The last 3D animation fundamentals assignment of the first semester is Performance animaiton, so I plan to apply what I have learnt this semester to make a better quality work, not only for the end of the course grade, but also for the future job search, where a good showreel will get more opportunities.
First I found some reference clips, I found a dialogue between the main character and the housekeeper in the first episode of Alex Rider, and then the scene took place in the kitchen, of course, it would not be impossible if I built the items manually, but the focus of the term1 course was not on the building of the items, but on how to make the movement of the characters better, the lighting system of the camera, the visual effects, I think these are more important, so I went to some free and open modeling software and found a combination of scenes suitable for the kitchen, and finally I put all the scenes together like this.
However, many of the items in this scene were not textured, so I had to manually select the Arnold material, and for some complex props I used Substance to paste the mapping, and the final result I could get is as follows.
Once you have built up the materials and lighting for the scene to get close to the desired effect, and then masked the lighting, it is a huge load on the computer to display the mapping in real time after importing the character.
This time the animation was different from the previous one, it needed two characters, when I found jerry in the resource, but I couldn’t find a suitable one to match the same style of girl character, finally I had to resort to a free model resource with full decals and a matching image style, I imported the decals, replaced the decals and started K-frames and then found that the character would collapse on the surface of the bound body when doing the K-action. At first I thought it was a history problem to remove the solution, but then I realised that the original model would also have this problem when re-imported, but not in the render window.
It was when I was doing the mouth animation that the process really got complicated. You can’t see the surface of the model, only the facial movements on the IPR rendered screen, as the nearly 30 seconds of footage I chose had a lot of dialogue. Luckily the facial binding on the male lead’s side worked very well, and I needed to pay attention to the blinking of the eyes, the twitching of the tongue due to the articulation, and the subtle turning of the head and neck, which are all important details that determine whether the animation is detailed or not.
Fortunately, the final close-up of the girl’s face is not particularly badly rendered, but there is one section where the lip-synching is not particularly good, which is a pity.
The first is at the beginning of the scene, when the girl is setting the plate, she needs to pick it up and put it down, and there will be a handover to replace the hand for holding and placing. The second girl, again, needs to be restrained on the handle of the pan when showing it to the boys.
Of course I have already shown how to restrain the phone in the previous Spider-Man project assignment, but of course this is, as I said at the beginning, this project is about applying all that we have learnt in term1, whether it is inertia of movement, use of props, or mouth animation, ultimately combined in the final project in term1.
Finally all the cameras were set up with a good focal length, and the original intention was to focus the cameras on the characters to make the background bokeh effect, but unfortunately there were problems with the characters and it couldn’t be solved so I gave up, and finally I set up different focal length cameras and used the action bulr effect in the rendering settings to give the action a more dynamic feel.
The final product is my render, but as I’m still in China and the VM doesn’t seem to be linked to the school farm, I ended up having to render in low resolution with a lot of noise in the process, and when I have time to optimise the scene I think I’ll re-render it again in high resolution.
Before proceeding with the research discussion, I would like to ask what part of the development of 3D animation has been the most significant in terms of enhancement? Is it the story? Probably not. Since the invention of cinema, many great films have been produced, but the stories of these great films have not made a significant leap forward over time, rather many of the classic films of the era have been difficult to surpass, so I don’t think it is the story that has improved the most over the years. So, is it the performance of characters in 3D animation that has improved the most over the years? Neither do I think so, although many 3D software controller plug-ins are getting smarter and smarter, and there are many new devices that can capture human action and import it into the computer for modification, but without exception the character performances and movements have to be manually adjusted in a more subtle way, and the new animated films nowadays are not fundamentally different from the early Pixar 3D animated films, because all the patterns of movement and performance experience is written down in the ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’. So, rendering and VFX are the biggest changes in 3D animation in all these years? I think yes, hardware enhancements and advances in rendering software have brought huge advances and developments to 3D animation, and below I will talk about the impact of advances in rendering on the development of 3D animation.
Research into Pixar’s rendering quality changes through the years
Now that we have spoken of 3D animation, we must not bypass the originator of its development, Pixar Animation Studios. The reason for this is that Pixar’s animated shorts are not only excellent, but they are also a window for Pixar to showcase its hard work ahead of its time, occasionally releasing short previews of feature-length animated films as a warm-up, so Pixar’s animated shorts are the best reference for us to study the progress of 3D animation over the years.
Where did Pixar get its iconic little table lamp for the opening credits? The answer is the 1986 luxo JR. Many people think that this short film is the earliest Pixar animation work, so much so that it has become an important reason for the current Pixar logo, but arguably not really, as two years earlier, in 1984, Pixar had already made a film called The Adventures of André & Wally B., the first fully 3D animation, but if you look closely you will find that the company that appears at the end of the film is not Pixar, but Lucas, as the Wikipedia profile of André & Wally B. ends with the statement produced by Lucasfilm Ltd., that was because the original Pixar team was called The Graphics Group, a division of Lucasfilm at the time, which was later renamed Pixar and then spun off as a separate company in 1986. So André & Wally B. is sort of the debut film of the original Pixar team before they became independent, and in just those two years we come to In contrast to luxo JR, it is clear that Pixar has algorithmically solved the problem of rendering the projections of the characters after they have been lit, and that the projections have a level of reality and fiction.
In 1988, Pixar released another tin toy animated short film, in which Pixar was able to differentiate between different materials on the characters, and the rendering was much improved, with smooth surfaces as well as rough hats and drum hammers on the characters. The toy theme of the film suggests that this short is probably the idea behind toy story
.In 2000, Pixar presented For the Brids, a short film that showed a huge improvement in quality and rendering, with more facets in the character models, more detail in the mapping, and a focus on hair development, from a few strands to the many faceted feathers that are now a huge upgrade.
When we add the 2003 animated film Boundi to the analysis, it is clear that the animal’s hair has become more detailed and realistic in 2003, and that in 2002 Pixar also produced a Monsters Inc. Short film with Sully’s hair looking like a stuffed toy.
From ’05 to ’15, Pixar continued to produce independent experimental shorts, as well as making short menus or trailers for many of the films that were released, and Pixar has won many Oscars for best animation through feature animation, while short animation has often been included in the Oscars. Focusing on the short films of 2016, Pixar has produced a very impressive work in terms of both rendering and VFX, namely Piper.
The resulting sand particles were simulated in Houdini’s particle solver, creating a fine layer of sand at the top of the mesh. This result was achieved by a combination of rejection techniques including camera sharpness, diagonal and distance, resulting in a variance of density to coarse sand flakes for optimum efficiency.
The water and foam used Houdini’s FLIP solver. For timing, the team animated simple wave shapes, from which they extracted the leading edge curve and encoded direction. They then built the FX wave shapes and adjusted the thickness based on flow. From there, they sourced the points and ran a low-res FLIP simulations. Lastly, a frustum-padded area is used to run high-res FLIP simulations using velocities from low-res pass.
And because sand renders are prone to exceptionally high levels of noise and take a huge amount of time to optimise for rendering, and the team at piper were happy to use the new RenderMan Denoise in order to eliminate path tracing noise. Traditionally, refractive surfaces and heavy DOFs require a lot of extra sampling to fully clean up, but Denoiser allows the teams to really push these techniques without fear of unnecessary noise or impossibly long render times. That’s why we still look back at the short film in 2016 with such stunning images.
During 2012, a paperman was also produced by parent company Walt Disney Studios, which examined the possibility of combining 2D and 3D, resulting in a stunning picture, and in 2014, a warm and touching feast was produced again, also using the Cel Rending expression technique. The combination of the old and the new is admirable, allowing the possibilities of animation to be shown in an infinite number of ways, and both animations are much more warm and full of emotion in their scripts thanks to Disney’s strong background in screenwriting
Is rendering the most important condition for successful animation?
Is it just a case of the more sophisticated the graphics, the more stunning the VFX effects and the more constant exploration that makes for great film and animation? I suppose not. As we said before, although rendering has been the most influential technique in animation and even film in recent decades, if we go back to the essence of animation, which is also to say story, I think that whether it is a game, a film or an advertisement, the most important thing is often not the rendering but the story itself. In imdb and Rotten Tomatoes, I saw that the emoji movie did not score as well as it should have, with a shockingly low score of 3.3 on imdb, and this is not a small company film, it was produced by Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation.
The movie has a lot of luxurious voice acting, the special effects and the characters are all very good, but why the low score? The reason is the script. So, it proves my point that it’s not as if a beautifully rendered picture can overshadow a script that doesn’t work, but it’s not unreasonable for Hollywood directors and investors to take the script very seriously when the script is so cheesy and implausible that it collapses.
Summary
Finally, the development of animation from the end of the 20th century to the present day would still not have been possible without the high speed of the Internet, the computers we use thanks to the improvement of processes and the development of hardware to be able to get high speed arithmetic, and also without the development of software that engineers have been working on. The creativity of designers and artists would not have been possible without the engineers who constantly optimised the engine and gave it more functionality. Although 3D animation does not have a long history of development, the advancement of 3D animation cannot be separated from the enhancement of rendering and VFX, comparing the first feature-length 3D animated storytelling, we do not need to compare to clearly perceive how stunning the visual effects of the current stage of 3D animation films are, many props and backgrounds can be faked, yes, because of the advancement of rendering, many live-action science fiction films and In the past, if we wanted to use creatures or props that did not exist on earth, we often had to make small props and shoot them in the wrong place to make impossible effects. It’s hard to tell what’s a special effect and what’s a real shot, but this is a sign that advances in rendering have had a profound impact on 3D animation and film, and have driven the exploration of more diverse forms of expression in film and television. I am grateful to have the opportunity to see the different forms of media that can be derived from digital animation in the future.
References
En.wikipedia.org. 2021. The Adventures of André \u0026 Wally B.. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Andr%C3%A9_%26_Wally_B.> [Accessed 5 February 2021].
Pixar Animation Studios. 2021. Pixar Animation Studios. [online] Available at: <https://www.pixar.com/luxo-jr> [Accessed 5 February 2021].
Pixar Animation Studios. 2021. Pixar Animation Studios. [online] Available at: <https://www.pixar.com/luxo-jr> [Accessed 5 February 2021].
Pixar Animation Studios. 2021. Pixar Animation Studios. [online] Available at: <https://www.pixar.com/luxo-jr> [Accessed 5 February 2021].
Renderman.pixar.com. 2021. Stories | Piper. [online] Available at: <https://renderman.pixar.com/stories/piper> [Accessed 5 February 2021].
