New Perspectives

I received this awesome book titled Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives just recently.  It's a collection of essays from different writers about the various themes and subjects of Kubrick's films. The pages are full of interesting behind the scenes making-of info, script revisions and other cool details. There's also some glorious full-page images from the films featured on the pages.

Through the years, I've grown to become a huge fan of the most notable Kubrick films (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange, Shining, Eyes Wide Shut etc). They're all crazy films but still very much compelling.

Rölli ja Kaikkien aikojen salaisuus

I had the chance to do some 3D modeling work for the just released Finnish film production called Rölli ja Kaikkien aikojen salaisuus. We started the post production work roughly a year ago and my duty was to create animated characters and some set extensions for the film. All in all I spent a few months working hands-on in the production. There's some pretty fun and entertaining moments in the film. Check out the promotional material below:

Siili Suhonen, one of the 3D animated characters

Divine Consultants update

Here's a brand new animated playblast from one of the scenes from the Divine Consultants short film:

And a breakdown of working with motion capture in Blender.
Note the realtime streaming of animation data in the viewport:

Achieving the NPR look

One of the goals of the Divine Consultants short film project has been to try and achieve a non-photorealistic look with our 3D assets. Something along the line of Telltale's Walking Dead, Wolf Among us, Borderlands and other stylized video games. A look inspired by realtime graphics that's pushed a little bit further with offline rendering and heavy compositing. Generally this means having line art in the character textures but also rendering some kind of cartoony outlines.

So far the most efficient way to do this is to use the normal pass; blurring the normal pass a slight amount and then comparing the difference to the original image generates lines where there's details. This black and white image can then be further adjusted and multiplied on top of the original image.

Here's how the passes look like:

Character's beauty pass

Normal pass

Generated outlines

NPR look development

Here's a brand new test shot for Divine Consultants. Testing out a more stylized and saturated NPR look with outlines. More about the development in a later post.. And don't mind the audio; it's just a guide for the voice overdubbing.

Shot development for Divine Consultants

I've been insanely busy working on all things related to Divine Consultants. Modeling, texturing assets, preparing scenes, doing simple animating and rendering frames + compositing them. The amount of work is just insane. But it's cool ...and even fun at times. Hah.

Here's a couple of new test shots that I made for the project:

Motion capture and retargeting the face

Here's my first proper test of using cleaned motion capture data and facial retargeting in Blender. Voice acting is still based on the on-set recording; the audio will be dubbed later.

Overall, I think the expressions work pretty nicely in sync. Rendered using Blender's native viewport.

Rooftops of the Hellish City

Here's a new conceptual rendering that I made for the Divine Consultants animated short film project. Featuring the main characters Oogle and Joy and the rooftops of Hellish City. Check out the high res version.

Here's a matcap clay rendering of the same scene:

Joy character portrait

Oogle character portrait

Rooftops test shot

Here's a brand new rendered test shot of sunrise in the hellish city. Definitly not finished stuff since there's some visible glitches such as one of the waving cloths freezing mid air. I think it's pretty rad to see the mocapped actors finally moving in their proper environment.

Divine Consultants concept renders

I've been super busy working on the Divine Consultants animated short film. We had a succesful shooting day at the mocap studio and I've been able to continue look development. Here's some new render tests that I've been making. The characters should get proper hand-painted textures and the foreground elements are still untextured as of yet, work in progress

The dog featured in Finnish newspaper

Here's something spotted in today's Helsingin Sanomat:

The 3D animated dog made at Talvi stands nice and centered in this brand new print advertisement. Feels incredibly satisfying to see piece of my own work featured in such a noticeable place.

Motion capture tests at Lume

Yesterday we had the chance to do some initial motion capture tests at media center Lume with our character models and placeholder sets. All the three main actors were there testing out their characters. It was also a huge learning opportunity for myself since I haven't been involved in motion capture shootings before. Was pretty cool to see everything in motion.

Overall it went relatively smoothly and we got some nice results even though we were faced with some minor technical difficulties (as always). The biggest hurdle is getting the characters made in Blender to MotionBuilder and back to Blender with their armatures and weights intact. So far the workflow seems to be working nicely.

Here's a 'best of' clip I made from the material:



The render quality is just from the viewport preview so nothing fancy yet. I think the movement works pretty nicely already and the handheld camera gives it a very realistic documentary style feel.

More to come.

Hellish city look developmnet

I've been busy working on the BA thesis animated film project for the past weeks. Character and set development with the team is undergoing nicely at a rapid pace at the moment. Lot's of cool stuff under the wraps.

Here's a new version of the sunrise shot. It now has textured assets and overall better compositing work:

The look of the base of the tower has evolved from this test quite a bit. It is now lifted higher from the ground plane and the spiraling forms of buildings covering it are more pronounced. Foreground still heavily work in progress.

Here's a closeup look at the vertical slums:

Book about hard surfaces

I received some time ago this brand new book called Blender 3D Incredible Machines. The book's written by Chris Kuhn who's one of my favorite Blender artists. He makes insanely accurate detailed vehicles and props.

The book covers intermediate and advanced modeling concepts in Blender using examples; making a scifi gun, spaceship and a robot. Most of the tools and techniques I already knew about but I did pick up some interesting new tricks. Great read!

Landscape progress

I've continued making the environment piece for the past week. Also tried to animate the sunrise just to see how things look in motion. Take a look below:

Pretty satisfied with the results so far. I had to composite the scene heavily to give it that painterly kind of mood. It all comes down to layering fog, adding overlays and color correcting the render to achieve the effect.

The city is procedurally generated using particles so it's easy to create different kind of layouts. It's actually not as simple as it sounds since there's different sets of particles for walls and roof to make them orient correctly. Had to figure that out all by myself. I made some lowpoly slum buildings that I could then instance all over the city. No textures yet, will work on that next.

The city itself is just simple blocks of buildings based on a map and then extruded up. There's also a lattice modifier to make it possible to shape the landscape nondestructively.

Environment blocking

Stuff from the weekend; this is a new environment piece that I'm working on. The instanced buildings are cubes for now. The clouds are volumetric CG clouds, don't think they're quite there yet. Work in progress.

Couple new art books

Got two new CG art books in the mail some time ago. The First one is called ZBrush Characters & Creatures by 3DTotal. It's pretty much what the cover art states; making monsters and alien creatures in ZBrush with the entire workflow explained. Having at least a basic grasp of ZBrush concepts is pretty much expected in today's industry so I might as well take a shot at it. I would definitly like to get more into sculpting organic things in the future.

The another book is titled simply Anatomy for 3D artists (also published by 3DTotal). It covers basic human anatomy with traditional illustrations and intricate 3D wireframes. Good stuff for understanding proportions, muscle structure and preparing models for better deformations.

I have also had the time to read an absolute classic about cinematography; The Five C's of Cinematography by Joseph V. Mascelli! The book has been recommended by a good friend so I finally decided to borrow it from the school library. Even though the book was originally published in the 60's all the elements of visual storytelling still apply in today's world. Super fascinating stuff!

More Anttila

Here's some more Anttila with the dog. I think they're pretty funny actually:

Anttila - Whiteweeks commercial

I had the chance to take part in a super interesting project at Talvi. Our brief was to create a fully CG dog model for a Finnish commercial; a french bulldog to be exact. I had the responsibility of modeling and detailing the character in 3D. Take a look below:

The commercial was aired on Finnish television and in social media.

Making something like this is more than anything a team effort. My task was to create the base mesh and make sure that it's as clean as possible. I also did some initial sculpting for the character. Once the model was ready, it was handed off to rigging and animation. After that, the VFX guys did their magic and tracked it to the live action plates and made all the simulations; fur and dynamics. So credit to all the respectable people who worked on it!

Feel free to check out my brand new project page for more renders:

http://www.ilmarisaari.com/commercials

More to follow.

Creature sculpt

Here's something from today:

Sculpted using Blender's dynamic topology feature. The model is based on concept art from Creaturebox. I might do a color pass on this one if time allows.