Yeah! I am back again. Since I last posted anything a lot has changed (as usual :p). I moved to Sydney, Australia and started a new job at Animal Logic as Pipeline Technical Director for Lighting (cool hah!). Work is pretty amazing, a lot of tool development (specially for my beloved Nuke) with great learning curve. Getting to learn new things both at work and otherwise. I am trying to travel a lot and I eat a lot (so had to join the gym!). It’s pretty easy to get meat/flesh free food here. I am loving this new experience, people and this place. I can totally bomb this blog with tons of pictures I take. Excited for more adventures and beyond…. 🙂
And before I retreat to my cave. Here is the trailer of my upcoming project Peter Rabbit (please don’t hate it without watching the film, after release feel free 😀 ), it’s is my first non-animated film project:
I know it’s been a long long long and long time since I last posted anything (I know I started with similar line last time too :p, but seriously I was quite busy all along) but I am back and this time I want to write down a brief about the things happened meanwhile and what I was doing professionally.
So as I mentioned in my previous post that I got a job as Lighting Technical Assistant at DreamWorks Animtions Studio’s Indian Unit after completing my Masters from Bournemouth University and in my second week there I got to work on How To Train Your Dragon 2 (awesome, right?) and then Penguins of Madagascar.
And after that I did couple of commercial for Home and a DreamWorks pipeline video.
Finally got an amazing opportunity to set up Lighting and Compositing workflows for DreamWorksTVs’ YouTube episodes of Swamp Talk, Kung Fu Panda, King Julien Stand Up and Puss in Boots. Trust me, that was some intense work because not only I had to set up the workflow, do inventory management but I also did a lot of Lighting and Compositing fixes, went from 3 episodes (each with 15 to 20 shots) to 5 episodes per week. Here is a small demo (you can find my name under “SHOW MORE” 😉 ):
And then came “The Boss Baby”, I hit a jackpot when I got this golden opportunity to work on this feature from the look development to final delivery (for 1.5 years, phew!!). As a part of look development team I learnt a lot, wrote a range of tools to automate the tasks for lighting/compositing artists and did quite a lot of workflow set ups, optimizations, troubleshooting and managed to deliver 11 sequences (from start to end), including almost all the crowd sequences (will try to talk about it in separate post because that was something crazy), plus not counting couple of more sequences for which I did the set up, inventory validation and health assessment and later handed over to my peers. It was an incredible experience, more so because I was also a part of Lighting Rig Task Force to design the studio standard lighting rig templates, which we used for the first time on this film. Here is my show/demo reel for the film (it only has 3 out 11 sequences):
Unfortunately, during the final two months of the production DreamWorks decided to cease their India operations and Mikros Image took over our unit. Now it’s a new experience of learning altogether where I am spending my time focusing on Nuke, Maya and Katana. I had some good exposure to Nuke and elementary knowledge of Maya but Katana is something else (in a good way 🙂 ). So in last couple of months after DreamWorks I did some tools in Nuke and Maya (check out videos below) and now have decent understanding of Lighting and Look Development in Katana. I will try and come up with some tools for Katana (I have couple of ideas swimming around in my head) but it may take a while as I have some interesting tasks in hand to create some Gizmos for Nuke. I will try my best to post some videos showing their functionality and will also try my best to share my knowledge of how to get certain things done when you are starting with those mentioned 3D packages. Till then enjoy the videos in this post and do comment if you have any queries. 🙂
So it has been a really long time since I posted any update because I got a bit busy and lazy. 😉
Here is the little bit of update on what I have been doing in past couple of months. First of all, I finally found a job as Lighting Technical Assistant (LTA) in DreamWorks Dedicated Unit, India, where my job is to setup lighting rigs for sequences and shots, scout for bugs and missing assets plus optimizing renders. And here in DreamWorks, lighters are the compositors as well so I need to deal with NUKE also. And if you are techy person like me then there is a plenty of opportunities to write python scripts for both studio and NUKE tools. And also you are given the opportunity to light shots to show your creative side, I also quickly grabbed it and lit 7 simple shots (you might miss them in a blink though).
So my first project is Penguins of Madagascar (POM) and I am also getting my first credit in it and I can’t write in words how I felt watching my name on the big screen. It was simply out of the world experience.
And I got lucky that my first sequence is there for the world to see in the video below (it starts at 2:27):
Yeh! I worked on baby penguins (I love Private).
And the shots I lit are the Hi-Ones right before Private comes out of the egg.
Please do go and watch it in theaters on 26th Nov. 2014. A lot of hard work went into making it.
And I will try to update for frequently. 🙂
So it has been a long time since I posted something, the truth is – I didn’t have anything worth posting so far. A few days ago I implemented a very basic cloth simulation system. If the question is why then that story is long and I may discuss later. I wanted to do a lot of things but since I didn’t have much time so I didn’t do complicated stuff. So here are the things I covered:
Both RK4 and Verlet Integrators.
Collision Handling against primitives, surrounding walls, and self collisions with Octree spatial partitioning.
Wind Effects and Texturing support (I tried to use cool textures).
Complete User Interface.
Multiple Cloths support.
So here is the output of my 10 days of shear hard work (literally just slept for 2 to 3 hours for few days):
I managed to compile all my work under one roof (showreel).
I know I am late in updating it on the blog but better late then never. This is dedicated to my parents.
To my mother for always encouraging me no matter what and to my father who does believe in me but always skeptic about my progress (He knows I am little lazy).
Enough talking, so here is my masters showreel with cool background music (at least I think so), having everything under 2 mins:
While doing the Procedural Building Generator Based on L-System I created a prototype for a simple 2D L-System where input is a text file with some L-System rules for creating trees and various curves. User can also change the position of creation, heading and turn angles. Here are some screen captures of it (I know they are a bit difficult to see but you can click to view slide show) :
Again this is one of those projects which I am proud of. I began with simple LSystem but after certain suggestions I decided to try something new and after a lot of research on L-Systems and its applications I zeroed down on a SIGGRAPH paper “Procedural Modeling of Buildings”. Before this paper I have never implemented a SIGGRAPH paper and frankly speaking it took a great deal of research for this particular implementation and I cannot express in words the feeling I had when I first saw a simple house generated by my program. This is a stand alone implementation done in C++ and OpenGL and I also created a very simple Python script to export the building in Maya. It also has the functionality to generate the buildings in steps. What I mean is that the input to this system is a set of rules (like L-Systems) for generating a particular building and user can select the number of rules to generate that building, if all the rules are fed to the system then the complete structure will be generated. Here is the video showing the implementation in action.
As part of one of my assignments I did a Free Form Deformation or FFD tool in C++ and OpenGL. Free Form Deformation is quite famous and available in almost all the 3D packages and once understood then fairly simple to implement as well. I have to admit that I made a mistake in understanding it and suffered for days because of it. So when you need to assign the local coordinate system then assign it only once, not every time when you pull a control point. This was my misinterpretation and I suffered a lot because of it. But anyways it is a part of learning process.
Here is the video of the final output showing a mesh in “.obj” format which can be exported from almost any 3D package and it can export back deformed mesh and again in “.obj” format:
So I was a part of “a bunch of great people” (that’s what we used to call our group) for my group project, this was one of those projects for which I worked really very hard and a lot. We decided to go with a 3D iPhone game for the group project because we were seven technical people out of nine. Some of us including me had to take up the job of an artist to complete the work in time. I began with doing the storyboard and animatic for the cinematic of the game.
Then took up the role of texturing artist and for that I needed to learn ZBrush, why ZBrush for texturing? This question was answered by our team leader in a simple way that is has really simple way of unwrapping the UVs. I never used ZBrush before so within six weeks I needed to learn and deliver the assets and I did that. I also did a lot of environment modeling and since we were making an iPhone game so there was a constraint on poly count too. Here are some pictures showing the things I did:
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The video showing the environment:
And finally, the cinematic came to me, since we said to our tutors in the beginning that we are going to make a cinematic as well telling the story of the game and then taking forward the game play, but eventually we ran out of time and with some help from my colleagues I did the cinematic as well with the sound editing. I would like to say that I am not an animator so it is not up to the mark. There is some weirdness in the animation of the character due another constraint of the game engine we used, that is, UDK (Unreal Development Kit). The walk cycle of the character had to be animated at the origin only to import it properly into UDK and initially we planned to do cinematic in UDK itself but finally with no time in hand we had to use the same walk cycle for cinematic animation in Maya. And it was really very challenging. Here is the cinematic:
And one of my major responsibility was to maintain the movement of assets among art team and technical team and among art team itself, since there were many 3D packages in use for various things so a proper flow of assets was necessary. I must say it was a learning experience and managing a team and working within a team of people with different intellects is no easy job. Always keep in mind – “KEEP CALM AND WORK HARD”.
Honey Sharma 