EMAIL: schaneville@hotmail.com NAME: Steve Schaneville TOPIC: Escape COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Spy COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: This page has my storyboards and a few early test renders I had intended to continually add many of the test renders and test animation as I made progress, but quit doing that quite early on. Oh well, here's what I've got: http://schaneville.homeip.net:81/spgm/index.php?g=A_Cartoon_In_The_Making RENDERER USED: Mental Ray 3.2 TOOLS USED: Softimage XSI Adobe Photoshop Adobe Premier CREATION TIME: Storyboarding: 2 weeks (5 hours?) Modeling: 3 weeks (20 hours?) Animating: 5 weeks (100+ hours?) Texturing: 1 week (5-10 hours?) Rendering/Compositing: 1 week (15 hours?) Sound: 1 evening (4 hours) Total: way too much... HARDWARE USED: AMD 1700+, 384 MB VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: ----------------------- There is an audio track. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: --------------------- The Spy vs. Spy characters are at it again. While browsing the internet for ideas, I came across a site that said that they are making a new Spy vs. Spy game for the PC and game consoles. I really liked the old game on the Commodore 64, so I was intrigued. That's what gave me the idea for this animation. I'll be happy to give the original sources to anyone interested, but they are very large (100s of MBs), so I didn't included a zip file. Please Critique! ;) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED (short version): ------------------------------------------------------------- Modeling -- all models are polygonal surfaces. Nothing special, just pushed and pulled points until I was happy for all models. Animation -- Most animation was straight keyframing. Simulations include the bomb fuses (cloth sim) and the smoke, sparks, and explosion effects (particle sim). Texturing -- mostly straight colors, with some procedural textures thrown in here and there. 2 bump maps and a single specular map were also used. Rendering -- rendered in 10 passes. Most were simple matte passes. Special rendering techniques include radiosity on the non-animated objects (walls, floor, bars, bed, and bench), and motion blur on the white spy and object he holds. Sound -- all sounds were downloaded from the internet and mixed in Adobe Premier. I did the sound in 4 hours... really had intended to have *much* more in there, but ran out of time. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED (long version): ------------------------------------------------------------ All modeling, texturing and animating was done specifically for this round of the IRTC contest (except the scissors, which were downloaded from 3D-Cafe). Modeling: -------- All models are polygon subdivision surfaces or polygon primitives. SPY -- for the spy, I started with a polygon primitive sphere and just pushed and pulled points and polys until he looked right, referring to pictures I found on the web of the original cartoon. His entire body is a single surface, including skin, clothes, hands, etc. Only the hat and eyes are separate models. Of course, the second spy is just the same model with different color textures. ROOM -- the room is very simple... single polygons for walls and floor, and primitive cylinders for the bars. The two bars that are spread apart by the Black Spy were deformed by spline for the animation. BED -- the bed is mostly simple primitives. The only fancy technique used was for the rumpled blanket, where I applied a cloth simulation to a grid and let it wrap itself to the bed. I then removed the cloth simulation leaving the blanket in a shape that I liked (had to tweak the shape a bit by hand). BENCH -- the bench is just 8 primitive cubes heavily subdivided and then deformed a little bit. Animating: --------- The smoke/sparks and the end explosion were simulated with particles, and the bomb fuses used a cloth simulation while being carried by the spy. All other animation was done by straight keyframing. SPY -- with all objects in a single scene, the computer was not too responsive. So most of the animation of the spy was done in a scene all by himself. Each camera cut was animated separately. Once I had all the clips of spy animations, I merged them together in a scene with all the objects and placed the animation sections in order. I think that him climbing the ladder and jumping off, and his face just before he thinks about the scissors, are my best bits of animation yet. I enjoyed seeing those in action once they were rendered. BOMB -- the bomb was mostly simulated. I used cloth simulation to cause the fuse to flop around while being carried. This wasn't as straight forward as I had thought it would be... the fuse kept collapsing (flattening) on itself with the cloth sim. In the end, I had to constrain a spline to the object that was simulated and then constrain a primitive cylinder to that spline, so that the cloth animation was sent to the primitive cylinder that wouldn't flatten. In a couple shots, though, the fuses were animated by hand, such as when the fuses cross and the second bomb ignites. The smoke and sparks were simulated with particles. The particle emitters were constrained to the end of the fuse. The sparks have obstacle interaction with the bomb and the floor. OBJECTS -- Whenever the spy is holding an object, the object is constrained to his hand using position and orientation constraints. Those constraints were animated so that he could be seen picking up or throwing down the various objects. Texturing: --------- Compared to the animating, very little effort went into the texturing, as I was running out of time. The bench, bed sheet, bed frame, walls and floor have procedural textures on them. All other textures are simply constant colors, including the spy (his eyes have simple image maps). The only object that has a bump map is the bomb and cell bars. Rendering: --------- There were way too many polygons in the scene for the whole animation to be rendered at once (with motion blur, 5-10 minutes per frame?), so it was rendered in 10 passes instead. The passes were carefully separated so that interacting objects could still interact. The passes are listed below, in order from the bottom most to the top most (the order changes for a select few scenes, like during the "sawing" scene). An interesting note: none of the lights cast any shadows... ROOM PASS -- the bottom most pass (in most shots) is the room pass, which includes the walls, floor, cell bars, bed, and bench. Since nothing in this pass was animated (except the camera of course), I was able to calculate a global illumination map for the whole scene and use that map for all frames in the render. This gave me fast radiosity for the room. In several of the shots, the background was blurred during composition for added depth. This is the only pass that used radiosity. BLACK SPY PASS -- because the spy is a heavy model, he was rendered in his own pass. ("Matte" pass composite) SKY PASS -- the sky and window bars were rendered in a separate pass to account for the animated bars that were not part of the ROOM pass. ("Matte" pass composite) SHADOW PASS -- as mentioned above, none of the lights cast shadows. The only shadows seen in the animation are under the bed, under the bench, and under the spy. The bed and bench shadows were created by the radiosity in the ROOM pass (and were rendered as part of that pass), so the SHADOW pass contains only the spy's shadow. The spy's shadow was created simply by shining a light on the floor below the spy and setting it NOT to interact with the spy at all, but instead, set to REMOVE light from from the floor rather than add light. This saved tons of render time, and was good enough since all the light in the room is soft anyway. I should have added similar shadows to the various objects (bombs, ladder, etc) but didn't have enough time. ("Subtract" pass composite) SPY AND OBJECT PASS -- the white spy and all animated objects were in a pass together. The reason they were not separated is because most of the objects are very light models and didn't overload the renderer, and that way I didn't have to worry about them interacting properly after compositing. This is the only pass that was rendered with motion blur. ("Matte" pass composite) BOMB SMOKE/SPARKS PASS -- two passes were created for the bomb and smoke particles, 1 pass for each bomb. ("Add" pass composite) EXPLOSION PASS -- the explosion particles were rendered separately. ("Add" pass composite) MANY MINI SPIES PASS -- there were 15 miniature spies in the final scene running from the cell. The big subdivided spy had way too many polygons to render 15 of them together, so I took the original spy model before it was subdivided and textured it to create the mini spies. This significantly lowered the poly count, so all 15 spies could be rendered together in a reasonable amount of time. ("Matte" pass composite) Sound: ----- I did the sound in only a single evening. I had much bigger plans for that, wanting to add many more effects than are in the anim, but simply didn't have the time. Also I had trouble finding the sounds I wanted on the internet (all sounds in the anim were downloaded from various internet sites). I used Adobe Premier to do the mixing and timing of the sound, but probably won't use it again in the future... I got frustrated with it.