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July 8, 2007
lsgl: stampede choreography
by sven at 11:59 pm
Woo-hoo! I've just finished the most complex shot of the film!
I think I like it. ...But then, it's been more than 2 weeks since I last completed a shot -- so a lot of that emotion might just be relief.
The final render for the stampeding Elder Things took more than 13 hours. Due to how I've chosen to deal with colors, rendering shadows would have to be done in a second pass. I'm hoping that for just this one scene I can cheat the shot and omit shadows. I want to believe that the chaos of motion will distract folks from looking at the ground too closely.
Here's the final galloping Elder Thing animation. It's not perfect -- but ought to be plenty good enough. It looks best from the side; I'm less happy with the front view, which seems a bit flat and mechanical. There's also a little a little a little stutter, which seems to only be visible from the front. I'll cope. :-)
With 15 fully-animated Elder Things, the stampede shot is krazee complicated. The stats:
- objects: 888
- points: 1,355,686
- polys: 2,375,522
- bones: 7275
- IK chains: 165
If I tried to animate all that at once, the computer would totally bog down and give me killer lag times... So to get around that, I did all the choreography using lo-poly stand-ins.
The green objects in the clip above simulate the Elder Things' silhouettes. The clapping pink bars on top represent the rhythm of the 25 frame run cycle. It would look ridiculous if all of the Elders were running in lock-step -- so I had to put a good deal of thought into how to stagger the cycles, trying to make them look naturalistic.
Here's what the stand-in Elders look like from above. I color-coded them into groups, so I could plan out sending them toward the camera in waves.
When I select all of the objects, bones and controllers that collectively make up a single Elder Thing, the highlighted bits create a baffling tangle of indicator lines. In this case, however, I was delighted to see that that the indicator lines happen to create a scarlet star. Smile.
In the stampede shot, the Shoggoth is supposed to be oozing in through the hive's only exit. Since I decided to make the Shoggoth opaque, I'm not sure that the concept "reads" anymore.
To rectify the situation, I put together a "before" shot, so we can get a good look at the exit. ...After all the agony involved in getting the stampede assembled, arranging and rendering a simple still shot was bliss!
posted by sven | July 8, 2007 11:59 PM | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
Comments
Great Post, Sven. The shots look great to me. Exactly like a stampede of Elders fleeing a Shoggoth!
Great job with all the solutions! Thanks for a peek inside the complex CG universe. I like pushing real pupps better I think. After your film is done, we'll ask you which form of animation you prefer.
One is easier up front, but the other allows for faster creation of worlds.
Posted by: shelley Noble at July 9, 2007 12:59 AM
Looks really good Sven. All the pre-work resulted in an excellent composed shot. The color balance and prominence of the Shoggoth character up at the top of the frame helps draw the eye there (for me) so any stutters or whatever in the footwork down at the bottom of the frame were totally unnoticeable.
A note: The Gamma difference between Macs and PCs makes these shots look better on the Mac. They're VERY dark on the PC. Depending on the final platform/projector setup when this is shown, you may want to view this footage on a Windows Box and render out an alternate gamma version.
Posted by: Markalope at July 9, 2007 10:29 AM
@ Shells: No question about it, I'd rather push puppets than pixels. I love the tactile, hands-on, 4D sculpturing. It's a physical experience... Unlike CG, where there's always this pane of glass -- the computer screen -- between you and your imaginary universe.
As I've mentioned before, too, I like how stopmo gives you such a powerful sense of progress. Each frame you shoot brings you that much closer to completion. Every 3-5 minutes, I have something to show for my work. Not so with computers, where you essentially program the animation -- fussing and fiddling -- then sit back helplessly while the 'puter does all the actual work of bringing things to life. (Wait wait wait....)
Of course, I'd like to have BOTH CG and stopmo at my disposal. "Mixed media animation" is where I want to go.
Posted by: sven at July 10, 2007 11:54 PM
@Markalope: Thanks for the tip about gamma! I confess, I hardly know anything about gamma at this point -- I'll have to look into it.
I've been worried for most of this project about how much detail's going to be lost in shadow. Ultimately I want this film shown on the big screen via digital projector... I have no idea how to how to calibrate brightness with that in mind.
Later on, I expect I'll do some DVD distribution. That, at least, I can evaluate by playing a test DVD on the TV.
No clear plans at this point for web-based distribution. The shots I share on the blog are all "work-in-progress" materials in my mind, so I'm not too worried about dark/light issues in this context. I'm very interested to learn about Mac vs. PC differences, tho...
Posted by: sven at July 11, 2007 12:06 AM