Day 57

Today was presentation, and we spent the morning doing that. It turned out okay.

We spent time after that to do some documentation and handover files to Mr Douglas.

Till next time, this is Mohamed Ziyaad, signing off.

Day 56

I've finished shot 2 compositing today, well to the best I could. I did not manage to include May's energy blasts into the comp as keyframing them in compositing will take time for it to look nice, but I did manage to get her weapon energy trails in.

I've spent the whole day preparing for presentation tomorrow. I've prepared various videos showing my sims, and my powerpoint presentation.

Day 55

The flying characters look really weird.

Mr Pang came in today and commented on my composition for shot 2. He said that a contrast in between the two armies would be good, as in a dark aura for the demons and a holy aura for the angels. The light rays were could also use a little editing.

I've been preparing videos for my presentation today.

Day 54

Came back to see that my renders finished, but I couldn't see how long it took for some reason. The renders came out okay. The people are fighting at a good speed,its not too slow and not too fast. I comped in what I had, the people in the middle fighting,its AO and motion vector passes too. I tried adding depth of field in Nuke, but there wasn't any clear way to get it done nicely. I just tested rotoscoping away the foreground after adding a Defocus node but it doesn't look that great. I added a sky background for now, but it doesnt fit well. I guess a gradient at the back would be better.

I found that most of the flying angel and demons Wei Jie had rigged up had certain issues that needed to be corrected. I had fixed a few problems with my previous particle system for the flying characters. I'm tested out using one flying angel to see how the geometry reacts to the flying particles. It looks really weird. Some of the characters look okay, flying as what you'd expect to see when a humanoid flies, but the others are just weird. They don't fly headfirst, they fly belly first and stuff like that. I expected that to happen actually, since I had to rotate the ones charging in a fitting direction. However, the ones that are flying are flying in random directions, like a chaotic dogfight in the air. I'm not really sure how to control the rotations for them.

I sequenced out Wei Jie's new rigged actions, and rendering them overnight.

Day 53.5

The render for the two armies charging at each other took longer than expected, it's nearing 20 hours. I might have left something on, it took only 16 hours before.

I did a comp of the frames I had anyways, also added in Wei Jie's god rays. I tried out the motion vector blur and AO on the angels that are charging too.

I'm going to render the people fighting in the middle as a sequence. The now go on at full 240 frames, no loops. Even though May hasn't added in the trails yet for my sequences,i'll still render them to see the actions. I'll render the AO and motion vector passes on Wei Jie's computer.

Mr Douglas told me that the angel wings I had on my character yesterday was upside down. I turned it around,but it still goes through the geometry. He said that it isn't an important element right now.

I did some comping on shot 5. Cleaned up my roto for the sea to make it brighter,initially the roto wasn't that accurate, now it is. The file kept on crashing though, so I just did whatever I could.

Day 53

I did 5 sequences of angels and demons fighting each other today. I did test renders. I found that they were fighting too fast, as they have only 50 frames and loops the same actions. I then figured that they don't have to loop since the motion captures are pretty long. So I re-rendered  them going full on 240 frames.  I gave May the sequences so that she can add her weapon trails on it.

Showed Mr Douglas the comp of shot 2, well, what we currently have to comp. Added in the new glass shader render into the comp. I asked Mr Douglas about the proportions of armies charging and people in the middle fighting. I was worried that when I put in the people fighting in the middle, it'll just cover up the whole terrain, without any prior space given before the two charging armies connect. Mr Douglas said that I can gauge myself where would be good position for them.

                                                 The crowd in the middle fighting

                                                             Comp of shot 2 (so far)

Mr Douglas passed me the angel wings he had so I can put them on the flying angels. Wei Jie helped me rig up the flying angels. I tried palcing the wings on the angels but I found that the wing flapping action translates too much or is too big, to the point that the geometry goes through the character's geometry. I attached it to the spine joint of the character. It still follows the spine joint perfectly, when the character turns and stuff, but the flapping movement is probably too big. I might be doing something wrong.

                                                                   The angel wings

                                                           Angel wings on the character

                                                           The flapping movement is too big

                                                           Goes through the character

Coming back tomorrow to check out my render and test out the motion blur and AO in Nuke. I have 3 sets of crowds to render for shot 2. The charging armies, the crowd in the middle fighting and the ones at the top flying and fighting. I can render the demons and angels charging together, but the other two I have to render seperately. The angels and demons charging together will take about 16 hours to render. The other two will probably take 8 hours each. The AO and motion vector passes render significantly faster, so I don't have to worry much about them.

Day 52

The movement of the charging characters are not really smooth, you can see them jerking. I tried fixing them using the animate controls for the joints ,but I can't fix them with that ultimately. Mr Ron suggested that I could try adding motion blur to them and see if that will ease the jerkiness. Also, with all the things that will be happening in the scene, it might not be too noticeable.

Mr Ron showed me how to add motion blur to the characters without having to render the motion blur right on the beauty pass. He used a motion vector method whereby it'll render the motion vector pass separately from the color pass and I cant control the motion blur in comp.

We also discussed about shadows in the scene. Since there's a lot of light and its a glass shader they are standing on, there won't be much shadows. I still thought that it might look weird without shadows. So Mr Ron showed me how to add an ambient occlusion pass. The motion vector and AO pass both render really fast. The AO can be used for the shadows on my character, so I don't have to switch on shadows on the lights and make my colour pass for the characters render as fast as possible. The AO will add more depth to the characters too.

I rigged up more angels charging today too.
                                                                       More Angels

 More Demons

                                                                  Ambient Occlusion

Day 51

My crowd render went well,no errors or anything and it rendered pretty fast for all the 140 frames,well that's because there were only a few demons to load.

Today I rigged up more demons now I have 10 kinds of demons loaded. I added more particles and it's starting to look like an army already.

I did a few angels today, I plan on rigging up more tomorrow and i'll probably have the angels and demons big armies completed by tomorrow.I should also be working on the fight in the middle on the battle field tomorrow.

Mr Douglas came today. He wanted me to change a few things for shot 5:

Change the trail color to a reddish hue
Make the sea brighter
Edit the entry of the demons at the top of the tornado
Keyframe the lightning so that it'll be brighter when it strikes

I've managed to make the sea brighter and fix the entry of the demons. I tried out the trail color thing but i'll still have to work on it. I'm seting this comp aside first, since it's an easier job. I'm focusing more on my crowds for shot 2.

he also showed me how to tune the moving parts of the rig that I want to control. He also showed me how to paint weights, in case the deformation is too much.

Day 50

"The path to ultimate crowd simulation will have many obstacles."
- Mohamed Ziyaad

I rendered the crowd sim yesterday,only to find that I didn't have frame padding in my file name when I checked it out this morning. I made sure the file name had frame padding from then on.

The geometry were also facing the wrong direction, not where the particle is moving. Mr Ron said that I had to rotate the bgeo sequences individually, so I did that and now they roughly face the right direction.

I then encountered another problem. When I rendered the crowd sequence, the cycles were weird and the geometry disappeared and appeared continuously. The problem had to be with one of the numbers or something in the cycle and offset attributes we added for the delayed load. I spent hours trying to fix the problem, but I finally did. Turns out that the cycle didn't need a padding of 2, I changed it to 1, then the sequences went on smoothly. I'm pretty sure i'll have to do something about the rotations. I might have to reposition where the particles spawn so that it will be in a straight translation in Z.

I had in mind to fix the problems with the system we were using first before doing anything else. Now that all the major problems have been fixed, my plan is to do a ton of character rigging for the running,fighting and flying cycles and just place them in the working system. Joyces is currently helping me do some of the fighting sequences. I'll have to try and mix the sequences she's done together to depict a group fighting each other and place that on one particle, like we planned before.

Day 49

When I left on Saturday, I set my render to be from 189 to 240. I checked those renders,and they turned out okay. I then proceeded to render frames 185-188. The result was weird, the rendered frames were all of the same frame,and it wasnt even in teh frame range. I manually rendered each frame individually and saved them out through mplay.

I realised that even though I managed to change the path directories in the weapon files to $HIP, bringing them into a rig file would still cause the directories to have errors, because the weapon files aren't in the same exact folder, although they are in the same base folder. So i copied out the weapon files into the base source folder and redirected the path directories for each weapon file. Now they can be easily imported into whatever rig anyone's doing.Phew.

I asked Mr Ron about the delayed load thing not working in my new crowd system. Turns out the problem was with a wrong padding number. We changed that and now it loads the geometry. Now the problem lies with the running cycle. Mr Ron taught me how to get better running cycles.Previously my running cycles were not constrained to one position, they moved forward according to the mocap data. We constrained the position to just the origin. Making the cycles loop correctly was the crazy part. We ended up using an angel running movement for the demons because the demon running mocap had the actors move their heads too much. I guess this is still okay, the demon models already distinguish the demons, the actions can be recycled.

They render pretty fast ,well for now.

Day 48.5

So I came back today, a Saturday because the render that I sat on Thursday for the demons falling crashed. I set up another one yesterday.


I came in today to find that it crashed again at about 184 frames.I tried to render from that frame a few times but it still kept on crashing. I called Mr Ron for advise and he told me to render frames after that. I did that,so now it's rendering without crashing,well hopefully. I comped in whatever frames I had first.


                              Comp with 3 times more demons

I sat down and reverted the directory paths of all the angel swords and demon axes to $HIP, so that it'll be easier for us to bring in the weapons.


I rigged up one angel with a running cycle. I tried to put in a little more detail. The angel didn't deform as much as before. The fingers however, had weird rotations and the weights on them were obviously off, if i rotated one of the fingers,a bit of another finger would move too. I couldn't make a nice fist since the weights on the fingers were off.


                            Less deformed than previous versions

                                     Like raw bacon strips held up in a wind tunnel

Day 48

Well, shot 5 seems to be coming together pretty nice.

I spent the day mostly compositing shot 5. After listening to Mr Douglas' opinions, I added a zdepth fog with a reddish tint onto the mountains. I also added a gradient from red to black at the base of the composite so that the background has an gradual ambience instead of the flat black it had before.

With Mr Douglas' help, I managed to get the weapon and the character in the same bgeo sequence, and I only had to render the sequence once, both character and the weapon together.

I tried to make the delayed load system in shot 2,but the characters didn't show up on the points in my render. I must have left something out.

Day 47

Most of my time spent today was on compositing.

I managed to composite most of shot 05. I was really confuzzled since it's my first time using Nuke, with no proper education on it beforehand. In the end after much experimenting and figuring stuff out, I managed to make the lightning go behind the clouds using various rotoscopes.

Mr Douglas showed me how to parent the weapons onto the  character. It seems that using his method, I'll have to sequence out both the character and the weapon separately. I'll probably have to combine those two sequences and sequence that combined sequence out to get a single sequence for my crowd sim.

Day 46

Firstly today, Mr Ron helped me out with loading the demon geometry to the particles. We used delayed load, instead of copy stamping,and it's so much faster than copy stamping. We had to edit the bgeo animations first though,before we could load them in the shot. We had to make sure the textures and the bgeo animations are still there when we load them in the shot. So, before we put them in a shot, we edited each of the sequences in another hip session. We made sure the demons are at the origin, 0 translation in all axis. Then used a timewarp node to output the range at 0-99 frames instead of the 1-100 frames we had, to make the sequences loop. We then rendered that out into a new sequence.

With the edited sequences, they work smoothly in the shot 5. The textures were loaded okay.To make life easier Mr Ron created 3 attributes in my demon falling geo level, SEED, OFF(offset) and CYCLE. Each of them had an expression on them:

SEED: rint(rand($ID)*#

OFF: rint(rand($ID)* 100

CYCLE: rint($F + OFF)%100

The new variables are then placed into certain parts of the directory path for loading in sequences and stuff. So,  this makes the system automated. All I have to do to bring in more demons is to update the seed integer at the end with an increased number.

I opened up shot 2 to bring in my crowd system.  I painted on the terrain where the two armies should spawn at. I found that my convert and creep nodes cook really long,so, I cant see the particles movement on the wavy surface. I tried the ray node just for kicks but it still has the skipping issues.

I tried out some more angel running sequences,but now with swords. I can't find a suitable way to constrain the sword to the angel's hand properly.

Day 45

Yesterday was a public holiday,so nothing was done yesterday.

Started the day off tweaking the new smoke effect emitting from the demons. Mr Ron helped me with it to get a  smokier feel to it,but it rendered really long. The problem was with the area light I was using. I had it to have shadows,but with area lights, that will really slow down the rendering time. So instead, I had a distant light emit shadows instead of the area light and the outcome was the same, just it rendered faster.

                                                               A render of the particles

I started mapping the mocap actions to the demons. I managed to do 5 of them today. It was relatively easy. I tried not to spend much time on them since in shot 5, where its a wide shot with quite some distance between the demons and the camera, detail doesn't really matter. The skinning wasn't perfect,but they are okay at a distance. I asked Mr Ron how to map the geometry onto the particles,but the textures didn't load. Since I changed the directories, the paths to the various textures didn't work. I quickly found the problem, which was, I didn't copy the texture folders into my new directory. I quickly did that and now the textures work.

                                               Various demons I have done(now with textures)

Mr Douglas came today with a much better rigging system. He managed to complete it and now we can map the skeleton to the model with much more ease. I tried doing a running animation for an angel but, the outcome wasn't that great. Since its a closer shot,there has to be more detail. I'll need to focus more on the detail next time.

                                                                       Angel Model

                                                               Angel Model With Rig

                                                             Wireframe of model

 
                                                    Running Action (notice the weird skinning)

                     
                                                                  Rig on the model

Day 44

Today was crazy.


I composited what latest renders we have so far in Nuke. I'm getting the hang of Nuke.


Mr Ron came in today and he had an idea for the debris. Instead of the debris birthing on its own and circling around like a massive tornado, the debris can be emitted from the demon geometry. This results in a trailing of the particles from the geometry. We tried that out, and well it seemed promising. Now there won't be too much happening , because there'll be less crazy debris going on.


Mr Douglas came in today to see Shot 5's progress,and a bunch of other stuff. He taught May and me how to use the rigging system he set up. It was fairly simple to understand and use.


(This Post Will Be Updated With More Content)

Day 43

Today, firstly, I checked my render of the demons falling. You can now see them more,but they'll probably still be  consumed by the other things we have going on.  I showed Mr Ron the render,he told me to render a new one with motion blur. So, I went ahead to set that up and render.


I decided to migrate from After Effects, to Nuke. I always wanted to learn Nuke, so why not start right now. I downloaded some pdfs outlining the different tools in Nuke and ways to do things. Thankfully, I've learnt Shake before and found that Nuke is pretty darn similar to Shake. I understood what some of the tools do since they have similar uses in Shake. I composited in Wei Jie's terrain, Joyces' tornado and some of my debris together. Wei Jie gave me a z depth map for the terrain. Initially, I didn't know how to use it correctly in Nuke. I asked Mr Ron for help. After much tinkering and problem solving, in the end we used a blur and a grade tool. We used the z depth + grade as a mask for the blur tool. The blur tool had the normal terrain as an input. With the mask for the blur, we managed to get a coloured depth map that I could use.


                                             What I have,so far

                                                   Look at me,all grown up and using Nuke

                                                         The Z depth

Day 42

Today I repositioned the debris and demons falling to match where Joyce's tornado is.


Mr Ron came in today. We talked about the reflections in the water. It'd have to reflect the clouds and tornado and stuff. We can probably fake it in comp,and save the time from rendering a direct reflection. I'll have to experiment with that in After Effects. I might want to learn a few things about Nuke though. I'll look up on videos on how to use Nuke.


One thing I was wondering about was the lighting of the scene. Mr Douglas kind of wants a look like Mount Doom. I saw the Lord Of The Ring scene,of Mount Doom and noticed that a lot of the light comes of the ambience of the Eye and Mount Doom. The clouds are covering the sky, so you cant see sunlight coming in,but you know there's sunlight behind the clouds. 


I also had an idea of having, at the top of the tornado, rays of light coming down. Since the demons are being kicked out of heaven,falling down from heaven, it might look cool. I played around with a fog shader and spotlight in Houdini. While experimenting in a fresh file, it worked pretty well, I could see the rays. However, when I brought it in into our Shot 5 scene, the whole scne became white when I rendered. I found that the other lights couldn't be in the scene, if I wanted it to work.


I made 4 different types of debris and rendered them. I'm also rendering the demons falling again,since I repositioned them.I changed the demons temporary model to not be poly-reduced. So now, it takes longer to render. The demons would probably be more visible this time since I'm showing more geometry, but the tornado and other stuff would still cover them up.

Day 41

So, I showed Mr Ron the renders I had yesterday.

Firstly, for the debris, I told him that Mr Douglas wanted, apart from what I have, more renders with a wider noise area at the sides. The problem with my render is that the starting and ending of the debris spiral are too uniformed,whereas the middle part had a nice feel to it. Mr Ron told me to play with the "add to inherited velocity" in the split pop. Well I did that, I tinkered with the variance amount and managed to get the particles to be more noisy. I managed to get the overall spiral to be of equal noisiness. Mr Ron helped me remove the birthing of the particles in the object level. He made a delete node and placed it after my spiral digital asset to delete the birthing. This is much better as initially, you could see the particles kind of popping in real fast.

Second, we found that the demons are super small in the shot and will be visually consumed by the tornado and the debris. Mr Ron said that we might have to add another shot of a top view of the tornado, showing the demons falling into the tornado. An alternative might be to give the demons a glow or something, but I dont think that'll be enough.

For today I managed to render 2 types of debris, one fat one with more noise, and a skinnier tube-like spiral.
When I rendered them, I switched off one of the lights in the scene. The rendering time overall for the 240 frames reduced by half, so now it renders in about 30 mins, compared to the 60 mins previously. I don't even know what the all lights in the scene are for. I'll have to think more about the lighting in the scene.

                                                               Tube-like debris spiral

                                                       Large debris spiral with more noise

I tried compositing whatever we have so far in After Effects. The debris will need tweaking. I tried compositing in Joyce's new tornado. The tornado fades too much at the beginning and is also a little too transparent in my opinion. I'll have to reposition my debris to match the tornado, but that's easy.

                                               You can't really make out the falling demons

Day 40

We all came back last Saturday to put in extra time for shot 5. I managed to render the demons falling and the debris, but in 640X480.


I showed the renders to Mr Douglas. He told me to render more debris at different sizes and noises. I found that the orbit node system I'm using can make what seems to be a tornado. I just played around with it to see the results.


                                    Trying out a tornado effect

I'm pretty happy with the debris effect I've been working on. I'm just using lots of particles with sprites. I made placed greyish brown colour onto the sprites. I also added an alpha ramp using the same colour node, but I'm not sure if it's doing anything.


                                           The falling debris

For today, I managed to render a HD version of the debris and also a HD version of the demons falling.


For now, both of them seem to render pretty well. The debris takes a little more than an hour for 240 frames. The demons falling take slightly less than an hour for 240 frames.

Day 39

Today i refined the speed of the particles. Made them move slower, still using the multiply by percentage method. Now it plays out better.

Mr Ron said that the particle trails will be for dust and stuff. I tried out using sprites. Now it just looks like smoke instead of dust and debris.

Coming back tomorrow for awhile to work more on the dust.

Day 38

Well, yesterday was a public holiday,so we didn't come in.

Tried to figure out how to make the particles slower,but I couldn't figure it out for myself. Then Mr Ron came, and solved it in like a minute. All I had to do was to multiply a part of an expression, which was using "LIFE" by 0.4 or something to decrease the percentage,so it seems slower. This resulted in the spiral to be really short and not reach the end. I had to play around with the other parameters to get the size right.

Wanted to reference Joyce's tornado for the scale, but she wasn't done with it. Her tornado was really small and I tried to scale it up, but I couldn't figure out which part should be scaled. I tried scaling the base circles and curves, but nothing worked.

Day 37

I refined the spiral effect digital asset. Added a few more parameters like number of particles, turn speed and birthing of the particle trail. I tested using the reference geometry onto the spiral effect to see how it looked.

I continued processing more mocap data. I processed like 30 of them but converted only 13 of them into hip files. The other files were captures for other scenes, which are not important right now.

Mr Douglas came in to day and I showed him the spiral effect. He thought that the particles move too fast, so I tried to make them slower. He told me to try to use the speed limit node. I tried it out but although it could slow down the particles, the particles do not turn around anymore and instead of looking like a tornado, it looks like a teardrop forming. I need to fix this

Day 36

First of all today, I tested making the spiral effect into a digital asset and placed it in shot 5. It worked correctly. I added 2 more parameters, the length of the particle trail and the life of the particle trail.


                                     Spiral effect in the scene

I also managed to process and convert 105 mocap data into FBX, then into hip files. Very boring, but it has to be done.


                                   Some of the files for proof