Making of "Lucy's Strange Love"

Introduction

I would like to share my experience about making of short movie, only by yourself. Well almost. This movie was created for CGSociety's competition "Strange Behavior", 2007. In fact, it was very hard task, because strange behavior can be interpreted by different persons in different ways. And so it was, during the competition. For someone, entry made by someone else was not at all connected to strange behavior, or vice versa. And why other's opinion should matter? Well, this competition was of open type - you show your work in progress in your Forum thread, and your rivals/other competitors can give you comments, observations, useful advices, critiques etc. Very interesting concept. I personally think that this concept should expand also on judging, and make it more open to public!

Anyway, my will to make something considered as strange behavior was so strong (in my opinion) that it became very weird... so weird that I even received this comment: :"damn buddy this is moving from strange to psychotic. i mean sorry to say this but I'm a bit disturbed by this story of ours. first I thought it was just a funny story abut a hen who cooks her eggs but now its turning into this serious thing where (if u c it from a human perspective) a mother kills her child... mmmm I guess its a good idea to think abet this thing a bit more...".

Well, it is in fact true, and then again maybe not. Depending on your point of view, and how deep you are going to think about something, and in which way. At least, it depends on strength of one's nervous system. "npantic I have read your storyboard. This story has a Medea style. Three years ago I see an oil picture of a woman that was cooking her baby. Her face was the face of a mad woman. She had a very interesting face. I don't remember the author. I think that one of the most important thing of this animation is the facial expression of hen. I am interested to see the animation of the hen's face when frying the egg. " . That was reply of another person, which approves that we are all different... someone like scary movies, someone do not!...

"I've read you storyboard, and no matter what you end up with, (deep or shallow meaning) the story should be simple. Personally I really loved the idea, a hen cooking her own eggs! And thats all I need, I laughed!"

"lolling all over this... Can't wait to see the cookup!"

Anyway, I admit that my storyboard had some changes from simple to more complex. When competition started I had simpler idea and I wanted to create shorter animation with not so much meshes and complexity. But greed devoured me. As i advanced i started to "hallucinate" about more and more weird story elements, and following that I started to plan and create more and more props for the surroundings. and I in my head I imagined longer and more complex animation... that at last reached the limit of 2 minutes. That epic development of the story and raise of its dramaturgy gave me more strength to work on the project. Also it seamed to me that if I create something bigger and heavier, somehow it will be better and more valuable....

First steps-modeling

After initial sketches I rushed for Lucy and modeled her quickly in Wings3d. Wings3d? Wow, it is a great modeler. Very spartan one, very minimalistic. A little, Grey gem. You can model great things with this open source masterwork if you have nerve to give it a try!

Well... you probably noticed that I did not create detailed plan of my work. Such competitions, a nonprofit project that was in fact a great learning project for me, give me that freedom, to taste quick little successes, to taste fruits of 2-3 hours work sessions materialized in Forum replies. That of course gave me the strength to proceed further, because the strength was what I needed - most of my working hours was "tired" evening/night hours, as I work full time at a design company and have family to care for.

"Great start, Nenad. That's some very nice modeling with Wings, too. I started using Wings myself about a year ago; it's really quite a nice program, and it can compete very well with some of the commercial modelers. I never really got into Blender myself, though it looks like you really know how to push it to its limits." - yes, such comments can give you a moral boost!. And yes, my main application was Blender. Blender, the king of Open source art applications - name that in the eyes of many people materializes the picture of impossible interface and a dangerous path where you can do nothing but tremble in fear that something does not go wrong!

Meditation about Applications

There is a vast number of 3d applications around us, and 2d applications too... and they have their power, and price. I test (installing and trailing) any software I hear of, as much as time allows me. First important thing is to see if the software package has all the tools it needs to have, second, how hard it is to use that tools(including speed of execution), third, what is it's price. Yet, with some knowledge about the matter, you cannot always judge about the first and the second. Because of the factor number 3 I haven't created anything useful in highly professional and high cost software. House adaptation was the thing of their rather higher importance. After all, the most important thing is to create. Even with poor tools you can do something great if your will is strong. Though, with better tools and the same will the result would be even better. I think I found good tools for myself, with some downsides, yet very powerful. At last, the most powerful and the most deadly weapon is one which you can handle. Elf is bad at Hammer and Dwarf at Bow. What you are trained at is the most efficient. Efficiency can give birth to a quality, because you can do more operations in less time. Yet, it can be disaster if you are building on wrong roots. And from disaster one can learn, too. Call me Nenad the Wise . ...

Further from modeling to armature and rig

Anyhow, i focused on main character and box-modeled her in Wings in about 3 hours... after that I proceeded with rigging. Firstly I imported my model from Wings to Blender (I export it as .3ds or .obj because i am convinced that way i receive best import.), and created an Armature (thats the skeleton in Blender) inside the hen's mesh... then cautiously named bones (very good thing if you have great number of bones to manipulate, and blender has a great feature that it can flip pose if you have properly named bones wit .l and .r extensions (left, right) which is helpful in repetitive sequences as a walking is.).

Next task was to assign vertex groups to the bones, and then to paint weights - a stressful task, because you can accidentally paint apart of the mesh that you do not want, what results in improper mesh deforming, or even greater sin, to have some parts of the mesh to squeeze itself in unpredictable direction as a chewing gum. Therefore - all of this took me 2 times longer than modeling - but i can allow that this is price of inexperience. But don't think that there is an easy way, as I foolishly thought.

Also, in spite I had great will I have not created an advanced rig. There was not special bones like IK solvers, not constraints, nor limiters. Not that i did not try, but it was not accurate, so i decided that i will "use my feelings" (as old good ObiVanKenobi would say) and try to animate without those great features. Though, I used the power of Blender's AutoIK button which moves the whole chain of bones.

Tons of Props - modeling is fun!

I proceeded further: "I started to model some props, directly drawing what I imagine in Wings. Here is the part of a baking arsenal. The fryer will have narrow cable falling from the table, connected to a power panel. the chair and the table will remain simple. whole ambient should be combination of the simple style, and some art nouveau ornamented details. More and more props to come, yet must try not to overload the scene, because i will spent too much time on texturing, while main thing should be the chicken. I worked more on its rig, added eyes, but now I will develop props and try to assemble whole scenery."

"Your lowpoly meshes look very clean and efficient! Those are signs of a good modeler! Waiting to see more of your scene, because all pieces are coming together nicely! Keep up!"

Yikes - great comment again, and I there I had opportunity to go back into the past, and remember that those who seemed wrong were, in fact, right...

"If there is any quality in my modeling, I need to say thanks to my highscool teachers (that was in about 1986, when computer modeling was unknown to masses, except maybe Kraftwerk television spot with their animated heads), when they, as the heritage of the older Zagrabian fine painting school (connected with Munich) forced us to understand thing around us as the surfaces. They insisted that we create our drawings, and render them (with pencil, using different shades of gray) as a simple low poly models! Then we were allowed to go in details, after we created relative good plain sketch, looking lots as an low poly wireframe.

Some of us, pupils, were enraged by this rigid teaching, and rebelled, but I embraced the technique after I comprehended that I can "subsurf" my models by shading and "subdividing" more and more parts, and achieve high realism!

Our teacher motto (which we mocked) was "Cleaner, cleaner surfaces!" ! Of course he was unaware of the modern digital era which is prospering by that theory

Later, on Belgrade art academy (which was closer to the poetry in art than to accuracy) i was introduced to the different technique, the Line, which is free and flowing. (maybe something like nurbs modeling?? I am not fond to it, so far). But it helped me to soften the accurate polygon style, and to add some "spirit"."

There was a very interesting reply, which strengthened discussion about power of surface against the power of curve:

"Recently, I've been more and more attracted to, as you also mentioned, lines, instead of solid forms! Personality and dynamic of a line, or curves, to be more precise! The silhouette of an object and how it can appeal to our senses, how it can divide the 2d space and it's relation with nearby silhouettes, the negative space! Unlike you I was so fond of curves, I started to learn them and play with them, starting with Rhinoceros and then Maya! Now, I can't afford not to using them on a regular basis and block out my sketches and pre-vis routines! I would sincerely recommend exploring their power, as nothing else, even subD modeling can replace them and offer the same flexibility and softness as nurbs! Although the newer

workflow methods suggest more and more use of polygon and SubD caging, I still believe nurbs/spline modeling will always be a part of any highend 3d package!"

and a reply: "As an designer I use curves very much, also transparencies and gradients. Curves can twist observers brain, and can hypnotize the customer to buy a product . Curves have natural and attractive look, and when combined wit gradient and glass effects - there is a winning combination of a modern era . I like curvy approach in my classical illustration work (can be seen on my 2d classic work web page, i think link is here in my cgprofile), as I am fond to organic and natural objects (ZBrush would be good to me, I will not hide that I am watching some video tutorials about it from time to time). For now I will stick to box modeling and receiving them from smoothing the cubes...but I know what you are saying and am not afraid of pulling knots, just I am leaving that for later."

"About the negative space: I learned much of its practical power doing the classical watercolors: often modeling in watercolors is based of painting something by painting its surroundings. Especially because there is no white color in pure watercolor, the white is white of the paper. So you are painting light by avoiding it!"

Back on ground - smooth edges, sharp edges

Well after these few days of philosophical ecstasy, there same the cruel reality: "the cage appears a bit too soft and smoothed, (unless that's your intention?) are u going to define the edges a bit more?"

Well oh. Until that moment I did not bother. But then i really started to ask myself a question: How will I force my models to have dynamically rich soft and hard edges ? Smooth button in blender helps allot, and subdivide modifier too (on a cost of speed) but does not solve a problem... This was very important in furniture design. Furniture of this type have great may of flat, solid surfaces with hard angles, but also some curvy delicate angles. How I am going to receive this in Blender?

I was going toward solutions to make my models as finished as they can be in Wings3d, even have textured them almost all in wings 3d, to avoid interpreter problems while export/import.

Wings have great feature that with shortcut you can turn on smoothed preview; and you can define which edges will be hard, and which soft. And it works very well inside Wings3d! You get really great results. But when we talk about importing this state into Blender. well it is a little bit more difficult. I have not yet found out perfect solution, at least not in that time versions of Blender/Wings 3d. One solution goes like this: You define soft/hard edges in Wings, and then when you are over with modeling, select all of your hard edges, and create a sharp bevel of them which will prevent smoothing of those edges. Export result in blender and smooth/subdivide it - and not bad at all! Other way is to import only hard edgemesh into Blender, then there manually define smooth groups by multiselecting smooth edges by hand. I have not yet/then found way to export smooth /hard groups correctly...

Making life more complicated

"Stimulated by the increasing number of props i started to create, I decided it is time (lol) to define the whole room more precisely. So this is it, i guess, without little details, of course. I guess this will be the battleground for furniture of all kind, the fly market :), but here it goes. I succeeded again to make my life more complicated...

Good thing is that I came to new ideas for filling starter simply scenario with small funny situations. I must create detailed storyboard very soon.

How many days we have... about 50? Less? Well God help me finish this..."

Storyboard improvement - what one person finds funny another thinks is demented

Huh, time is leaking even in far-deadlined contests, contract-free. At last, when you put so much energy, you want to see the project finished! That forced me to think more about milestones, create detailed storyboard, because time to animate stuff was very near... So i came up with the detailed storyboard. Well oh there were some "negative comments" and I "defended" myself like this, and in the same time I pondered too much into bizarre aspects....

"Yea I pulled much of association on the family and emotions there... but I think it was unavoidable (for my thinking process), and I admit that it have much psychedelic elements, in very dark meaning.

In fact it tells a "hidden" story of a woman who is in prison of her sins, and her captor is devil. She can break through, and free her self, but she choose to follow the path of gluttony and to continue being hedonistic, thinking of herself and her enjoyment, committing kind of abortus. She struggles with herself a little, willing to change from evil to picture of family... but then she decided to enjoy the meal instead.

Strange behavior in this should be that: she haven't chosen natural and logical path of saving her future children. As the story ends in madness, it does not approve what she is doing. (I am personally greatly against abortus)."

quote of the contest introduction: "They (Strange Behaviours) also stimulate discussion – what one person finds funny another thinks is demented. "

Fixing "Can't-undo" things

"the wing which points backward is strange, I think it's because of the elbow, it points forward, try a more human-like elbow pointing backwards. Now it looks kind of inverse.

The hen model is cool, I like her.

Mapped feathers on the body will be alright, but I would put real feathers on the tail."

Ah - yeah. I tried to create simple main model... and I make it relative simple. But then I created pretty advanced props, too "realistic" for the actor. It seemed to hard for me to remodel the hen in this stage, though suggestion was very good. I proceeded as-is, hoping that some goodly mapped feathers and some correction of her back side will improve her looks.

"Hey Anya, thanx for comment! About her wings, well I followed Bird-like anatomy rig, but i admit maybe it looks strange because i will use wings as a hands, what suggests human anatomy. In fact, I have planned to show the hen as an ordinary "realistic" hen in the start, with chicken movements, and to use cartoonish humanoid movements after she lay eggs. That is still a plan, but I guess i will need her more for cartoonish animation. I will see what to do, and can I set up the rig that it can be used by both animation setups...

About the feathers - yes, that was my idea too in one moment (the tail looks to flat), but somehow it escaped me in my last thoughts- thanks for reminding me!"

Deus Ex Machina

Meantime, as the animation time was at the door, and I still haven't made up my mind about movie ending, I remembered old school trick from the hundreds years ago. Well, in old theater, when director/scenarist came to impossible relationships/situation on the stage/script, he added "Deus ex Machina". That was unexpected supernatural element that solved situation in a moment. For example, goddess appears and helps the Hero; or the ground opens and devour the bad guy. I decided to use this trick, remembering old good Monty Python.

"I added 5tons heavy metal piece falling on the chicken after her ultimate madness... in the Monty Pyton Flying Circus style ! :) Also continued to work on environment, and did some cleanup to the chicken mesh, reading it for shape keys and UV mapping."

"Hey Nenad! The hen looks awesome, I like the expression in her face, but honestly, 5 tons of weight? Man, you are brutal! Hehe, that would make a great ending to the animation, with a nice VFX sound effect and maybe a camera vibration!"

The power of light and AO

There was one important step, even if i succeeded to put all meshes on the stage and design the room. Ambience. Atmosphere. Materials. I ad to create many materials and lightnings, to achieve what i wanted, a kind of a very small rented flat, very poor, Balkans-movies style.

"nice work, just the lighting looks a bit old-school, are you rendering with internal? maybe try to turn on AO. the eggs are great."

O I have turned on AO (Ambient Occlusion), and lot more. but render time was increased dramatically. But there was not turning back...

"With this I am satisfied: it is Blender internal render with ambient occlusion, ray tracing, aerial lamp and one spot lamp only for halo effect - little amount of "spice" with volumetric light."

Shape keys

Oh yes - there was one more important step to finish before animating - shape keys. It is a Blender feature - you can define vertex positions as a key, in edit mode, and save it. Practically that means you can define facial expressions like smile, anger, dull face, despair, joy... etc. and blend those shapes in time regardless of bone animation.

"AN update with (mainly) finished Hen. I unwrapped the hen in Blender, lots of UV node editing, then painted texture in PS. There is also UV normal map for some sense of texture. I also remodeled some parts of the hen mildly. It is far from realistic, but I love this hybrid between realism and cartoonish, I think it will fit well in story. Some seams are visible and some minor tweaks to do... I will correct that on the go... it is time to start animating!"

Texturing and UV mapping

I did all texturing work in Photoshop. I have used freeware texture website Imageshack, but also had photographed some textures for myself. Some parts I have drawn by hand in Photoshop with bushes and effect. Some mending, blending, color leveling, saturations, dust and scratches, and you get pretty attractive atmosphere which I needed - and Art-Noir-Balkans style!

Hard work of UV mapping and Unwrapping i did with Wings 3d. Wings have a good tools for that, when you use to it, very quick. Blender have even more powerful tools, but I am faster with Wings, so I used it, because my time was leaking swiftly. I did Hen UV in Blender thought, because there I wanted more control over details. Also I created some Normal maps, which made feather texture on hen less flat.

Eye for details

"You have an eye for detail, I love the atmosphere in the room! Maybe you could introduce the scene with a few flies buzzing around?"

Oh yes I have passion for details, that can be seen in my 2d work. Some call it "Horror Vacui" - the fear from empty space!

So I did listen and added some flies, and also some unplanned extra meshes (Alcohol bottles, Playing cards all around, empty glasses, an poster and picture on the wall (even 2d-painted it for myself!)...

About animation - my current (technical) insights

I dared to start to animate, and it went fair, when we take in account my pretty poor animating experience. I followed the storyboard, also tried to make some dynamics with camera movements (some claimed that it is too disturbing and to basic, but I had not time to make it more advance, and also in fact I liked that feeling of basic camera, like in old movies.

"the animatic looks nice...but i think that is a little slow...we have to wait to much to see some action...maybe changing a little faster the cameras and cutting the shots, so we can get more fun watching the animation "

And another opinion:

"A little slow? Do you really think so? I don't know. One of my biggest complaints with a lot of computer animation is that the action is too frantic. I kind of like it when someone slows things down to establish mood."

With he hen I had bone animation, moving bones around and defining key positions. Tricky business in Blender is to remember before hit key for Inserting key pose to select all bones... you can lost a complex setup if you do not do that... there is no undo for that!. And replay, and replay, and replay in preview mode. Of course, that was not truly real - preview mode is not shown in 25 fps., so I rendered parts in lower resolution-setting to see how i am advancing... nasty, but rewarding job. Beside bones animation, i also had to take care of shape keys animation for her face, and a little problem is that this is in different timeline so you have to sync that good. Also there is a great problem when you need an object to be bound to another in action - like i had with the situation when Hen is carrying the eggs, or a spoon, or a hat. It was done with mechanism of constraints - copy location and rotation, and empties - empty objects which you bind with parenting to some meshes. Controlling the influence of those constraints, you can tell the handled object is he attached to the hen's hand or is it set on the table. A pretty hard to make it really real, because sooner or later it will happen that some mesh will go through some other and produce unnatural effect... so it needs lots of work and concentration for beginner.

Easiest way to animate is those which i used on solid non deformable objects. For example, when chicken is dragging the cup with eggs, cup is just dragged from from location A to location B! Harder part is to sync keyframed animation with that kind of solid animation, because Blender automatically softens (make ease) between keyframes, so you have to create some in-between keyframes to define a motion (which makes possible late corrections harder) or to play with IPO curves, which i will not discuss here (though it is very powerful tool of dancing ellipsoids.

Very interesting moment was also that when she is breaking eggs and pouring them into a frying pan. Well i have not done that greatly, because real breaking simulation would be too exhausting to me at that time. I have rather created some smashing effects, cut, and show broken egg with the yolk falling down. That was hard enough too- I had to make Yolk look yummy and dense, but also slippery, so i used shape keys again. Also I used some material animation, to have some small effect of on-going process of egg frying, which changes the color and structure of egg material.

Rendering - How many Days?

"Ok, i hit *final* render button. Each frame will be rendered approx 2-6 mins. t means average 6 mins ;( - thats about 12 days of 24hours rendering. Well. Will render it in sequences of lets say 250 frames, will render everywhere I find decent machine to use... and hope ill have final render till end of this week!

Reason for slowing down render time is relatively strong Ambient occlusion ad Aerial light. Both of my processor cores are used fully!"

I rendered the movie till the last moment, almost. Many frames, 640 x 480, strong and demanding lights, strong home computer but not enough strong (Blender will take advantage if you have dual or more core computer, you can define multi-thread rendering and speed up your render. For example, if I turned on 2cores to render, 1 frame would be finished i 4 instead in 6 minutes.... only then forget that you will use that PC....

That was not enough! I calculated that I have not enough power to finish it on time. So I used all my PC-s in home, and few of PC-s at my work overnight. I studied way to have network render but I abandoned that - too much technical complication. Rather I defined segments, and gave every computer to render that segment. At the end I received about 20 segments. I was very very careful not to render one frame more or less that i need, or that will show up in animation. I glued all that segments afterwards using a very simple but OK Windows Movie Maker in Video Editing!. I noticed one very useful thing - the Intel processored computer was more efficient against AMD of same MHz. even for and 1/3 and more!

Sound and Music

I had to solve Sound compositing, so I browsed while rendering was in process the interned, and found the work of very good compositor Kevin Mac Loed, who have published his work under Creative Common license - so I used his work for main thema. I gathered the sound effects from Freesoundproject web page, and some I have recorded for myself with DVD camera with very good 5.1 snorkel for high quality sound. I mixed all in Kristal Engine Opensource program - I admit I am not proffesionalist in Sounds, so some parts may be too loud or not to well synchronized. And oh yes, Syncing the sound and movie! I used old primitive method of "pressing the buttons in same time" to sync the sounds. And guess who was the hen?...

I had to record hens voice in the middle of the night, so anyone's laughter could not disturb the recordings...

Conclusion

"This is really great! You've done a great job modeling the interior! I also like your textures, maybe you could have been a little more dramatic with the light? The animation has both good and sometimes weaker points, but you manage to tell the story well, and that's not easy. I like the cartoony style of her running. Especially when she runs for the chair!

This is very strange behavior, and funny!

And what an ending!! He he.

Roger"

"Hey guys, Fruela, Trickz, Vikram and Alvin! Thanks for your exceedingly kind comments!

Your support was really precious thing during the creation process. Somehow it is easier when you have a public who encourages you, as well as you do to them. I guess we all came out with greater experience from this competition.

I am satisfied by establishing contacts here at CGSociety in such manner. Also, it is a good way to learn about other people workflow. I mean: all the stuff that motivate us to work and compete, all things that prevent us to work as we might (work, obligations of many kinds). Excitement, endurance, sleepless hours in the night ."

Also I would like to thank: Ferx, Eveng, R1-381, DaddyMack, Maxy, Melkao, Trickz, Medunecer, Ania, Overcontrast, Varma, Fruela, Versiden, Kdawgjetz, Slangford for the comments and critique...!

And happily I do not share the Lucy's fate... I had not been flattened by the 5 tons...

Nenad Pantic

info@nenadpantic.com

Credits:

All models created in Wings 3d

Unwrapped with Wings3d, except hen, she is Unwrapped in Blender

Texturized with Photoshop 7

Animated in Blender, about 2800 frames 25 frames per sec.

Rendered in Blender, internal render with Raytracing, Aerial light and few fake lights, Ambient occlusion.

Sound compiled in Kristal Audio Engine

Additional content source:

Music: “Work is work" , “Unrelenting" by Kevin MacLoed

Sounds(partial): The Freesound Project

Fonts: Ray Larbie

Textures source: Imageafter

Duration: 2 min, and approx 3 min. "Making of"

Resolution: 640x480

Thanks everyone at CGTalk