I had my soundmix today, and as always it was a great experience. I don't know how it works in other school but at USC we get professionals sound engineers to do our sound mixing for us. You sit in front of this big console with the engineer next to you and watch as he works away, directing him on what you need from time to time. The result is beautiful sound for your film, much better than what you started with and all leveled out and ready for big screen projection.. hurray!
For my film soundmixing was pretty simple actually, since I only had one track which is the music my composer did. Speaking of, finding a composer and settling on your music is not an easy task. I had many meetings with my composer and basically had to find a balance between me directing him to get what I wanted while letting him be creative enough so that something good actually comes out (since I have like a quarter of a brain when it comes to sound). In the end though it was a good experience, and if you come across the right guy or gal you'll know right away and you'll have great stuff for your film. Always remember though, personal relations are as important as his work.. so dont get carried away with one or the other.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Animation is done!
Finally, animation is done. What does this mean? That I still have a lot of work to do!
Basically what's happening is that I am done animating properties and cameras, so that my film is 'soundlocked' which means I cannot change any of the timing to it or move scenes around. It does not mean i cant change the camera movements, but I am also done with them, so pretty much all animation is done!
Next is the long and arduous process of rendering and comp work, each presenting its own difficulties and rewards. More on that soon@!
I leave you with a sneak peak of one of the final parts of the movie...
Basically what's happening is that I am done animating properties and cameras, so that my film is 'soundlocked' which means I cannot change any of the timing to it or move scenes around. It does not mean i cant change the camera movements, but I am also done with them, so pretty much all animation is done!
Next is the long and arduous process of rendering and comp work, each presenting its own difficulties and rewards. More on that soon@!
I leave you with a sneak peak of one of the final parts of the movie...
Paint Effects Workflow
Now that you have somewhat an idea of what Paint effects are and what they can do to you, I will proceed to tell you how to work with them, or at least how I have found useful to work with them.
Since we do not have an Alpha channel I plan accordingly and render all of them at once (in the images I have showed you the red nebulae, the stars, the sun and the glow line are each different paint effects strokes).
However, when we absolutely need an alpha for whatever reasons, there are work arounds one can employ which basically create an alpha channel for you in much better state than the one that comes default from Maya. There are several ways to do this, I will now outline a couple that I find to work the best:
Keying:
keying out the black is an obvious choice, and although at first it sounds hopeful it is not that easy, or rather, the results are not that great, especially with glowing things, which is about all of paint effects.
here is a paint effects image in the raw, as it came of the renderer and with its alpha ignored
Now here is one with a color key applied
although at first it might seem promising, look at a close up of what the key looks like
after some work with the key
and a close up
now this looks much better, until you go back to the original one and realize how much detail you've lost
another method is the shift channels method, where you take another channel of the image, say the red channel or the luminance depending on what would be best for that particular image and make it the alpha. the downside of this method is that you can adjust it very little, but for particular images, say if we had only stars which are mostly luminance with almost no hue in them, it could work very well.
same image with shift channels applied
The only way to control this method is by using individual controls on the levels and adjusting, of all things, the alpha on it, which is basically its luminance.
In my opinion the second method gives somewhat better results although it really depends on the image.
Since we do not have an Alpha channel I plan accordingly and render all of them at once (in the images I have showed you the red nebulae, the stars, the sun and the glow line are each different paint effects strokes).
However, when we absolutely need an alpha for whatever reasons, there are work arounds one can employ which basically create an alpha channel for you in much better state than the one that comes default from Maya. There are several ways to do this, I will now outline a couple that I find to work the best:
Keying:
keying out the black is an obvious choice, and although at first it sounds hopeful it is not that easy, or rather, the results are not that great, especially with glowing things, which is about all of paint effects.
here is a paint effects image in the raw, as it came of the renderer and with its alpha ignored
Now here is one with a color key applied
although at first it might seem promising, look at a close up of what the key looks like
after some work with the key
and a close up
now this looks much better, until you go back to the original one and realize how much detail you've lost
another method is the shift channels method, where you take another channel of the image, say the red channel or the luminance depending on what would be best for that particular image and make it the alpha. the downside of this method is that you can adjust it very little, but for particular images, say if we had only stars which are mostly luminance with almost no hue in them, it could work very well.
same image with shift channels applied
The only way to control this method is by using individual controls on the levels and adjusting, of all things, the alpha on it, which is basically its luminance.
In my opinion the second method gives somewhat better results although it really depends on the image.
Paint Effects Hurt - an Overview
As I mentioned in the last post, the space environment I'm creating is done with Maya Paint Effects. I will now talk a little but more about this intriguing technology.
Paint Effects is basically a way of painting with 3D. Although I am not familiar enough with its inner workings to describe 'exactly' what it is, I can tell you from its results pretty much how it works and what its advantages / limitations are.
First off, Paint Effects is, at its core, a 2D effect. This brings with it several bits of information worth knowing before using them. Its main advantages: it renders blazing fast, it is easy to tweak, it looks pretty. Its main disadvantages: due to its nature, most times you get no alpha channel (as when you use 'strokes'), making them a pain to work with in comp and to layer over each other.
On a more technical side, Paint Effects is a Post Process, which means it doesn't get calculated at render time together with all the other geometry in your scene, but rather after everything else is done, Maya goes in, looks at what paint effects are in the scene, and in effect paints them onto your render as if a blotch of paint suddenly fell on your beautiful painting, and it is equally irremovable. That is also why only Maya software render can render paint effects (other 3rd party renderers like mental ray or RenderMan wont do it).
So basically if you want to have Paint Effects in your 3D scene, you better render them all at once and you better get the exact look you want right off the bat, because there is very little you will be able to do with them after they have been rendered. (if anyone knows otherwise, please show me the error of my ways).
Sample images:
Now I will show you a paint effects image
and its alpha channel, which is apretty much unusable (only fully white areas are fully opaque).
So that if I would like to put something BEHIND the paint effects layer, it would loose all the detail and pretty much look like this:
Paint Effects is basically a way of painting with 3D. Although I am not familiar enough with its inner workings to describe 'exactly' what it is, I can tell you from its results pretty much how it works and what its advantages / limitations are.
First off, Paint Effects is, at its core, a 2D effect. This brings with it several bits of information worth knowing before using them. Its main advantages: it renders blazing fast, it is easy to tweak, it looks pretty. Its main disadvantages: due to its nature, most times you get no alpha channel (as when you use 'strokes'), making them a pain to work with in comp and to layer over each other.
On a more technical side, Paint Effects is a Post Process, which means it doesn't get calculated at render time together with all the other geometry in your scene, but rather after everything else is done, Maya goes in, looks at what paint effects are in the scene, and in effect paints them onto your render as if a blotch of paint suddenly fell on your beautiful painting, and it is equally irremovable. That is also why only Maya software render can render paint effects (other 3rd party renderers like mental ray or RenderMan wont do it).
So basically if you want to have Paint Effects in your 3D scene, you better render them all at once and you better get the exact look you want right off the bat, because there is very little you will be able to do with them after they have been rendered. (if anyone knows otherwise, please show me the error of my ways).
Sample images:
Now I will show you a paint effects image
and its alpha channel, which is apretty much unusable (only fully white areas are fully opaque).
So that if I would like to put something BEHIND the paint effects layer, it would loose all the detail and pretty much look like this:
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Space
Here I am going to show you some stills of the final scene in my film which takes places in space. The environment was done mostly with Paint Effects, which although it is easy to use provides a host of new problems one must contend with like the absence of a an alpha channel.
That being said, it does render really fast and its quite easy to tweak once you understand the underlying architecture. Its nature though makes it pretty much a use-what-you-get type of thing, with very little tweaking possible in comp.
The idea here was to create a sort of a fantastic environment in space in which clouds could exist, the band of glow across the horizon was done to provide some balance and weight to the image, otherwise i felt the viewer could get disoriented really fast. I will post more on the look of the sun and the clouds later.
As you can probably see, there are still some issues I need to work out in terms of the glow and also the general look of the image, which hasn't been color corrected or worked at much.
That being said, it does render really fast and its quite easy to tweak once you understand the underlying architecture. Its nature though makes it pretty much a use-what-you-get type of thing, with very little tweaking possible in comp.
The idea here was to create a sort of a fantastic environment in space in which clouds could exist, the band of glow across the horizon was done to provide some balance and weight to the image, otherwise i felt the viewer could get disoriented really fast. I will post more on the look of the sun and the clouds later.
As you can probably see, there are still some issues I need to work out in terms of the glow and also the general look of the image, which hasn't been color corrected or worked at much.
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