You combined all the elements very nicely. Nice atmosphere and mood.
I think this is my favorite one, good job!
FXWars! "Dracula's Castle"!: Trey Harrell, EXTERIOR
system
#42
Lol, I thought i recognised that music! Garage band is quite fun!:buttrock:- I had the oppurtunity to try it out in my video production class:).
As for your piece, i think it’s definitely going to win for something: great job!
tharrell
#44
A little more about the character rigging in my piece:
According to my short script treatment, originally it called for a spider, a fly, a horse drawn carriage and potentially bats.
From the time I joined the contest until delivery, I had three weeks to deliver everything, and I really wanted to concentrate on a single, difficult camera move.
Slight confession at this point: before this project, I’d never animated anything with more than two legs, or with wings.
Because of this, I knew that I was going to have to refine my level of animation and model detail based on what the camera was seeing, and because I was dealing with a mostly static plate, I wanted to have as much motion on my creatures as possible.
Here’s the criteria I used to decide how to animate the creature rigs:
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I really wanted to use the bats to guide the viewer’s eye through the scene and give a sense of chaos and depth to the scene – however they move so quickly I didn’t really need to refine them very much because of motion blur (which I abused pretty heavily close to deadline and ran out of time to fix the results).
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I knew the horse was going to be moving at a fairly constant speed, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to integrate the characters at first, so I decided to animate the horse and carriage on an infinite curve loop in place, then manually bump it around to get a little more organic motion once it was referenced in to my master scene.
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I knew the spider was going to be extremely close in frame, and I wanted very subtle interaction with the web, so I spent a lot of time rigging her for maximum performance potential.
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I tried a fly originally, but it just wasn’t big enough to work with the scale of my web. After a little thinking, a moth worked better as a metaphor being drawn to the light (the castle with its red glow). It also read a lot better at the scale I was working and had a much nicer silhouette. I was extremely close to rendering deadline for this plate, so the moth marks my first experiment with procedural animation. I used a 2D noise function to drive the rotation on each of the wings and the rotate/trans on the antennae. On top of that, I rigged some FK bones into the critter’s legs because I wanted to show a half-hearted attempt at a struggle in the web. Let’s face it, he knows what’s coming – his wings are just reflex.
More detail about the rigs with a few pics shortly…
tharrell
#45
The horse & carriage (which I’m treating as one creature):
Because I’d never animated a horse before, I started with a google images search for a Muybridge photo progression of a horse’s walk cycle. I compared this with a couple of clips of horses trotting in the Lord of the Rings series to give myself a feel for weight and speed.
From here, I built a very, very simple horse skeleton and animated the legs, back and root node for a 20 frame cycle in place, which I cycled to infinity in Maya’s graph editor (the dotted lines on the rather confusing capture attached). Everything was animated FK on the horse.
I wanted the horse to be able to react to the bats flying by, so I was careful to leave a few of the bones in the horse’s neck unanimated so I’d be able to work with them outside of the infinite oscillation.
I wanted the carriage to be able to trail the horse on the landscape, but react more severely to bumps, so I added a axlepivot locator (giant locator in the capture) that I parented the entire carriage under so I could counteranimate some nice bumps and wobbles.
Because the carriage was going to not always be on the same plane as the horse’s feet, I also added a locator in front of the horse’s nose to aim constraint the carriage supports to to allow them to continue to point and be oriented in the right direction, no matter how bumpy I might animate the carriage.
From here, I added a quick expression to the wheels to have them rotate throughout the piece:
carriage2.Lwheel.rotateX=frame3+16
carriage2.Rwheel.rotateX=frame3
…basically, have the wheels rotate three degrees per frame, and then add a 16 degree offset to the left wheel to make them a little offset from eachother and asymmetrical. I arrived at the final multiplication based on eyeballing the speed once the file was brought in to my main scene and pushed across the landscape.
Yeah, I know the horse is slipping and popping a little 
add it to the list of stuff I ran out of time to fix.
I’ve already covered the attachment of the live action cards to the carriage rig, so here are a couple pics of the horse setup before I move on to the bats…
tharrell
#46
The bat was by far the easiest creature for me to rig in the whole piece.
Simple poly/subd boxmodeling – I knew I was really only interested in silhouette and a little specular off the bats so I probably blew through this in an hour.
The bat skeleton is placed in a group under the main trainsform locator I created, then I added two channels to the locator and set them up to drive four poses with set driven key – flap (two extremes) and contract (two extremes).
From here, I was able to reference in my bat file to my main scene three times, and only animate the locator for each one, animating my flap/contract and rotate where I wanted the bats to be in frame. It had the added benefit of being able to scale the locator and affect the entire rig.
In retrospect, my hero bats ended up extremely stiff and I probably should have done a polish pass to the bones and weighting. A little counteranimation and polishing my weights to preserve mass a little better would have made me a lot happier. Again, time constraint.
A quick capture of the setup is attached.
tharrell
#47
Now on to the fun stuff.
The spider
I set up the spider to have a rather full range of motion, and gave her a rather full featured rig as I knew I was going to spend a couple of days getting a good performance out of her.
Her legs were rigged for IK, I also rigged up her head, jaws and abdomen to control curves. I gave her a global transform (to move her around the scene and into initial position) and then a local root transform locator (for crouches and pounces).
With the rigging out of the way, I did a fair amount of research getting a feel for good spider walks – Eight Legged Freaks, and an eighteen hour binge with my rogue killing spiders in Ashenvale in World of Warcraft. For research. Ahem.
Each type of spider I looked at had a rather different walk, and the style I settled on was one in which the front and rear pairs of legs on each side seemed to cascade after each other. This type of crawl looked rather menacing on angular spiders like the one I modeled, and imparted a little intelligence and deliberate pace… which I rather liked.
I then texture mapped my final 4k web texture to a base plane in the scene and did my initial walk pass.
From here, I turned the plane that I mapped my web onto into a soft body and rigged it to react to a low-amplitude turbulence node parented to the spider’s location, and also a higher frequency one at the moth’s location. This gave a slight movement to the web.
I then baked in the particle cache from my soft body simulation and manually tracked each foot to the web itself when her legs were still (turned up my texture resolution to 1k in the viewport) – it gave a much better impression that the web was real and the spider was on it.
Nothing much more to add on the spider besides that the final pounce had some FK animation blended into my primarily IK legs for some anticipation and weight – which I’m learning is pretty hard to achieve in pure IK without a lot of counteranimation and extraneous keys. I’d still like a little more weight and punch to her movements, but again, I had so many elements I was dealing with that I simply ran out of time during polish.
The moth
The moth was rigged as a fairly lowpoly object, with almost all its detail derived from texture maps. As mentioned somewhere previously, almost all of the moth’s animation was created procedurally from a 2D noise routine driving the wing flapping and antennae movement.
I wanted a little bit of organic struggle to one of the legs, so I animated the rear legs manually.
The moth was super easy to setup – I simply hit the insert key and placed the center pivots of each of the parts (just parented to each other) to be the place I wanted to rotate from and I added some simple expressions like the following:
moth_Rwing.rotateZ = noise(frame,frame) * 16 + 8
This basically uses the frame number to walk through an animated noise map giving a smooth transition between frames. Because this is inherently a value between black (0) and white (1), I’ve multiplied the value by 16, and then added 8 to the rotation (half of 16) to normalize between the up and down extremes created by the noise.
Pretty ugly hack, but it’s my first time experimenting with this type of setup and it was pretty effective with three days remaining!
Similar expressions were added to various translate and rotates on the different moth parts, scaled to taste.
The web
I rendered the web as a separate pass so that I could cheat a slight shadow & glitter pass on it, and also massage the composite because I really wasn’t happy with the alpha information passed via matte opacity in Maya.
This ended up extremely advantageous because in order to get a good look, I had to change the matte to a medium gray instead of black in After Effects – otherwise the web was too thick or it had a black halo, or both. Good cautionary tale here – when you’re compositing wispy stuff like smoke, thread, whatever, you might try changing the background matte color to something brighter if your alpha key is coming out crappy.
Once I had the spider, moth and web assembled, I applied a very very low amplitude animated distortion to the entire plate in Final Cut Pro in order to give a little more feeling of wind.
Whew, that’s pretty much all the details on the animated bits. Feel free to ask specific questions or make suggestions about the rigs. Up until very recently, almost all of my CG work has been stills and studio product photography fakes, so I’m extremely new to all of this rigging and expression business!
–T
tharrell
#48
Just a quick note for everyone:
I’ve used an absurd amount of bandwidth the last two weeks hosting videos, so I’m going back and adding a coral cache URL prefix on all of my image and movie links. I didn’t even think that the traffic generated by the challenge would be in the hundreds of gigs transferred a day.
It’s my intention to leave all of the videos, etc, up on the thread permanently, but I may need to look for some type of mirror if the caching doesn’t soften the load.
I may miss one or two of the links, so let me know if you find anything in this thread that’s broken.
Cheers,
–T
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