Escape from the Mines of Titan

[Glob Studios]

I'm doing a short video for my band. I've been working on animating a guy in a space suit doing low-gravity jumping. I've rigged him with a simple rig based on Barry Zundel's, which he described in his A:M 2005 training video. The space suit is a lot simpler than a human body, because you would expect it to crumple in ways human skin will not, so there is not as much cosmetic bone work. Also, movement is somewhat restricted.

 

Anyway, at the moment I'm trying to get the movement as natural as I can. You can see the action at the link below. I've been working on getting followthrough and overlapping action happening. I'd love to hear your views on what I've done so far, and if there are other things in that regard I should be doing. Also, I have not done any actual squash and stretch, and I'd be glad to hear your views on whether and how much I should add, given I'm going for a realistic look.

 

 

You can see it in 720p, which is clearer.

 

If you want to see what it looks like in a scene, here it is:

 

 

Anyway, I'd be grateful for any feedback you might have.

 

-Vance

[mouseman]

Hey, Vance,

 

Nice jump test to show scale!

 

Two quick suggestions on the jump action:

 

1. For the jump, the legs currently straighten very slowly. It probably shouldn't be too much slower than it would be on Earth. It would be easier to jump up except for the suit. Once he's in the "air", maybe you can have his feet and legs dangle a bit.

 

2. Have the arms start out low and go up as he jumps, and then hover while in the air, and then come down as he lands.

 

Also, if you are using IK arms and legs, be sure not to let them get too close to their maximum position from their pivot (shoulder or hip), because that causes popping.

 

I really like your vision! This will be exciting to see the project develop!

[robcat2075]

The jump motion looks better in the context of the scene. By itself it's hard to tell when he's jumping.

 

I, too, think he should be pushing off harder since he is jumping so high.

[Glob Studios]

Thanks for the great feedback, guys. Those are good suggestions, and I'm in the process of implementing them.

 

-Vance

[robcat2075]

You may find this discussion of another forum member's jump tests useful...

 

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=352251

[Gerry]

That's a great start! Hard to tell from your screen movie when and how he's jumping but the in-context shot makes it clear. One thing I would suggest is when he lands between jumps, have him hold there for maybe three frames. It may help give him more of a feeling of weight.

[largento]

Just a thought: Juumping in a pressure suit (even in an imaginary one) would still have significantly less movement. It's basically a suit filled with air, so bending the joints is difficult. That's why we have that image in our head of the Apollo astronauts almost straight legged when they are walking on the moon. Later suits were designed to bend at the knees specifically so that they could operate the moon rover. :-)

 

Of course, an imaginary suit could have all the movement you like, but part of what makes us think "space suit" is that stiff jointed-ness.

[Glob Studios]

These are good suggestions as well. The frog jump from the other discussion made some useful points. I'm going to try a full hold at the bottom. I'm sliding him for a few frames now but his feet move, so he seems reasonably rooted. I'll see if an actual hold looks better. And, yes, the real pressure suits do obscure movement, but I think on that one issue, I'll choose to be unrealistic.

 

Thanks again to everyone for all the energy, encouragement and solid advice. It really helps. I'll post as soon as I make further progress.

 

-Vance

[Gerry]

yeah, don't be too locked into the way "real" spacesuits move. One thing I've learned with my sax-playing gecko is the pitfalls of under-animating in a quest for realism.

[Glob Studios]

I have made some updates to the jump motion. Thanks, your comments have been invaluable in getting it looking good! I will post video of a revised jump soon, but I'm still working on it.

 

I have some other stuff ready to show now. I've been working on an opening establishing shot that zooms toward Titan. Here's my first test. Jupiter and Titan look pretty good, but the spacecraft probably still needs some work. Also, there is no starfield behind it yet. This does achieve better accuracy in that Titan's orbit is pretty close to the plane of the rings, so the rings being close to edge-on is correct. (Astronomy buffs will be pleased, but no one else will notice.) Anyway, you can see it here in true 720p:

 

Titan Opening Test #1

 

Make sure to open to full-screen to see the detail (Vimeo is much better quality than YouTube).

 

Also, I've begun working on a "getting into the suits" shot. Here's an early still. It needs a lot of work, and I need to redo the smudges on the suit to look more realistic, but it shows where I'm going. I'm planning to composite in video of the band's heads poking out of the suits and then have the helmets cover them. Here it is:

 

 

As always, I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions.

 

-Vance

[Glob Studios]

OK, I'm starting to do the suiting up section in detail. My idea is that the heads of the real band members will be composited into the suits. This is my first motion test, which has lots of stuff wrong. The motion is jerky and not quite in sync with the head, the hands need to move more, the real head needs to be darker and more saturated, etc. But I thought I'd share it anyway.

 

TestHead3.mov

 

-Vance

[mouseman]

Very neat concept! Looks interesting!

[robcat2075]

OK, I'm starting to do the suiting up section in detail. My idea is that the heads of the real band members will be composited into the suits.

 

That's a good solution. Might even be good use for mocap if you had a mo-capture device.

[robcat2075]

On the suit smudges i'd suggest making them grainier and not so blurry so they look more like dirt.

[Glob Studios]

Here's another section I have a rough one of. This is a landing of the vehicle shown in the first section. I'd appreciate any comments you might have.

 

-Vance

 

TitanLanding5sm_6.mov

[Vertexspline]

Vance,

That's pretty good. I think for me -I would like to see the camera a little closer to the space ship at the end. I do not know the intent of what you are doing but it seems a little less dramatic with such a long shot. But keep trucking along on your project I cannot wait to see it all when its all complete.

 

Rich

[Glob Studios]

That's a good note, Rich. I think you're right, coming closer with the camera would help. I did put up a preview that has a demo version of the music.

 

Escape from the Mines of Titan Preview

 

The shots have all been improved since (including the landing), but it will give some flavor of where I'm going.

 

-Vance

[Glob Studios]

I have a problem with my landing shot I'd like your advice on. For the landscape of Titan, I've applied a pretty low-res bitmap (it's actually the one normally used for the standard Ground object, but with the color shifted to the red), and then to make it look less like a low-res video game, I added a very large amount of roughness (200% with a roughness scale of 50%). It looks pretty good in stills from both far away and in closeup.

 

There are two problems with it. First, I'm getting some jittering of the roughness from frame to frame of the shot near the beginning, and then as you get closer, there appear to be alternating bands of patterns which shift back and forth a couple of times.

 

If you have a good strategy for fixing these problems using roughness, I'd love to hear it, but it may be that I'm pushing it beyond what it was intended for. If roughness is not going to do it, do you have another approach that you think will work better?

 

You can see the latest version of my shot here:

 

Landing Shot

 

It was rendered at 1920x1080 (HD) final quality with 16 passes. I also increased the contrast and saturation of the frames to give it a harsher look.

 

Running 4 processes at a time on V16 NetRender, it took about 12 hours to render 661 frames on an i7 machine at 3.4GHz. It averaged a little over 4 minutes for each batch of 4 frames. I continue to be impressed with how much faster at rendering V16 is than previous versions, especially with NetRender included for 4 simultaneous processes. And on my machine (quad core), I have no trouble doing other things like reading email or browsing the web while 4 processes are banging away at rendering frames.

 

Anyway, thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have. The latest version of the landing shot (link above) incorporates Rich's suggestion to get closer, and has some robots added.

 

-Vance

 

P.S., I see that on Vimeo, for some reason the video plays twice as fast as it should, taking 12 seconds instead of 24. But you still can see what I'm talking about.