Documented Developments

ORBS // Experimental film by James D. Wood from James Wood on Vimeo.

I rendered two shots out at 300 dpi and ridiculous dimensions to use as posters/postcards. Honestly this shot with the dolly zoom is one of my favourites in the whole film, it just looks really intense.

I have also made a business card finally! Not that it is exactly relevant to this project in particular, but still.

In other news THE FILM IS DONE. I’ve even uploaded it! It’s all up on my website too! *EXCITED* (I’ll post it here, but it looks better on the website... jamesdwood3d.com/orbs)

EVERYTHING IS DONE. Well not quite everything, but the bulk of it is finished, meaning everything in Cinema is done -- all the modelling, animating, simulating, lighting and rendering is finished. What remains is compositing everything together and post production, as well as adding music/sound (big ups to my housemate Josh, he’s working on something super sick for me in terms of music).

All that will be left then will be creating a nice website/landing page for the film, which I will link here when that is complete.

I can’t believe it’s almost over...

The final room. I really made very few changes to this room between having made it and now. Of course I swapped out the old materials for the crispy new photo-scanned ones, and perhaps tweaked the lights and fog a little to line up with the other scenes. I also extended out a corridor from the doorway that previously led to the waiting room, through which the 'protagonist’ orb enters.

I did a little shot in this scene that I’ve always wanted to try: the dolly zoom. It has a few other names but that’s what I know it as. This technique is generally used to show tension in a scene and other stuff like that. Basically the camera ‘dollies’ or moves backwards away from a subject whilst simultaneously zooming in, which I did by increasing the focal length. The effect is that the subject remains the same size whilst the background looms up bigger and bigger. The effect can also work the other way around, where the focal length is decreased as the camera moves toward the subject, which results in the background seemingly dropping/moving away from the subject.

The material for the huge ball ended up being my most complicated yet. I merged several maps together to create the cracked, glowing, black orb texture, and also made use of some spherical area lights to create the volumetric glowing.

Having worked out exactly what I now wanted to do with my much loved dome room, I have now finished and indeed much improved it. First of all, I completely dropped the C4D cloth having discovered that X-Particles has it’s own particle-based cloth system!!! And it truly is a pleasure to use.

I utilised the same mesh as before and reduced the polygons down a little so as to distribute the points around more randomly. This allows the cloth to bend and deform more fluidly, like something akin to silk, as opposed to straighter, linear bends like a woven fabric. I then added the X-Particles cloth tag to the mesh, which automatically creates an emitter and a load of particles, specifically one for each point in the mesh. I also added a turbulence modifier and turned off the effect of gravity on the cloth, so that it would ripple like before. I then of course messed with the various settings until I was happy.

This next room I created for a transitional shot between the waiting room and the dome room. The camera flies down this curved corridor, and the orb from the first scene has now grown and conceivably rolled out of that first room, heading who knows where. I created the corridor by modelling a single segment from a slice of a tube object and then using a cloner to make it as long as I needed. I also used the cloner to evenly space lights above the skylights in the same fashion as the other rooms.

Following The Great Restructuring of my project, I separated the original small waiting room I had made from the huge room, as it was now to become the first scene of the film.

The sphere that I mentioned would be a continuity device is positioned on a plinth/pedestal at the end of the room, and the first shot is the camera panning down from a skylight to face it. I had the idea to submerge the sphere in some fluid as a means of having it ‘come alive’, which in this case consists of it changing colour to a bright white and growing larger.

In order to submerge the sphere, I made a glass box that would raise up from the plinth to contain the fluid, and a simple little corrugated tube that I wanted to come out of a hatch or door in the wall to dispense the fluid onto the sphere. In fact, instead of a hatch, I made a very simple mechanical iris rig which I thought was nice and effective. I’ll make a separate post about that.

For the fluid itself, I used an X-Particles FLIP Domain (FLIP stands for FLuid Implicit Particle... in case you were wondering), which is supposed to be pretty accurate for fluid sims. The domain basically sets the threshold for when a particle behaves independently or as a part of the fluid, and gives it its direction and physics. I turned up the viscosity of the fluid so that it would flow over the sphere very slowly and prefer to hold its shape rather than drip down and fill all of the space in the container, giving it the appearance of a thick gel.

Okay, so we’re way over halfway through the project, and I’m having to make some critical decisions. So far I haven’t really had a proper plan in mind for the actual content of the film, I’ve just been making rooms and doing minor little tests for the ‘installations’ in each room. That has now changed.

One of the big factors in me completing this on time, a factor which I have constantly had in mind but until now have not fully considered, is rendering time. The problem with having many rooms and multiple simulations to animate while still allowing time for shots to sort of linger and not rush on too quickly, is that those render times are gonna just keep on creeping up. Most of the scenes I have currently render at around 3 to 5 minutes per frame, depending on the scene and what is in shot. That doesn’t sound awful, and for a still render that would be fantastic, but this is motion graphics, not... graphics? (Yeah, okay, poor joke, I know.) Lets average it out and say 4 mins a frame, that equates to 96 minutes per second of animation. If my film was, say, 4 minutes long (or 240 seconds), that would mean 23,040 minutes of rendering time. I’ll save you some working out: that’s 16 days. Yup. You see my problem. Even cutting that running time in half to 2 minutes would mean about a week of straight rendering. And it’s not as if I could possibly want to use my PC at all within that time, amirite? Remember how I said I’m using Redshift because of how fast it is? ...Nice one eh? In all seriousness though, if Redshift is gonna take that long, imagine how long Physical would take. Ha, gg. Also, it doesn’t help that my hardware isn’t exactly ‘industry standard’. A GTX 980 isn’t bad, I’ve never really had any problems running games, but it’s not best suited to this kind of workload... (psst, anyone got any spare 1080 TIs...?)

So I sat down and really thought it all out, planning specific camera shots, finding ways to link scenes together and otherwise getting rid of stuff. I even draw up an actual storyboard that I’m going to stick to as much as possible. The sad part is I’m dropping a couple of rooms. RIP. The rooms in question are the room with the drain, and by extension the spherical basement room too. I am, however, promoting the sphere from that room to a core element of the film. It will serve as a kind of continuity device to take the viewer/camera from scene to scene.

Although I’m now going to end up not using a lot of the stuff I’ve already made, which kinda sucks, I’m actually fully fine with it. For possibly the first time in this project so far, I have an actual plan to stick to, I feel like I have direction, and I’m really confident despite the looming deadline. 

So, this is how I made the dome. First I took a hemisphere and sliced the very top and maybe about a quarter of the bottom off, and then inner-extruded the remaining polygons. I then deleted the excess polygons around each face, and manually filled in the gaps again with the bridge tool. The purpose of doing this is so that the bars between each glass pane of the skylight are ‘flat’ on the top and bottom, without the centre line and thus without the little peak down the middle that resulted from extruding the faces in. I separated the bars into their own object and extruded them out, giving them thickness. For the circle of glass in the middle, I sliced the top off a separate sphere (specifically a hexahedron sphere, so that the circle would have a roughly even mesh instead of converging on a centre point) with the same radius as the original hemisphere, which I later subdivided to create a smoother curve.

This room has probably been my favourite so far, not least because I actually did a little experimentation with C4D’s dynamic cloth system which ended up looking pretty damn cool. This room is also unique in that it is octagonal, and has a big, beautiful, domed skylight which I am super proud of (I’ll make a separate post about it). This dome/skylight was actually somewhat inspired by the one at Brent Cross shopping centre, by the way.

As for the cloth, I cut a circle out of a plane, subdivided it, and applied a C4D cloth tag. I pinned the very edge in place, and then tweaked with the settings and turbulence a bunch until I got a result I was content with. The cloth kind of breathes, moving up and down and rippling about. Originally I was thinking I’d give the cloth a very reflective material, so it’d look like some kind of mirror pool, but in fact I found I loved this leathery look, and just decided to keep it.

This room is a little bit of a depart from the others I have been working on... My thoughts with this is that it is some kind of basement room, specifically this would be a room directly beneath the room with the drain, and by going down that drain one would end up here. In that way, when the room above floods, then that would mean this room would be flooded as well. I feel like I’ve said ‘room’ a lot...

So, in typical me-fashion, I jumped straight into C4D and started modelling. In general I find it somewhat difficult to visualise and plan things until I have something tangible that I can work with in 3D. Thus far this hasn’t really been an issue because I’m a fairly fast and efficient hard-surface modeller, and I take backups of my scenes as I make major changes, so I can always just jump back and tweak things later if that becomes necessary. My plan at this point is that I’ll make a few rooms, and then start testing out some dynamics and particle sims in-situ to get a better feeling of how they’ll integrate into the rooms.

I started out with this huuuge open room with a skylight which was more or less directly inspired by the Hayward Gallery, although I didn’t make pyramids of glass. I also decided now on a feature that I’m going to continue as a commonality between all of the rooms, that being to kind of divide the otherwise flat walls into ‘segments’, or perhaps you could call them panels. This, to me anyway, gives the impression that the room has been built with these plaster panels covering the bare walls, and really just helps to break up an otherwise boring, uniform surface. A great deal of the modelling of these rooms involves cutting edge-loops and extruding polygons to create these interesting walls and ceilings instead of what would otherwise just be simple cubes with holes in the roof. I also made a kind of ‘waiting room’ as an extension to the huge open room.

I did some render tests with a plain white dome light and a physical sky (the first two examples above were using the sky, figure included for scale) but wasn’t fully happy with the results. Although the images are (I would say anyway) pretty aesthetically pleasing, the light is pretty harsh and not diffused enough for a gallery, not to mention the shadows. I ended up using a combination of area lights (as general fill lights) and spot lights (for some light shadowing as well as a touch of volumetrics) to get closer to the look I envisioned, but without a doubt I’m going to continue tweaking this literally up until I have to start rendering.