Month: February 2022

This week our team start lighting the scene and keep refining our textures. At the same time zhengzhong trying to find a proper way to layer our rendering scene and preparing for the further compositing works.

I did the first version of lighting and then refined the lighting with zhengzhong and wanxuan in this week. During the process of lighting we meet several kinds of problems. For example, the weird noise in the image and improper shadow range. We finally overcame these problems and found a proper way to light the scene. Also we found the correct way to export multi-layer exr files with Z depth data, edges data and color data, which can make the compositing much more easier.

We also changed several of textures in our scene. Unfortunately, the scene has a lot of BUGs because of the improper use of referencing project and the file transfer between different maya versions, which took us plenty of time to fix them. It makes me realize the importance of file specification. A improper or wrong file specification can be a nightmare.

I made a cloth simulation loop for the curtain in our scene with Houdini this week and export an alembic file to maya to render it. What I want is a moving curtain with a wind blowing it. The movement of the curtain must be natural. I used a expression with random and sine function to drive the wind, which can provide a better result. Finally I turned the cache into a loop so that the length of that cache can be expanded in a short time.

I am not quite familiar with vellum solver so I took sometime to figure out how to use it. I think the final result is ok.

Reflection: It is a quite frustrated week to me because we have to fix tones of problems that we left in last few weeks and fortunately we finally finished it. Next week we will start rendering and compositing. There is still a lot of things to do so we must speed up our process in the next few weeks.

This week I still focusing on the textures and models of our scene.

I did a further research on the color key in our scene and find some useful references:

Firstly, I remade the floor texture this week because the old texture, which is made based on real textures, has less useful details and the color is not good enough for the scene. Therefore, I used Substance Designer to make a simple wooden floor texture. The details in this texture is simplified, which looks more like a cartoon style floor. It seems that the color of it needs to be adjusted, which will be finished next week.

I also find a better water pot reference for our scene, which has a more colorful and untraditional outward. I modeled the pot, textured it and did a simple rig.

Since our character need to break something inside the kitchen, I added some bottles and plates into our scene. The color of these bottles still need to be adjusted and I will finish it next week.

In next week we will start to add lights into the scene and keep refining our textures, shaders and models. We will test the environment and process to figure out a proper method for our further rendering works.

This week I discussed our project with classmates in other teams. We talked about the purpose of our project and our schedule, and finally focus on discussing about the technical topics. We exchanged several ideas with other classmates. I also saw the development of their projects and their recent achievement.

I discussed with Yaozhang, who is recently making some cinematic compositing works in his team. He shared us with his ideas of the whole project and the things that he is focusing on. I think his project is quite interesting because he has a great chance to combine real life shooting and his software techniques together to develop something quite cinematic and realistic, which is quite challenging and practical. We also talked about the technical problems in both of our project and some personal experience of software usage.

I also have a chat with other classmates and learned their working pipeline and what software they are using in their project, which gave me a lot of inspirations. I also realize that each team works pretty well and has clear schedules for the project. I saw their passion to the project, which motivated me to work harder. There is still several weeks for us to develop our project, I’ ll work harder and try to acheieve a better result after this discussion.

This week I focus on the textures of our scene and start to test rendering. Wanxuan did the setting of our models so I can texture these models based on her scene.

Since our main scenes are a livingroom and a kitchen, I firstly did a research on Pinterest to find some color reference for our scene. I then find some reference like these:

After compared with different kinds of references, I finally decided to color the kitchen with white, black and light warm green, which can keep a balance between realistic style and cartoon style. The livingroom is designed to be colored with blue, orange and warm brown, which increases the contrast of image.

I made textures in Substance Painter, which is a handy software for me. I mostly focus on texturing the corners of each object and adding some lines and drops to simulate some kind of hand drawing effects. I also added some fake light and shadows on textures to make it looks more three dimentional.

After making textures I turned to maya to add shaders to models and adjust their light and shadows. Here is the initial effect of two scenes:

The kitchen looks complicated enough but its wooden floor may need to be replaced by some other kind of floor like ceramic floor or something else. The livingroom has a lot of things, but it still looks empty, we are trying to change the settings and adding models to fix this.

One of the most struggling things in this process is the UVs. There are tones of UVs to be unfolded. What’s more, the models of the scene has a lot of problems like bad topology, overlapping points and faces, which added some difficulties to unfolding UVs. Anyway, the problem has been solved manually, which took me a lot of time.

The next step is polishing our textures and keep testing rendering. Also, I think the livingroom seems a little bit empty and we will add more models to fix this problem in next week.

This week Zhenzhong made the character model based on Wanxuan’s sketch and I focusing on character rigging. After I received the model, I finished the character rig by myself.

The character rig is a full handmade rig, which takes me several days to finish. It is a full character rig which covers both body rig and the facial rig. The main body is an ik/fk system which covers ik and fk spine with a basic squash & stretch system, and ik/fk system for limbs. I also made a 360 degree foot controler so that animator can make tiptoe or heel animation much easier. It is pity that I don’t have time to make the squash & stretch system for character’s limbs, which can give animator the opportunity to do some cartoon style animation.

The character rig also has facial system, which covers eyebrow controlers, cheek controlers, jaw controlers, lip controlers and ik/fk eye controlers. I used a blended mode of skeleton based and blendshape based rig system to finish this character rig. Honestly, building the structure of this rig doesn’t takes much time. Instead, painting skin weight and making blendshapes take most of the time because both of them determines the flexibility of this rig.

After I finished the rig I also take some time to check the bugs in this system. I adjust the blendshapes, the skin weight for serval times, which takes a lot of time to finish. The rig also has problem when the main controler scaled. I then find out that the problem comes from the squash and stretch spine system because of the wrong data that transfered within the node editor. I adjust several nodes and fixed the problem.

I also tried to add some sub controlers to the clothes to avoid the crossing between models. However the sub controlers’ shape doesn’t scale when I scale the whole model. I used serveral methods to fix this problem but failed. I will do a further research on this to try to solve this bug. What’s more, I think the cheek control can be improved to be more flexible, but I may not have time to develop it deeper because I need to focus on texturing in further process, which is also a tough work.

Next week Ziyin may start to make the layout and animation. Therefore, me and Zhenzhong will then focusing on texturing and rendering. We will try several techniques to achieve the rendering result that we want in maya. I think we can finish all the textures before the animation finished so that we may save a lot of time for rendering and lighting.