Animation Capstone 1
This year I am taking the University of Washington Animation Capstone. It is a year long course designed to blend academia and industry to teach us all the many skills that go into creating professional 3D animations. It also gives us the opportunity to make a very big thing with a group of very smart people. So far, it has been a blast.
We spent the first quarter learning the tools for the whole pipeline, from initial modelling to post. Most of this was in Maya, with a sprinkling of After Effects and Premiere. This quarter, the really fun stuff starts. For the rest of the year, the whole class (14 students, plus a handful of TAs and staff) is making a short film. Currently, we're shooting for about 6 minutes, although it will certainly be longer than that.
Our story follows an octopus, doing octopus things. If you look at an octopus doing much of anything, you'll notice that they are ridiculously strange creatures. Their whole body can squish every which way, their brains are built on a totally alien distributed model , and they have twice as many appendages to play with. All of this makes them uniquely challenging to animate, and a lot of our pre-production has been experimenting with the rig to get comfortable inside the mind of an octopus.
In order to make a project of this magnitude, we have to specialize a little. Thus, there are many different teams all working on different aspects of the project, just like there would be in industry. Of course, we're not that big of a team, so we’re all wearing a lot of hats.
I'll give a brief overview of what I'm working on, with the caveat that we are still mostly in pre-production and much of this is likely to change
Lighting & Rendering Lead:
This biggest task for lighting is lighting the whole film. Maya has a lot of sophisticated tools for making lights look real, and a lot of distinctly digital ways to cheat. It’s an interesting blend of artistic and logical problem solving. Fundamentally, we're trying to light the scene enough to see everything, while keeping it pleasant to look at, setting the mood and pushing the story, while also keeping render times somewhat reasonable. We'll also be responsible for managing the rendering process as the production continues.
3D Effects Lead:
This is what I am most excited to work on. Our job description is to "solve all the problems that we don't already have a pipeline for," which is quite the undertaking. I’m planning on crowd simulations for fish schools, fluid/particle systems for ink and sand, and a variety of ways to quickly build dynamic environments. Each of these problems are deserving of a number of posts dedicated to their intricacies, and new problems are certain to emerge.
Scripting/Rigging:
We are building on an existing Python codebase that plugs into Maya. There are a number of scripts on the drawing board to automate common animation tasks like adding overlap and overshoot, and there is a cryptic auto-rigging system that we need to learn. I've seen glimpses of it in action, and it's pretty impressive.
Layout:
Layout will be the first team to really get rolling once we start production. We are responsible for doing rough passes of every shot to put characters roughly where they should be, and to set up the camera motions. This is similar to lighting in that it requires some artistic thinking, but it's also a logic puzzle. Character A needs to be on camera at Point B and C, but not in shot D, I get to figure out how that actually happens in 3D space.
Editorial:
Editorial is responsible for cutting together all the in progress storyboards, playblasts, and renders to keep an up to date reel of our work at all times. We're also ultimately responsible for keeping the project files organized, because if it gets messy it’ll start breaking Premiere references and we will be sad. This is also an area that I see a lot of room for automation, so if there's time it may get a bit of coding love.
Animation:
The big one, animation needs to make all the moving things move good. And there are a lot of moving things.