EDUCATIONAL. interview with. Wojtek Zankowski. for Computer Animation (NCCA),

Transcription

1 Spotlight interview with Wojtek Zankowski Graduate of the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA), Bournemouth University, UK

2 Meet team Poseidon, award winning graduates from the UK National Centre for Computer Animation, whose animated short titled Poly s Feast won the Best Character, Best Rendering, and Best Film categories in this year s BFX Awards. Please, describe shortly the role and experience of each member. We have all just graduated from the undergraduate animation courses of the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA) at the Bournemouth University, UK. Alexandra Birchmore was Art Director, Lighting / Texture Artist in our project. She has worked on giving herself a wide and varied general CGI skill set in areas such as modelling, texturing and lighting. A strong artistic background has given her a good eye for colour, composition and layout. Simone Giampaolo s art background helped him develop multiple skills during his NCCA experience (such as Compositing, Editing, Character Design, Storyboarding), but his real strength lies in animation and creative direction. Over the past years, he has worked as a director, animator and pre-production artist on six animated short films (both personal and university projects), some of whom have also been screened at several international film festivals. Simone was Group Leader/ Lead Animator in Poly s Feast.

3 During his studies Henrik Linnes became a strong generalist with main focus on modelling and animation. As a Lead Modeller his knowledge of Maya made him a good problem-solver which helped him and group members out when facing problems. Tuomo Rinne, Modeller, Pipeline / Effects TD, mainly focused on the technical aspects of computer imagery. He self-proclaimedly stated before the competition: Programming, Unix-like systems and general tinkering are close to my heart. Robert Stratton, Rigging TD, focused towards the technical spectrum of CG where he found a strong passion for Rigging. This allowed him to problem solve a wide range of tasks while keeping his artistic eye to create believable deformations. I (Wojtek Zankowski) am specialised in VFX technical direction having strong CGIoriented maths and physics knowledge and I am confident in the look development of all kinds of visual effects. In my career, I ve solely performed full CGI projects and leaded a number of group projects, ranging from 3 40 teammates, in areas of film, animation and programming. Through these, I ve gained strong skills in direction, production, group leading and cinematography. Andrei Leskovski was in charge of sound design for Poly s Feast.

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5 How did you decide to take part in BFX? Quite honestly it was a pretty unusual decision. I have refused to join the BFX a few times before, since I had a job over the summer. Eventually, two days into the competition, Simone Giampaolo the group director and a good friend of mine contacted me saying that one of his members has quit and they need a TD urgently. I considered joining the competition before, seeing a great potential in getting our work noticed by the industry, and I thought it is the best way to prove our skills after the university course. Actually one of the key factors that made me jump on the team was their aim to use V-Ray as the primary rendering engine. Therefore I finally agreed to participate in the BFX as a part time activity, but as usual it turned out that I was spending every free moment of my time working on the project. Standard.

6 Tell us more about the 6-week campus. What was it like to work with the team? What did you learn from the process? Despite my initial worries, we have worked extremely well. Joining the team, I knew that every member is a specialist in their field, which was an unusually attractive situation, and I was confident that if we would encounter any difficulties they would be related to team management and communication. Eventually however, we have all approached the task very professionally, nailing down a strong pipeline in the first days of the project, which has then allowed us to just execute without a need of redesigning anything. I believe that such a good production planning is one of the key factors behind our success, since even the best artists can fail horribly if their time isn t used wisely. How did you come up with the idea about the project? The way we put together team Poseidon reflects the philosophy of our course at the NCCA which believes that the field of computer animation represents a marriage between art and science, and that practitioners in this innovative and exciting field need a good understanding of both the creative and the technical processes involved. In fact, the team was equally divided between artists and technical directors, and every team member had his/her specific task to take care of throughout the six weeks of the competition.

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8 With Poly s Feast we decided to push our CG characters to a cartoonish extreme. We wanted people to remember our film for its fresh and exaggerated style, as well as its charming characters and appealing environments. Because our director had an experience as a stop-motion animator, he suggested the group to create a CG piece with a stop-motion plasticine feel. Everyone seemed very happy about the idea, including the tutors, who immediately suggested V-Ray as the best rendering tool to achieve this kind of look. In terms of animation style, the main inspirations came from the snappy cartoons of Tex Avery and the more recent Genndy Tartakovsky s Hotel Transylvania. The way we interpreted the Odyssey s passage is simple: we decided to paraphrase the story of the encounter between the Greek soldiers and the hungry Cyclops by giving it a humorous twist. Instead of having a giant Cyclops threatening and devouring the unlucky bunch, our Greek army runs into a tiny, cute baby Cyclops who soon reveals his real nature as an insatiable predator. Which were the most challenging parts? What technical approach did you use to solve them? Most challenging? Available resources. Even though our film is only 30 seconds long, rendering it on 4 average machines required a totally different approach concentrated on efficiency. Many times a quick answer to a lot of visual artefacts was cranking up the settings, samples or introducing extra shaders or lights.

9 Being the only person in our team with V-Ray experience and some sort of in-depth knowledge about rendering, I needed to filter all such ideas and come up with solutions that would fit into our very tight schedule and small render power. So yeah, we couldn t just Brute Force everything. For a number of (partially unknown) reasons I encountered problems with Irradiance map pre-caching and distributed rendering and couldn t use these techniques as a result. Just like all other V-Ray-using animators we needed to find a solution for the GI flickering and noise, whilst broken pre-caching pushed us to introduce a number of various tricks and workarounds to get a smooth result. Baked background textures, camera projection for GI, 3 separate AO s and always-priceless rotopainting just to mention a few. On one hand I lost a few hairs being unhappy about things not working correctly, but on the other I was forced to learn the renderer even more precisely and understand each part of the process to nail down areas in which we could have saved some time. I always find efficient (or biased) rendering much more attractive and challenging than putting all sliders up and hoping the renderfarm is going to be fast enough refraining yourself to tight resources is one of the best ways to learn our craft in my opinion.

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11 How would you describe the role of V-Ray in your workflow? Which features did you find most helpful? Firstly V-Ray was the thing that made us achieve such a quality of visuals, which I find to be incredibly harder to obtain using other engines. It is this something that good V-Ray outputs have, which I can t even properly describe. However answering the question more professionally I think that creating realistically lightened scenes is what the engine s strength is. Our goal was to partially deceive audience to believe our animation is made with clay-motion, so we needed to make the images emulate the real world photographs. I had many more features planned to introduce to our footage if we were given more time, however I think we ve already managed to make it look at least good enough to make the audience question its origin whether it is a camera or a computer. This hasn t only meant applying a strong depth of field, but more importantly other things: scaling the textures of metal, fingerprints or sand, changing the light temperatures to indoor, modifying the light decay, creating lens artefacts, animating on two s, etc. Still, the main reason behind achieving the look is our choice of rendering engine. I honestly don t know how to describe what exactly it is, but V-Ray was what took our piece from good to good, but is it really CGI?.

12 What are your ideas about the future your vision about establishing a career in 3D visualization? I am still struggling with answering that question myself. I ve already got a secured future in London after I finish my MSc, but despite it was my goal for many years, I ve recently started to question whether I want to stay in the film and animation industry for good. With all the problems that big studios are going through right now I ve asked myself what other ways there are to have a good career, that would allow me to stay creative and passionate, without creating unnoticed work and overloading myself with crazy hours. For now, I m trying to stick with smaller companies and freelance projects, whilst at the same time I m extending my programming knowledge at the masters course. As far as I have observed during my short career, programming is like an enchanted key from a fairy. In every software, whether it is Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Nuke or any other, there is a finite number of tools and options. It takes time to master a package, but there is always a point in which you can only execute what has been prepared for you. With a good programming background you can largely extend the possibilities of your programs, giving you a unique skill that not all normal users have. If it is not worth learning just to be more attractive to your employers, it is something I see as the only way to be truly exceptional in the field you choose to specialise in. Unless it s animation.

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14 What advice would you give to someone starting their education in 3D visualization? Sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at it you can t expect too much from yourself, just keep on being foolish and keep on being wrong. Your models topology will be bad, your renders will look rubbish and your animation won t be Pixar but that s fine! I feel very upset for how current education and society approaches the learning process it is so destructive that we are constantly required to be correct and to listen to what others tell you is right. Being wrong, being stupid and being bad is the best way to progress and to grind your skills. Of course learn from others mistakes, listen to what they try to teach you and accept constructive feedback, but filter it through what you know, who you are and never take it personally. Experiment, observe, break rules, question, disagree and add your own character to whatever you do, because even if you re not correct according to the book, you are correct according to yourself, and that is what will keep the joy of creativity with you.

15 Spotlight Wojtek Zankowski Graduate of the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA), Bournemouth University, UK ncca.bournemouth.ac.uk back to top See more V-Ray customer success stories