Cougar WIP

Here is the cougar/cat I have been working on. As you can see, I still have a long way to go in terms of detail, so before I go any further with this model. I want to see your thought on what I have so far. I also have some questions for you guys that will help me improve the design. I have a particular hard time modeling the back end, since there are still many unknowns. Your feedback will greatly help my process. : )

Do you see the cat and his mechanical parts exist in the same world setting as the girl & soldier? If not, what makes you feel that way?

Will we be having close-up shot of the cat? This will help me figure out the level of details I will need to achieve.

Are there things you want me to simplify/fix for the rigging process?

Are we expecting the cat to be fully rigged when the semester starts?

Another Shot at the Girl

So I really need to start modeling the girl's clothing soon if we expect to make the deadline of having the fully rigged and ready character before semester starts. Wanted to draw one last proposal before our meeting tomorrow. This is a Photoshop paint over of the 3D model, so everything here is proportionately accurate to the model I did months ago. I did it this way so I could get an idea of how old she looks, and get a closer preview to a final result. I also deliberately made her hair shorter and took out a long dress because it can cause big headaches trying to fix dynamic simulations.

To me she looks in her early to mid teen years, which I am fine with. May not be quite as young as what we may have been imagining in terms of story, but let me explain why this age is ok with me.

To start, it is incredibly difficult and time consuming for me to make age corrections. Sure, it's an easy fix drawn out, make the eyes, forehead, and cheeks bigger, and scrunch the mouth and nose closer together, but with 3D comes another complication. I have consider what I like to call the porciline doll effect:

An example that comes to mind is a Christmas Carol. The children look well, like porcelain dolls. To me it is a bit out of place in contrast to the other characters, but it's done for a reason. It's not just Zemeckis' movies either. Take a look at this new trailer for Toy Story 3. Notice Andy, as a teenager, and the children look like they could literally be from different universes.

There is a trend with 3D films of greatly stylizing children characters for a reason, more realistic children look downright awkward and creepy. Watch Polar Express if you are not following. So for us, if we choose to go even younger I would have find the happy medium between a less awkward stylized look and a look that fits with the other characters and world. Quite frankly I'm not so sure it exists.

In conclusion I would much rather have a slightly older girl that fits in, than a younger child that either looks awkward or feels out place in the universe. That is just my opinion however, perhaps you feel differently.

Ugh, I Know, More Lighting

For the past few days I went back to testing out even more lighting possibilities, seeing how it's one of the bigger bottlenecks impeding production. If you haven't been able to tell yet, this stuff can get pretty complicated.

After reading through a ton of Siggraph Papers about the spherical harmonics solution and learning there is no automated implementation for Maya/Mental Ray we can use, I happened to stumble upon this:

Smart IBL

This quite literally seems like a gift from the heavens. It works with Final Gathering, the most commonly used method to calculate indirect light. The problem with the Final Gather approach is normaly you get results like these:


YUCK!!

The ways to avoid this flickering is either to increase samples to an insane amount, which still can cause problems and increases render time, or significantly decrease the samples and blurring them together which causes a loss of quality.

But thanks to Smart IBL, they have an automated solution that gives awesome results in less render time. Here is my quick test:


YAY!!

No noticeable flicker! There is a little variation on the walls, but that is from the light bouncing off the cubes which should be there.

Machines & Some Quick Sketches

I did these few quick sketches during some brainstorming sessions to find ways to incorporate mechanical parts into our existing feline model. I also throw in some character studies I did.

The first option I came up with is to replace the back portion of the feline with exposing mechanical parts. I want the front to retain the organic feel of the feline, so people will still be able to recognize it as a cat, unless that is not what we want.

The second option is to simply have inner mechanisms exposed on parts of feline's body to suggest the cat is mechanical.

I do not have a sketch for the third and last option, which is an exoskeleton that will be put over cat's body. I do not like this idea because it sort of take away cat's nimbleness and make it into a clunky awkward killing machine.

Let me know what you think. : )

Pre-vis and Some story talk

To start, an update from Karen that I she sent me tonight!


And some explanation from Karen:

"The first square is a look at the scene when the cougar is stalking the guy and the girl. I showed them hiding behind the trashcan the cat moments away from discovering them. The second image is a possible look on what the main character experiences when the little girl uses her powers. She is shown really white and pale and ghostly. She has dark circles under her eyes and bright red lipstick. I wanted her to be spooky and still cute at the same time. I hope this helps a little. The silhouettes that are overlapping her are ghost cougars that serve as a metaphor or foreshadowing danger. the picture below that one is a close up of the girl in her strange telepathic state. The 3rd picture is the statue in the middle of the town square, if you want to show the character looking up at a statue."

There is some really strong imagery going on here. Think it is a good mix of everything we talked about last meeting, and some new ideas tossed in. Great work!! This exploration will be extremely helpful when we further solidify the story and design at our next meeting (planning for one soon).

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Now what I have done. I may have strayed slighting from some of what we talked about, but it's a little hard not to when you translate ideas to drawings. I want to clarify nothing here is intended to be a final storyboard. This is merely my very rough attempt to loosely visualize some of the ideas that have been buzzing around in my head.

It starts by the soldier entering his home town after being away for 10 years (or so) at war. I see this as Act 1 & 2, the 3rd act hasn't been done yet:


(automaticly starts playing the slideshow. Hit pause and click through each frame)

I toyed around with a few ideas here. To start, I wanted to hint at a possible backstory for the killer cat, and how he came into existence by 2 brothers in this fantasy war torn town. More on that in a future post; I want to create a family tree of sorts showing how all the characters are related as well as a timeline.

Second, I thought it might be interesting to have the cat be excessively protective of the girl. Like in a "kill-every-who-comes-in contact-with-her" kind of way. You could think of the cat as sort of a curse for the girl. She cannot have human relations in fear that the cat will murder anyone too close. That is why she is at one point happy to see the guy, but then once she sees the cat, tries to push him away. She returns only when she realizes the cat has already set his eyes on the man to try and convince the cat to stop.

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The biggest differences between what Karen and I have done so far seems to be with the girl. I've taken her away from that magical state to work with my different take on the story, while Karen has fully embraced the mystical side.

What we have now is choices, both with her design and what role she plays in the story. Is she a protagonist, or a victim? Perhaps both? Maybe if she was wondering soul of sorts left in the town that would work. She could need some sort of human relation to be fulfilled for her release, but the cat keeps making it difficult.

Maybe I'm just talking crazy, what does everyone think?

Some Further Lighting Development Possibilities

***Warning, more technical lighting talk ahead***


Like many of you I got around to seeing Avatar over the holidays, which naturally lead me to reading some behind the scenes interviews. One particular sentence jumped out at me in this AWN Article:

We came up with a system based primarily on image-based lights but then converted the whole system to spherical harmonics," Letteri explains. "What that meant was we could pre-compute all the lighting contributions in a scene and then put the characters and everything in with the lighting and the TDs could move the lights around.


This got me very curious. Our current solution, called Ambient Occlusion Environment Sampling, uses a very similar method to get that nice animation friendly indirect light that is one of the secretes behind great lighting. But for every rendered frame our method has to recalculate the environment light contribution, whereas the method used with Avatar does not. That is ton of wasted render time for us.

So my question was, what is this magical "spherical harmonics" and how could it fit in our production. What I found through some research is the technique also can be achieved through what is known as a Diffuse convolution envmap. It's a bit technical of a read, but I know exactly how to implement it for us. Our lighting work flow would look something like this:

1. Figure out time of day and sun direction for film.
2. Bake Physical Sky enviornment hdri with this method and apply the correct filter to the image.
3. Attach "spherical harmonics" environment to ambient slot to a white lambert for testing.
4. Light the scene with other lights as we see fit, such as a rim lights and possibly fill lights.
5. Pipe the the "spherical harmonics" into the render passes and tweak further in composting.

Ta Da!! We just potentially shaved off minutes of every frame rendered at no sacrifice in quality!!!

So to conclude, we can implement a similar lighting approach used with Avatar that can save us a ton of time. Don't know about you, but for me, that is a very exciting prospect.

Talk About an Awesome Reference

Check out the Artwork of Lisa Black.

This stuff couldn't be more spot on to what I was thinking of.