SCAD X Harbor Picture Company: Week 03

This is the third week into the class. We have made a lot of progress but in the meantime there are a lot of thing meant to change. Professors and mentors have provided even more helpful feedback than last week.

Professors' Suggestion:

• Taking out the city scene since the women in the heels supposed to be powerful. Normal City Scene does not show that.

• Adding a theater scene such as award ceremony into the storyline.

  
  

Mentors' Feedback:

• When the CG human taking the spread effect step, showing a bit of red bottom to explain why red effect spread across.

• Spreading effect should be emphasizing by spreading iconic red color from duller red carpet.

• There should be more shots emphasizing shoes instead of the person.

• Doing more live shots and then replacing shoes in CG.

• Be mindful of the time finishing animating the CG character walking in heels.

  
  

Guest Yong Duk Jhun's Feedback:

• There should be more scene that shows heels instead of upper half of the actress.

• Camera in shot 6 should be tilted down more to show heels.

• Stage shot from the back should more actress centered to make the shoe more heroic in the shot.

Reassigning Works:

I supposedly to work on the city street scene and the transition effect from street scene to runway scene. However, since they are both removed on request of Professor Bridget Gaynor. Our FX team have to reassign our works to make sure everybody have jobs to do.

Revised Assignment Table:

Assignment Table created by Tianze

Tasks for the Week:

• Finialize the Paparazzi flashlight effect.

• Create a background for product hero shots.

• Start researching on Crowd Sim for theatre shots.

Paparazzi Effect:

Since it is for the lighting in LED Volume, it should be done in Unreal as scene lightings during all red carpet shots.

Paparazzi Effect References:

Paparazzi Effect Unreal Demo:

Paparazzi Effect Unreal Blueprint:

Blueprint Viewport

I started blueprinting from placing a spotlight at center.

Blueprint Event Graph

Programming parts starts from creating a custom event called "FlashBegin". First "Set Intensity" Node turns up the light to the user expected brightness. In the Timeline Node (The Yellow One), I normalize the time for the first "Set Intensity" to 1.

Timeline Node

The second "Set Intensity" Node turns down the flashlight brightness to 0 after timeline ends. "Delay" Node creates a time gap until the next time the function calls itself.

When the scene begins, it calls the "FlashBegin" Event and starts the call loop.

Blueprint Construction Graph

The Construction Script supports most of the important customizable aspects of flashlight. Light color, Inner and Outer light cone angle, and light temperature are customizable. Light Intensity, Flash Repeating Time, and Flashlight Speed are also instance editable through the event graph.

All Flashlight Settings

Product Hero Shot Background:

As the request from both professors, we decided adding a background to product shot. But at this moment how it is going to be is still to be decided. So I rendered a quick demo for my idea for the background.

Possible Background Idea Render:

Currently it is still a simple vellum sim with a single wind force and minimal noise tweaking, but we would very much like to put it into the presenting and waiting for the feedback from mentors next week.

• The cloth is pinned on one side to make sure it does not move away from the camera frame.

• Camera is pushed into closer to the cloth surface to avoid edges of the grid appears on screen.

• After little team discussion, we decided to make it as a blurry background to focus more on shoes.

Crowd Sim R&D:

This week I officially started researching the crowd sim for stage shots, which is exciting because I have never done it before. I started from simple bits since I'm new to this. And as expected I ran into problems. The crowd should be placed on chair rows and columns in theater background. So the first thing I tried is to generate several dozens of agents on a grid by copy to points. With some jitters it looks pretty much like audiences except all agents are doing the same movements at same time.

Crowd by Copy to Points

Node used in Agent Geometry

With this method it is not easy to randomize the pace of movement for differnet agents, and it's not possible to do the simulation through dopnet because there are no source node. So I switched to randomly generated agents with crowd source node.

Crowd by Crowd Source

It looks better with the randomization of clip time in crowd source node, but all agents doing same postures will still give it away on the screen, so the animation will definitely requires some tweaking. Another major problem is the random scattering. Even though audiences shouldn't be in a perfect straight line, it still shouldn't be scattering too much away from seats. What I have to research for next week is to find a way to combine the jittering from copy to point method with the posture randomness from Crowd Source.

Can't wait until next week to share more of our progress!