EDUCATIONAL. interview with Michael Blackshore. Gotlands Högskola University, Sweden

Transcription

1 Spotlight interview with Michael Blackshore Computer Graphics and Animation Graduate Gotlands Högskola University, Sweden

2 Michael Blackshore shares how he developed his passion for art and interest in 3D. When did you first develop a passion for art? I think I ve always been interested in drawing but I only did it for me and because it was fun. My interest in VFX started in I was 7 years old and I had saved my Saturday candy money for several months to buy a movie on VHS. VHS is basically an analog container made to store media similar to DVD and other ancient containers. There was a problem. I was too young to watch the movie I wanted to buy, so I had to bribe the cashier. With that done, I walked out with a VHS of Jurassic Park. I watched that movie over and over again. The creatures I saw were the most beautiful things I had ever seen and they did not exist in real life. Over time, The Mask, Jumanji, Forrest Gump, and Terminator filled more slots in my childhood.

3 When I was 15 I moved from the middle of Sweden to Nacka to begin a three 3-year high school program in Filmmaking. MediaGymnasiet I Nacka was back then the best media high school in Sweden and might still be today. That was the best decision I have made regarding education and my life. There were a lot of resources and the teachers had passion for what they where teaching. All of the major media subjects where in that school and I focused in editing and filmmaking. I was curious and wanted to know how Futurama made their 2D/3D combo, so I forced myself to learn 3D for a project. After this project I realized that this is what I wanted to do as a profession. When did you decide to enter Gotlands Högskola University in the Computer Graphics program? There were online courses you could take, including Concept Art and a course in ZBrush, at Högskolan på Gotand College. The school offered a 3-year Computer Graphics and Animation program which I began the following autumn. After the three years I can say that the program was not as structured as high school was. Some teachers were older students directly from the final year without any professional experience. Every term ended up being over budget, so there were severe cutbacks. I started to look more to Gnomon and Digital Tutors video tutorials. I was up many nights going through the various tutorials online. So, majority of skills I learned in those years in college as was mainly from online tutorials by Gnomon and Digital Tutors and my college friends.

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5 Let s start with inspiration - how did you come up with your idea for the project? Back at FMX 2010 I saw the presentation of Laika s first film, Coraline. It was a new take on traditional stop motion since it was a heavily CG assisted production for a traditional stop motion movie. Their production pipeline was very different from the old production pipeline Aardman had. Laika was going to be the first company in the world to bring rapid prototyping, CG animatics, CG compositing and other digital tools to traditional stop motion. Since the analog world was now tiptoeing in the digital world, the CG world could do the same thing the other way around, going for look of analog stop motion. What were the most challenging parts? What technical approach did you use to solve them? The most challenging part was look development, it demanded a lot of time and choices for the final look, but it was also fun. A lot of trial and error comes with this and it is fun! Matt Chandlers V-Ray Interpretation

6 A while back Miendbender did CG commercials for Cartoon Network that looked like they where made out of clay. It turned out that they had done these clay renders in CG and that they had used Maxwell to render it. After some research I found a guy in the UK named Matt Chandler (Analog) who also studied Miendbender s work and was going for a similar look. The results were 6 hours per frame render time which we thought was too long for a realistic clay shader. In his blog, Matt referred to me as the Swedish Student and asked for a V-Ray version of his clay shader. It did not come as close as the Brazil shader he had done earlier, but I thought that it would be a good start for development. This was the first project ever done with V-Ray for me. I actually started in Luxology modo since I already had that in hand. It has a similar shader and light setup, but it is obviously a bit modified to match Matt Chandler s original clay shader made for Brazil. I did some animation tests and it seemed to function fine. I decided to make the Wallace character from Wallace from Gromit, primarily because this character is famous and well recognized. If I could make people believe that this was not CG, then you have reached a point where the audience could not see the difference. I had to break down the animation, which makes stop motion look like stop motion. With some fiddling I came up with some basics and a large part of stop motion is human error, meaning imperfection. A picture from Michael s copy of Cracking Animation by Aardman

7 There should be traces of human involvement in order for the audience to believe it was real. In the digital world this is hard since the tools you use to create are perfect, so you need to add imperfection. There are additional things like timing and the simple animation. After that was done I imported two clips from two different Wallace and Gromit movies and attached them in a single sound file without any larger correction and exporting the video as an image sequence for reference. I was going to copy the original animation as close as I could. Since a raw export of 3.5 million polygons would be a bit overkill I made a lot of maps and exported them for various tasks. The animation started in MODO 601 and finished in a 701 trial. I made custom controllers for controlling various tasks such as dynamic shaders, which means that the shader is ALIVE! It moves, it blends with the help of the maps and the controllers I made. The technical approach was quite simple once you understood how and why traditional stop-motion looked as it did. It s easy technically, but the setup was time consuming. In MODO this is layered workflow and in my V-Ray + Maya setup it s node-based. The shader works mainly the same way in the end. There was a lot to learn. I had to learn what Fresnel was; I had to get a deeper understanding of light functions, SSS shaders, and what animating in threes and fours meant. A picture showing mouth shapes for various expressions that Wallace makes. Michael made a digital version of this using ZBrush, using layers and custom brushes.

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9 How would you describe the role of V-Ray in your workflow? If you can say that work is more fun than fun then you are in the right place Stephen Fry V-Ray provides that fun with the real-time preview. This is my single most favorite function in V-Ray. I can change some settings and instantly get a preview of the changes I just made. I don t have the hassle of rendering everything every time I make a small change or switch between shadow maps and ray traced shadows to quicken the process. Everything in real-time. BAM! Just like that! The V-Ray shaders are awesome and simple to use, it feels very logical so you can quickly develop shaders in V-Ray. The renderer can give you very clean results and with the right settings very fast renders. What are some of the funniest moments during the making of your project? The most satisfying part was to troll people in general with the end result. I posted the end result under the pseudonym Fluffywallace and people thought that this was stop-motion. On Vimeo I posted this under 3d-stuff but it was removed because they thought that it was actual stop-motion.

10 What are your plans for the future? Finding job in the industry within Look Development or Sculpting would be awesome. What advice would you give to someone starting his or her education in 3D visualization? I do not know, maybe that future students should be sure to check the school s track record before spending a lot of money and time. If the VFX school does not match the industry requirements it might be a better idea to get into a basic art school. As I said, my primary CG education was video tutorials. Focus on the basics, color, shape, and try to be a good observer if you are going for the artistic side of CG. Get an SLR camera and learn how light and technical equipment work to bring out what you need in the final picture. See Michael s project here:

11 Spotlight Michael Blackshore Computer Graphics and Animation Graduate Gotlands Högskola University, Sweden back to top See more V-Ray customer success stories