Creating Stereoscopic 3D Images

Such a fun assignment. Here are my 3D photos, with Red/Cyan color pair.

me self at the art building

sculpture on campus

the art quad Spartan 

3D in 3D

Recreating Cameras and Lights in Maya

photo 1

photo 2

photo 3

Extra Credit: Lighting a Scene in Maya

1 point

2 point

3 point

Building a Scene in Maya

Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

Uncut

           This is a great topic and one I’m happy to research and write about. I’ve chosen to elaborate on the hair special effects of two films: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within from 2001, and Pixar’s Brave from 2012. I remember watching Final Fantasy for the first time and being amazed at the realism the film reached. I remember seeing Aki’s hair and noticing how greatly special effects had evolved: it was not a visual stylization of hair; it was a head full of real hair! Years later I had the same feeling when I watched Brave. Merida’s hair was so flowing and bouncy, and very believable. Clearly the innovation with Aki’s hair paved the way for Merida’s curly locks. However nailing her hair was now not only another visual effects problem overcome, it was absolutely critical because it also served as the very personification of her fiery, rebellious character. It seemed to me to be the actual main character of the film.

Final Fantasy I thought was a big film when it came out. Even though derived from a video game, it was one of the first animated films to reach a new level of photorealism. Groundbreaking as it was the first film that had human leads played by non-actors. I remember thinking the backgrounds were stunning and monumental, and the sound design being great, however, what made its presence solid was its heroine Aki, in particular her hair. Pondering back, hair has been a tough hurdle for visual effects artists because plainly there’s so much of it. Analyzing upon the history of hair in animated films, it’s easy to discern why a head full of hair was usually dealt with as one single shape. It takes a long time, energy, and rendering power to create a full head of hair.

Evidently, animators have been diligently working on techniques to smooth out the artistic process. Because in Final Fantasy the animators pushed for realism rather than stylization, Aki’s hair was unlike anything we had seen before. Being accustomed to the spiky and strandless hairs of early-generation films and video games, the flowing silky hair of the movie’s heroine – 60,000 strands -- was truly radical. Twenty percent of total production time was spent on realistic animating these 60,000 strands of hair. For the first time on the big screen a character’s hair could flip, whirl and refract light. To accomplish this, for every second of film, it took 36 hours of render time at 24 fps.

           On the other hand, Merida’s hair represented a once again new breakthrough in digital hair. Her long and curly style took many years to perfect, being much more complex than a straight style hair. Tight curls interacted with each other, and this required its own technological advances. Katherine Sarafian, a producer of Brave said that “the computer really likes right angles and straight lines; the computer hates anything organic and soft […] we then developed a whole new system to compute the motion of Merida’s hair.” To arrive at this challenge of making the hair look both rich in detail and natural, the Pixar engineers and artists had to create the hair with its own kind of physics and gravity. Each strand – 111,700 strands – was modeled individually.

To achieve the full head of curls, each strand was started as a spring in Maya. The Pixar team created many kinds of springs: short, long, thin, stretched, compressed, bouncy and stiff. In order to give Merida’s hair volume, the springs were entered on the computer in layers. The layers varied in length, size and flexibility of each curl. The challenge was to create springs that were stiff in order to hold their curls but also to make them soft in their movement. All this staying true to the character’s personality, personified in her wild hair.

The red color posed as another challenge because of its strong effects on light. Even with a computer-generated head of hair, there were times during production when the team needed to see a live Merida hair model. Famously, at one point the whole team had access to a Merida wig that sat permanently outside the animator’s offices so they could get submerged into her character.  

In comparison with Aki’s hair, in Brave, with even more challenges but with greater technological advances, for each second of film Merida’s hair took 8 minutes to render at 24 fps. It took almost three years to get the final look, and two months alone were spent on the scene where Merida removes her hood and the viewer sees the full volume of her hair.

Each film used the most up-to-date technology available at the time of its conception to achieve realistic results. Final Fantasy unmistakably paved the way for Pixar to create the rebellious locks of Merida. Even though cutting-edge at the time, and while still impressive today, Final Fantasy seems somewhat outdated in comparison with Brave’s pioneering new generation of hair strand technology. As an animation lover, I have to say that I must watch these sorts of films twice: the first time I’m focused on the story and the second time from a technical aspect to get fully submerged in their awesome visual effects.

Stop-Motion Character Animation

For this film I wanted to do a comedy involving my cat Otto. I first planned the wood armature's movements and edited in Premiere. Once I was happy with it I went ahead and re-shot each frame and filmed my cat eating a snack. I then played around with the timing and the overall composition in Premiere and added Otto's part at the end for a comedic climax.

Extra Credit: Walt Disney Museum

Extra Credit: Cinequest Film Festival

Outline for the Third Term Paper

                Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

I have chosen to compare the visual effects of hair from two films: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) and Brave (2012).

 Final Fantasy

First film with human leads played by non-actors

Aki, the main character had CG photorealistic hair

First time a character’s hair could bounce, flip and refract light

20 % of production spent on time animating Aki’s 60,000 hair strands

1 second of film = 36 hours of render time

A huge leap forward in special effects

Film created using Maya

Still stiff in today’s standards

Brave

Merida’s hair symbolizes her character

Flowing, curly tangled mass of hair

New technology developed to enhance heroine’s hair

111,700 hair strands

1 second of film = 8 minutes of render time

Each strand animated in Maya

Film’s main focus was to use this hair technology

The breakthrough with Aki’s hair paved the way for Pixar to create the rebellious locks for Merida. Before Final Fantasy, viewers usually saw one-shape, spiky, strandless hair types. Both films used the most up-to-date technology available at the time of conception to realize realistic results. Even though groundbreaking at the time, Final Fantasy today seems somewhat outdated, while Brave pioneered a new generation of hair strand technology.

Character Animation

I just wanted to have fun with this project. I arrived home and it was time for the thrash to be thrown out. Right then I saw my little character. His name is Travis. Pressed for time and without a steady hand I put Travis to sleep.

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

Science Manipulated for Cinematic Fun

Although what makes movies attractive to most audiences is the sense of escape provided by a good story, where the viewer embarks in a whole new fantasy world, every so often I also enjoy watching films that are focused on action mostly, such as blockbuster movies. Such films can be entertaining because they are deceitfully unconvincing, and I find that in them the most exaggerated actions are the most entertaining ones. These have the laws of physics manipulated for entertainment continuity, and  one of the laws that I’m most pleased to see broken is Newton’s first law of motion, or law of inertia. It states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. In such films the “heroes” perform remarkable feats that ordinary mortals could not pull off. The entertainment value, for me, comes from watching scenes so outlandish that I think “Really?”

 One example that comes to mind right away is from the 1994 thriller Speed. A low-budget fun ride thanks to its premise of an exploding device being wired to a commuter bus which will detonate if the vehicle drops its speed to 50 mph, this speedy bus gives many opportunities for the bending of physical laws for entertainment. As the bus is moving on the highway, the people on the bus are informed that due to road construction, a bridge in the highway is missing a segment. Unable to stop the bus, Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves decide to make the jump over the gap. The bus then accelerates to about 70 mph, and successfully makes the jump. Beforehand the highway is clearly seen as perfectly horizontal and the bridge is level with it. This predetermines that the bus would nose down and hit the ground below. Being aware of this fact, the bus was special effects-modified to depart at an upward angle relative to the horizontal, as if a ramp had been placed exactly before the gap. Even though the bus was tilted upward, as it plunges off it flies on a horizontal line, and furthermore appears to float and stay up in the air as if it was a toy kept suspended, creating a scene that is quite odd. This bus just kept on going!   

Another fun example is from the comedy action film True Lies. During the 80s and 90s James Cameron seemed to be the master of big, over-the-top stunt films. This film is no exception, with absurd scenes so absurd that they outdo being offensive to the lay intelligence. Between a motorcycle jumping between two skyscrapers and a gigantic exploding bridge, the most memorable scene here is the final one, when Schwarzenegger takes to the sky in a jet and snags a terrorist into a missile -- while saying “You’re fired” -- then launches both into the air through the side of a building and toward a passive helicopter. It feels like watching the demolition derby! It’s futile to argue of the nonsense of such scenes, but with the weight of a grown man that missile wouldn’t just keep flying like a bird. But what?!? Lose all that wonderful CGI? Nonetheless, as I’ve read once somewhere, watching this film is like being force-fed “the proverbial Chinese dinner,” leaving me hungry an hour later.

Another example that comes to mind is from the unmemorable film Resident Evil: Afterlife. This sequel is pretty much forgettable, but a scene strategically placed right in its beginning caught my attention. Milla Jovovich, loaded with superpowers and an army of clones, plays the film’s heroine and lands a small red airplane at the roof of a Los Angeles skyscraper. This scene establishes how shallow and unreasonable this whole film is going to be, as if it’s a forced attempt to grab hold of the viewer, and it stalls from there. The absurdity is easy to detect, and the viewer can surely sense that when a light aircraft comes in to land, it needs a few hundred feet to touch down and come to a stop, but our heroine managed to land her bird in a pretty much small area. This landing is emphasized by the large amount of slow motion camerawork, even to the point of self-parody, with the result of every action dragging along. This is a film so “incorrect” and CG-infested that it feels like watching someone playing a videogame. But the again I don’t watch these films to practice my critical thinking.

 Directors and special effects creators work hard to create impressive scenes in movies to excite the audience. Many scenes are created with absolute disregard of the physical laws in our universe. Sometimes the scene is so profoundly wrong that it is hard to be missed. However, by my observations many scenes that bend the laws of physics to the extreme are actually not noticed by every viewer watching. Perhaps this sort of film reinforces passivity, or might even create incorrect scientific attitudes to some, but to me these scenes are so obviously unreal, and the directors are so obviously not trying to make them real, that that’s where the fun resides. The point of these films and their entertainment value lie precisely on the fact that they overreach themselves in unreality, and I go Really? Yeap.

Outline for the Second Term Paper

Science Fact of Cinematic Fiction?

                One of the physics laws I’m most pleased to see broken in films for entertainment continuity is Newton’s first law of motion, or law of inertia. It states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Especially in action films, the “heroes” perform remarkable feats that ordinary mortals could not pull off. I actually enjoy watching scenes so outlandish that I think, “Really?”

                Speed:

                On one scene Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves drive a bus off a huge gap section of a highway. Instead of following its path, the bus appears to float and stay up in the air as if it was a toy being lifted, making then scene quite odd.

               True Lies:

                On its final scene, Schwarzenegger snags a terrorist into a missile and launches both into the air through the side of a building and toward a helicopter. With weight of a grown man that missile would not fly like a bird.

                Resident Evil: Afterlife:

    In the beginning, Jovovich lands a small airplane on the top of skyscraper. Any aircraft needs a few hundred feet to touch down and land. The only memorable thing on this film. In the beginning for a reason.
     
               Although unexpectedly outlandish, these types of scenes are to be expected in blockbusters. The laws of nature are defied for entertainment value. Many films, especially the ones focused on action alone and not a memorable story, become fun and memorable precisely because they are over-the-top.

Reverse Video Reference

Outline of the First Term Paper

Video Analysis of Path of Action

Shooting Video Reference

Mini-Portfolio

Hi! I'm an Illustration/Animation major currently on my final BFA year of the program. I love telling stories through drawing and painting. My main focus has been on Illustration and Visual Development, but I also enjoy animating a lot. I lean toward Visual Development for film, and I also enjoy creating concepts for animated films and video games.

 This is an illustration I did for Ani 117 based on a novel by Gary Soto.

An illustration based on the 'Crew of You' concept for my Ani 116 class.

Having fun with the idea of metamorphosis.

 

I had a great time making this animation film for my Ani115 class.

The First Post

My first post for this blog :)