Final Major Project & Thesis – Guanze Wu (Greg)

What I would like to do in my final major project is an urban legend (or creepypasta) theme short film. The main idea of this film is to tell an abnormal or horror story. It is quite different to other horror topics like zombies or ghost. The film base on some ideas from Control, SCP (Secure,Contain,Protect), The Backrooms or The Thing.

The project name is Channel-7:

Channel-7 is a short horror animation in which the protagonist who is working overtime experiences hallucinations after watching the non-existent Channel-7 on TV. This somehow triggers an abnormal behavior in him, eventually, leading to tragedy.

After I finished the script of animation. I started to draw the storyboard and design shots. The whole animation has about 40 shots at first and finally added to about 55 shots.

I then started to prepare for assets and character. I firstly find a free male base character on website and reshape his head in Zbrush to get the result that I want. I then find clothes in character creator 4, which is quite suitable for my character.

I then used Substance Painter and Mari to paint skin textures of this character. I spent most of the time making diffuse texture, normal and SSS textures because these textures will significantly affect the quality of character rendering. Especially the SSS ( sub-surface scattering) texture, which judges the texture of human bone and skin.

Then I started modeling and texturing scenes in my animation. Totally I need four scenes: working room, livingroom, corridor and printing room. Since these rooms requires a lot of furnitures and props. I modeled part of it, others are found on the internet, all the models are free. After that I textured them in Substance Painter.

After that I turned to do animation. The animation contains camera animation, props animation and character animation. Camera animations and prop animations are quite easy. I have already set up the rig and controlers on these props so that I just need to do some simple animations. However, character animations can be a big task, which not only has body animations but also facial performance. I tried to finish about 2-3 shots everyday so that I can have enough time to do VFX parts and compositions. I also applied the knowledge of facial expressions in my research into my performance animation.

Then I started to make VFX shots. There are several shots that requires VFX: two blood shots and one explosion & RBD shot. I used Houdini to finish these shots. Since the number of VFX shots is limited, it only took me a week to finish.

After I finished VFX shots I started compositing some of rendered shots. I build up a compositing templete in Nuke so that I don’t need to redo the same thing again and again. I used z depth channel and motionvector channel to add depth of field and motionblur on shots. I also exported each light layer individually so that I can change each light information in Nuke.

I also start to edit the videos after I composited them in Nuke. This time I use Premiere Pro to edit these shots. I did a rough editing at first, then I polished the editing and add sound effects and music into it. The sound editing significantly increased the whole quality of the animation.

During the production of this project, I met some problems and realized the limitation of my hardware. However, I overcame these problems and successfully finished the whole animation. I think the camera design and the storytelling still has some problem. I would like to fix them, but the time is to limited since I also spend sometime to prepare for job interviews and tests. I tried my best to make this horror animation. Overall, it look great.

19th November 202229th November 2022

Week_07: Fixing BUGs

I almost finished all the works in the beginning of this week. I just need to check all things again and fix some bugs in them.

I redo some of the compositing stuff this week. When I was doing the editing stuff, some new ideas came out of my mind. I thought it would be great if I could add them into the shots. For example, in shot 44, I firstly want the character to open his eyes to see part of the creature and then the shot suddenly turns to black. I then think maybe I can add a creature hand into that shots. At first the hand is out of the camera and comes across the camera at the end of the shot. Therefore, I add the creature hand into the scene and animated it.

I also repolished part of the editing. I add color adjustment fx on part of the shots to make them looks better. I inspired by the film Matrix,, which uses green filter to separate virtual world and reality. Therefore, I add green filter on shots that the character is in hallucination.

12th November 202229th November 2022

Week_06: Compositing & Editing

I finished the compositing section this week. Nothing fancy there.

Editing

This week I trying to add music into it. As we all know, music is an important feature in horror films and horror games. Good music design and sound design can effectively increase the immersion and atmosphere. Therefore, I did another research on the internet to look for free horror music. Unfortunately I can only find part of sound that fits my animation, so I have to buy some of high quality horror music online. Thanks for the audio resources from Boom Library and Triune Digital, I find a large number of great cinematic horror sound for my animations.

There are several types of music sound that I used for the horror animation: Hit sound, Stinger sound and Rise sound, which are normally used in films and games. Each sound has its unique functions. Some of them creates tense atmosphere, others creates shock effects. It took me some time to finish the music editing, and the final result is great.

5th November 202229th November 2022

Week_05: Compositing & Editing

Compositing

This week I continue to do the compositing stuff. With the set of compositing templete in Nuke, I can easily finish each shot in a short time. However, I need to finish about 40 to 50 shots’ compositing, which still take days to finish.

Since I used render layers in some shots, I need to merge them together in Nuke, which takes some time to finish. Also, I need to animate some of the lighting animations in Nuke, so I write some expressions to animate some attributes like gamma or gain. I also add vignette, glow and grains on each shot to create a sense of cinematic. The overall compositing process is quite easy to be finished.

Editing

I also start to edit the videos after I composited them in Nuke. This time I use Premiere Pro to edit these shots. At first I did a rough editing for the all shots. After that I realize that the rhythm has some problem, since the length of some shots is too short. Therefore, I firstly turn to Nuke to retime some shots and export them again, which solved some of the problem. However, part of shots is not suitable to be retimed, so I have to add more shots between them to make the editing looks more natural.

I also add some typing effects in After effect. It is quite easy to be finished by using expressions and some simple animations.

After the video editing is finished, I started to add sound effects into it. I write a list of sound effects that I need. For example, human breathe sound, light flickering sound, TV sound, etc. After that I turned to youtube and other websites to search for free sound effect. Fortunately, I successfully found a large number of high quality sound effects that I need, and they are all free. This process took me plenty of time, but the result is quite satisfying. When I added these sounds into the video, everything becomes better.

Next week I will still keep working on the editing and trying to add music into it.

29th October 202229th November 2022

Week_04: VFX_02 & Compositing

VFX

This week I did the third simulation, which is an explosion & RBD simulation.

I want the hands of creatures suddenly hit ceiling and smash the ceiling tile on the ground. Therefore I firstly fractured the ceiling tile and ceiling frame. After that I used hard constraint + soft constraint to mimic the deformation of tile. The hard constraint will broke based on how big the impact is, and then generate into soft constraint to keep the pieces together.

After the make of RBD simulation I then made debris particles and debris pieces, and finally simulate a simple pyro smoke to mimic dust. To make the smoke cache file smaller, I used VDB camera clip to remove VDB imformation outside of camera.

The most difficult part of this shot is the high-speed simulation, which requires more substeps of sim, which took many time to finish.

Compositing

22nd October 202229th November 2022

Week_03: VFX_01

This week I started to make VFX shots.

There are several shots that requires VFX:

two blood shots
one explosion & RBD shot

The first VFX shot is a blood liquid shot. I want the blood to slide on the surface of the printer, and the blood should be quite thin. Therefore, I generated a thin geometry and transfer it to points as the fluid source. I also turn on stick on collision tab to mimic sliding effect. I added some thin blood strings to make the whole liquid more detailed.

The second one is also a blood liquid shot. The blood needs to flow on the carpet and wet papers. I firstly used flip fluid to do the simulation. The flow looks good, but the generated liquid is too thick. The reason why the liquid is too thick is because the resolution of volume in simulation is not high enough. However, high resolution of volume will bring more simulation time and hardware pressure, which can be another problem. Therefore, I turned to use particles to mimic fluid simulation. I added particle fluid node into pop simulation so that forces between particles will be created. To make the cache file smaller, I used toNDC function to group the particles outside of camera and delete them. By adding masked smooth and meshing techniques, the final result looks fine. After that I use sop solver and attribute transfer to make the wet maps on carpet and paper, and later generate them as material masks. By using the wet map, carpet and paper can change materials when the blood flow over them. They will become darker and redish.

Next week I will finish the last VFX shot.

15th October 202229th November 2022

Week_02: Animation_04 & Rendering

This week I finished all the animations in this short film. It is my first time doing so many animations in a single project, which can be quite struggling. Any way, I finished it.

I also spend some time to look back all the shots, making sure that there will be no bugs in them. After fixing some animation problems, adding more details and changing some lighting in the scene. I started rendering.

Since some of scenes can only be rendered after I finished VFX part, I put these shots into the last part of my rendering schedule. This time I used redshift and arnold to render these scenes. Redshift rendering is extremly fast and can preserve high rendering quality, which can be the best choice to me. Arnold is only used to render one shot (the eye close-up shot), for it’s SSS material quality is much better than Redshift.

Next week I will start to do VFX parts, which will cover some liquid shots and an explosion & RBD shot.

8th October 202229th November 2022

Week_01: Animation 03

Last two weeks I finished about half of all animations. I finished some of the other animations this week. Next week I will try to finish the last part of it and spend some time to get back to the first one and repolish some of these shots.

During this week I met some small problems. I tried to make the shaking effect of the printing machine and these creepy hands. I want the print machine and hands to shake really fast and weird. At first I tried to animate these by hands. However, the result is not quite satisfying. Also, I need to animate almost every frame since the shaking is really fast, which can be quite boring and will cost huge time. Therefore, I tried to write expressions for these controlers so that the shaking effect can be controled by math. I used some noise and random functions to control the way of shaking. Though The result is not perfect, it is good enough for these shots.

I also get back to the rig of printing machine and added a shaking controler for it. Just like what I did for the foot controler before, this controler can rotate the base of print machine in 360 degrees. By adding this controler, I just need to write one expression to control the shaking of machine, which can save energe and time.