TITLE: Workout



NAME: Markus Altendorff

COUNTRY: Germany



EMAIL: maal-irtc20030115@anthrosphinx.de

WEBPAGE: 



TOPIC: Dance

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

MPGFILE: maal_dnc.mpg

RENDERER USED: 

    Maxon Cinema 4D 10.008 Studio Bundle





TOOLS USED: 

    Adobe Photoshop, Apple Final Cut Pro HD





CREATION TIME: 

    100+ hours for modelling + animation, about a week for rendering.

    "Many after-hours died to bring you this animation"





HARDWARE USED: 

    Macintosh G5 2000 Dual (Editing), Mac Mini (Render)





ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 



See a robot move around to a beat.

See other things being moved around, too.

See a tough alien make a fool of itself in the process. :) 



*** CONTENT WARNING ***

Dressing of characters may be considered inadequate 

depending on your cultural background. You have been warned.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 



Any MPEG player should do (tested with Windows Media Player, ATI Player,

Quicktime Mac 9/X), including VideoLANclient and MPlayer 2



Side note for Quicktime Player: At least on my machines, the video is

much darker than with any other player i've tried. May be some gamma

table effect or whatever.



Play it twice. 1. Read the dialogue to get the story. 2. Look at the

video. Sorry for the lots of text, but there's a limit to what story you

can tell with gestures alone...



General recommendation: Make sure to set up the brightness right. By the

way, regarding one comment "it's the artist's job to balance the

lighting" - yes, i try. Really. But it's your job to balance your

screen. The videos look just fine on mine...







DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 





+ Credits / External sources / Copyright notices: 

-------------------------------------------------



Textures of planet earth: NASA Blue Marble Project

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ "These images are freely available to

educators, scientists, museums, and the public. NASA images are

generally not copyrighted." (NASA Website).



Soundtrack: built with Apple's GarageBand audio files.

Quote from Apple's SLA: 

"b. GarageBand/Jam Pack Software. You may use the Apple and third party

audio loop content ("Audio Content"), contained in or otherwise included

with the Apple Software, on a royaltyfree basis, to create your own

original soundtracks for your video and audio projects. You may

broadcast and/or distribute your own soundtracks that were created using

the Audio Content, however, individual samples, sound sets, or audio

loops may not be commercially or otherwise distributed on a standalone

basis, nor may they be repackaged in whole or in part as audio samples,

sound libraries, sound effects or music beds."

In other words: I made it, i can share it. You try to re-wrap and sell it, 

and the lawyers may smite you. Well, may.





+ Alterations to raw renderings: 

--------------------------------



- Subtitles added in Final Cut Pro - Fade-over between scenes added in

Final Cut Pro. Ditto for freeze-frame effect and descriptions.



No further enhancements or compositings werde made.



+ Old objects:

--------------

Most of Amurel (the cat creature), Loa (the winged), the operations room.



+ New objects for this round:

-----------------------------

Kinematics for Amurel and Loa, hair, hallways and corridors, robot arm, 

floor diaphragmas (based on an older design, though), the freezer boxes,

the multi-purpose tablet communicator, the swords, the rose, the massive door.





+ Things i hate about it: 

-------------------------



- Overcompressed again. Edge artefacts everywhere. *sigh*



- No lipsync. No time...



- The soundtrack. Thrown together over the last five hours. Ugh.

  But i just wasn't sure about the Blue Danube copyright situation... darn,

  the robot was so perfectly in sync with Strauss' classic waltzer piece.



- The "ice" of the cylinders just doesn't look like it should. 

  See the frosted glass on the "fridges" for what i wanted to get.

  Note to self: don't start rendering until you like the look.



- Started far too late with this project, AGAIN...



- Volumetric lighting of the "Dancefloor" is too intense and causes

  some shots to be blown out. I noticed that after half of the sequences

  were already completed, and didn't have the time to re-render all for a

  consistent look, so i kept it.

  

- Not enough interesting decoration in the gym. I wanted to have two enormous

  speakers on the walls (behind a slide-open segmented hatch), but it didn't

  happen...



- The new IK of C4D 10 is fast, and precise, but lacks the angular lock that

  9.6' IK system has. By the time i noticed in full, i already was beyond the 

  point of no return and kept going with what i had. Hence, rarely you'll see

  feet-on-ground shots. Need to re-rig the legs... currently, tilting the hip

  makes the feet tilt in sync... *bangs head on table*



- The hip bone points from the navel downwards, with -90 degrees tilt from its

  horizontal parent. I learned that this is a really, really dumb idea, even

  though it's what happens when building the body rig in a straightforward

  manner. Need to add a rotated null element before the hip bone, so it does 

  not have to swing around all three local axis to create a simple left/right 

  move - that's the reason for some of the uneven movements in the final dance

  sequence. With the "pre-rotated" parent node, the left-right becomes a simple

  heading +/-, instead of the combined head/tilt/roll that's a p.i.t.a. in the 

  timeline and hardly editable once its keys are recorded.

  

- Need to add null bones to be able to controll hand and upper arm rolling.

  For now, the roll angle declines as the upper arm or hand near the 90 degrees

  limit, rendering that axis useless. Afterwards, the upper arm element is

  supposed to only do the head/tilt angle, and the roll angle is moved "down"

  to a bone halfway in the upper arm (which in itself does only the roll)

  This should also fix the "tearing" of the mesh at the shoulder at extreme

  poses by relocating part of the deformation down the upper arm. Same way for

  the hand setup.

  See the sword dance moves for an example of how a model should not behave.





+ Things i love about it: 

-------------------------



- It's done! Boooyah!



- The rhythm. Most movements and camera cuts are based on a 10-frames grid,

  so any soundtrack of 150 BPM (waltzer sequence excluded) should give a

  feeling of "moving to the beat".



- The "fridges" (where the ice cylinders are picked from). Hand-painted frost

  on the glass, with backlighting effect.

  

- Much more motion than in the last one.



- Speedier than the last one (though that's not too hard ;)



- The IK of the robot arm. Works just great, once you figure out the IK needs

  to be at +1 priority in the calculations. Otherwise, it lags by a frame...



- Some more improvements on the interal rigging of the characters.

  Arms are forward-kinematic with several settings sliders.

  

- HAIR! Well, it's a bad hair day in space for now, but hey, i'm still learning.



- The fact that it took only all of two weekends (though @16+ hours a day) 

  to animate. That's much faster than what i could do earlier.

  E.g.: All shots with Loa (the green-haired girl) were built and rendered from

  Friday 12th to Sunday 14th, including my first-ever hair setup and rebuilding

  the arms/hand rigging.





+ Some tech talk: 

-----------------



- The feet movement during the last dance sequence is based on an 8-step tango

  scheme i found on the web, played back in reverse. Doesn't really show, 

  though. A glimmer of it is visible in the cam-looking-down part.



- I am very, very impressed with the Release 10 of Cinema 4D. 

  Yes, i did write the same thing in 2005 about 9.1, and in 2006 about 9.6.

  But this time, i really, really mean it. Again. It's amazing how much faster

  the whole process has become (things like "select the hand joints" etc) :)



- All arms, fingers and hands are controlled by numerical sliders that are

  interconnected by Cinema's XPresso logic and range mappers to limit the 

  movements to near the actual properties of real bones.

  While not as flexible as a real IK setup, this worked rather well for me,

  and it was easy to create the poses i wanted. The tweening seemed more 

  convincing, too. The main reason for the change was because the rotation 

  controller handles of Cinema4D gave me hard times earlier because of its

  hyper-sensitivity when viewing the scene almost aligned with the controller 

  vector bands (think "touch of mouse = 380 degrees"...)



- The IK of the robot arm consists of the arm itself (three joints) mounted on 

  a swiveling platform targeting the grabber along the horizontal plane.

  Target first, IK resolver second. That way, the IK only needs to do a 2-D

  resolution.

  

- Both the doors and the fridges are controlled by a single slider whose

  value is split into several parts and transformed to various rotation angles

  and offset values, e.g. for the door: 0-20 % = move bars aside, 

  20-40% = move left door, 35-55 % = move right door, 

  55-80 % = slide floor element up (though you don't 

  see that in the shots i've used... talk about overdesigning stuff :)



- No global illumination. I wanted to, but while initial tests showed promise,

  once the scenes filled with elements, the rendering times went through the

  roof. I faked it by placing non-shadow light sources at 20% strength with 

  medium falloff where the light cones from the ceiling would hit the floor,

  and wired their attributes to the ceiling lamp above.





+ Production blog:

-----------------



Oct. 15, 2006

Next round officially starts. Topic???



Nov. 10, 2006

Topic = Dance. Finally.



Nov. 24, 2006

Created folder on hard disk. Things are looking up! First test of ice material.



Dec. 3, 2006

Test robot arm IK.



Dec. 12, 2006

Build exploding ice cylinder model.



Dec. 15, 2006

After much feet dragging, order software update. Hear "not before christmas." 

Start modeling in current version anyways.



Dec. 26, 2006

Build robot arm, second edition



Dec. 31, 2006

Modeling + wiring of the floor diaphragms while at new year's party. Don't ask.



Jan. 1, 2007

Build robot arm. If all else fails, robot placing cylinders to the "blue danube"

should qualify as "Dance" in the broadest meaning.

Build fridges model, multi-element animateable big door.



Jan. 3, 2007

Title sequence.



Jan. 5 - 7

Re-rig Amurel in Cinema 4D 10. Edit "fly through" title sequence. Animate

Amurel walking into gym room, robot placing ice cylinders to waltzer rhythm.



Jan. 7

Fix robot arm resting position (right in front of light sources. D'oh!)

Start building sword model.



Jan. 10

Re-wire finger control for Amurel.



Jan. 11

Re-wire finger control for Loa.



Jan. 12 - 14

Hair for Loa. Animating of the "punch through ice" sequences.



Jan. 15 (before work)

Inspect overnight render results. Sword moves right through Amurel's head. D'oh!

Fixed right hand movement of swords dance.



Jan. 15 (after work)

Combine final movie, hack together a license-free soundtrack, this text and the

splash picture for the IRTC website. Three hours remaining to the official 

deadline.



Jan. 16

Asked for grace update. Had some dump typos in the subtitles, shouldn't write

at 2 a.m. ...





+ Storyline PAQ (Preemtively Answered Questions):

----------------------------------------------

("Beyond this point, animators are required 

  to have their frame story at hand at all times" ;)



Q: Why use ice to make targets?

A: It's easy to clean up, and easy to produce. Since the animation's location

   is aboard an advanced spaceship, there's extreme cold on the outside anyway,

   so all you need is an area that's insulated towards the inside and conductive

   to the outside (the "fridges"). Water is sprayed onto a rotating core

   and builds up to become the clear cylinders shown.



Q: Either there's some inconsistency, or in the observations room, there's no 

   artificial gravity this time? Earlier stories showed "normal" gravity almost 

   everywhere. WTF?

A: There's artificial gravity aboard the whole ship, including Observations. 

   Loa's floating in mid-air because she can (showoff!), not because she has to.

   Her species is able to control gravitational forces within a certain range.

   Besides, she's doing some photosynthesis on the side, that's why she's

   tracking the sunlight with her wings in "collector mode".



Q: Shouldn't astronauts wear lots of protective gear and stuff? Instead...

A: Maybe. Let's just say that if the story has a 300 meters intergalactic

   spaceship with panorama windows in it, we might as well assume it's heated 

   at comfortable levels for its passengers.



Q: No, what i wanted to hint at was ...

A: I'm not even listening. La-la. Move along. Nothing to see here... next 

   question, please.



Q: There's some animosity between the two, isn't it?

A: Not really. They're supposed to be more like the two guys in the balcony 

   at a certain puppet show, and since their task at hand is the ultimate in

   boring, they tend to annoy each other for a change. All in good fun. 

   Honestly.

   

Q: What's that task you mentioned in the last answer?

A: They're watching the planet. Mostly, it's just the ship's sensors keeping 

   logs of human development. The reason for that? Unknown. It's not like they 

   ever cared much about the data collected.

   

Q: And what about those posters mentioned in the end titles?

A: Not telling. Oops. Time's up.