Animated Film Production Process: The Creation of Lighting for Gear Up

The following thesis details the creation of a shot for an animated production titled Gear Up. The process for creating this shot was patterned after professional animated productions and included the following steps: pre-visualization, story boarding, modeling and asset creation, UV layouts, texturing and surfacing, scene assembly and camera layout, character and prop rigging, character animation, lighting, rendering, and compositing. The motivation for this project was to create a product that artistically has a darker aesthetic than many previous Clemson DPA animations, but still enjoyed high quality visuals. One of the goals was to create a large-scale scene centered in a post apocalyptic robot war. This project also served as the first opportunity for incorporating the rendering engine called Arnold into the Clemson DPA animation pipeline and artist workflow. In order to accomplish the goals set above, a series of technical and artistic problems needed to be solved. With the use of 3D preproduction prototyping, modular and procedural asset gen-eration, new content generation tools, and optimized workflows, the team was able to tackle all production challenges and create high quality content efficiently and with minimal stress to the artists. This thesis also delves into the elaborate process of scene lighting; detailing the artistic decisions and motivations that lead to the final product. The lighting is created by examining references from film and real life, lighting designs, and advanced lighting techniques. The results of the project was a 400 frame animation of a post apocalyptic city block featuring a detailed robot, armed for war, standing guard by his tank amidst piles of debris, barbed wire, and rubble. The shot was rendered entirely in Arnold apart from the FX elements, which was rendered using Houdini Mantra. It also represents a successful collaboration between several volunteer artists with various skills and time commitments

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Lighting and Compositing for QA-ARM-A

This thesis focuses on lighting, rendering, and compositing for the short film, QA-ARM-A. The goal of this project was to create a photorealistic short film centered on an interesting story. During this project, aesthetic direction, rendering requirements, and technical challenges arose. Issues of primary importance included: the proper render system to employ, the division of render layers, the selection of render passes, the combination of those layers and passes in compositing, and techniques for lighting each scene. As a result, many of the collaborative techniques and methods can be directly employed in future productions

Purged

This paper describes the entire thought process, the work and journey behind the completion of my Thesis Film titled “PURGED”. This film was animated in 3D and created over the course of four semesters. Purged is a thrilling short animated film about a couple’s escape from death. The film mainly revolves around a couple; namely the white king and queen, and how death; the black pieces of a chessboard enact out the game as if it’s happening in real life until the big reveal at the end of it merely being a game of chess. The film is centered around the theme of sacrifice. The Oxford dictionary defines the word sacrifice as an act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else regarded as more important or worthy. It defines the same word in terms of chess as a move intended to allow the opponent to win a pawn or piece, for strategic or tactical reasons. The film is thrilling amalgamation of these two concepts. On one hand, it shows the sacrifice in love whereas on the other hand it shows strategic sacrifices of pieces in order to win the game. Through this three minute animated short film I learned a lot about the value of sacrifice and how our life is full of them. The various obstacles faced during the creation of this thesis not only helped make me a better artist

Photorealistic physically based render engines: a comparative study

Pérez Roig, F. (2012). Photorealistic physically based render engines: a comparative study. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/14797.Archivo delegad

Real-time Cinematic Design Of Visual Aspects In Computer-generated Images

Creation of visually-pleasing images has always been one of the main goals of computer graphics. Two important components are necessary to achieve this goal --- artists who design visual aspects of an image (such as materials or lighting) and sophisticated algorithms that render the image. Traditionally, rendering has been of greater interest to researchers, while the design part has always been deemed as secondary. This has led to many inefficiencies, as artists, in order to create a stunning image, are often forced to resort to the traditional, creativity-baring, pipelines consisting of repeated rendering and parameter tweaking. Our work shifts the attention away from the rendering problem and focuses on the design. We propose to combine non-physical editing with real-time feedback and provide artists with efficient ways of designing complex visual aspects such as global illumination or all-frequency shadows. We conform to existing pipelines by inserting our editing components into existing stages, hereby making editing of visual aspects an inherent part of the design process. Many of the examples showed in this work have been, until now, extremely hard to achieve. The non-physical aspect of our work enables artists to express themselves in more creative ways, not limited by the physical parameters of current renderers. Real-time feedback allows artists to immediately see the effects of applied modifications and compatibility with existing workflows enables easy integration of our algorithms into production pipelines

Real-time rendering and simulation of trees and snow

Tree models created by an industry used package are exported and the structure extracted in order to procedurally regenerate the geometric mesh, addressing the limitations of the application's standard output. The structure, once extracted, is used to fully generate a high quality skeleton for the tree, individually representing each section in every branch to give the greatest achievable level of freedom of deformation and animation. Around the generated skeleton, a new geometric mesh is wrapped using a single, continuous surface resulting in the removal of intersection based render artefacts. Surface smoothing and enhanced detail is added to the model dynamically using the GPU enhanced tessellation engine. A real-time snow accumulation system is developed to generate snow cover on a dynamic, animated scene. Occlusion techniques are used to project snow accumulating faces and map exposed areas to applied accumulation maps in the form of dynamic textures. Accumulation maps are xed to applied surfaces, allowing moving objects to maintain accumulated snow cover. Mesh generation is performed dynamically during the rendering pass using surface o�setting and tessellation to enhance required detail

Serious Games in Cultural Heritage

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented