the rise in technology

As 3D animation has come into its own over the last 20 years the main potential is one of the reasons I am so passionate about it, the potential to create fascinating worlds to get lost in, and special effects to be in awe to! and how fast this method is developing. lets go back in time to where 3D animation was getting introduced into film.

Looker

Looker was the first film to include a CGI character, all the way back in 1981, it used computer shaders to create sci-fi looking effects

Jurassic Park

Jumping to 1993, 12 years later, Jurassic park created 3D animated and modelled Dinosaurs, this was a big jump in 12 years, and already the quality of the CGI has come on leaps and bounds.

Toy Story

Just 2 years on in 1995 was the release of Toy Story, the first 3D animated feature length film, which is the foothold in the animation industry, the technology curve just sky rockets from here!

The animation style seems to step back a bit to look less realistic, I presume the reason for this is due to the fact it was a whole feature length film rather than just elements within the film, and as previously posted, it would have taken a lot longer to render.

And then in the 2010's we have films such as avatar and Beowulf which are CGI but also appear very Photo-realistic, which is the type of animation I want to pursuit.

benafits of 3d animation.

From experience in my personal project, there is a benefit of 3D that springs to mind after working out what method to use to animate an aspect of my project.

The project

My personal  project consists of an island in the middle of the ocean that is inhabited by one man who lives in a windmill all of which (apart from the ocean) I have modelled physically.

the challenge that I crossed was how to recreate the ocean.

my initial idea was to use a technique of modelling an ocean, but this would require hundreds of panals of ocean to use through stop motion animation to produce the effect of the ocean around the island.

But with the ever increasing technology of 3D animation, I soon realised that 3D has one potential that I couldn't create myself...

Infinity!

A problem that I would face would be a limited horizon if I went down the road of modelling the ocean, I would have to frame the shot so that the horizon would look like it was going on forever. which I can easily create using Maya and its built in ocean shader mixed in with some bifrost at closer parts.

Here is an example of what I mean:

As you can see the ocean goes on forever, until it reaches the horizon, so with a bit of learning I will be able to get a convincing ocean around my island without having to worry about framing to keep a modelled ocean from looking fake.

limitations of 3D animation

Limitations

After researching into the process of animation  in the 3D form, there are two big set back that arises from this form of animation, even though the results can be extraordinary, there are two main problems with the increase in the technology.

The Size!

And the time it takes to render!

with the ever increasing poly counts and quality of renders, the file sizes and render times are getting immensely big, just for examples sake

here is an example of a low poly sphere compared to a high poly sphere:

as you add more and more high poly objects in the scene, the renderer has to work a lot harder to process all of the data, which in turn increases the file size dramatically.

Also with more realistic renderers, such as mental ray. here is a scene which I threw together to demonstrate the issue at hand, here is the comparison

Maya software renderer

 Still quite a nice render, but compared to the mental ray render it doesn't look near as realistic.

Mental Ray

As you can see this render look a lot more realistic, all I had to do was switch renderer to mental ray.

The renderer takes alot longer due to all the attributes that need to be calculated.

To contextualize this issue lets look at the film Avatar.

according to BBC's clickbits,  the entire rendering of avatar took 1 Petabyte of data, which amounts to a 32 year long MP3 file. which is absolutely mind boggling!

but more astonishingly is the time in which it took to render, one frame ... ONE FRAME took 47 hours to render.

This is just crazy! so it really goes to show how invested these companies have to be in order to produce these films, but it also shows the limitations linked with 3D animation, how it takes a lot longer to create a feature film compared to the conventional filming method. 

Facial motion capture

The progression of motion capture

As in my last post we talked about Gollum, and the way he is brought to life, but this led me on to think about the development of facial tracking in 3D animation.

So in the Lord of the rings the motion capture suit was quite bare, only a wet suit with a few tracking markers. so the face was very much exposed, other than very subtle tracking markers dotted out in felt tip.

And there is definitely room for improvement in the animation of Gollum in the lord of the rings, especially in the face. but we are forgetting how this was 14 years ago, so the increase in technology has been incredible since then. so lets compare this to the hobbit.

So as well as having the motion tracking suit, Gollum also had a facial tracking camera of its own, so the camera is constantly pointing and recording the actors face so in can pick up every nuance that the actors face creates.

As you can see the variety of facial expressions due to this method are 10 fold compared to its predecessor. in this method the camera is fixed on the actors face throughout the whole performance which anchors the position of the tracking. which makes it easier to place in the final animation.

A slowly decreasing problem of 3D

So there are many many potentials for 3D modelling and animation, but lets start with the potential restrictions/ downfalls or limitations.

As shown here, this is a very photo-realistic rendering of simple household objects, there are some things that cannot be equally achieved with 3D software.

I speak mainly of course about:

Mouths/ speech

Animation

As the technology increasingly develops to stronger and faster software's, the animation of the mouth has always been a set back to an otherwise extraordinary animation.

many have tried to scale this boundary using different techniques, the first is the game LA Noire...

They used a form of motion capture but on a grand scale, they called it the death room, were there were sat numerous cameras all focused on the actors face. no tracking markers or suits, just the raw detail in the actors face.

But i digress, this is moving more into the realms of motion capture. which makes it even harder for animators working on 3D rigs and characters to keep up with the ever developing facial animations.