2011-04-18

Shade Thesis:  Process Book

Below is the culmination of my senior thesis Shade.  A semester of junior year is spent in pre-production as well as 8 months of senior year in production.  To be honest, I was extremely over-scoped in my pre-production stage moving into final submission…  I’m quiet shocked that I even finished.  Although that being said, my thesis did receive great appraisal.  I was awarded Best of Ringling by the faculty as well as the Juried Award by Keith Self-Ballard from Volition.  Thanks for everyone for the effort, critique and support.  Now onto the process!

Pre-Production:

Our first assignment was to create a tone video which encompassed the tone of the thesis. We then outlined our Pitch Document going into our first barrage of critiques.   Through development and critique, my scope was reduced to one single character and three separate environments.  Drawing for animators was a class where we fully realized our prepro concepts.   Below is some of the final designs and development for thesis pitch. Prepro Critique Notes  

Final Animatic:

For the final animatic, I knew I wanted to use perspective and the environment to lead the story.  I kitbashed a city instead of relying on traditional drawing to build the shot.  I  used a contour render in mental ray  to build the linework for the city and keep a correct perspective.  Then I used a Sun and Sky render to overlay a soft global illumination to the lighting and values.  Finally I utilized After Effect and Toon It by Red Giant to add more visual interest to each shot.  One of the major benefits to kitbashing the city VS drawing the perspective is I had a already grasped my environment in 3d space.  This will greatly help while creating the environment in production.  

Production

Senior year! Moving into production I can say there were a great deal of challenges that I had to overcome throughout the process.  First and foremost, we were the first graduating class of the game art major.  This essentially means that there was ZERO process and pipeline for us to rely on as we developed our pieces.  Developing while using R&D to direct our work was a key use of our time.  Our first critique included a blockout of the film as well as a model critique on the environment.  I sculpted most of my assets for the modular building kit in zbrush and retopoed the models during the next wave of development. Below are the complete critique notes from senior year Senior Crit Notes Below are the models I showcased for my direction for the modular building kits.    

 

And here is the first block-out of my film for the first critique.

  Moving forward into the texturing process of the film, I realized how much I had ahead of me.  First, the textural detail in order to pull off 3 different environments is a huge scope.   Just the initial city shot could have taken the entire year to develop to the level i wanted to achieve!  Second, the ending of the film was still unresolved.  I knew I wanted the shadow to come off the wall in a scary “FEAR”-esc villainousness introduction, however this wasn’t reading.  I attempted several other options such as using a voice over of my fiancée’s  kids to antagonize the shadow off the wall.   Third, the building rubble wasn’t up to snuff.  At this point i had heavily relied upon Fracture within UDK to destroy the buildings.  This was reading as a poor resolve to the level of detail to my scope of the piece.  Furthermore, I never could resolve why an impulse actor would respond differently to a weapon on the UDK fracture system without coding, something I did not have time to delve into. Below is my submission for the second critique of senior year. Well at this point my first semester of senior year was closing and I had one month till “pass fail” by the facility.  This is the process where the entire computer animation department votes on whether the student has achieved  a level of detail to allow the student to continue to the final semester.   We had to have the entire thesis textured at this point and refer to the “whitebox” which outlines the criteria to continue with the film. Below is the whitebox criteria for Fall of 2010:

Burning every ounce of motivation I had left, I leapt to tackle all these points on my final film.   I built a new modular kit for the destroyed city.  I removed the day/night cycle from the film due to its distraction from the overall focus on the shadow, along with the blend-shape growth of the vines and other foliage.   The shadow had still been unresolved, so on a limb, I returned to my trusty program after effects to create a mockup.  Our characters were not scheduled to go into production till the beginning of next semester, however I had to convince the faculty that I had a plan in place for the shadow’s reveal.  I animated the shadow within Puppet Shop and exported this sequence to a avi that could be played within a bink movie inside of unreal.  From there, I created an alpha to composite out the background of the shadow and placed her upon a card in front of the wall.  I used a minor filter in premiere to blur the edges of the shadow allowing the effect to read as the shadow jumping from the wall.

Below is the submission for the final critique before “Pass Fail”

Second semester senior year!  Well I still had quiet a bit of R&D on my hand as well as quiet a few technical/visual problems within my thesis.  First a great deal of the textures felt either A) watered down or too noisy.  I had several assets from last year that didn’t fit to scale such as the telephone poles.  In the mad dash to finish assets for “pass fail” last semester, I could only finish texturing each asset for a single shot.  This is why the telephone poles in the establishing shot feel as if they had already lived through the explosion.  Not only this, but I had to sculpt my character, rig and animate both her and the shadow!  Quiet a bit to swallow!

First I focused my attention to the character:

 

Secondly I focused my effort on creating a more sophisticated textural environment.  I was in the process of refining new assets such as the main tree in the entrance shot, breaking up the ground and adding details to break-up the tiled nature of my textures.  On the ground second shot, you can see the beginning of my “super shader” which would allow me to texture most of the world in rapid iteration.  This would be fully developed and deployed in the 5th critique.

At this point in my process, I had tackled a few of the major points within my thesis.  Texturing was still a main focus and I had finally developed a “super shader” to texture most of the second and third shots.  I was also in the process of heading to the Game Developers Summit in San Francisco.  I received some fantastic feedback from both Charles Morrow of Raven and Steve Reid of Redstorm.  Although their feedback wont be addressed till my Final critique video, it was extremely influential from this point on as I refined my work.

Below is the video I took to GDC

HERE WE GO! The final push was upon me as I cranked through the last two weeks before my thesis deadline.  As I mentioned above, i received some incredible feedback at GDC and I had a huge drive to incorporate as much as it as i could.

Some of the major points:

• With the mad dash to texture and refine assets, lighting wasn’t a focus yet.  Of course i know better, but I was just overwelmed with too much to do with my project being so over scoped for 1 student.
• I needed to use leaf cards to break up the walls and hard edged lines.
• Focus on one shot.  At this point I worked from the third shot backwards.  The entrance shot of the city contained too many problems to completely finalize, so i felt my time was best used working on the shots where the most pixels could be moved.
• Scale seemed off in the first shot, especially the phone poles in relation to the rest of the world.  The girl felt too high off the ground and attention to detail need to applied to the subtle parts.  An example of this is the tread in the dirt where the girl could have dug her feet into the ground.
• The color of the world during the aftermath shot felt off so i rebuilt the lighting and added a fresnel shader to the wall to push focus.
• “If there isn’t Candy, dont make me look there.”
• “Think about the 5 minute, the 5 hour and the 5 day while developing the shot”

Most of the second and third shots were created with the use of a “super shader” which I finalized after my time at GDC.  Below is an except of its functions.  

Additionally, I had still not finalized the animation of the shadow.  Originally I had attempted to have the shadow “twitch” akin to the effect used in Fight Club.  My faculty advisors did not feel this was successful, so it was cut. Here is a test from that attempt.

Putting it all together, I feel that the last 2 weeks the piece made the biggest jump in the development of the piece as a whole.  I approached the final critique looking at our final “whitebox” where our thesis would be critiqued in order to pass senior year.

Below is the requirements for the final “whitebox”

Below are a few choice shots from my final thesis submission:

 

 

 

And finally, the final submission of my film. Thank you for reading and the interest in my process book. The most valuable thing I have taken from this is the importance of art direction, critique and cutting what wasn’t working.