When John Galloway and Mark Wainwright embarked on their final project for their Masters in Digital Effects at the University of Bournemouth in the UK, their goal was to mesh live action and CG as believably as possible in a short film. Using Houdini as their software of choice, they tackled many challenges along the way. “Short Lived”, the impressive finished product about a collector’s toy robot who has been called home, is sure to launch successful careers for these two young talents.
HARNESSING PROCEDURALISM AND DIGITAL ASSETS Houdini was used for all aspects of the 3D work, from modeling, rigging and animation to lighting and rendering. Johnny and Mark credit Houdini’s procedural approach and being able to update everything using Houdini Digital Assets as the keys to success on this project. “The fact that I could access the history of my Deedar the Robot model all the way back to whatever primitive I first created was amazing,” says Mark. “If changes were needed or if I needed to try an alternative approach, a branch could be started anywhere in the history or parts pulled out and simply pasted elsewhere.” Mark adds that his first choice when it comes to polymodeling is definitely Houdini, because of its flexibility and excellent tools. Houdini’s proceduralism was not the only feature that helped these students meet their deadline and turn in such a high-quality finished product. They also relied extensively on Houdini Digital Assets to help them bring Deedar to life and create this engaging, entertaining tale. “By the time we had shot, edited and prepared all the CG models, we had only 30 days to animate, light, render and composite 36 shots,” says Johnny. “The only way this was possible was by setting up a system of digital assets that we could update with all the relevant on-set information per shot, such as lighting data, reflection maps and camera position.” CREATING DEEDAR THE ROBOT Deedar the robot, the star of the film, was one of many digital assets. Johnny and Mark were able to place all the correct environment maps and distance measurements on set into pre-configured parameters on this digital asset. With minimum work, Deedar could be in the right position with the reflections all being correctly aligned. Having Deedar as a digital asset also allowed animation to be done on a very basic block version of the model, with it being updated with the high resolution, fully-textured version at render time.
Another bonus of having Deedar as a digital asset was that if an extra model detail or functionality was needed for a particular shot, they could go back and add the necessary changes without affecting the shot setup. “All shots could be automatically updated with the new model and we didn’t have to worry about setting everything up again,” adds Mark. MESHING CG AND LIVE ACTION Along with the challenge of meeting a tight deadline, there was also the requirement that the all-CG robot look as real as possible in its live-action settings. “To achieve this goal, we concentrated on building an efficient shading and lighting pipeline early on in the project,” says Mark. “We also had to develop a process to get a lot of on-set lighting and camera reference information into the Houdini scenes.”
Mark, who oversaw all the 3D work while Johnny focused on camera work and compositing, was able to write shaders for the first time, without having to write a single line of code. Having had no prior experience with this, the ease of the task was surprising and most welcomed. “Building shaders in VOPS was incredibly useful throughout the making of this film,” he adds. The students built utilities that set up and matched the lighting and cameras in the more than 30 shots to the footage that was shot on location. Once again, Houdini Digital Assets played a key role. “We had a tool that gave us reference objects to match with real world objects for camera placement and setting,” adds Mark. In the digital assets UI, they were able to set the appropriate environment maps taken from chrome sphere light probes for each shot. The environment map was blurred via COPS and applied to an environment light, which gave them the ambient lighting for the scene. “We could then use a virtual white matte ball, also within the asset, to set up the remaining lights to match the white ball reference,” adds Mark. “Usually a shot was lit with only two or three lights, and could be set up in just a few minutes.”
RENDERING IN MANTRA During the film’s creation, Johnny and Mark made a mini production-line process that allowed a big idea to be realized in very short time. “We used Takes and knew that after animation was complete we could leave the render running overnight and have all passes for that shot ready for compositing in the morning,” says Johnny. “This allowed Mark to get on with animating the next shot right away.” They chose to render everything in Mantra, which also proved very successful and user-friendly. The passes were easy to render with arbitrary outputs from within the VOPNET shaders. “We could output passes for whatever we liked without any messing about or limitations,” says Mark.
MAKING THE GRADE Johnny and Mark successfully finished the project on time and have since gone on to land fantastic jobs in the industry. Their short film continues to make waves within the Houdini community and beyond, with some saying it is some of the best student work they’ve seen. Based on all of this, it’s safe to say their future in CG will be anything but short lived. You can contact Johnny at:
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