Researche and Development Compositing
The compositing in The Reward is kept mostly to the basics. The final output should not lose any roughness given by the animation nor the saturation and roughness of the background. Thereby most working hours are spent on integrating the characters in their current environment and merge them somewhat together with the help of color bleeding and some rim lights
Given is a red background and the character animation of the
woman with her main colors. The compositing changed her main color with a blue hint and glow was added on the rim lights.
In most of The Reward shots some kind of glow is used to give the picture a touch of “epicness�. It is one of the main points to remember before rendering out a shot from the compositing, to use a good amount of glow.
Characters are normally grounded with some kind of color gradient added in compositing to give the characters more weight and to achieve less of a layered look. Those compositing guidelines count for about 80 percent of the movie. There were aswell shots though in which 3D and Simulations were used. These shots need a lot of attention and R&D (research and development) before people could start working on them in production
R & D production
Analyse The Reward compositing-style
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For Tales of Alethrion it was important to keep those expensive shots to a minimum since there is only a certain amount of time for testing things while working in a production. But we will talk about those RnD shots a bit later.
Right at the start of the developing phase we were wondering which software to choose for compositing, Adobe After Effects or The Foundry Nuke.
Nuke was the software which was used for the The Reward movie. It is
probably the strongest compositing tool on the market, especially for 3D and real life movies.
Having said that it is one of the most expensive compositing software on the market.
R & D production
Adapting the style for Tales of Alethrion
After Effects is quite the opposite. It is easy to use since the interface and working process is similar to Adobe Photoshop which most artists know and it is pretty favorable.
This brought us to the conclusion to switch to After Effects and build a pipeline around it.
One of the key elements to make a production efficiency is to create a solid pipeline.
A pipeline is there to structure and simplify the file exchanges from the first quick sketch of a shot to the final movie.
To create the most efficient way to produce episodes in the shortest amount of time the work process / pipeline which was used for The
Reward had to be modified to a cheaper / less time consuming method.
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One of the key steps as mentioned shortly already while talking about the Background Developing-Process was, to split each category (Animation, Background,Compositing) in three working steps ( “a.”, “b.”, “c.” ). Step “a” is to get a quick result down on paper which will be the base on which the artists are working on. While “b.” and “c.” are work in progress outputs and finally the approved files.
R & D production
Below is a quick breakdown with the main steps of our pipeline, which we are using to create a single shot
Doing so the animators, background and compositing artists can work simultaneously on one shot, while steadily giving each other their current state of progress which can be checked with just a slight delay in the composited scene with all effects and sounds included. This gives the directors a much better vision of what is still needed and the working process feels more natural. Another important point which we figured out was to make the exchanges of files automatically, so that the artist is not losing time to export his work and he can fully focus on the creative aspect. This is happening with the help of many scripts which were made during the developing phase as well. Regarding the compositing workflow it was important to build Sequence-, Shot-, Char- and FX templates which include a basic composition setup which can be replaced with any footages from other shots and give still the exact same look.
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Enclosed two compositing examples from the setup stage to the final shot : Medium quality shot Step “a.” (overall working time : 1 hour ) Step “b.” (overall working time : 2 hours ) Step “c.” (overall working time : 4 hours )
High quality Shot Step “a.” (overall working time : 1 hour ) Step “b.” (overall working time : 3 hours ) Step “c.” (overall working time : 7 hours )
R & D production
In order to do so, we had to spend some time figuring out what animators and background artist had to deliver to get the The Reward look and what the right namings for those animation - and background layers were. As soon as those things were set, we created scripts and templates with the certain names and layer structure to try to avoid most of the common human errors like spelling mistakes etc. and we were ready for the first decent looking tests.
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Usage of 3D in Tales of Alethion As mentioned above, The Reward had some really expensive shots. Most of them were solved with the help of 3D. The help of 3D is as well needed in a few shots of Tales of Alethrion. First we were once again exploring which software would be best to use, and since the The Reward was using Autodesk Maya, we tested it out first. But after a few days of try and failure we figured out, that Cinema 4D, a 3D software which is known for its great abilities of great motion graphics and which works closely together with Adobe After Effects was the one program to use and we got pretty quick decent results.
Animation Research and development The goal with the development of the animation style was to take the look from The Reward and push it towards to a more production friendly method. The animation style in The Reward was a bit too undefined and we needed to clearify it both for the pipeline and for the animators. To do this I focused on the workflow.
I liked the soft “pose to pose” idea of the style of The Reward. When it works, it is both fun to do and fun to watch. It uses a lot of smears, stretches and squashes to explain movement in a funny but fluent way. These smears are quick to do since they don’t require the animator to be on model when they draw. The bigger challenge is the smaller more subtle movements. Here we go back to more traditional Disney style animation. I want to push this part of the style and find a process and method to make it easier, faster and fun to do. I want to cut down on the amount of frames and simplify the movement to make it faster. The method I found most useful was a technique where you reuse and trace the storytelling keys for most of the movements. It saves time and keeps you on model. What I also found was that it keeps you on style as it forces you to simplify your animation.
Here are two examples. One for simple movement and one for more complex movement: Example 1
R & D production
A quick look into the After Effects Viewport : Since we have a camera move in this shot, the layers had to be setup in 3D space to give a better feel of parallax. This is as well the reason why we added 200 pixels extra on each side of the footage with color information for each shot.
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This movement that Amerath does with the sword is simple because her different poses are more or less independent of each other. The two poses (A and B) are poses where she stands still and the movement stops and changes direction to another pose
R & D production
These are the two main poses. The start/finish of a key movement.
The only “original� drawings I had to do were the smears. As you can see on the example, then C is the next key which is drawn on style and more clean where the smear is much more off model and strangely proportioned. These smears only need to communicate movement and can therefore be drawn more loose and freely. They are therefore much easier and faster to draw. For this shot the retrace style works very well. It’s faster but it also forces you to work more pose to pose and simplify your arcs and movements. It keeps you from overcomplicating the scene and makes you stick with the necessary and minimal. The movement is based heavily on the keys and is therefore easier to handle as you can copy those for help.
A,b and B,b are inbetweens or the frames explaining the trantitions from A to B. Almost all of the inbetweens are copied from the keys. I retrace for example the sword arm from A and move it slightly to the left then retrace the other arm and move it slightly to the right etc. Then finally I draw the hair and dress to create a drag in those compared to the overall movement of the body. These individual relocations of the bodyparts and seperate redrawn elements create the illusion of a movement without me having to draw a completely new drawing. It also lets me work in clean up from the start which saves a lot of time at the end.
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Complexe animation style :
This shot is much more complex since the key poses are all connected and the movement needs to flow from key to key. The frames that can be copied are less than in the simple example above. With the sword shot Amerath stands still most of the time, but here, Alethrion jumps from a pose to a new pose most of the time. The retrace method can therefore not save you as much time as in the other example, since more original drawings needs to be made. It can still help though. In this example are two key frames of Alethrion’s jump:
R & D production
Example 2
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I’m very happy with the result of the animation style. I think the trace method helps speeding up the process and if used correctly it can almost cut away the clean-up process since it gets merged with the animation step. I think though that the challenge is for the animators to get used to the style. It is very unnatural compared to the classical way and can therefore be difficult to get used to. If the tracing method is used in a wrong way it can look very stiff and unnatural. However, the test period with the interns has been very good and they have picked up the style very well. So I will definetly use this style for the next part of the production.
R & D production
Here are two of the frames between A and B. The top one is a mix of smears, traditional style and the bottom one is a mix of the tracing method and the traditional method. When the movement gets more complex, then only parts of the character can be traced. In the A,c example I traced parts of the leg, the upper part of the torso and the head. If the shot gets more complex, then a collage of different methods can be used. For example in the A,b pose I couldn’t use the tracing method but I smeared the arms since they were meant to move faster than the rest of the body. Smears and tracing are good to cut the corners and save time since they demand less from the animator. At the end, this shot only took about two days to fully animate, clean and color, which I think is a really good timeframe considering the shot’s lenght. The effects that were needed and the complexity of the movement. Had it been in the old style I would probably have spent 3 or 4 days on the shot. I see this as a big improvement..
So far I think the animation style has been improved during this development period and has been defined more to make it easier to teach the animators who are new to the style. It is much faster to animate with this style and it keeps the animator in the pipeline and the style of the show. I think with the new method we can aim for 10 - 17 seconds of animation per week depending on simple or complex shots.
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