Animations.

I have animated Shot001-Shot005, just waiting for final approval from Angus that these look scientifically correct.  The opening shot looked really bland using a straight zoom as detailed in the animatic, so instead I got some inspiration from this impossibly beautiful shot from Inside the Human Body.

I found that the Jiggle Deformer (most evident in Shot002, but not yet included in all shots as I haven’t cached them all yet) helps with the realism and makes the molecules look a bit more lively.

Shot002 relied heavily on the animation of constraints to make the ubiquitin molecules transfer from HDM2 to p53.

Shot003 was great fun and really quick to do, using a Motion Path and the “Side Twist” attribute to produce a forward rolling motion.

Shot005 was a complete nightmare (probably because it was the one shot I hadn’t done enough testing for), and went through several iterations inluding trying to squash it though a lattice, which produced results that were… not quite what I was hoping for.

In the end I used a Spline Rig similar to the one I used for mRNA to give the impression that the protein was “unwinding.” I’ll have to use clever comp and shading techniques to make it look like it’s still the original model.  I’m not totally happy with the final result, but time is ticking so it’ll have to be one of those “fix it in comp” jobs.  Motion blur will go a long way toward achieving this, I suspect.

Music (recorded!)

I have music! Big thanks to Graeme Watt for doing such a stellar job with the mixing.

And yes, I know the overall sound levels are wonky. No, I am not going to do anything about it at present. I will wait till I have a proper voiceover artist doing the narration.

Music…

The last three days I have been putting together a score using Sibelius and QL Goliath. It just keeps acquiring instruments… most of them orchestral, others with weird names such as “Submarine,” “Stargate” and “Butcher’s Blade” (I think they’re synth patches). Off to the studio tomorrow to get this lot mixed by my maestro pal, Graeme Watt.

The assets are done!

Yeah! Now to do some tidying up of the project directory… then it’s on to Animation, Dynamics and Lighting.

p53 Rig

Well that’s got to be one of the weirdest rigs I’ve ever made.

Lacking any clear point of reference for joint names, I decided to anthropomorphise the p53 molecule somewhat, and assign it such things as “knees” and “elbows” even though it has none of those. Oh well, makes it easier…

Rigging

These blog posts will be getting shorter from now on as the deadline looms… they will probably be more frequent though.

Yesterday and this morning I have been rigging.  The first was the nuclear pore rig, tedious but relatively straightforward, the most complicated control being a “move arm” set driven key to speed up animation.

The mRNA rig was more of a challenge and much more interesting.  I initially followed a DT tutorial for a snake rig using an IK Spline, but it was really hard to smooth the weights in a way that would get the sinuous look that I wanted.  So I tried a Wire Deformer, which was nice and smooth but apt to stretch.

I eventually figured out how to combine the two – I bound a curve to the IK spline, then made this curve the Wire Deformer, as its length was limited by the joints, preventing stretching.

The Blue Planet

Suffered a creative block yesterday so I decided to take John’s advice and go take some underwater film footage. Well, sort of. Underwater video cameras and diving holidays are somewhat outside my budget so I settled on the next best thing: The Blue Planet.

I watched two episodes: The Deep and Coral Seas.  Got some good screen grabs, which have got me inspired to do more texturing and lighting based on the footage.

Show Your Working: RER Reference Images

There’ll be a few of these “Show Your Working” posts going up, as one of the main points from my feedback meeting was that I had to be more explicit about my real-world references, rather than just other CG films that had inspired me.

The mental image I have of the rough endoplasmic reticulum is like that of battered and rough skin.  Fortunately, I already have sculpting experience in that area, from creating the whale for Going Live.  Therefore I used a lot of my whale images from that to create a scratched texture.

Rough Endoplasmic Reticulum – Shader Build

So since my last post I have had to completely redo the RER sculpt as my UV map wasn’t up to scratch, which was frustrating.  But now I know how to lay out UVs properly so hopefully I won’t run into the same problem again.

The resulting image was fairly similar to the one in the previous post (albeit less distorted), so I had to find a way to get the texture to come through as the layers of the SSS shader were causing the dark details to be washed out.

Doing a bit of snooping on my classmate Scott Dunbar’s blog, I saw that he made the scatter layers by changing the colours of the original texture.  So I did the same with mine, as well as extracting an AO map and layering it over the texture for extra shadow and detail:

Diffuse (Weight: 0.2)

Epidermal (Original Mudbox Texture) (Weight: 0.4)

Subdermal (Weight: 0.2)

Back (Weight: 0.2)

Final result: