HR Project Lighting Settings

Hi all,

Here are the settings and accompanying screenshots for lighting/rendering on the HR project. You may have to click on the images to make them large enough to read.

To begin, open up your Render Global Settings window. Make sure it is set to render with Mental Ray and not Maya Software or something else.

Settings for Common tab:

• Image format should be changed to OpenEXR (the exr format is ideal as it allows for multiple passes to be contained in a single file whereas these same passes would have to be split up into separate files using almost any other file format. The exr format also has good support for floating point bit depths, which is also lacking in many other formats).
• Frame/Animation ext should be changed to "name.#.ext" (most compositing programs prefer this formatting for image sequences)
• Be sure to change the Frame Range and Renderable Camera to the proper settings for your shot
• Change the height and width of your shot to 720 pixels wide and 388 pixels high

Settings for Passes tab:

• Under render passes press the button with an image of a sparkling clapper that will be in the top-right most corner of the window. This will bring up a dialog with different types of passes to choose from. Create passes for 2D Motion Vector and Camera Depth and then close the dialog.
• After doing this you must explicitly add these passes to each layer you wish to have it rendered out for (thus all passes don't need to be put out for all Render Layers). When highlighting a pass, a button with a image of a clapper and a green checkmark should no longer be grayed out; pressing this button will associate the highlighted pass with the currently selected render layer. The Camera Depth pass should be added to every single layer pretty much without fail. The 2D Motion Vector pass only needs to be added to render layers that have moving objects in them (keep in mind that if your camera is moving then, for all intents and purposes, all your objects in all your render layers are moving)

Settings for Features tab:

• Render Mode should be set to Normal
• Primary Renderer should be set to Scanline
• The only secondary Effect that should be toggled on should be Raytracing. If you are not using Raytrace shadows you should also turn this off. If you are unsure of whether you are using Raytrace shadows or not then simply leave raytracing on.
• Shadows should be turned on
• Motion blur should be turned off (the 2D Motion Vector pass will allow us to compute this in post)
• All other settings on the Features tab can be left at their defaults.

Settings for Quality tab:

• Under Anti-Aliasing quality:
• Set sampling mode to Custom Sampling
• For foreground render layers set Min Samples to 0. For background render layers set Min Samples to 1.
• For foreground render layers set Max Samples to 2. For background render layers set Max Samples to 4.
• For Multi-Pixel filtering set the Filter Type to Gauss and Filter Fize to 3.0 x 3.0
• Under Anti-Aliasing quality, all other settings can stay at their defaults
• Under Raytracing
• Raytracing should automatically be turned on when you toggled it under the Features tab. If for some reason it is not on then do so now.
• Set Reflections to 3
• Set Refractions to 3
• Set Max Trace Depth to 10
• Set Shadows to 2
• Set Reflection Blur Limit to 1
• Set Refraction Blur Limit to 1
• Under Framebuffer
• Set the data Type to "RGBA (Half) 4x16 Bit"

Under the Indirect Lighting tab:

• Be sure to click "Create" on "Image Based Lighting" if Rob has photographed an HDR image for the set you are lighting. When you do so an Environment light will appear in your scene's outliner. Be sure to set all your option appropriately within the environment light (such as which HDR image to use and so forth).
• Make sure all other indirect lighting options are turned off. Most of these features add an excessive amount of work to mental ray which slows down render times considerably. Also, some (such as Final Gather) can sometimes cause flickering renders, which means you may have to re-render your entire shot or at least individual frames. Joe Creswell recommends using Final Gather in his previous post as it does improve the quality of the final renders (as do most indirect lighting features). However, Hazel and I have found the high render times and flickering frames to not be worth the time and effort. I suggest avoiding Mental Ray's indirect lighting features (other than image based lighting) whenever possible. Similar features can be faster to render in some other renderers, but as a general rule indirect lighting features are slow and/or hard to work with in most renderers and should be avoided unless necessary (or you have a large, fast render farm at your disposal or you are only rendering a single still image).

Under the Options tab:

• Leave these settings alone. Whatever defaults Maya has in here should be just fine.

Be sure to smooth all geometry before rendering. By this I mean select all geometry to be rendered and press the 3 button to use Maya's smooth preview. Mental Ray will understand that this means it should subdivide at render time (and not before). If you do a true subdivision (smoothing) to your geometry before rendering this will cause more geometry to have to be sent to Mental Ray, which will in turn slow down your renders considerably.

Pretty much all other settings will be dependent on your setup of lights and geometry in your particular scene. I recommend using raytrace shadows on area lights with 16-32 Shadow Rays and a Ray Depth of 3. If you want softer shadows simply scale the size of your area lights (keep in mind that this will increase their area of illumination thus lighting everything more brightly so you may need to turn down the intensity of your lights after scaling up their size). Area lights mimic more accurately the way real light sources act and thus give better looking lighting with less effort. Raytrace shadows are much easier to manage than depth map shadows and also look better and more accurate with less effort. Since Mental Ray is a raytracer it renders raytrace shadows at decently fast speeds.

I do not recommend using light decay unless you find that you need it to make your lights illuminate correctly. With light decay off your lights will be less physically accurate, but will be more predictable to work with since they will infinitely illuminate at the same intensity.

That is all I have for now. As I think up more tips and tricks I will edit this post and add more. Good luck!

Middle Mouse Button Drag for animating

Hi all, this is a little Maya trick for animating that Rob asked me to pass along to everyone.

In short, if you middle mouse button (MMB) drag from one frame to another in the timeline you can preserve the animation from that initial frame so that you can keyframe it on the latter frame. Let me show instead of just tell.

In this first image I have my character keyframed with an "f" sound at frame 29 that I am reasonably satisfied with.

I realize that I could use this same keyframe later at frame 65. Instead of trying to switch back and forth copying values or trying to manually reposition my characters face, I can simply MMB click, hold and drag the frame I want to replicate until my time line is on frame 65. Notice (below) that although my current frame has changed, everything in my scene that has animation on it is frozen as they were at frame 29.

Keep in mind that although I have his mouth controls selected, MMB dragging does not keyframe my changes automatically (even if autokey is on). I must do that manually by selecting the objects I want to keyframe and pressing the "s" key or by some other means. Notice the difference in the animation curves from the screen grabs above (before keyframing) and below (after keyframing).

Now that I have hit the "s" key the selected controls have been key framed at frame 65. If I now left mouse button drag around the timeline and return to frame 65 you will notice (in the image below) that the mouth is the same as frame 29 but all of my other animation remains as it was previously.

This is a quick and easy way to reuse animation from different frames. Keep in mind that you don't not need to MMB drag from a keyframe in order to replicate animation; MMB drag can used to replicate animation from any frame whether it is a keyframe or not. Best of luck.

Lighting on HR animation

Hi, I decided to put together a some lighting documentation specifically for the lighting setup that I found to work on HR animation for the CTL. For starters lets begin with adding in an HDR image into our scene. Depending on your scene, you will have an HDR that will be scene specific that Rob has shot with his camera and put together in photoshop. Know that these intructions are given assuming that your rendering will be done in mental ray.
First, we need to create an HDR light so that it can exist in you scene. Go to render settings, indirect lighting, environment, and under image based lighting click create. After you create it, it will change to the option to delete it. Don't delete it. Next, go to the final gather tab and click the Final Gathering check box. Make sure your settings resemble the settings above. Final gather can usually cause flickering problems in animations, but looks amazing when rendering a single frame. However, with the settings I will give you, the batch renders have been tested with very minimal flickering that won't be noticed much by the viewer.
After you have created your HDR light you now need to load an image. Select your HDR in your outliner and in your attribute editor load your hdr image specific to scene from S:/Projects/HR Animation/Drafts/Art/Production/HDRi. Once loaded, scale down your HDRi in your scene. Whenever you rotate your HDR around in your scene it will effect your lighting differently. If doing an outside scene, it is a good idea to rotate the sunspot of your dome light so it matches up with where you will be placing your main key light. In your attribute editor, under render stats, make sure that the boxes you see in the image above are unchecked so that your HDR image won't show up in your background render. It's important to keep the rest of the settings as you see in the snapshot above.
Go back to Render Settings/Quality/ and set your Custom Sampling to 1, turn on Raytracing, and turn motion blur to Full. Make sure you do not turn your sample level above a 1. It will double your render time every time you move up one value. This is the quality level that Rob approved for the blur quality of the background on this project. For motion blur, you might also want to check on the quality tab underneath the motion blur and make sure your motion factor is set to 1.
Now the fun part. Starting with your lights. When I light my scene I always try to use as minimal lights as possible so I'm not killing my render time. I have 5 lights that I have created in my scene. I have the subtle HDR dome light, two spot lights (one key and one fill), and two directional lights (one linked to the character and one linked to the background by light centric linking). I also have shadows turned on for only two of my lights, my key and one directional light. You might not even need it on your directional unless you are casting shadows on your background from your directional. Starting with your Key Spot light, make sure that it has a Quadratic decay rate, and you turn it into an area light as a rectangle shape and with high samples of 3 and low samples of 2. Turning it into an area lit will make your lighting a lot prettier but also give you the control you need of a spot light. How you set your Cone Angle, Penumbra, and Dropoff will be totally up to your creative eye.
There are several ways to do shadows but mental ray works best with raytracing shadows more than using depth map shadows. It's render is built specifically for raytracing as opposed to other renderes such as renderman. For a special case of rendering lighting on the HR characters, we are going to use a mental ray shadow override because it works best for the targa files on hair for the characters. Next, scroll down to mental ray/shadows and click the box that says Use mental ray shadow map overrides. Make sure your shadow map format stays at regular shadow map. I found that the settings of resolution, samples, and bias worked best as the settings above. The softness of your shadow will be dependent on your artistic eye. It will change depending on how far a shadow will be cast on an object or how close.
On one of my directional lights, I turned on shadows to cast onto the background. As you see above the softness value has been changed.
Once you got your lighting set up and begin testing your renders, you will begin to see how the eyes are reacting to the reflections of the HDR dome light. The reflection on the eyes will need to change depending on the HDR you use. There is a control that I created that will make it easy for you to do this. If you select the main eye control on the rig and go to your channel box you will find and attribute named reflectivity. You can set a float value anywhere between 0 to 1.
In most of our shots we will be adding depth of field. Just in case you might not know where that is located, here it is.
When you start your first batch renders to see how your lighting is working along with it's animation, it is good practice to render the sequence on 5's or 10's rather than 1's. This is a faster way of locating problems quickly. Under render settings and under frame range you can control this in the by frame tab. Also make sure your Depth channel is unchecked since you are already calculating depth of field in your renders.

Since the camera you will be using in the HR scenes will not be moving during the entirety of the shot, you will not have to render several frames of the background. It will be easier to just render your background seperate from your characters on one layer and one frame. Then render your characters on a seperate layer without the background. An example of this set up is above.

These two images are an example of a render of the masterlayer and the background.

Finally, in the process of solving any major flickering. This is after the fact rendering all your frames out, (because this might happen on one frame that you could not have predicted) the values circled above is what you will be adjusting to test things out. You will also need to enable map visualizer and diagnose finalgather. When you run a preview render with these checked on you will get a render scattered with green dots. These dots will tell you where the areas of flickering will most likely occur. Using this information, adjust the above values accordingly until the dots lesson. Then re-render that one or two frames that flickered and replace them with the bad images and wala. FIXED.

WHERE YOU WILL BE PLACING YOUR RENDERS

As far as where you will be placing your renders when setting your project, go to S:/PROJECTS/HR Animation/Drafts/Art/Production/Renders/Lighting/ in lighting you will have 3 folders. Primary_lighting, secondary_lighting, and temp_practice. Your experimentation will go into temp_practice and delete your files when your done. The renders that you do on 10's will go into Primary_lighting, the renders that you do on 1's will go into secondary and this is where you will render out all your final passes for compositing. Inside the primary and secondary folder, you will need to make and shot folder of the shot your lighting, inside of that you will need to make both a background and character folder. Background will be for your background render and primary will be for your sequence batch renders of your character animation.

Also, when you begin lighting a shot go to S:/PROJECTS/HR Animation/Drafts/Art/Production/Shots/ then navigate to your shot. Inside that folder make a folder called lighting and save a copy of the .mb file you be working on.

cheers

Of Pioneers and Wagons

This has been one of the funnest projects that I have worked on. It has been a goal of mine for a long time to A) Work with actors on a green screen, B) Composite live action plates with CGI elements, and C) Be a part of a story telling experience from beginning to end.
Our whole team can now say they accomplished this. Everybody in the Film or Animation industry should have an opportunity to work on something similar.
We learned a lot through this project, and there were some interesting challenges that we had to overcome along the way.

Talent and the green screen: It is best to know exactly what you need before going to the green screen. We had very limited space for our shoots, which meant that we had to be careful with our placement of the Talent in front of the screen as well as placement of the lights on the set.
We did well in this area but we didn't get everything (specifically the Talent saying ALL the lines that they need to say). This means that there was way more After Effects corrections than necessary.
Blending CGI objects into a "live action plate" with the talent: This was a pretty fun challenge and also goes back to preparations on the green screen set.
The main problem we faced here was getting rid of the shadows that were created by the folds of the greenscreen, due to us barely having enough green material to cover up everything that needed to be covered. Better preparations and a bigger budget can probably solve the problem.
Syncing voices with the talent, and fixing the mouth shapes that don't work: We had to do some clever masking effects in After Effects to work through this. The result was not quite as seamless and a lot more comical than we anticipated.
Creating an environment that doesn't actually "exist": I was fairly impressed with how we pulled this off. All of the environments exist, but not as they appear in the final composition. Each environment was pieced together from HiRes images that were taken from the Utah area.

Something that could make this work better on future projects is to label the layers making it easier to manipulate them.
Creating a digital Zoom on an environment: This was a fun little challenge required some clever use of After Effects tools and position of layers. In essence, making After Effects a digital version of Disney's Multiplane Camera.
Blending CGI animation into the mix:
The biggest challenge was with rendering and figuring out the best way to render everything.


It was also a minor challenge to figure out exactly how the Talent would interact with the CGI elements. Normally you would have a live action plate that you would have to fit the CGI elements into, but we did it somewhat the opposite way here.
Making sure the scale was relatively consistent:
This was only a minor challenge, but it was never completely solved, which is OK because it works with the style. We tried to make it consistent by having a guide from the beginning that would show the size difference. We also only sized down the bodies, thus helping maintain the integrity of the images.

There were other challenges that weren't fixed very well or could have been done better:
Lighting consistency: As we had to work with talent individually and on different days, the lighting wasn't always very consistent (i.e. the professor on a saddle and the Sam and Becky on the wagon). The problem was primarily with limited room on the set and awkward shadows.
Work around: A way to solve this problem might be to situate the screen in a more neutral location in the room, and mark where lights should be on the floor.
Camera limitations: The camera we used didn't have the ability to take rapid pictures, which made it difficult to capture all of the expressions and the poses of the Talent. It was especially difficult to capture all of the horses movements.
Work around: Well ... we could either find someone with a different camera, or have a bigger budget to buy a better one.
Talent performing to big heads: When we did our shoots, we didn't take into account that the heads were going to be two or three times bigger than normal. Therefore every gesture that was made where a hand went up to a face, or taking off a hat needed to be manipulated in after effects.
Work around: One idea is to have them wear a "Big Head" shaped sphere and perform to that. Another less embarrassing way might be to let them imagine themselves with a larger head while doing their motions. This could also be easier if we purchase or make a shirt or bib of green material for the Talent to wear after wearing the costume.
Horses on the green screen: The camera wasn't the only problem with the horses. It was very difficult to ensure that the horse was covered at all times by our small screen.

Work around: One way could be to put the screen on a wheel system to be able to role it behind the horse, at which ever angle the camera needed. Another way is to find bigger green screen surface.
"Big Head" style: Since we were pressed for time, we had to hurry through some parts of the process and this also included the way the heads were connected to the bodies. Therefore, the style was very inconsistent.
Work around: One way would be to do a couple of master poses of the Talent in extreme positions and have the lead place the head and body in the right positions with a fluid transition between the too. This would also require close collaboration between everybody involved with this part of the process.
Mouth shapes and head positions separated: This is part and parcel to the acting-to-big-heads problem. We forgot to have Becky say her lines when we had her on set the first time, so it was difficult to match her mouth shapes to the head angle. Separating the mouth and the head also made her animations inconsistent with every other character.
Work around: The angle of the head needs to be as close as possible to the mouth shapes that are used. The lighting also needs to match as close as possible.

Ending on a high note:
One thing that was particularly helpful was to have very well made CGI assets, that were both well modeled and textured. This made allowed a lot of freedom in our placing them into the scene, and allowing us to come really close to the camera and not lose much quality.
The only thing that could have been better with this is to get rid of some of the assets from the wagon, to speed up render time. The wagon was well done, and all the pieces would be great for a demo reel, but they weren't all necessary for the project cause we never really looked inside the wagon.

Refreshing textures in Mental Ray

While this was not an issue with 2008, with our new 2010 versions of Maya it seems that it is needful to be more careful with where we are putting asset files such as textures etc.

One problem I ran into is that I was working on a texture (rendering, tweaking, rendering again) Mental Ray would keep rendering my old texture even after I had loaded it again in Hypershade. (The swatch would update but the render would not)

The way to solve this problem is to set your project to the current folder you are working under. In the case of our Virtual Chem Lab project, you would set the project to the main asset folder where everything is under.

Example 3D_Maya>Inorganic/Assets/Centrifuge_table (You would set the project to "Centrifuge_table."

From there, make sure your textures are located right underneath your "sourceimages" folder that Maya looks for. It will not work if you put it in any other folder. However, you can name the "sourceimages" folder whatever you want. I illustrated this below with screen grabs.







































With our VCL pipeline, Rob created a folder called "Texture" in every asset main folder. It is fine to use this as the "sourceimages" folder, but it is important to type it in the "sourceImages" box exactly as it appears in the folder name. Problem solved! One more thing, the texture file needs to be directly inside this folder, it cannot be in a subfolder inside the folder, or it wont work. If organization is a big thing for you, I would recommend creating subfolders for each part of your asset, and then when the texture is final, bringing it back up directly under the "sourceimages" folder.

Modeling Techniques

Hey Guys, Since our next project is going to be pretty modeling intensive, Rob wanted me to do some modeling tutorials, and then publish what I learned here. I found some great techniques to model complex geometry.The First step is to find a good set of photos or drawings, and then set them up as image planes in the corresponding orthographic views. In this case a 69 GTO. It's impossible to model accurately without this step.
Once the image planes are set up create a basic polygon, in this case a cube, and add enough subdivisions to get the basic shape. Scale edge loops and move verticies until the cube matches up with the drawings. Do this in each of the orthographic views. Try to keep edge loops at places where there are divisions in real life, such as around the door, hood, trunk, glass, etc. At this stage we are not worried about small detail.After I created the basic shape, I went in and deleted half of my cube making it easier to work with. Then I adjusted edges and verticies to make the mesh more accurate (real life photo reference is great for this). Keep edge spacing as consistent as possible except where there are sharper edges. I also went in and deleted the glass.One at a time I went in and selected the faces of the different body panels. I then used the extract command to make each panel it's own piece of geometry. A good rule is that if it's seperate on the real object, seperate it on the mesh. This way it's much easier to add detail to individual panels, but the overall shape and edges of everything still match up.Next I went in and defined and reworked each separate panel, until it was the shape I wanted, then I started to add other details. The chrome trim was extruded from the edges of the panels and then extracted. I built the chrome bumper and grille the same way extruding the edges and using my reference drawings in the orthographic views. Finally I went in and added the GTO decals, lights, mirrors, glass, and wheels. Then I duplicated all the surfaces and combined them with the other half to make a full car.All done. I hope this helps with some modeling concepts when dealing with complex hard surfaces.

Jibba Jabba

Hey y'all. I've been trying to do research on basic jib jab techniques to get ready for that short pioneer jib jab project coming up.

Here are some fun examples of the different stylistic approaches to jib jab animation:

Time for some Campaigning :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adc3MSS5Ydc
Obama Saves the Day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVFdAJRVm94m
Monty Python:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ72fcHDUC8
Hedgehog in the Frog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRsXU4Q6a0Q
Tale of Tales:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmcp4XNCWRY&feature=related


So I tried to do a little test animation to get my feet wet. It's not spectacular but it utilizes some of the basic principles of jibba jabba:




Here are some tutorial sites that I came across that I found pretty helpful. I'll add more as I find them:

Basics:
http://ae.tutsplus.com/tutorials/beginner-series/create-the-jibjab-effect/
Putting it together:
http://blog.jibjab.com/2008/07/14/putting-it-all-together/
Utilizing the Puppet Pin Tool:
http://www.motionworks.com.au/2009/02/the-dancing-can-part-1/
Overview for AfterEffect tools:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSB2E4332E-8EA6-4fa2-AF6F-D50C22088EE3a.html