Early Artwork

I found these early sketches while cleaning recently.

Look Test

First pass render/composite:

The Maharaja's New Clothes

The clothing worn by people in this period and part of India consisted largely of salwar-kameezes and kurtas. This form of clothing is extremely difficult to animate in 3D, so I am working with two options:

1. Use a cloth simulation -- difficult, but nice secondary motion
   
2. Stylize the cloth and rig it -- easier technically, but may look too stiff
   

I got some great advice from Mark de Sousa of Sony Imageworks, who suggested that I use a combination of bones and deformers to rig the clothing if I choose not to do a simulation. But he felt that cloth simulation would still be better overall if I could fit it into my production schedule, and liked this test that I did using Maya's new nCloth system.



I'm still deciding, but am leaning towards rigging the cloth because I already have my hands full with technical issues and cloth is known to be tricky. Still, I'll keep working with the cloth simulations for a bit longer.


In addition, Christine Panushka suggested that I differentiate the clothing between the Hindus and the Muslims more, instead of relying solely on colour. Now, the people from this time would wear similar clothing, so it'll be tricky to do so, but maybe I can give the Hindus shorter kurtas or a waistband or something.

Second crowd test

For this test, I started to explore what the crowd might look like before the riot starts. I still want to stay with the idea of silhouettes, but they don't need to be black.

I like what I came up with because it's getting away from the idea of distinct 3D characters in the crowd and starting to resemble a moving painting. I've still got a lot of work to do - for starters, I need to get some more dust and atmosphere in. I also need to integrate Bir and Maqbool so that I can see if the crowd design is too distracting.




**** Update
Christine agreed that the projected texture looks weird when the characters are really close to camera. So I need to try to give each character a unique texture, perhaps by projecting the textures in 3D.

Motion Tests

Based on my meetings with Mike Patterson and Christine Panushka last week, I decided to try some motion tests to see if my ideas for the crowd were even feasible.

Massive (the crowd simulation software) doesn't export geometry to Maya, so I had to hack together a script to get my Massive animation to drive Maya characters. These tests use just one character although the final version of the film will have more variety.

Here's the 3D render:



The composite with color correction, temporary smoke and a background:
***Update: I also added Bir to this shot



I think the next step is to get some more handdrawn texture onto the crowd and Bir. Also, the white caps are not really that visible right now.

Medium

I plan to make this film in 3D CGI. My previous 3D film has a relatively clean look, but with my thesis I'm trying to create a very textured, worn look and "dirty" up the frame. The 3D elements will be created in Maya, and I'll likely composite in Shake (maybe After Effects). Although the characters and environments will be 3D models, I'm going to experiment with rendering them flat - sort of like a textured Toon shaded look. Hopefully this approach will also have the side effect of keeping my render times lower than if I went with a Global Illumination-type look, which in turn will give me more time to play with the art directing.

In addition, I'm going to use a lot of handmade (possibly animated) textures along the lines of the references and tests that I posted about earlier. I'm also looking at puppet/stop-motion films for character design ideas. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm going to do some tests with Massive for the crowd scenes.

Finally, there will probably be a tiny bit of live action in there too. During my Contemporary Topics project, I got some more experience integrating a live cloak onto my animated character. Similarly, I used some dry ice footage as fog for my last film. Based on these projects, I feel that elements like dust (which I plan to have a lot of) are a lot easier to create in live-action than in CG, and can be integrated pretty well with some careful compositing and futzing with the frame rate. Live elements also seem to ground the animation, and make the environment seem more believable and organic, even when you're not going for a photorealistic look.

Crowd Psychology

One of the big technical challenges with this project is depicting the sheer number of people involved in the migration. Since my story has Bir getting lost in the midst of a mob, I also need a way to pull the characters out from the background. I'm still exploring how I would achieve the sense of chaos, but I do know that I don't want the film to feel like it should have been made in live-action. As a result, I'd like to use lighting and painting techniques to stylize the crowd into a single mass. I did the following "style frame" to explore this idea:



I plan to backlight the crowd and exaggerate depth of field to really pull attention to the main characters and have the crowd be a mass. Of course, this is going to mean a lot of post-production work, but I really enjoy art directing and compositing, so I'm looking forward to it.
I'm also about to start experimenting with Massive, a crowd simulation software that makes it easier to choreograph CG shots with many characters. So even though I want a stylized look for the crowd, having a Massive layer will give the crowd a little more internal movement that might look pretty cool.

September 26: I found this picture that reminded me of my concept -

Visual Development Test

At the same time that I was developing the idea for this film, I did a project for my Contemporary Topics in Animation class that explored a stylistic direction that I may take with this project. While the actual content of the project was quite different, the colors and mood are elements that I hope to carry over into my thesis.

Character Designs - Old Man

Character Designs - Mom

Character Designs - Bir