SuperHeroes Power #24: Friendly Fire

Behold the latest in the superpowers series, Friendly Fire. By far this one has been the most fun to work on yet.

It has more of a story than the previous ones, and it had some aspects that were challenging which in turn made it fun.

 

 

This was my first jump into fluid dynamics to recreate fire. If there’s one thing I learned, is to mind the render times when you get layers of simulations. The first few shots rendered out fairly quickly, however, once the main explosion was triggered, the renders slowed down to a crawl. I’m talking a week of rendering 300 frames. On a side note, the final explosion shot generated a 90+ GB cache file/folder – yikes!.

 

Making Of:

 

crisp.

“crisp.”

Seeds, nodes, connections, and underlying structures; the small parts that make up a whole.

 

 

This was a quick test to check some render speeds/settings that ended up turning into something more – what started as a test ended up becoming a little passion project.

Dig Deeper: The Groundbreaking Story of Michael Bottom’s Big Dig Adventure

While this post isn’t about an overly technical project nor its intricacies, it is about making the most of what you have.

As I said in the Iceleration post, I am not a character animator. However, I was presented with the task of animating a miner digging. I handed off the concept brief to our intern designer Therese Albertsson, and she made the character and environment in separate layers for easy rigging and layering.

Fast forward to an IK setup/texturing/grading later, and we had a little 5 second test of the miner digging. All ready to be sent off to the client. Next thing we know, the client really likes the style but doesn’t have the budget to proceed.

We were stuck with 5 seconds of animation and no budget to keep going forward, plus other projects and deadlines now taking priority.

So what do you do in this position, as an animator and/or motion designer?

What you do is you dig a little bit deeper. 5 seconds of character animation might not be enough to tell a story, but it might be enough to get a feel for something.

Enter “The Groundbreaking Story of Michael Bottom’s Big Dig Adventure” – a made-up film who’s only point is to give a 5 second motion test context and a purpose.

So what if the animation won’t be fleshed out and developed? A faux-story is better than an uninspired motion test.

Most people don’t know or care how many joints/bones/controllers went into a character; they just care about the end result. And if that wasn’t enough, to the untrained eye something that’s not polished and doesn’t go anywhere just isn’t worth their time.

Tweak it, add some music and sound effects, maybe even a title (as ridiculous or irrelevant as you want), and it will make it seem bigger than what it is. Trust me, the original brief had absolutely nothing to do with adventures nor Big Digs.

So the moral of the story is, even if you didn’t complete a project, try to salvage some part of it. It will make you feel proud to show it to people, and you won’t have to explain that it’s just a motion test or a failed pitch.

The whole “see positive in the negative” bit, but applied to animation.

SuperHeroes Power #83: Iceleration

It’s my pleasure to announce the first in a series of SuperHeroes themed animations.

We’ve got a few already done and ready, but will be released later on – a trickle of animations, if you will. These are based off some models I had made earlier based off the SuperHeroes branding avatars.

The premise of these series is a warehouse/testing-room where the SuperHeroes avatars showcase their unique abilities and SuperPowers. Because the ice is melting here in Amsterdam, and because it’s Valentines Day, we’ve decided to give and early release SuperHero Power #83, Iceleration.

 

 

This one was a lot of fun to make (well, they’ve all been fun to make). I’m not a character animator at all, so getting my feet wet with a blobby and leg-less character that slides around the floor makes for pretty easy animation. An animated bend deformer to give the illusion of speed, as well as when he turns corners.

The background icicles were very low-poly, but I went ahead and subdivided the ice-trails he leaves so that they would have an extra bounce when they popped up.

The trail of icicles was very easy to make. I made a spline that the character followed, and then used a Mograph Cloner set to Object on that same spline, and parented a Shader Effector with enough falloff so that they started popping up at his tail-end/butt. The final shot proved a bit tricky for this process, so I just keyframes the clones coming up.

As the trail of icicles were popping up, I added some extra icicle-bits flying out as secondary animation. These were done as a mix of C4D particles as well as some in Trapcode Particular, depending on the shot.

I initially attempted to have the atmospheric fog in C4D using Pyrocluster, but it was proving to be render-intensive and difficult to give it the right look and feel, so I just added that in After Effects using a mix of animated Fractal Noise and Vector Motion Blur.

This had a lot of compositing which would’ve been difficult had it not been for Maxon’s Exchange Plugin (Particular Emitters, the fog, flares, etc…) as well as wise use of object buffers. Having the reflections on the floor was also adding a lot of time to the renders, so using the exported camera I was able to fake the reflections on the floor (and while they aren’t perfect, they work well enough).