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Autodesk® 3ds Max®
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AUGI
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Daniel Law
Looking to find creative and exciting work, Daniel chose to study game programming after graduating from high school. He attended the Capital School in Sweden and graduated as a game developer in 2000. His next challenge was making Internet games as a freelance developer. Daniel then turned to the study of 3D computer graphics with a major focus on character animation.
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Kjell Emanuelsson
Kjell has spent several years working with traditional media, mostly oil on canvas, and until recently used computers only to produce music. He then discovered the potential of using computer graphics to augment his strong arts education and hasn't looked back!
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Mattias Jervill
Mattias came to 3D animation through his education in multimedia productions. Much of what he has learned is self-taught prior to his current education at the School of Future Entertainment in Sweden. He also attended the Richard William's Master Animation Class in 2002. His main interest is character animation, with rigging coming a close second, and is currently \"in search of the perfect rig.\" Mattias finds his largest source of inspiration in the work created by PIXAR.
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Simon Flesser
Simon has always had a great passion for visualizing his thoughts through pictures and also has a great interest in storytelling and music. His favorite artist is Tom Waits whose music, among a lot of other things, inspires him a great deal. These influences, plus thoughts of his childhood exposure to animations using Deluxe Paint on the Amiga, have helped Simon shape a decision to study 3D Computer graphics.
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In this interview, the AREA takes you inside the making of the Light the Torch video.
| The Area:
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What made you decide to explore 3D and to know what was the first 3D application you used?
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| LTT Team:
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We used Maya simply because it's the software that our school provided us with. Maya is the first 3D software for both Kjell and Simon; none of us had any experience of 3D graphics at all one year ago.
Before Mattias started this school he used 3dsmax, but after using Maya he never wants to go back again.
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| The Area:
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How did this project begin? Did you find this band to make a music video for them, or did they find you?
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| LTT Team:
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The band who made the song, "Light the Torch" is the Swedish metal band Soilwork. They have so far released five albums, and toured around the earth a lot.
Simon, the project leader, knows the band's guitarist and songwriter, Peter Wichers. Simon came up with the idea to make a video for them. They thought it was a great idea since they were just about to release their fifth album "figure number five".
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| The Area:
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Did you have artistic freedom to do what you wanted, or did the band already have something in mind?
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| LTT Team:
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They trusted us to make up a story and style without them interfering too much. One thing that suited us perfectly was that Soilwork wanted to get away from the classical "metal" image. So it was nice that we didn't just get to do skeleton armies and fighting sword-barbarians! This gave us the chance to make it a little more twisted and bring in elements from different sources of inspiration.
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| The Area:
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Did the band like what you made for them?
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| LTT Team:
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Yes, they liked it a lot and were very impressed with the result.
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| The Area:
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I went through the scene files and I saw that, primarily, you were using polygons. Why's that?
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| LTT Team:
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We used polygons because we think it's more intuitive than modeling in NURBS. We find it easier to add details, make changes, and come up with new ideas along the way, as you model with polygons..
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| The Area:
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I saw that there were a few NURBS objects but they were for simple shapes; shapes that could have been done with polygons as well. What's the reason for that?
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| LTT Team:
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Why NURBS for just some objects? Because of the "free" mapping. All the NURBS object are mostly details and are textured with procedurals. Polygons are easier to use for those kind of objects.
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| The Area:
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The Elvis character design is pretty wild. Where did you get that idea?
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| LTT Team:
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I don't know why, but we just wanted to have a bunny in our video. There's just something bizarrely appealing about a giant killing-bunny-machine, isn't there? Kjell came up with making him "half-organic", instead of being just a robot. It seemed to fit the music well. The design is entirely Kjell's..
The idea behind the Elvis character was that the Evil Doctor had made him as an experiment to resurrect his recently deceased, mentally challenged big brother.
Simon had an idea to make his body a big corrugated cardboard box, that idea was soon rejected& the result had might not been as effective as it turned out.
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| The Area:
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The characters in general are dark and there is a certain style to them. Were there any artistic styles that influenced you, such as Tim Burton?
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| LTT Team:
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We had a lot of different influences. All of us have different styles and like different things. Mattias is totally into PIXAR and cartoons (Disney, Warner Bros etc.)
Kjell is probably the most dark of all the people in the group, and loves splatter, horror, gore and more industrial stuff, both in music and in design. I think Daniel is more into Asian culture, Manga, Anime and tends to bring these really whacky Asian movies to school pretty often. Simon is always accused of being a "mini-Tim Burton"--although he won't admit it. He likes fairytales, European folklore, LOVES Alice in Wonderland, and the mix of cuteness and darkness. All the team members love videogames, which have also influenced us, especially Silent Hill 2. The design was also kind of influenced by the French movie City of Lost Children.
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| The Area:
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The rigging was done very well. How did you do it and with what functions, for example MEL, Trax or deformers?
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| LTT Team:
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Simon, Kjell and Daniel modeled, textured and skinned one "hero" model each. As their work was completed, the characters were sent over to Mattias who cleaned up and did the Rigging/Setup for all the characters.
The basic idea for all the rigs was to keep it as simple as possible. The things that were animate were the only things that were possible to select (NURBS curves). All the rigs have the same controls to make it easy to switch between characters. Character Sets were used on all rigs and, like in the hallway chase scene, the Trax editor was used for looping-up the animation cycles of the characters.
After the setup, the rigs were integrated in the pipeline that Mattias developed for the production. With just a mouse click, you were able import the latest versions of a specific rig and switch between different resolutions from a very easy-to-use custom UI , where all the special attributes for each character could be found.
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| The Area:
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How did you texture your models?
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| LTT Team:
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We used standard UV mapping. We took a daytrip--in Daniel's old Volvo--outside of town searching for rusty textures that we could map. We found these huge machines that were probably part of an old sawmill or something, and they had all kinds of kinds of buttons and pipes on them. And we found an old abandoned truck. They were just what we were looking for! Then we used Photoshop to edit the textures.
One useful tool that we used quite a bit is the clone painter in Artisan. A great tool, if you want to get rid of horrible texture seams.
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| The Area:
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Why did you decide to do pre-light textures?
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| LTT Team:
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Well, we didn't really pre-light the textures--you're talking about the floor, right--, That's actually supposed to be dried up blood and dirt. It's not meant to be "real" shadows, although it adds a lot of depth.
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| The Area:
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What did you use to render your work? Software, hardware, mental ray?
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| LTT Team:
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We used the software renderer in Maya. We tried to use mental ray but didn't have time since we had no experience with it.
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| The Area:
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Did you use render layers for composition?
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| LTT Team:
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Yes, we used layers. Mattias worked out a really nice and intuitive rendering pipeline. It is a must need to render in layers, for color styling--brightening up characters etc., and to make the "fake" depth of field effect.
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| The Area:
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In the video, you've used particles. Did you use MEL scripts for their behavior or the standard dynamics tools in Maya?
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| LTT Team:
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We only used the standard dynamic effects, no MEL at all. We had almost no experience with dynamics, so that bit was pretty tricky.
We used soft body dynamics for the evil doctor's coat, and that was probably the most difficult thing to do.
The bubbles and the blood/oil are software particles.
To make the particles collide with characters and features in the tanks we just made simple primitive dummy objects that had similar forms to the "real" objects, and let them collide with each other. The lifespan and size of the bubbles are controlled by a black and white ramp.
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| The Area:
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About the things in the book shelf...:-))...Were those family photos? ;-)
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| LTT Team:
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Ha, ha, the portrait photos in the bookshelf are actually us! There are also two party pictures of drunken classmates.
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| The Area:
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...the graphics book (any significance for the other ones there)?
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| LTT Team:
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The books are taken directly from our school library, and are programming and picture reference books.
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| The Area:
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Can you please translate for me that newspaper article on the side--something about students?
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| LTT Team:
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Well, the story behind the newspaper is kind of funny. What it actually says is "Student discounts on pubs withdrawn". It's from a local newspaper, and we had to incorporate it in the video! Oh, and text of the bottom says, "Does anybody miss Missan?" ...guess it's about someone who has lost a cat...kind of sad, really.
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| The Area:
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What do you feel is the biggest benefit from using Maya?
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| LTT Team:
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The biggest benefit is that you, more or less, can do anything you want, and realize all of your ideas and visions. There really are no limits.
To be more specific, the program is very open, and that you can change Maya with MEL to suit your demands, is really great. MEL is just unbelievably powerful. If Maya doesn't have a specific tool that you want, you can basically just write your own. Another thing that is absolutely great about the program is its Node structure. You can connect almost anything to anything.
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| The Area:
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How long have you used Maya in order to have attained the level that we see in this video?
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| LTT Team:
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Everyone in the team had used Maya for less than a year when we did this project.
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| The Area:
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How long was the project--from conceptual sketches, to design, to the finished product?
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| LTT Team:
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The whole process took about three and one-half-months.
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| The Area:
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How long did it take for you to render this?
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| LTT Team:
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Because of our tight deadline, we decided to render and composit our scenes simultaneously as the animation process went on. So all the processes "floated" together as we also did the editing "at the same time".
As soon as we had animated and finished a scene, it was sent to render, and later be composited and directly moved into the final movie for editing.
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| The Area:
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What hardware did you use?
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| LTT Team:
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We had four Maya workstations and one compositing/editing computer. At nights, we could use most of the computers in the school to render (approximately 15-20 machines.) The computers are all Intel Pentium 4, 2.2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4 TI 4600.
Thanks for your questions; they were a lot of fun to answer!
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| Posted by Alexander Lilja on Jul 14, 2008 at 09:21 PM
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| sofe 4 life! :)
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| Posted by Gersart on Jun 22, 2008 at 11:23 AM
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| great team!! its unbelievable!! 3 and half months? did u ever sleep?
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