Chris Reilly Commentary, Projects

Creating a Futuristic Concept Scene: Speed Designing with Photoshop and Blender

Last night, I created a set of simple concept images in roughly 4 hours of on-and-off work. My goal was to quickly develop a partial continuity between two images, establishing a sort of implied workflow utilization. In other words, I wanted to first create a hand drawn digital image of the concept using a pressure sensitive pen tablet. Then, using this drawing as a guide, I wanted to speed model and texture a 3D environment inspired by the drawing, thereby establishing a workflow continuity commonly seen in the industry: from hand drawn concept image to rendered concept image.

I began in Photoshop, where I set up a 16*9 inch 500 ppi resolution document with no guidelines. I set the pen size to roughly 25 pixels for fine control of the design. I decided to go for a neofuturistic, bleak image of an astronaut of some sort traversing a somewhat barren area. I wanted to combine elements of the past into the image by featuring a draped cloth, which would be covering the lower half of the figure’s visible physique. I began to draw with smoothing at around 50%. I first did a complete sketch of the man’s face from the inner muscle groups outward, even though most of this would later be covered by other elements, such as his helmet. I even included facial hair. The man’s thin face and the shape of his jaw helped dictate where the different elements of the helmet would go, and what shape they would take.

The first defining strokes I made staked out the area that would later make up the visor part of the helmet. I defined the opening that the man would be looking out of, as well as the collar piece and other essential components of the structure. Once I had pieced the entire structure together, I began shading the image according to the geometric contours using various pen widths and shapes until I was satisfied. I blocked out elements of the man’s bare face using white shapes with various opacities to define the surface of the helmet.

To go from 2D to 3D, I first sculpted the man’s bare face using the sculpting tools in Blender. I then began forming the geometric segments of the helmet around the face according to their required positions. I frequently adjusted the design and shape of the pieces on the fly as I went. When I was ready, I used Blender’s texture paint features to literally draw on color and damage marks, and applied these image textures to the model pieces in the node compositor. I used glossy shaders for the most part, and reused the hand drawn textures as displacement maps to give depth to the material.

To achieve the cloth look, I created a subdivided plane with a hole in the middle around the figure. I “pinned” the vertices at the center so that they would not move, and then ran a cloth simulation using wind and turbulence forces to achieve a billowing cloak model. I textured this using a combination of an opaque velvet shader and a transparent shader in a mix shader, with the factor set to a stretched brick texture. This gave me long strands of “cloth”, which looked like a woven burlap material up close.

I then ran a particle system with wind and a collision object to simulate snow, and rendered this separately. I pulled everything into Photoshop, applied a lookup table, touched up highlights and shadows using the brush tool, and composited dust and smoke into the shot, and rendered it out. The resulting image is comparable to the original sketch, albeit vastly different in proportion.

This exercise has given me some insight as to how concepts tend to change from conception to execution, and how one might go about adapting reference images for use in 3D environments. To see more of my work, go to www.newflightdigital.com. Feel free to reach out to me at contact@newflightdigital.com.

Chris Reilly Projects

Motion Capture for Music Videos: Update #1

Over the course of the past two days, I have had the pleasure of working with the Shadow Motion Capture System to create motion capture data for characters, which will be featured in a music video. The music video takes place in a swamp, for which we are creating some creepy practical effects using a diorama. As such, the “people” performing the music will be swamp animals, created with animation and mocap data. 

Practical Effects created with a Swamp Diorama
On set with the “Gods of Fire” during a mocap session

Without giving too much away, a frog will be singing the song, while other animals such as raccoons and lizards play the rest of the instruments. The mocap suit requires several sensors to be placed over the shoulder blades and on the chest, which often come loose during rock-out sessions. This was our biggest challenge, but we overcame that before long once we determined how to best fasten the sensors. The mocap suit transmits a 5Ghz wifi signal back to a laptop running the latest Shadow software, allowing us to record the data. To begin, we needed to have the actor strike a “T” pose, with his legs together and arms out like a T. This allowed the sensor to calibrate and determine the orientation in that pose. Once the software knew the orientation in that pose, it could determine the orientation in any other pose. 

We experienced small problems with the device, but nothing too significant. For example, the device comes with foot pads that go in the user’s shoes. These pads sense pressure, and therefore, determine whether the user is in the air or not (during jumps). Since our talent was rocking out, he would often perform mini jumps in enthusiastic dance. These jumps were not enough to “trip” the pressure sensors, so they did not know the user had left the ground for a moment. As a result, the mocap figure preview on our computers would slowly slip downward as the sensors de-calibrated. The solution, of course, was to cut the jumps and replace them with other enthusiastic movements. Below, you can see our entire broadcast from yesterday when we recorded the mocap data:

All in all, the mocap session was a success. I exported each session as a BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) file, and imported them into my favorite 3D program, Blender. To make the 3D models of the animals move, I used a plugin called MakeWalk, from http://www.makehumancommunity.com. The plugin takes BVH data and retargets it to a separate rig. To start, I produced a BVH rig for the animals using MakeHuman. The rig is one that MakeWalk can understand (since they are sister applications). I then edited the rig to fit the curvature of each animal, and then applied it to the model using automatic weights. This means that each “bone” in the rig affected a part of the model in a way that the application determined automatically. I then edited the automatic weights to better reflect the animal’s anatomy (for example, the upper arm bone should move the whole upper arm, etc.) After this, I retargeted the rig to a .bvh file recorded on set, and voila! The rig and model moved and acted just as our talent had on set. Last step was to apply “corrective smoothing” to the model to correct some bumps that inevitably form as a result of the mocap warping.

As I work on the mocap data and refine it, I will be posting more updates. Stay tuned for more… including a singing frog! That will require facial motion capture. I will be using a technique that I invented myself, and I will describe it in a future post.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at contact@newflightdigital.com.