Dare To Be Digital...

A little making off, in this project I had to deal with 3ds max physics, video montage, post production and so on.

The idea was to create an entry to our video that would be a theatre curtain that opens and there you would see us. However before it would open we would see our logo and company name. The idea I had in mind was to have a game name pop up from top like a puppet on string, wiggle around for a few seconds and then got pulled back up. Also before that would happen a company name would display.

Now the physics was quite easy part. I modelled a simple quad based mesh – it deformed nicer than triangle based mesh. Once I got it done I rigged it to behave like cloth and attached it edges to around 5 helpers. Each helper was animated to move at its own unique time to simulate opening of a curtain. Once I had the animation of helpers where I wanted it to be I started to sim cloth. I run in to various problems such a scale issue, cloth parameters issue, quite big stretching of cloth and so on. It took me quite a while to polish the animation and get it where I wanted it to be. Once the simulation was done I have baked the key frames so that I don't need to simulate it again. However I only had simulated half of the curtain, the right half I just inverted and slightly offset the key frames.

The next part was to drop a Puppet Show sign and deal with animation. Now u would think this would be easy and all I had to do is to use a rope modifier in 3ds max, however that was no the case. 3Ds max 2012 and early version are a mid way through being evolved to GPU based physics from CPU. Because of that a lot of features were still missing and I did mist the GPU rope based modifiers. In that case I had to hand animate the rope. There were few cheats to get the GPU physics to simulate the rope effect however I had way to little control over the effect to use it in my final scene. After hours of tries and fails I ended up animating the rope by hand – well not really by hand I had a little helper script that simulated a wiggle effect on bones. What I did was to create a 6 bone straight “leg”, which then I used a source for my rope mesh. Once the bone rope was done I animated the first bone to move the way I would like the Puppet Show to appear. Once the bone was rotating and moving I set up the script to animate remaining of bones. What it did is to calculate how much its being moved and then add a bit of offset to make it look more natural. Its quite hard to explain, the best example is to grab a chain and just hold it by bottom and drop the top of it. It will wiggle and hang around until it get still and straight again. This is exactly what script did and all I had to do is to spend some time on re siming it until I had the sort of animation I was looking for.

That was the end of my animation process next part was to deal with rendering. Now I wanted it to be very quick and efficient, since I was on deadline I did not use any GI. I decided to have a 4 lights in my scene.


1 – main spot light for curtain
2 – A company name light that would project the company logo on to curtain
3 – A spot light for puppet show logo
4 – a fill light to simulate GI

Now you ask why so many lights. Well I needed to have full control over the lighting aspects in post production. To be able to tune the light blend of company name and puppet show were quite hard to do in 3ds max and the best way to deal with it was to control them in post. I could enable and disable any of the lights at any time. Thanks to that re lighting the animation in post work was a piece of cake. A specially in 32 bit where I could extract the data from the darkest pixel. Below you can see just a few of the render layers I was working on. Aditionally I have rendered a flare, smoke, dust and other effects

Once I loaded up all the light layers in After Effect I begin to composite them together. It was quite a fun part because the beauty shot out of 3ds max look very bad. There were a lot of over burns on puppet show logo because it was so active and moving so much that the lights did not really work on it. I had to use fill light as well as spot light and logo light to blend them together and create a nice lighted logo. I wanted to keep the cartoon alike look with a bit of light direction in this animation. At the end of day I used a lot of extra footage as well as pictures to simulate lens flare, smoke and so on.