Evelyn Alsemgeest’s Capstone R&D Blog

  VIDEO ESSAY, DESIGN DOCUMENT, ENVIRONMENT TURNTABLE, ANIMATIC EDIT This week I have been focusing on my theory, writing a script for a video essay on the methodologies I have used so far during my production. These include pre-visualisation, contextualisation and autobiography! I have started to gather together my hand in documents. I started by curating my design document, putting all of the concept art, mood boards and more in one easy to digest PDF.  BATHROOM SCENE I also have created a turntable for my bathroom environment in Maya, showing all the angles of my model. TURNTABLE Lastly, I edited my animatic, I made some shots clearer and edited the audio. FINAL ANIMATIC Going further I want to block out my CGI elements in Maya and edit my stop motion frames into a proper Roughcut. As before I’d only done that for my one VFX shot due this semester.

 COMPOSITING, ROUGHCUT, SFX YAY!! I made a roughcut!! And It ticked all the aesthetic and quirky narrative notes that I wanted it to. Of course theres things I want to change but generally I'm super happy with it! Still have a lot of colour grading to do haha. So I did the compositing mostly in Nuke and some touch ups in Premiere pro where I also edited it. I also mixed some free upbeat tech music for it and recorded my own sfx on OBS and pitched it to suit my little guy Gerry!!  Took a bit to fix my photography issues editing my white balance issues so my footage doesn’t flicker but I used nukes match colour node and for any difficult frames I took them into premiere to manually colour match. Going forward I need to get some feedback on it, refine it and the go over all my extra documents to make sure I haven't missed anything extra. So exciting!! It's all coming together!! Sounds and music used: https://youtu.be/ubFq-wV3Eic https://youtu.be/laZouT-5wvk Updated Rough Cut: ...

 LIQUID SIMULATION AND COMPOSITING I continued doing my Houdini Vellum fluid simulations and solved my visualization problems by starting again (my original one was corrupted.) I also had issues exporting using Alembic and with some perseverance I got it done.  I even decided to do a second shot with the liquid simulation of it going into the sink. I just had to make new sink collider :) Then I moved on to compositing! Which was very exciting, it's my favourite part of the pipeline. I started with compositing my butt shaking shot in Nuke and then moved on to a shot with my simulation going into the sink. It went pretty smoothly I bumped into some issues with roto masking so I'll bring that up in our next discussion. For the mean time I used Premiere Pro for masks. I'm also experiementing with how to fix a colour flicker in my stopmotion. I Tried the deflicker node in Nuke and it didn't do very much but I need to try more ways. Though I was particularly proud of the refl...

  SIMULATION, BACKGROUND GRAPHICS This weeks progress was a bit slow but I'm still sticking to my schedule!  After some back and forth I decided to change the look of the posters in my bathroom enviroment to make them look a bit less perfect, just like my character, Gerry. I belive that this greatly improved the look. Just to make sure this would work a also did a mock screen shot to show what the final composition would look like.  The second part of my week I was starting my simulation for when Gerry spits their toothpaste into the sink. I'm using Vellum fluids which Is familiar to me but I'm running itno some trouble with the geometry type which is making my liquid look square. Also I'm struggling to export using rop_alembic. So these are questions I'll ask Hossien in our next session.  Next steps are continuing with my simulation, Might add an extra shot of the liquid going down the sink if i'm feeling fancy? Also I'll try and get a start on compositing ...

SCULPTING, FILMING, MODELLING, ENVIROMENTS, EDITING, KEYING, INTERNSHIP Spent majority of my semster break finshing off my internship editing masters videos for Good Health Design but now that I've finished that I can focus all my attention on my capstone. I did some adjustments to my puppet, making him a bit stronger and dettaching his arms (hidden by his sweater) to give him more flexiblitity. I also made some props, I made some hand puppets for shot where theses just a close up of their hands, I also made a tea pot and experimented with using kinetic sand as drink powder!  3D modelling hasn't been something that i've often gotten to do so I really enjoyed creating my bathroom enviroment. It also helped that I based it off my own bathroom which was an easy reference.  I used subtle textures with a pastel palette that I picked out before hand.  I then rendered a still frame for each of my needed shots and put them into procreate on my ipad where I collaged on top of them...