EddieOffermann dot com

I don't know where I read that, but it amused me and stuck in my head.

Hi!  I haven't been updating the vfx blog because I've been crazy busy.  Work has me deep in MEL and Python code most of the day, writing software to manage animation data, shuttle it this way and that and process it in interesting ways.  There's also the secret project that everyone isn't talking about but is quietly and excitedly waiting for (assuming they have any idea what it is).   We're on super-special-secret-lockdown at work, I'm guessing for the rest of the month.  I can scarcely go to the bathroom or grab a soda without passing through at least two security doors now.

Ok, I admit it, we've been contracted to create the lost tapes of the lunar landing.  Seems NASA has gotten enough flack about the original landing with people claiming they can prove it wasn't real that they've decided to create more proof to put the concerns to rest.

Or at least that's my amusing cover story until I'm allowed to talk about the other thing.

Between all the other little tasks, I'm in the process of working up a new tool for moving complex animation data around the pipeline.  The idea is to be able to read and write an XML file that contains as much data as anyone would care to put onto a model.  The model can be updated, have new elements added to or removed from it, all sorts of parts of that model can be animated at a whim by the artist and passed along to subsequent versions of the model, low res or high res versions, keeping all of the data intact, allowing for scaling of the animation data if it's transferred to a different model entirely, even passing along worldspace location and orientation of parts of the model (and maybe even eventually the full animation) to other platforms like Houdini and Realflow.

It's a little important for what we're doing on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but the existing tools I developed are working ok there (even if they're still a little limited and occasionally awkward - they're getting better on a weekly basis).  There's already a small test of what I'm doing in a broader sense: we have a particular element with a moderately complex rig on it that I'm publishing and subscribing the animation data on.

The Big Goal for this tool will be on T4 which we should be working on soon.  That'll be a huge show and we've got some really epic-scale work on it: most likely we'll be needing the more sophisticated animation tools for managing our data throughout the pipeline - so that's what I constantly keep in the back of my mind as I script the current version of the tools.  They need to serve the current project in the most complete way possible, and they need to be able to expand to do more than I'd currently dream of asking them to do.

It's a lesson that's come up recently because of a little tool I wrote that I've mentioned here before "CurveBaby" - CurveBaby allows me to take a scene with an animated camera and one or more animated objects, preserve the camera's relationship to one of those objects but change that object's animation - or, conversely, reanimate the camera and have the animation of the object automatically adjust to still look the same from the camera.  It's a powerful tool, and one that I can barely imagine how I'd get through half a day without using it at least once.

Big tools make big projects go a lot more smoothly.

I noticed the other day that my own 2d crowd generation software tool (DynaCyc) is ranking higher on google than Massive Software's listing for their incredible 3d crowd sim software.

In fact, if you google "Crowd Generation" there are two hits for my own websites before theirs comes up.

While DynaCyc is nowhere near as sophisticated for generating realistic behavior (it's more of a dynamic matte painting tool than a crowd generator - I created it for doing plants and trees to algorithmically make forests and such), it's pretty cool that I'm placing so well.

I really need to get the tutorial for my uv remapping tool recorded so that people can start using it. At the moment, though, I'm working 12-14 hrs a day, 6 days a week scripting some fancy animation pipeline tools.

The funny bit is something I've come to realize of the last couple days: while I fully grasp the minutiae of what I do, some of what I'm doing just baffles me in the big picture. I wrote a tool for "recasting" an animation from one space to another. For instance, if there's an object in a shot done during previs, and that original object has a particular animation on it, and there's a camera with a camera angle that we like... but the object itself is given a different animation in our scene because it has to fit in the "world" relative to other objects and be moving at a certain speed, reach a certain place at a certain time... I can take the camera motion from the original animation and transform it to the new shot maintaining the relationship between the camera and the element... while replacing that element's animation.

That's tricky... but I know how to make it happen and I've embodied it in a deceptively simple tool.

Separately, I worked out a method for stitching multiple animated shots containing a common object and many separate cameras together. The object's motion remains constant, and the cameras follow it along the path. Additionally, I developed a method for steering that element so that I can change its motion, adjusting the cameras to follow it.

That last one works using the first tool... so they end up all being connected to each other.

Once that happens, it feels like magic. I no longer understand the big picture: how we now have nearly a hundred separate shots stitched seamlessly together, but with different animation... and still working with the cameras and tracked objects matching to the footage? That starts to get away from me... I can conceptualize it as steps, as stages to reach a goal... I can break it down into its component parts: but the whole big process I understand only in that way: as big steps. I don't hold the whole thing in my head at once, though I use the tools that make it happen several times a day.

What's also funny is how much I'm even animating at this point... and I'm no animator, believe me. Let me write you a few expressions, though, and I can sometimes fake it.

I am officially in crunch...

It's mini-crunch, though, because we're just working to get things together for the trailer. Most of the staff isn't actually working overtime, but there's a few of us... the dynamics/fluid guys, an animator or two, the cg supe and me, piecing together the necessary bits to get the shots ready for the trailer.

I wish I could be a little more clear on what exactly it is I'm doing... When the trailer comes out in a couple weeks I can at least indicate then what segment of the film I'm addressing - I'd rather leave that part as a surprise for when the trailer hits (not to mention that talking about things like that would get me in hot water).

In a sufficiently vague sort of way, I can say that there's a segment I'm working on right now that's around 76 shots long, each ranging from 50-300 frames, that has a common element that's travelling between them. Our tracking team has been tracking that element, and its progress through each individual scene, for each of those 76 shots (and at least that many more as well that I'm not dealing with yet).

The particular task I've been working on is basically a continuity script. It's a MEL script that gathers all of that data: cameras, animated and matchmoved elements, and stitches them together end to end in a master shot. This way, the element that's moving through the scene will maintain an accurate location relative to the CG environment.

To coincide with what's happening in each shot, it's necessary on that big grandaddy master shot to make adjustments: turn something here, nudge something there... and that affects the path of that common element throughout all of the individual shots.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Basically, if we imagine that I'm talking about a man driving a car across the salt flats in Utah (not at all what's happening in this film), there are features on the horizon that we want to be consistently and realistically moving in relation to the view of the car. If the driver swerves to miss a rock, we want to change the path he's taking across the salt flats (even though in the original plates, that driver would have been sitting in a stationary vehicle in front of a bluescreen, with some hydraulics underneath making the car tilt and sway to add realism). Our view of the car from the camera should stay the same... Car and camera must maintain their relationship... but the position, speed, orientation, etc of the car and camera combined will need to change. If there's a guy on one of those sail-carts out there, we need to make sure his path is realistic and that he's in the right place in the background of each shot...

Remember that the car, the driver, and the camera are often the only real things here... the sail-cart, other things on the horizon, in fact the entire salt flats... all are cg or augmented with cg.

So I've been developing tools for funneling data from all of these shots... everything from camera data to object matchmoves, world-space offsets for each shot, and animation data... stringing it together into a seamless master scene, manipulating the paths and locations of elements in that master scene and transferring that data back into the individual shots. If we need our hypothetical salt-flats driver to swerve this way and that across several separate shots, I'm making sure that it doesn't just "kinda look right" but that we can get that data integrated into the object and camera motion of several live camera plates.

If somebody didn't ask me if I could do it, I'd probably have never thought it could even be done.

If I'm kinda scarce around here in blogland, it's because I'm catching a much-needed nap in between long shifts.

but I ended up going in to work today anyway.

I'd agreed without thinking more than "yeah, extra cash would be nice" and forgot what had been looming.

Annoying project. I mean, the spot's going to look cool even if it's a little froufrou. But the details of making it happen are tedious and I agreed to come in and track which I haven't done much of recently and am starting to not miss at all.

So I went in, tracked, found out it wasn't *nearly* as annoying as I'd anticipated... and briefly wandered off into MEL scripting territory to make a button that places arbitrary geometry at the location and orientation of any locators or mesh vertices that you have selected as well as constraining the new geo to the locators in case they were animated. I may change it to orient based on the vertex normal. That might be more handy. It was irrelevant for this purpose though.

That's more interesting and is more helpful for everyone else.

Besides that, I've a thought in my head: My WordPress blog, while inherently "personal" is more along the professional side. Same with my facebook profile... A sizable chunk of my facebook friends are people I know professionally: so glittery graphic "thanks for the add!" and stupid pictures get deleted from my wall. casual banter is fine: but things I wouldn't do or say at work don't happen there either. I've started deleting comments that wouldn't be appropriate to yell out at me at work. If you leave a comment that gets deleted: I'm not mad at you, I'm just not going to embarrass myself on anyone else's behalf.

Myspace is a filthy pit anyway, so I'm not policing it yet. Professional contacts on there are incidental, but I'm probably going to clean that mess up soon as well.