JAGUAR’S NECK BRACE
There was much discussion early on about whether or not we would break our rule of “organic is 2D" with the neck brace. Clint and I pushed for a 2D neck brace, thinking it would be easier to animate that way. I also believed that it might make for an easier contact point between the 2D and the 3D. To our art director’s credit, Jason did not think we were correct and did a test to show us that a 3D neck brace would work just fine. He animated shot 9 with a 3D neck brace. The neck brace had a simple lattice deformer on it, and it worked just fine. In fact, since we rarely see the neck of the character, the 2D head can mostly be composited on top of the character with few registration issues. We all had to agree that Jason was correct. The test proved it.
Figure 5.5 shows how the 3D neck brace moves along with the high red 3D head. A playblast of scene 9’s 3D is in the companion data: 3DLeads2D_3Danim_shot9.avi.
FIGURE 5.5 Shot 9 of Jaguar McGuire and his 3D neck brace animated.
The 3D animation was then brought into Flash where the rough 2D animation head was placed. The high-res version of the head in Maya helped the animator with perspective on the face and ears. When combining 2D with a 3D shot, it is extremely important that the 2D follow perspective as much as possible. Otherwise there would be a visual mismatch that would detract from the animation.
The Flash file for this rough animation scene is in the companion data for you to view: 3DLeads2D_2DAnim_shot9.fla.
The scene was cleaned up in Flash using a very small brush. Then the scene was ready for final composite.
FIGURE 5.6 Shot 9 of Jaguar McGuire’s 2D head, animated in Flash.
FIGURE 5.7 Cleanup draw in Flash.
YOUR SHOT 4
Now it is your turn to take a shot from the project. You have been issued shot 4. This is a reaction shot of Jaguar. He has been looking at his cape and cards and the newspaper headline that pronounces his career over. Just as he sighs, a deep sad groan, his nostalgic lamenting is interrupted by his cat’s meow.
3D ANIMATION LEADS
Start by opening the Maya file Shot4_Blocked.mb. If your project is not set, Maya will automatically call in the referenced rig file jaguar_bodyCast_v2.mb. If Maya cannot find it, you will be prompted to browse for the file. Once the file is loaded into Maya, you can switch views to display the animated camera for this scene, cameral. To do this, in the panel window click Panels > Perspective > Camera 1.
FIGURE 5.8 Blocked in Maya, this file was opened and viewed through an animated camera.
The animation for the head has been blocked in already for you. The scene is 100 frames long. The frame rate is 24 frames per second (fps). Our camera rendering settings are HD720. You will note that the blocked-in animation was not placed on the rig controls but on the head itself. Select the head so that it turns green, and you will be able to see the keyframes in the timeline. This is normally naughty rigging. In rigging classes, I teach the students to lock down all geometry so that the controls are the only thing that can be animated. Rigging this way keeps novice animators from breaking the rig easily. However, in a small group project like this one, where most of us were familiar in the out-liner, we broke convention and animated the geometry. In larger group projects or when the team issues scenes to animators who are not familiar with the rig (like you), this convention could cause confusion. In many scenes throughout the film, we had to break the rig to get the posing we needed. This is entirely to be expected in settings outside of a sterile classroom. Do what you need to do to ensure that the shot is completed on time, but do not cause more issues for others down pipeline from you. Because you are being issued this scene, please note that there is no character set on Jaguar, and the head geometry has been animated.
FIGURE 5.9 Animation is on the geometry—naughty rigging.
The camera has been animated, which will likely be the case in a production environment. You are to animate the 3D character. Those who have worked in production know this to be the case; for students, this might be a new concept.
The neck brace is not rigged. You can select on it directly and rotate it as you see fit for your animation. Those who take my rigging courses know that this bothers me to the core of my being. Make a note: these students did not take my rigging class and we’ll live with the unclean implications. In a perfect world, we would have a completely locked down rig with controls in place. Breaking the rig on a shot-by-shot basis is one thing, but having a part of the rig that should have controls to be animated in every shot is another. It is simple animation for the brace, so we can animate the geometry.
FIGURE 5.10 The neck brace can be animated directly by moving geometry.
When you have completed your animation, do not forget to run the twos.mel script by typing twos in the command line. This will put your animation on twos for you, and in this scene there shouldn’t be a need to change it to ones unless you feel you need to when the character quickly turns to find the source of the meow.
Render 3D Reference Images
Save your project and render out a sequence of images to bring into the 2D package of your choice. There is no need to render out render passes in this scene because the head only needs to be composited right on top of the body. This is an easy registration scene. However, if it will make your registration a little bit easier, we can render out the head on a separate level so that when you are drawing in your 2D package you can hide the head and only see the body level. This will allow you to see if you truly have proper registration.
1. Click on the body; it should turn green.
2. In the Render Layer window, select Layers > Create Layers from Selected.
3. Label the layer RLBody.
4. Repeat for the head.
FIGURE 5.11 Render layers for the body and head.
Remember the settings that you need to have in order to render layers:
1. You have to tell Maya to render all of the layers in the Render Layer area by clicking Options > Render All Layers.
2. Make sure that your render settings have the following:
a. Correct naming and file extension
b. Correct frame range and padding
c. Camera1 selected and alpha channel
d. HD720 resolution
Take Note
Watch out. I would prefer to use .tifs or tgas for the whole process, because that has been the image of choice in production. However, with our Adobe software there will be issues. For the final render, you can use tga or .tifs when we composite into After Effects. To use them in Flash or Photoshop, we have to convert the .tifs or tgas into a raw QuickTime movie file to retain the alpha channels.
What would happen if we used .tif images and skipped making them into a QuickTime movie file? Glad you asked, because I did use .tif images and when I brought them into Flash they read in as an astronomically huge file that I could not see. If you try to use a tga, it will open correctly but without the alpha channel. Both image types opened well enough in Photoshop as a single image (which we have seen before), but they will not open with their alpha channels when brought in as a video layer. Abandon your ideas of .tif images here, sadly. We must add the extra step of converting to a QuickTime file.
1. Then click Render > Batch Render.
2. Your images will be placed inside of folders with names matching your render layer names.
3. In the package of your choice, convert those .tif or tga images to a QuickTime movie file. I will use After Effects. As we have done before, drag your images into After Effects and create a composition with the proper frame rate. To check if your alpha channel is there (please check, this will save you the headache of having to come back and redo this), click on the Show Channel icon and select Alpha. You should see a black-and-white image that matches the shape of the object in your image. If you only see white, you have no alpha channel. Go back to step 2 and make sure you are not using jpgs or some other image format that does not support alpha channels. I’ll wait for you right here until you get back.
4. Once you are sure that you have alpha channels, export the images as a QuickTime movie with the compression set at Animation. This will basically be a movie of full-res images that contain alpha.
5. Repeat for the head layer.
