Compleat Project

I use 'compleat' here with its archaic meaning.

My thesis project is finally finished! After my last post, I presented and successfully defended this project to a three-person panel. The panel gave me some very pointed feedback, and I also got some nice criticisms from my classmates who were present. We talked about what I was trying to prove by using a game engine as a rendering tool, and where the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach might be. I shared the data of what I found while working on it, and happily enough, they came the same conclusions I did in my paper. If you'd like to read up on that, check out the prior post.

Probably the most memorable question of my defense came at the end, when one panelist asked me what I wanted to do after school, and how this project was relevant to that. I told him that I want to be a technical director, the guy who sets up things and fixes things to empower other artists to make all sorts of awesome. I want to be a problem-solver and an awesome-enabler. I've decided to focus on effects work because that seems to be where I can do the most good with those skills.

In point of fact, this thesis effort ended up being a lot closer to my ideal career than I even intended. For this project I was technically the producer, but most of the time I was modeling and rigging up characters and fixing things to allow my other teammates to animate, record, and generally strut their stuff. The rigging script I created for this project was almost completely re-written, twice. Yet in the end, I estimate it still saved me about a month in production time. In short, I was the medic to everyone else's soldier. And the soldiers on my team were very, VERY good. One of these days, I will pay them back, because the occasional cookie or pizza slice that I was able to provide is not suitable payment for that kind of awesome talent.

In the end, we ended up with an enjoyable short film. I ended up stating a point in my paper and I feel like it was a worthwhile effort. In their deliberations, the panel discussed the quality of the film itself as well as the technical points I hit while working on it. For those considerations they decided to graduate me with Honors. It's a nice feather in my cap :)

And now, thesis completed, NYU Master degree conferred, I step bravely out into the world to look for a place to begin my career. If you think the film linked up top is fun to watch, just think: I made that film while holding down a full-time job and going to school in my after-hours. Just imagine what I'll be able to do as a full time technical artist!

I can imagine some pretty nice things, and I can't wait till I can share that with you guys, too.

Due Date!

Today our thesis papers were due. The video projects are due in a couple weeks, but as I boasted earlier, I have finished both ahead of time. Not by as large a margin as I had hoped, but still, everything has been completed for the Source Animation Thesis Project.

It feels wonderful to be able to write that out.

Unfortunately, I cannot yet hand in the video files, as the requirements for the deliverables are being revised by our school dept. Until they settle on that, I can't render out the final version to whatever spec they're looking for. But I can at least share with you the paper :) The paper itself is not terribly large, but the entire production process from storyboards to rigging is detailed there. It's a flash book file, so once it loads up you can turn pages with the arrows on your keyboard, or by clicking and dragging one of the page corners over.


[click here to view paper]

I have a lot more to say about the project's results, but it will have to wait until later. I'm up to my neck in job applications and that need to be handled first!

Guns and Butter

I loved my high school economics class. I may not remember much of it now, but at the moment, I am faced with a 'real-world' application for something we actually covered in class. That problem was about two fictional countries, each is capable of making two products: 'guns' and 'butter', and they are capable of trading with each other. At the end of the exercise, we learned that each country made huge gains by specializing their industry and trading with the other, instead of doing everything on their own.

This is relevant to me, because despite my love of audio composition, I'm finding myself trying to juggle both guns and butter at the moment, and now my hands are getting all messy. I got about halfway through the song for the thesis when I realized that it was taking way too long. The solution? ROCK-OUT STOCK MUSIC!

It's not as pretty as I'd like, but I found a stock song that fits fairly well, and also that allows for a full sync license for a very reasonable price. So I put aside my keyboard and the 17 gigs of audio samples I was playing with, and wrapped up the music portion of the short film.

I will learn from this experience and avoid making the same mistake twice. Sure, I love tinkering with composition, but if I start down that path I will have to give up my other duties to the project, because there's only so many hours in the day. Especially when I have to share those hours with a full-time job. So for the next project, I will find myself a good composer and coordinate with him/her early on. That'll give them the time they need to work their magic.

And make no mistake, good music in any film/game project is worth its weight in gold. Magical gold.

Home stretch, plus audio

Several more small edits have been made since the last video was posted! I asked around and got a lot of feedback from classmates and colleagues, and I think the result is a leaner, even meaner robin danger commercial. All of the video files have been officially rendered out from Source, and I've got all of the little visual tweaks down. Now it's just some finishing touches on the comparison shots, and background music.

I've been putting off the music for way too long. But that's okay. I spent a great deal of my formative years playing with midi composition, so I've re-built a  replica of my old midi rig to see if I can whip something up. If that doesn't work, there's always free music online! You can see my setup below:

In true New York form, there is no space for anything. I have that keyboard crammed in so tight that I think it's structurally supporting the rest of the room at this point. That's my mic to the right, still taped to a pole. That bowl on the desk is one of my props, which doubles as a food receptacle when I remember to eat.

The bowl was used mixing sounds, which you can hear when there's that row of chefs mixing stuff at 1:30. Most of the sounds for the project were recorded this way, with me just hitting stuff in my room. Characters falling on the floor was me hitting and flopping onto a pillow. The trapdoor KATHUNK sound was just a broken part of my computer chair. Those robot arms? My trusty power drill. The whooshing and thwacking noises? I took a bandana and whipped it through the air near the mic. It's amazing what you can do with random household items. The sounds don't need to be perfectly authentic, but they do need to sound believable.

Probably penultimate project post?

I am very close to finishing this! I wish to do some animation tweaks on two of the shots, some lighting tweaks on a third shot and add the last voice (recorded yesterday) as well as more polished sound effects.... but it's almost there.

oh, also, I have to replace the music. But I'll worry about that after the visuals are locked.

But here it is, in its almost-done state. Comments and critiques are welcome, because it's never too late to iterate. And once all the fixes go in, and the music and effects and re-renders, I will post the final version here. So this is the penultimate time I will post the storyreel for this short film! That feels nice to say. Or type. Whatever!

Thesis in a nutshell (or more accurately, three images)

As part of the thesis submission process, I had to send in a blurb of text about the project a few images that summarize the project. Here are the three I picked:

Busy and backpedalling

The blog has been woefully quiet as of late. I've been really busy, but not much noteworthy of sharing here, unless you think me flailing my arms around and ranting about Maya crashes or Source bugs is entertaining. The animation portion of production is just about to be finished. All the model assets have been built and textured, and our last animator is finishing up the one remaining shot, and then it will be nothing but fixes, tweaks, and sound/music additions.

One thing I did decide this week was that I was not going to render the entire thing in mental ray for comparison to the game engine. It was important to my original idea, and it was sort of relevant to my amended project once the original idea was made obsolete. But now, so close to my project's completion, I realize that it's a little silly. My project is more about the process of making animation in a game engine than the comparison between the two, so why not just focus on that? Also, I must be honest, I'd rather use the time to focus on my upcoming job hunt.

So I have picked two shots. And a possible third if I decide it's necessary. I'm going to render those two out as high-quality as I can, point out the comparative difference between them, and wrap it up. So at the end we'll have:
-2:20 short film using game engine tech
-25 seconds of mental ray renders for select scenes
-A short visual comparison between the two

Think of the first part as the feature film, and the rest as DVD EXTRAS.

In which greg trades sleep for progress

I'm so very tired, but that's okay. I can sleep after thesis is done, right guys?



In the meanwhile, here's an updated story reel, featuring (for the first time) a majority of what will be the final animations! WOOO! Over the past few weeks I have come up with a few tricks to slim down my work process even more, trimmed one scene from the script lengthened others to match what their acting required. In the end, the film got slightly longer, and we are now just a hair under 2:20. That must be a good sign, because that's my lucky number. Yay superstition!

Based on the comments and feedback of my advisors, a lot was changed from the last version. For starters, I re-rendered the entire thing. Thanks to the game engine, this was a quick and fairly painless process :) Both scenes were 're-decorated' and almost every camera angle was at least slightly changed. And some of these camera angles are already doomed, and will be changed again. Look forward to the next one!

A real studio just did what my thesis is doing

I feel relevant!

A studio called the House of Moves just basically did what I'm doing on this thesis project. Only they used the unreal engine instead of the Source engine. Also, they were paid cashmoney to do it, whereas I (as a student) am doing quite the opposite.

Small differences aside, they did the same project: used production tools to make stuff, rendered it in a game engine, and saved lots of time rendering. In the article they mention some of the limitations that they faced, and some of their statements mirror my own description of game-engine limits on previous blog posts. Some of the similarities are almost word-for-word.

So yeah, further proof that this is a solid idea and that I am on the right track. Here's the article if you'd like to take a peek:

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/capturing-the-guardians/

Story Reel update

This is what I have so far. Lots of work needs to be done, but you can start to get a flavor of what it'll look like when we get the final version out of the Source engine.

First scene with a voice track

I didn't feel well tonight. So rather than go out and have fun on a friday night, like every other 20-something in the city, I came home to recover. But instead of wrapping myself under a blanket, I completed the rough animation for another shot in the thesis' short film. Why did I do this? Maybe because I really enjoy doing this stuff. Maybe the looming deadline for the short film has me scared silly.

Probably both.

Either way, shot 06 is green on the animation! Woo! Like all the other shots, nothing is going to be polished or finalized until the whole kit'n'kaboodle gets completed. But for now, this is good enough to move on. And hey, it's the first lip synch in the script! I like the voice on him, I feel it matches the Thrall quite well :D



Also, one of the animators on my team has delivered their first shot! That'll appear next, once I get all my stuff imported and compiled for it.

If we don't delete our history, we are doomed to repeat it

George Santayana once said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. A very quotable (and often slightly butchered) phrase. And it comes to mind when I think of how many times I have made a history-related mistake in my 3D works.

After making some adjustments to the Thrall's face, it looked even better than before! So I dumped all of his info back into the source engine and was greeted with the monstrosity you see above you. Why? Because I forgot to 'delete my history'.

See, his face was attached to his skeleton way back when I first made his character rig.  This face-attaching process is referred to as 'skinning', which I know is kind of backwards compared to how we normally use that word in ANY other context. -_- Anyway, since the skinning happened before I did my recent tweaks, the Source engine ignored everything that came afterwards. He looks okay in my 3D software where I did all the fixes, but while Source is ignoring them it looks like he got hit by a particularly large ugly tree.

The solution? Delete the character's history! (or for the Sourceist who might be reading this, delete all non-deformer history). For the layman, that just means that we make all the edits concrete and wipe the slate clean. But we still keep his face attached to the bones so that animation magic can happen.

TLDR Version: Don't rush while changing your main character, or his face will implode.

Robotic Overlords Yelling at Chefs

Here's an animation test for the robotic arms that descend on a poor chef towards the end of the short film. I had to put this guy together because one of my animators is about to start the scene this robot thingy shows up in.

In the final version, four of these will descend at once. Each even has their own little personality, which makes me chuckle. But for now, here's robot arm #1, doing his strangely non-robotic double-take. This was built over the course of a night, and rigged/animated in a morning. Things like this is really where the script I made starts saving lots and lots of time. Hooray!

Not Dead. Just busy.

The thesis blog has been woefully devoid of updates recently. But it's not for lack of attention to the thesis project! It's just that thesis work itself takes precedence over writing ABOUT thesis work.

Over the past month and a half, I have done a lot of work making more of the props that I missed earlier (back when I grossly underestimated the time it would take to do em). I also re-designed the kitchen to be a little livelier. Also did several rig fixes for my animators, and started my own shots for animation as well.

I'll share all of the above soon, but here's a small taste: shot 04! This is where the announcer's voice comes out of nowhere and startles our poor main character. I am responsible for everything there, so I'll take credit for anything that looks good. For anything that looks bad, I blame Zoidberg.

Interlude: more game-engine films!

Currently a lot of time is being spent animating, troubleshooting, and writing my research paper. Not much fun stuff to share with you guys. So here's a nice distraction! More films, made with a game engine, that have come out in the months since my project started.

Unless you have a lot of spare time, you don't need to watch the whole things. But I do encourage you to load them up and skip around, and take a look at the quality of each:

"The Mastermind" an episode series made using the GTA. Visually pretty, though I'm not a fan of the pacing:


"Red Dead Redemption" a half hour short film that used the Red Dead Redemption engine, aired on the FOX TV network and was directed by accomplished director John Hillcoat.


"the Jackknife chronicles" a source-engine made short, shot in the first person, and featuring some kind of revenge tale.


"No Russian" - A wartime machinima film. The camera work and framing on this is very well done, but it might be considered a little too violent for some. Especially as it includes a terrorist raid on an civilian airport. But watching it evokes some pretty strong emotions, which to me signals that it's an effectively made film.



"A too much spare time cartoon" This is mostly flash driven, but it uses game engine scenery and it's very silly, so I'm adding it here.

Start to Crate and the joy of moving

By this point I'm almost exactly 2/3 through my thesis project. It's fascinating to look back and see how much ground has been covered since I started last february. When making the schedule for this project, I added in a buffer in between each section to account for unforeseen delays. Most of that buffer was gobbled up when I grossly underestimated the time it would take to model the various props needed for the project. But I figured, hey, we're still on track!

So as per murphy's law, as soon as I said that other stuff started happening. Some of it was bad news, like getting surprise-shafted by one of the recently changed courses at my school's department. Or the abrupt announcement that 'hey, the dept you're in isn't taking any more students, so you better finish soon.' But on the other hand, some of it was good news, like one team member getting an awesome job offer that necessitates a move to a new state.

The most recent good news is that Sonja, my audio technician in this project (and beautifully talented girlfriend outside the project) has officially moved in. We spent the weekend carting stuff from her place to mine and unpacking said stuff. It decimated any chance I had at working on the thesis this past weekend, but some things are worth the delay. Progress is still being made, and it looks like I might have the first clip of in-Source footage to show you soon.

In the meanwhile, I can share with you a bit of trivia that the moving-crate image above reminds me of. There is somewhat of a video game rating system called "start-to-crate" that was established by two game critics on the website Old Man Murray. Because item crates are such a common trope in video games, the website chronicled how long it took in each game to find the first crate, and used that as a metric to measure the game's worthiness. This cliche worried the developers of halflife2 so much that they made a crate be the first thing you see when you start controlling the character.

In a fun turn of situational irony, the creators of Old Man Murray, Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, are now Valve employees and fairly visible ones with the community, at that.

In a nod to the crate trope, I'm trying to figure out where in my short I can hide a packing crate. Any suggestions?

Animation test on the Thrall Character

Two posts in two days! This is madness.



I just finished compiling the office thrall character for the thesis project. He was the first asset I made for this project, and  like all first attempts he needed to be fixed up. I brought him into zbrush and re-sculpted his head to give it a little more volume, and what I think is a more appealing shape.

Also, when I first imported him, his face imploded. So that had to be fixed, too.

Then I re-rigged him (using the nifty script I showed earlier), and what you see above is me just mashing the different shapes together to see how they display in the game engine. And you can see, it worked! So now I can begin animating the scenes that I have set aside from myself, while the other current animator toils away on his part.

Many hands, light work, etc etc

The first Panel Defense, and other short stories

A couple news announcements for the thesis project. There hasn't been many announcements here in the past couple weeks, because stuff is busy gettin done. But if you're curious on the status:

• The first 40 seconds of foley work is complete. I'll probably replace one or two sounds by the end, but everything is properly mixed and the scenes have been re-timed to match.
• One of the animators on my team has, in a beautiful twist of irony, accepted a job at one of the companies mentioned on this blog. It's wonderful news, but it will take that animator out of the project until life settles down enough to allow free time for it.
• There was a trial run for the thesis defense panel this past monday, where I had to take what I had so far and pitch it to two instructors who were acting as a panel. I pitched the project, they asked questions, and at the end of the session I can safely say I knocked it out of the park. I stumbled over my words a little, so when it comes time for my final thesis panel, I will be sure to practice speaking about it, out loud, repeatedly.
• The thrall character has been re-rigged to match all the improvements that were added to the chef. Just as before, without doing the face shapes it took about 45 minutes. Face shapes should be finished tonight
• I have created a personal brand to stamp on all my works, and have used it to update my resume and website: www.gregmourino.com

As it's going, I'm not going to hit my target deadline of Christmas. Too many things are holding up the animation portion of this project. But I am scrambling like mad to finish the modeling, texturing, lighting, and rigging portions of the project so that I can step in and fill some gaps.

In which I rig the heck outta this chef

As I think I mentioned earlier in the blog, my characters are using skeletons to drive their movements. Since the game engine doesn't support the nifty shape-deforming tools that are available to CG filmmakers, I've got to make do with a basic skeleton.  Think of how traditional stop-motion films are made, with their little wire frames inside a clay/foam body. It's the same basic thing.

Well, once you've got a body full of bones, you can grab them and start animating. But that's a bad idea, because it would take foreeeeeeeeeeeever. This is why we need rigs in animation. The word 'rig', in animation, refers to a whole system of controls and attachments that we stick to a character to make animation easier and quicker for the animators.

For example, I could animate a character sitting down by manually moving each individual joint all over the body down one frame at a time, until he was settled in a chair. But really, I'd rather just grab him by the waist, drag that down, and let the computer calculate the rest. That's an over-simplification of what a rig can do, but you get my point.

A lot of people in the industry hate rigging. They speak of rigging the way most American grownups speak about math. "Oh I was never very good at that stuff" "Man, I hate that stuff, never touched it since school" etc. Well I love math, and while I won't be writing any poetic adulations of The Rig, I don't mind riggin' either. It's fun puzzle out how to build all those controls to be easy for the animator, yet still work correctly. It's like uber-advanced virtual lego building.

To make rigging easier for me, and to speed things up when thesis hit, I've been spending spare moments over the past year making a rigging tool. It's called 'gRig'. It's a program I wrote using Maya's scripting language. It basically automates as much of the rig creation process as possible, and makes it easy to do the rest by hand.

So, using this tool, and armed with the massive list of improvements suggested by my animators, I updated it once more and used it to build a new version of the chef character. This time, I decided to record the process and share it with you. As a note: rigging a character is something people usually spend days on. I'm awfully proud I was able to pull off everything but the facial expressions in 45 minutes.

Another note: this is only a one-minute time lapse video of those 45 minutes

The importance of Advice and Critiques

A common question asked in job interviews, especially for a creative, is "how well do you take criticism?"


Constructive criticism is the very keystone of what makes a great production. No matter how awesome, how talented, how godly you think your favorite director/artist is, they're not. At least, they're not that awesome all on their own. Sure, there's skill in there, but one thing that separates these great creators from the pack is their ability to sit back, listen to a critique, and learn. They listen to people around them when they are told that a joke doesn't work, or a character's design doesn't fit. They cut out parts of the story that don't make sense to their peers. And in the words of one of my classmates, they're ready to "eat their baby" if the project falls flat and needs to be completely revamped.

You'd think this is common knowledge, but after someone has spent hours, days, and weeks sweating over something... to hear someone else say that it is bad, well that hurts. It feels personally insulting. It's not though. Most often, it's objective and it's honest.

I see many of my fellow students ignoring advice as we critique each other's projects in class. I am guilty of it myself, two posts back on this blog, when my adviser told me the project was too much to handle. (small addendum here, after meeting with her last night and reviewing my production book, she has agreed that the project is in striking distance) But with that exception I have been making a conscious effort to listen to the advice of those around me. Especially from the members on my team.

Their time is valuable. It is a commodity that must be split between their own projects, mine, work, and personal lives. And if they're going to spend some of it to give me advice and help me improve my craft, I damn well better listen. Take, for example, this message. The text is blurred, but note, if you will, the size:

This isn't some half-baked critique. It's not someone rolling their eyes and saying "eh, it's okay I guess." This is an essay. It's an investment. It's a lot of verbage. And it's not an isolated case, either. I have teammates that are willing to invest a lot of time not just in the project, but in helping *me* specifically to accomplish it.

This isn't meant to be a flattery post. I'm pretty sure the author of the specific message above doesn't read the blog. But it's a point I want to make: messages like this are a gold mine. I'm lucky to have so much time invested in my improvement. If I listen and learn, hopefully one day I can be a respectable project lead.

 The alternative is, well, if I chose the alternate route I probably shouldn't be in charge of anything. Even my own thesis.