This project was developed as the final piece for our module on motion capture. The concept was to have a character made of dust to emerge from the floor of a dancer room to the dissonant sounds of piano and dance to exhaustion till it finally collapsed and returned to dust.
Ballerina
Motion Capture Shot
Motion Capture Setup at Stage 1 ( NFTS )
The motion capture company Centroid3D kindly came down to the NFTS for three days and set up a 32-camera rig on Stage 1. The first day was spent setting up the cameras and calibrating the system. On the second day we had a ballerina and two martial arts actors coming down to school and "perform to the cameras".
The dancer - Kimberly Alan Marques from Centroid3D
It´saction Time ! A part of the 32 camera rig setup
Cameras Setup Autodesk Motion Builder
The capture motion was previewed in real-time through Auto-desk MotionBuilder. This set-up allowed to concluded our shots before we expected and we still had time to capture some data to use on our Pesky Joe project.
Animation
Centroid supplied us with the motion capture data in TRC format which was applied to an actor in Motionbuilder. The final animation was an edit and blend of different pieces of animation captured during the shoot facilitated by MotionBuilder's strong non-linear animation tools. The VFX class was supplied with extra tuition on MotionBuilder by employees from Centroid and Nick Jovic (Autodesk's employee).
Mocap Dummy test
The final animation was baked down to a skeleton in Motionbuilder and exported to Maya using the FBX format. Finally, we animated the different cameras and rendered the animatic with an untextured room and a general character.
Modelling and Texturing
It had been decided on an early stage that the dancer room would be digitally build within Maya. This process took longer than expected at beginning due to several changes in the design. The VFX team visited an old house in Deptford and photographed reference material which was used in the design and textures of the room. Other sources of inspiration were photos found on the internet, namely referring to Cuban architecture.
Cuban Bar Old house in Deptford
Maya Scene Setup A "Stockman" Piano
Lighting & Compositing
Particles
The development of the particle system ran parallel to the study of light. Due to our insufficient knowledge of particle systems in Maya, Chris Holmes gave three days of tuition on particles. We soon realised we would face two difficult problems. Most of the shots we had devised were big long shots because we wanted to show the vastness and emptiness of the room to underline the melancholy of the piece.
3D Dust dancer Final scene
However, because of this, and because we were rendering at SD resolution, we had a relative small amount of pixels to define the dust dancer. Ultimately, we realise too late, we would need the particles to be a quarter of a pixel to give it the impression of dust. Moreover, even though we didn't want to have a too strong outline of the character, we still wanted to show its anthropomorphic physiognomy. This balance was specially hard to realise on the dancer's legs.
We soon realised it would be necessary to render several layers to combine in compositing to overcome the latter problem.
Maya Particle Tests Particles Final Look
There were three main kinds of layers. The first render layer was a render of particles being emitted through a surface emitter of the dancer mesh. These particles had their opacityPP connected to a ramp that made them fade away preserving the shape of the mesh and creating a stylised fading trail. A second render consisted of particles being emitted through a curve flow. The curves were drawn on the (live) mesh, their position readjusted and then binded to the skeleton. These curves were turn into dynamic curves (using the Maya's Hair module) to simulate a certain fluctuation of dust. A final layer used the same technique as the latter but with a much lesser density of particles.
These particles were composited in shake with a random expression for their brightness to give the piece a slightly magical feel. There were several layers rendered for each type of layer, in which its density, velocity, turbulence were slightly altered.
There were between 5 to 9 layers of particles composited in the final shots. A small defocus was applied to most of the layers to reduce the grainess inherent to the Hardware render of particles in Maya. A brightness node with a random value was connected to some of the layers as explained above. Another brightness node was added downstream to increase the brightness of the particles that were in front of the window and would therefore be brighter. A mix node was sometimes added to help the blend with the background.
Conclusion
VFX students and Centroid3D team
Even though, the final product is somehow distant from what we had realised in our heads, we were happy with the final results. We learnt a lot about motion capture, CGI lighting and particles and we produced a rather stylised, melancholic and beautiful piece of animation. Chris Landreth, kiss our asses!!!
Credits
DIRECTOR : VFX CLASS ( Pedro Pinto, Rodrigo Fernandes, Sambo Gansser , Wilson Stockman )
PRODUCER : Sarah Hayward and VFX class
VFX SUPERVISOR: Centroid 3D & Chris Holmes
POST PRODUCTION: VFX CLASS ( Pedro Pinto, Rodrigo Fernandes, Wilson Stockman )
COMPOSER: Miguel de Oliveira
ACTORS : Kimberly ( ballerina)
