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STE - Full Sail

STE - Full Sail

Learning a new 3D package is certainly difficult. Learning it in a month is just as hard. Luckily though, if you already know what you're going to do in a package, you can focus just on that area, and learn more about it later. That's the concept that I learned with my class in Software Technology.

In this class, we utilized the program of Softimage, better known as XSI. The idea of this class was to prepare us for learning a new 3D program to merge into any situation and to accept any 3D application in a workflow. While Maya is an amazing program itself, it helps so much to know more. After taking this class, I look forward to learning more about Blender. I've known quite a bit about Blender, and it's a little difficult to navagate, but after this class was finished I'm more thrilled to learn more in the package. Using the program as a compositor, however, XSI is very simple to set up and model, so as a compositor, it's a really easy workflow. Setting up renders is just as easy, as well as render passes that act just like buckets, it's really cool.
So, getting back to what happened... Well in the beginning of class we had to get into groups that could be as big as 5-10 members, mainly to have two members per discipline.

The disciplines ranged as:
  • Character Model
  • Environment Model
  • Shading/Lighting
  • Animation
  • Rigging
I had the pleasure of working in a great group, where even though we had some set-backs, we overall came out on top. The major issue we had was one of our group members set back our original deadline, and unfortunately we came to the decision to fire him. On top of that, he was our character modeler... We came to our conclusion for the fact that we decided what our group's project would be in the first week, and he said he would have our character model finished in three days, and we could have everything worked out and have it rigged and ready for animation, and it could be imported overtop the final UV'd model. Unfortunately, he had major difficulties in Zbrushing the model, his scale and proportion kept changing, which made rigging difficult if things kept changing, and this pushed us back to the last two weeks, where we had the environment, the lighting, the MoCap data, but no character, and no rig. Overall, he had about two weeks, and then said he was scrapping his model and restarting it all in ZBrush. This was the last straw. We had our discussion, and came to the agreement that we had to let him go. After the agreement with the Course Director to fire him from the team, we HAD to get a model. I wasn't aware that in the situation we were left in we could use a premade model, but I went ahead and made a character in 6 hours. It wasn't the greatest model I've ever made, but it held its purposes, and made me realize that if it took me 6 hours to get a whole character, why did it take so long to deliver what we anticipated in the first place? If I put a little more time into the character, brought it into ZBrush, it could have been a lot better, I could've even subdivided one more time so the rigger would have more to work with, but I wasn't the character modeler for the group, I was concerned about lighting and render times. The amount of 6 hours for the character also include UVing and texturing.

So, after that was settled, I kept the proportions of the model similar to the rig that was made previously, and all the rigger had to do was bind and paint the weights... Magic! The animators got the animation done in about four days using MoCap data, utilizing Cortex, MotionBuilder, and XSI. When completed, I had about half a week to render out of XSI, and so the fun begins.
I had an open lab in room 127, which I'd like to say are very nice machines for rendering, however that's on the Mac side. The PC side of the machine only uses a set amount of RAM, else the program crashes; and since XSI is PC-Only, that created some major difficulties. I'd try to kick-off a render in there, and after 7 frames it would crash.. Joy. Luckily, the PRM instructor was in the lab, to help his students if they needed help in sculpting. He's a great person to be around, and with his permission, I still kept my open lab, but I kept going back and forth to lab 129 to set up my renders. I had my teammates in that lab, so they could keep an eye on the computers that were rendering out. I had a total of 6 renders to do, ranging from 60-200 frames each. The slow-motion part of the shot I was trying to find a work-around of how to do, but I just grabbed the keyframes and stretched them until the motion was slow. What many people don't understand about slow motion, is that when you slow something down, you need more frames to fill in between, else it will look choppy, and just not like a slow motion. So, when running back and forth between lab 127 and 129, I was informed about renders crashing, needing to restart and back up files and renders. It took about 8 hours to render the whole sequence.
When I got all the files, I went ahead and brought all the clips and passes into Nuke, compiled them together, and rendered that out again so it would have all the appropriate flares.

The passes that were used per shot where as follows:
  • Diffuse/Beauty Pass
  • Ambient Occlusion
  • ID Matte
  • Shadows
  • Depth (made awesomeness happen)

These passes were put together to achieve the final look. I was especially happy with using the Ambient Occlusion Pass, as that's always the prettiest pass (and the most expensive for time) and the Depth Pass, which helped me achieve the Depth of Field look in all the shots, so some objects are in focus while others are blurred. Genius!
After finagling around a bit more, I made the title card and the end sequence, rendered out with the sound effects and music Ben obtained, and.... Done!

Here's some overall facts about the project:
  • Character modeler was fired for setting back rigging/animators, taking two weeks; whereas model used was made in 6 hours.
  • Environment was modeled and textured by Anna Castro
  • Animation was done by Ben Brewington and Cai Castro
  • Rigging was done by the Magical Mark McCall
  • Lighting/Rendering was done by myself, Nicholas Daniels. I was also the assigned leader for this group, so I would talk to the lab staff and give them progress reports.

Some more interesting facts:
  • Original idea was two toonish aliens in a spaceship, one pressed a button and walked away, the other character presses the button and the destination changes to Earth.
  • Due to set-backs, the animator's had to use the MoCap data, but it was originally proposed to be hand animated
  • The rig was redone a total of 4 times
  • The environment model's textures had so many textures with Diffuse, Spec, and Normals, that it crashed the render occasionally, so we had to cut out the Normal maps on some buildings.
  • The depth pass is what made the cameras look so cool.
  • Renders crashed 7 times.
  • Rendering took a total of 8 hours, then brought into Nuke and took another hour to set up, with 15 minutes to render out of there.
  • It took another 8 hours to figure out why Final Cut AND Premiere didn't keep the file to stay at 720x405 with H.264 codec.
  • This was the first project submitted (just like MOC!)
  • We had the smallest group for this class' project.
  • The submitted project without the render files was 4 gigs!
  • Total amount of scheduled STE Lab time was 40 hours.

So in the end, our group did an amazing job among our class. It wasn't the greatest of all time, but we were pretty darn close for learning a program in a short amount of time in a schedule as busy as Full Sail's. I was glad that our group achieved a great end-result, and colors really shown when we were crunched down for time.

Without further adieu, enjoy the final project for STE!

Traceurs - Software Technology Final Project from Nicholas Daniels on Vimeo.



-endy.