Inspiration
We went to view Tate’s exhibition together at the start of term and learned a lot.
My group are Tara Jackson and Unisha Thapa and we had a lot of discussions together before deciding on David Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ as our theme.
We created a miro and put in a collection of images to communicate. We wanted to retain the artistic style of the original work and to create a ‘shuttle’ animation into the painting after seeing a camera ad with cool transitions.
Storyboard and Animatic
We then moved on to storyboarding, where we discussed the story’s direction before sketching out a storyboard for each person. It was a nice thing that we always did everything in communication and wanted everyone to be involved. This method of distribution, I believe, will be carried over to our group’s future work.
In class, we established the story: a person approaches the toilet, then the camera goes through the toilet, into the water stirring up a splash and swimming into David Hockney’s painting.After that, we were assigned the job of making the animatic: Unisha made shot 1, Tara was shot 2 and I was in charge of shot 3. Finally, we put together the shots we had made.
Shot 1
Camera Tracking
For shot one, we wanted to have content that approached the toilet and then saw the small characters on the toilet with the shot drilling into the toilet. The idea of the small characters was added later, which was fun and allowed for a good mix of realistic and 3d characters.
As the shot1 scenes were realistic, we shot the school toilets and let Unisha do the camera tracking in Nuke. This was our first collaboration between different software. At the beginning, Unisha placed some small balls in Nuke to allow us to better determine the position of the characters in Maya. However, we soon ran into difficulties with the balls not displaying well in Maya, which we solved by re-tracking the camera in Nuke and repositioning the balls.
After we tried to find the position of the figure in Maya, I placed the camera track in Maya and made sure we could see it in the camera. I’ve had some issues with importing image sequences, but I’ve found that I can use the ‘File. Image number. File type’ naming allows Maya to find these files and play them successfully. And if I set the Depth farther away, it ensures that the characters are displayed in front of the image sequence.
Modelling
I created some of the props here, such as the beach chair and the towel.
Shot 2
We wanted to achieve some interesting effects in the second shot, jumping into the water into the world of the painting, which is like a channel. This scene we intended to create in Maya and at first we wanted to create some interesting effects like jelly, some stretching.
In the end we opted for bubbles. I wanted to make them inside Maya’s Fx and looked up some video on YouTube to learn.
I created the Emitter using nParticles to create the bubble effects and after being happier with the results, I handed the file over to Tara to create the camera for the shot.
Shot 3
Modelling and texturing
For Shot 3, I was charged with modelling the scenes and create splash effects. To make the rendering closer to David Hockney’s original painting, I recreated the size and position of the painting as closely as possible when modelling, and the size of the house was referenced to adult scale.
For the house texturing, I used Substance Painter because I wanted the render to seem more like the drawing, but it didn’t help much. I tried to get the colours closer, but Maya’s Ai Standard Surface achieves a relatively good result. Despite this, I kept the textures made by Substance Painter, which still gives the house a more substantial look.
When making the material for the window, I tried to create a transparent material directly in Substance Painter to show the house and plants using the reflections, but it failed, and it did not appear as a reflection in Maya. So I switched it up and painted the house and plant texture in Photoshop, then put it into Substance Painter as a texture and adjusted the reflections.
Rendering test
When testing the rendering I found that the image was too exposed and could not be improved by reducing the intensity of the Skydome. I then searched online and found that selecting Enable in the Color management in the Preferences window and changing the input colour space for hdr to Raw can made the exposure smaller.
Splash
In fact, the making of the splash took me a lot of time. The reason for this is that there are many steps in making the splash, and each time I try a new value, I have to wait a long time for the effect to load, and there are also problems in the process, such as the splash suddenly going wrong in the rendering, and the splash being lost in the collision and having no effect, which commonly appear at the beginning.
But it was nice to be able to solve these problems as I got better at this production method. I used the Boss editor to create the water surface, then created an animation of a ball going through the water and used Bifrost to create a collision on the water surface. On my first attempt these splashes did not appear at all until I discovered that it could only be produced on ‘play every frame’.
Try different values for the splash:
I tried a lot of different values in the hope of achieving a better splash effect. In the end I was going to use a trajectory that made the ball move upwards rather than downwards, as this made the splash look higher. After this, I added foam to it.
Rendering
Once that was done, I exported the splash and foam and saved it as StandIn to make sure it could be transferred between us. In fact, I don’t think the splash was clear enough after the export, which may have been caused by the lighting and the textures, but we left it as it now, which I think we can work out how to export better next time.
We then started to put our separate pieces of work together and we worked out some file export errors and tried to render and hand the image sequences to Unisha for compositing.
Final Outcome