Hairless Rodent VFX

I finished the hairless rodent project!  I have been working on multiple projects at the same time over the past few months and I am glad to see that this project is completed.  I am quite pleased with how this has turned out and I am happy to have learned as much as I did about the whole process.  The compositing phase of this project was hard to get to grips with.  I know a lot about the 3D aspects of this kind of thing but I found it hard to adjust while I was compositing in 2D.  Suddenly I was dealing with shuffling image channels, rotoscoping and marker removal.  This was hard to get to grips with at first but after a while I started to think like a compositer and I could overcome problems that came up.  Do take a look at the finished shot and the breakdown of it in the video below.

Case Study

 Rigging

After I had modelled and textured the rodent the next stage was to rig it.  The most difficult part of rigging the rodent was skinning.  It was very hard to try and give it the look that the skin was loose and stretchy.  I did not take advantage of Maya’s new skin and muscle system like I first planned, purely because I wanted to see if I could get good results by using normal skinning techniques and I wanted to use pose space deformations. you can see in the picture below I also rigged the skeleton. This turned out to help me quite a lot when skinning because I could imagine where the muscles were attaching and if the bones would pertrude through the skin etc.

 

I used a few scripts that I found on highend3d to speed up a few of the really tedious tasks. One of which was the “creat fk controller” script. This simply created an fk control on a joint with all the transforms zeroed out. Doing this manually would have been very tedious and boring as there are many controls on the hands.  One set of controls I always like creating are the eye controls.  Specifically the “fleshy eye” setup.  Using blendshapes and set driven keys I could create the look that the eyes were tugging on the skin of the eyelids as they rotated.

 

 

 

 

 

Pose Space Deformations

A skinning technique that I was really excited to incorporate in this rig was the use of the amazing poseDefomer plugin by Michael Comet.  To briefly explain what pose space deformations are, they are corrective shapes that are activated based upon the pose of a joint or group of joints.  For example, on the rodent’s rig the skin had to be able to wrinkle in certain poses and be smooth in others.

As is shown in the videos to the left, parts of the skin deforms and wrinkles as the area in question is compressed.  These little deformations can be quite subtle and if done right they arent noticed at all but would be missed if they weren’t there.  I made many facial and body shapes that were for correcting areas that lost volume like the area below the jaw, or for areas that needed to wrinkle such as the neck and torso.

 

 

 

Animation

I dont have as much experience in animation as I do in other areas of 3D but I am still quite pleased with the animation, because I have not had that much practice at character animation and I think it is good for someone so inexperienced.

HDRI Lighting

I got to try out my mirror ball and create a HDR panorama so I could create a nice indirect lighting pass for the rodent.  It was easier and less problematic to create it than I thought it would be.  The workflow to create it was fairly simple.  Place the mirror ball in the area where the rodent was and take multiple pictures of it at different exposures.  Then I imported those pictures into photoshop to create an hdr Image which is a 32bit image that has a large amount of lighting information in the picture.  I then take this hdr image of the mirrorball and unwrap it in a free program called hdrshop.  Then I can import the image into maya and use it with final gather to create an indirect illumination pass.
I Usually blur the final HDR image so it creates very soft lighting, of course if an object was very reflective I wouldnt blur it so I could get nice sharp reflections.

 

Compositing

Learning how to composite things for visual effects was a lot of fun.  After all this is probably the most important part of the entire process simply because it is what brings everything together to create the final result.  I used the compositing package Nuke, which was not very popular a few years ago but it has recently gained a lot of popularity.  I rendered the rodent in different passes.  each pass would contain different types of information.  Such as colour, specular, ambient occlusion, indirect lighting and fur.

This meant that when I imported them into nuke I could adjust each pass individually without effecting all the other passes.  E.g. In the final composite I was not happy with the overall look of the colour map so I used a grade node to change its colour slightly to be more pink.  I could also do things like blur the cast shadow on the floor or increase the amount of backscatter on the subsurface scattering pass.

Here is a look at the Node tree inside nuke. I like using node based compositing programs like nuke because it is very easy to organise everything.

 

 

That concludes the case study on my hairless rodent visual effects piece.  I loved every second that I worked on it and I am quite happy with how it turned out.  I hope you enjoyed reading.