MoCap W10 24: Camera, Animation, Water Effects

This week I was quite productive in terms of my motion capture project.

CAMERAS: Guided again by my storyboard, I worked on the camera setup. I took some creative liberties with some of the shots so they don't match the storyboard exactly. I followed this YouTube tutorial on how to create a turntable camera. There are three turntable camera shots in my scene.

With my shots set up on individual cameras, I used the Camera Sequencer to visualise the shots as a full sequence and then adjust them as necessary. I played my soundtrack alongside the sequencer so that I could adjust the cuts to match the beats in the song.

When my cameras were set up, I created an ubercam to turn the sequence into one long renderable shot. I followed this tutorial by Dr Jason Kennedy on YouTube.

One issue I came across was that there were errors in the script editor with the turntable cameras. It didn't like the connection of the camera to the motion path of the Nurbs Curve. To combat this problem, I aligned and parented new cameras to the turntable cameras and then made the ubercam using the parented cameras.

ANIMATION/TRANSITION: One of my top priorities (after cameras) was figuring out a way to transition between the two settings. I went back to my storyboard where I got inspired by frame 4 in which a piece of mesh breaks off the body and flies towards the camera.

So I decided to use this as my transition. Instead of aligning the camera with the shatter pieces (which would sometimes move differently depending on how the simulation ran), I duplicated a shard from the shatter and animated it to behave like the other shards - except this piece would line up with the camera and block it for a full frame. I keyed the visibility of the setting objects so that they disappear and appear based on the timing of the shard. Here's a view of the transition through Camera 7.

BIFROST: Next on my to do list was adding the water collapse. I looked at this tutorial on Youtube for some guidance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt5erX635PE&t=8s

Combined with my knowledge of my bifrost experimentation in Week 4, this is what I got:

It's not very accurate but as the simulation drops gravity acts upon the fluid and deforms it anyways.

I couldn't for the life of me get two bifrost simulations to work in one scene (one for the body and one for the heart yolk) so instead I just animated the heart falling to the ground with the fluid.

Before Animation:

After Animation:

Bifrost in bubble setting:

RIPPLES: When playing through my sequence, I felt that the start was lacking in terms of effects. After all, the point of this assignment was visualisation of motion through EFFECTS. I had wanted to add water to the feet with bifrost but judging by how slow it was to load the 70 frame collapse, I found I couldn't be bothered going through that pain of setting it up in the pool. Instead, I hacked the system a little bit and created a mesh deform wave on a plane to simulate a ripple effect.

This tutorial showed me how to set up the ripples.

I found this tutorial when I was looking into the boss editor, but the boss editor required a collider instancer and when I ran the simulation it was very ineffective as the mesh hardly moves in the beginning.

NPARTICLES: Finally I wanted to have some water droplets coming off the mesh to make it appear more fluid-like instead of using just the shader. I used my knowledge of nparticles

There were too many particles to begin with which just distracted heavily from the motion. I toned them down significantly, however there's still too many particles for my liking. I'm thinking I could switch the emission from the whole mesh to just the hands or fingers.

I did a full render test to round off the week. With my edited soundtrack, the project is almost complete. Some things still need tweaking, but I'm mostly happy with the progress I've made.

Things I want to work on are:

Lighting - I think I should add my gobo filter of water ripples back into the scene somehow. It enhances the aesthetics of the sequence and was a key element with my initial storyboards. If not the gobo filter, I think I need to use the contrast of yellow and blue lighting that I talked about in my conceptual phase. The white light seems a bit too stark and boring.

Eyeballs - I need to animate the visibility of the eyeball mesh because it looks obvious and super janky in the water scenes as they turn bright blue.

Bifrost Blueness - For some reason, my bifrost collapse turns blue even though it shares the same shader as the body. I should figure out how to adjust it to match the shading of the body so that the continuity isn't interrupted by the abrupt blueness.