagine themselves as the drivers in a racing game. As they successfully reach higher levels, their vehicles become newer, much faster models, that is, until their money runs out…

The short was a final-year project created by four students РAlisson Thi̩baut, Beucler Louis, Garcia Tunon Nicolas and Mathieu Tiger Рof the Albert Jacquard School of Namur, Belgium.

The initial idea for the film came about during a warm summer afteroon. “We were thinking about scenarios,” says Louis. “The window was open and we heard children laughing, screaming and making noise with their bicycles on the stone pavement outside. We began to think of a story about two little boys running on a pavement, which lead us to the idea of a race.

“We had some graphical goals, we wanted to model a lot of different things and different environments so we thought our characters could travel in different worlds on vehicles that went faster and faster.”

Drawing inspiration from the greats

Both the set and character designs were carefully considered by the student team. “We looked at a bunch of great characters we found in animations from Pixar, Dreamworks and Disney,” says Thiébaut.

“I tried to figure out what made their characters special and appealing. So we defined a personality for each boy. Lucas, with brushed blond hair, is taller and more serious with his vintage glasses. His friend Theo is a smaller, bad boy with his purple reversed cap.”

With the film featuring many different environments, the team were able to have some fun with their designs. “We really wanted to enjoy making this short,” Nicolas. “The end-of-study work is the last chance you have to work in team on a really personal project. We wanted to have fun with things we like or liked when we were children.”

The quartet also wanted each of the sets to be unexpected. “We wanted to give a specific look for each environment and make each one of the them a big surprise,” explains Louis. “We looked at Bip-bip the Runner & Coyotte, we looked at Donkey Kong on Super NES, 101 Dalmatians and Star Wars, of course. We had a lot of other ideas: bobsleigh, planes, etc but selected the most aesthetically interesting.”

To create the multiple environments and assets, the student group used 3ds Max for modelling and animating, ZBrush for adding fine detail to the characters, V-Ray for rendering and Photoshop for final composition.

Alongside these applications, the team also made use of maxscript and third-party plugins such as Multi-Scatter, PEN-Attribute and BonyFace.

“I think BonyFace was one of the most useful scripts,” says Nicolas. “Rigging a face in 3ds Max has never been easier. The other greatest feature was our custom scripts. I developed two character UIs to quickly access every part of our character rigs, and I also created a script that setup the scene before rendering. It was a small script that would just hide and show specifics layers or apply a black material to specific objects. It saved us a lot of time and gave us peace of mind.”

Coping with millions of polys

Scripts and third-party plugins did not, however, provide the answer of how to cope with the film’s biggest hurdle. “Our scenes were really heavy, from 2 to 10 millions of polys for 3ds Max’s poor viewport,” says Nicolas.

“Our biggest technical challenge was to optimise our scenes, for which we used V-Ray proxies a lot. Sometimes we had to import the high-res model of ZBrush inside 3ds Max to avoid loosing details. We used camera mapping for some shots. For example, the grass of the first shot was too long to render for the animation and we had GI flicks. So we rendered a still image of the grass that we projected on the existing ground planes for the final animated render.”

After 15 months in production, the student group are pleased with the final film. “We had other projects at school while creating this one,” says Nicloas. “If given more time, we would’ve added more FX like fire or fog, and worked more on the animation. But I’m really happy that we didn’t cut anything, everything we wanted to put in this movie is there and we had a lot of fun creating it.”

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