The final year 3d project was something I had been looking forward to for the previous three years of my university course. It was the project which generated the movies which were shown to promote the course to all newcomers and I remember being pretty impressed with the ones I saw when I was just starting.
Using 3d Studio Max as the primary creation tool, the expresso short uses a composite of two different rendering techniques to achieve the cartoony feel of the character, yet still based in the (relatively) realistic setting of a coffee shop. The background scene contained over 1,000,000 polygons in over 5,000 objects, and was a true test of my computer…which wasn’t really powerful enough, it ended up being a true test of only working on one or two objects at a time.
The character took heavy inspiration from Blur’s Coffee & TV video, looking back, perhaps too much. The character animation was done using original motion capture data from the talent of Fiona Cosgrove and is certainly one of the crucial factors for determining the feel of the movie. The process of adding the motion capture data to the biped bone structure for the cup was long and time-consuming, as typically about half of the movements needed to be manually corrected to avoid problems with the skin clipping itself (usually the arms going inside of the body), this had to be fixed very carefully so as not to make the movement look unrealistic.
The project took 5 weeks from conception to hand-in, two weeks of that time was taken up by rendering the video. At the time I was very un-sure as to whether it was going to be ready in time. I setup a small render-farm in my flat utilising the other three computers owned by my house mates, the combined power was about 6GHz and 4Gb RAM. First the background scenes had to be rendered to a set of tiffs (for improved quality) using the default 3dsmax renderer, then the animation renderer was used to create another set showing only the character(s). The shots in which the character interacts with the cocktail umbrella were probably the most challenging, as they required three layers for the composite and a keen eye to make sure there were no arrangement errors (ie. The umbrella appearing to be above the character when it should be behind).
Finally the scenes were composited and the video sequenced to music…enjoy!
