Making the Face - Part One & Two

Well, it's been a while since I last blogged, and owing to the fact I can't get into college today I thought this a good time to reflect on my progress thusfar!

As I knew my face wasn't totally symetrical I thought I'd try and discover my better side to work on as we are only building half a face and then mirrorring it, and decided on my left side as the image I wish to portray to the world!

I tried taking still photos but couldn't get the sides exactly right, so to get round this I took some video of me slowing turningg 360 degrees and then took frame grabs from that. It meant I was in the same place every time. Gawd bless Hi-Def!

This has been another steep learning curve and something that has been more detailed than I could imagine. I really approached it wrong in thinking the topology was just a grid, when in fact it is a map of the face, so after some disasterious attempts and sloppy joining of splines that ended up with a bizarre map that really wasn't anything like a face!

I took the time to look at muscle anatomy and plan the muscles. This meant I needed to create a new template, from which I will begin the topology from scratch, so wish me luck and I'll see you next week!

Choosing Music

After importing the finished .avi file in Premiere it was time to complete the edit, with countdown, fades and music. I searched through my collection and came up with songs that I felt were not too obvious but definitely had a wedding feel to them. My first selection was ‘Love is in the Air’ by John Paul Young, a great song that I have heard played at a lot of weddings and for me was the perfect choice. A bit of careful editing over the camera shutter ‘click’ I added gave a fairly unnoticeable edit which cut a four minute song down to thirty seconds.

For Ident 2, the church I decided to make the soundtrack more atmospheric, so created a mix of a traditional wedding song, ‘Going to the Chapel’, which faded in and out over a peal of bells (actually from Westminster Abbey – if you’re going to add SFX, add the best!)

Rendering for Video.

I had real issues with the quality of the final .avi file, which on render seemed very clear, but on playback was full of smearing and artefacts reminiscent of 16 bit colour processing rather than 24 bit. Even upping the Cinepak quality threshold to 100% made little difference, before I realised that on quick movement (especially the church Ident) I had to render the files uncompressed or at the least to DV Video standard. The results were startling in the amount of clarity, which makes me wonder Max would use the Radius Cinepak Codec as the default for .avi rendering? Like so many aspects of the programme, it does not seem to follow a logical layout.

Creating Ident Two: The Church.

For the second Ident I wanted to retain the main wedding couple, as they were to be the corporate characters throughout the campaign. Having used a wedding cake for the first Ident, I asked people what they thought of when I mentioned the word wedding, and church came out top, so that was what I decided to build next. Again, it was made up of simple shapes, but this time I wanted to employ a more photorealistic model, so sourced real materials including tiles, stained glass windows and a church door, which I made more realistic by adding the ‘bump’ effect, pushing the clock up to 450 to give the object a real 3D embossed feel. The UVW mapping was invaluable for creating the correct perspective of the object such as the tiles.

It was easier to merge the characters this time, and I had also gone back to the original characters and added all the correct materials to them, so the whole process was becoming smoother and quicker.

Again, moving the camera by manually setting keyframes made the camera more interesting and less unpredictable!

I also realised that the shows feature had been turned off on the lights, and although it wasn’t important in Ident 1, I needed to give the wedding characters weight as they were standing outside the church. After playing with the shadow, I added a low-key spot onto the couple and selected the ray-trace feature & didn’t think any more of it. That was until I came to render the sequence, and the computer ground to a halt! It took a lot of back tracking before I finally realised that the ray-trace was the problem, and after changing the shadow back to normal, everything started working smoothly again. Phew!

Again, I carefully chose a background that suited the piece, and a blue sky with fluffy white clouds seemed to perfectly encapsulate the ideal English wedding day.


Things learnt from Ident 2: Bump mapping of materials, UVW mapping of materials, Boolean for windows, shadow mapping and the dangers of ray-trace shadows!

Making the first Ident.

Now I had all the elements I needed for the first Ident, it was time to create my first animation. I had decided that I wanted to make the whole sequence in one go, rather than build it up with different elements edited together in Premiere. So most importantly was the positioning of all the objects. I started with the cake & table, added the smaller versions of the man & woman on top of the cake by merging in the files. This is when I encountered my first problem – suddenly there were duplicates of body parts all over, and although Max automatically re-named them, when trying to select a particular dummy or point it was almost impossible from a huge selection list!

So I had to go back to the masters and carefully re-name them with a man / woman prefix and group any abject that didn’t need separate movement, reducing each figure to four elements: Head, Body & two dummies for the arms. This made selecting much simpler when I created the new composite of all the elements.

Pleasing discovery: One thing I was delighted to find was that the light also came in with the characters and didn’t seem to conflict with other objects inserted. Not sure if this was luck, but it meant I was able to keep the creating modelling lighting I had employed in the cake with all the other characters complimenting it!

For the reveal to work, the larger characters have to appear quickly as the camera pulls away from the ‘cake’ couple, so when setting up the camera I selected a wide 20mm lens. This would give a feeling a depth and speed without adding too much of a fish-eye effect.

Animating the Camera.
This is something I had had problems with in the past. The Auto key function is a blessing and a curse, as it seems to record every movement, including the mistakes, and I couldn’t figure out a way to edit it. Again, being used to the key-frame ‘tweening’ principal of Adobe Premiere and Flash was totally different in Max. However I managed to get a good smooth tracking shot that looked effective using the Set Key function rather than the auto function. I learnt how move the keyframes along the timeline, both singularly and in groups to add extra time to the beginning of the sequence, and also how to extend the running time of the whole sequence. I loved the real time preview to accurately test the timing, which is a definite advantage over programmes like Adobe After Effects which needs to render its previews.

The main way of working I learnt was that each individual element or object has its own sequence of keyframes, and it is important to make sure the right object is highlighted before key-framing; otherwise the effect can be quite perturbing!

I also quickly realised that the window size I had set up in the main project was not the actual final rendered 768 x 576 pal frame, so the most important thing I learnt was to re-size the preview camera window to reflect the final render and NOT TO RE-SIZE IT!!! Once that was achieved, life was a lot easier!

I had problems with the end wedding. TV logo. I had mapped it onto a plane, which I keyframed quickly over the closed shutter. The problem was there was no real illumination to keep it looking flat and white, and if I positioned an additional light bright enough to illuminate the sign, it bled through to the main composition and over-exposed the shutter blades. The work-around: Create a flat colour and export it as a series of frames (11 in total) which I then imported into Photoshop, cut out and saved as a sequence I could import into Premiere and overlay into the sequence. With that done, I realised that I could also re-use the shutter animation in subsequent Idents and so did not need to re-merge it again. Nice!

However, when I rendered the sequence, I noticed that the standard shading I had added to the characters made them look a bit ‘flat’, so I source my records and found pictures from wedding, and from them I took out skin, red satin, jacket cloth and wedding dress ivory silk which I mapped onto the characters. The overall effect made a huge difference with what was a little effort, so I was delighted.

When I looked at the final sequence, something didn’t look right, and I concluded it was the background, which was a simple Colour gradient I had created in Photoshop. I explored the Max materials library and found a lovely sunset which really seemed to fit in with the overall sequence and really brought all the elements together superbly.

Things Learnt from Ident 1: Merging characters from other projects. Camera tracking and manual positioning. Importance of backgrounds.

Things needed to be revised: Self illumination of objects. Keyframing lights to become brighter and duller.

Building the Camera Shutter.

I knew this was going to be complicated, as I knew roughly how the shutter on a camera worked, but wasn’t sure how I would get everything to work at the same time! I even considered cheating and went onto Turbosquid.com to search for one, and there was one very elaborate model which looked beautiful, but cost $80! However, I was able to download the promo still from it to use as a template, and by adding it as a material on a plane I was able to trace the basic shutter shape, extrude it and with Lara’s help found out how to Boleen a hole for the joint to be added. I ten copied the shutter nine times and positioned it in a circle, which looked pretty good. It was a lot simpler than the commercial model, but as I was only going to show the centre aperture, it was fine. A nice metallic material made it look very professional.

Moving the Shutter: Now came the big problem, making the blades rotate in the right place. Again, this is where I found Max infuriating, as noting seems to be easily placed. In Photoshop it is a simple case of dragging the anchor point to where you want, but Max there was nothing. Much searching though the help files finally revealed the pivot point change in the hierarchy section. Why there? Madness! Still, once I found it, it was a pretty straightforward to move the points, and then by chance I found while accidentally highlighting more than one shutter by mistake that the rotation edit worked universally on anything highlighted – fantastic! So closing the whole shutter was a simple task, with a few minor tweaks to make sure the iris was completely closed on the end position.

Learnt from modelling the shutter: Line tracing a picture. Boleen cutting, re-positioning pivot points, simultaneously rotating multiple objects.

Building my woman!

After finally creating my wedding man satisfactorily it was time to make his wife. I copied the figure to a new project and began adapting.

The Dress: This proved to be a huge challenge, more complicated than I first thought, and although the end result was satisfactory, I would like to practice more to get the effect more fluid. The first difference I found was the colour: the black suit of the man hid a multitude of sins in the final render, and creating him with simple objects (spheres, cylinders, oil tank, etc) worked well as the shaped naturally blended together. However, the white really showed up the joins, so I used this to my advantage by stylizing the dress, making the shoulder spheres more pronounced to create stylized shoulder pads, which looked very effective, if a little 1980’s!

However, the bust posed a different problem, and whereas the shoulders looked good, adding two white spheres as boobs looked ridiculous! The main dress had been easy to adapt with the scale adaptor and I hoped the vertex modelling would be the same. So I had to model the dress with the vertices, the first time I had really tried this. I used soft-selection to get an even ‘bump’, and the effect was OK, but not as smooth as I really wanted. I tied adding a turbo smooth, but although this improved the effect, it was still not perfect.

The Hair: This had been a challenge on the wedding man, and I had created a good luck more through luck than judgement, with the hat helping to hide any raggedness, but with the woman I didn’t have that luxury, as it was all on display. I began with a sphere which I then tried to adapt and it was difficult! However, the effect was again passable, but it is something I will definitely work on further in the future.

Render problems: When I rendered the picture, the hair was invisible, even though there was a back! This was really perplexing and I trawled though the various menus looking for an answer, even enlisting the help of Alan Hopkins who had the same problem. Then I saw it, in the render options: Force 2-sided render. That was it, and everything worked fine. I have to say that I’m finding Max really frustrating with so many options that do not seem to been a logical place, or follow the same logic as the Adobe products that I am used to working with.

Lessons learnt from modelling the woman: Vertex manipulation, rendering options.