Siggraph 2017 Rewind - Nick Lyons: Futuristic Technology in Ghost in the Shell: Brief to Deliverable
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Nick provides an overview of the concepts as well as how Territory executed some of the final VFX. Nick breaks down the creation of the "Equalizer" (using MoGraph Cloner, Random Effector, Turbulence and X-Particles), human holograms (using Photogrammetry, Polygon Reduction and X-Partcles), Solograms (solid holograms) to create the futuristic looking cityscape and describes how Territory used Cinema 4D and Shotgun to create and manage hundreds of assets including the use of a custom platemaker built with Xpresso.
02:00 | Territory Studios Demo Reel |
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05:10 | Ghost in the Shell Breakdown Reel |
06:40 | Concepts for the Memory Sequence |
11:00 | Creating the "Equalizer" Effect |
18:57 | Concepts for the Ship Wreck Scene |
21:10 | Creating Holograms |
31:36 | Creating a Sci Fi Cityscape |
39:12 | Creating one of the Sologram Assets |
44:49 | Bespoke Backend Workflow Tools |
Transcript
Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining me today. My name is Nick Lyons, and I'm a
motion designer at Territory Studio in London. You heard that correctly.
I am from London. I'm sorry if you're hoping for a soothing British voice this
morning. That will not be the case. I'm an American that moved over to London three
years ago, and I work in motion graphics and film at territory.
We're a multidisciplinary studio, meaning we do work in lots of different
disciplines including visual effects, motion graphics, commercials,
games, branding, and virtual reality. Today, I'm really excited to talk to you
about our work on Ghost in the Shell and how we created this massive world with
a large, deliverable list of assets. This film was really exciting to work on.
We had the opportunity to work with Rupert Sanders and helping create his vision of
Ghost in the Shell. It allowed us to hone our visual effects pipeline.
We had to create an asset list of over 200 deliverables to populate the city,
shop fronts, and different story telling moments. Today, I'm going to break down
different concepts and deliverables from this film and give you a basic idea of the
type of work that we did. I want to kind of take you through our thought process
and also through a few different files and show you how we made certain bits and
pieces. This was a really exciting project. We had the chance to work at two
legendary visual effects supervisors. Guillaume Rocheron from MPC who we worked
with directly delivering files and the legendary John Dykstra from Star Wars
fame, the original lead effects supervisor from Star Wars and one of the founding
members of Industrial Light and Magic. Today, I'm going to show you a quick reel
of all the work that we've done over the past few years at our studio, and I'll
give you an idea of the type of work that we do and where we're coming from.
♪ [music] ♪
Cool. Thanks, guys. So, we're a London-based studio.
We also have offices in San Francisco and New York. This is the outside
building of our studio. It is based in the city of London. If you're familiar with
London at all, it's the oldest part of London. We work off of a full-time staff
model. So essentially, we hire a large base of generalists, and we pat out our
entire work with talented freelancers, based in illustration, effects simulation,
Houdini, VR and interactive to kind of specialize on certain projects depending
on what we need. Our staff is as diverse as the work that we do.
We have people from all over the world. This is a small part of our staff, but we
have people from all over the UK, the U.S., Spain. I'm going to try to remember
all these. I have a list. Hungary, New Zealand, Ireland, Denmark,
Switzerland, Australia, and Russia, to name most of them. I'm sure I forgot
someone. But over the past year, we've essentially grown quite a bit.
We've grown so much that the studio I just showed you is going to be our old studio
in a few weeks. So we're moving down the block to a bigger office.
This is a team photo of after we finished our work on Ghost in the Shell.
It shows all the freelancers, all the editors, staff and everyone who helped
contribute to this film. Today, I'm going to talk to you about Ghost in the Shell
and give you a breakdown of the different scenes and visuals that we helped create.
I'm going to show our breakdown reel right now, and it's going to give you an idea of
the type of work we did, some short breakdowns, and I'll delve a bit further
into all these.
♪ [music] ♪
So, this work took its part in three different stages. When we initially came
on to the project, we were given conceptual work to work on the memory
sequence that Major is kind of…the whole film kind of revolves around the idea of a
memory. And she's talking about what happened to her before she came a shell.
And she talked about possibly being in a shipwreck where her body was completely
ruined and her brain was salvaged to put within the shell. And this was kind of our
initial idea, initial concept that we were asked to help visualize.
We called this, the director called this idea the digital sand concept.
And we went through several different variations and iterations of this concept.
And I'll walk through some of the thought process behind a few of these concepts
before I go into more of a demo of some of the work that we did.
So we originally started off taking some of these key elements and created a mood
board of what we possibly may want this hologram section to look like.
We came up with these orb-type elements with immense amounts of data.
The idea is that we had to communicate lots of different elements within these
orbs. We had to communicate typography, different types of digital kind of
displacement effects that I'll show you and have them sit within this world.
We began to research some famous Japanese patterns. The asanoha pattern was kind of
the first, one of the major patterns that we decided to bring on into our work flow
to help ground all the graphics within the film, within this Japanese-type world.
This pattern is very popular in the traditional Japanese Kimono. This was one
of our first concepts based on the orb. You can see kind of the Japanese Kimono
asanoha pattern, the orb-like pattern, and over time, this orb would help develop key
storytelling moments. It would reveal different images and pieces of typography
from within. We did several initial motion tests. As time went on,
we were asked to help visualize, like, an equalizer-type animation.
So this was important when Major was sitting in front of, or any other
character was sitting in front of a hologram asset, there would be some sort
of, like, jiggling, equalizer-type motion to signify that there's something being
spoken to her, like some sort of voice recorder of some sort. This was one of the
final assets that we created. You can see how we began using typography and kind of
having this calm-motion-graphic-type animation. Over time, we decided to
develop a second concept which was based more around traditional typography,
UI, and layering old concepts together. So you can see how the traditional Japanese
pattern was still used. We began to implement some line work, some bespoke UI
and animation as well and began playing with the different types of orb assets.
We created the entire bespoke library for this process. This was used originally for
this concept but it ended up becoming a part of a lot of other concepts that we
began developing as well. This was used primarily in more the UI work that we did
throughout like the conceptual parts of the film. Our third concept that we worked
on is another digital san concept that's more particle-based. The idea was that it
would be a kind of voxely-type particle approach. So there would some sort of
surface as you can see in the top right over here where the ship's kind of
appearing. It's the idea of some sort of snow globe where elements kind of fly up
in the air, turbulence around and form different objects. And we had the
shipwreck scene and this equalizer-type animation that you can see as well.
And this was one of the equalizer concepts that we came up with.
It's a simple animation. I'm going to show you how we created that from scratch.
So, this equalizer animation had to signify communication. So the idea was
that we had to create an asset that when a character was sitting in a room, this
would give us some flexibility to show voice interpretation. It's a fairly simple
rig that allows a lot of control. I'm going to go ahead and
create that for you now. So what we're going to do is
I'll build the asset, then also apply X particles to
it and show you how we created the type of ethereal particle-based look as well.
So, what you want to do is you want to start off with a circle. You go under your
Spline Library. We're going to change the orientation of that, and we go directly
into our Cloner Object. And we're going to duplicate this around 60 times.
The idea is that we want to have a lot of different variation,
a lot of different splines to give us that type of variation that we want.
We're going to shrink this down quite a bit, bring that down to there.
And then what's cool about this is we're going to plan a random effector to it, and
this random effector will do most of the work for us. So we're going to turn off
position. And under Scale, we're going to change the scale to quite a high number,
like 400. So you're seeing it's blowing off the screen a bit. So we're going to
take our original circle and drop it down to 0.1, so it's quite small.
And you can see it's starting to have some sort of resemblance of that animation.
There's no animation happening right now. So what we're going to go ahead and do is
head into our Effector and add turbulence to it, and it's going absolutely crazy
right now, and this is not what we want. So we're going to go into our Effector
over here, and we're going to change the animation speed to 50%. This is going to
slow it down a bit more. It's still not very detailed yet, so I'm going to change
that and go into our scale and drop this down to 10%. And this is going to give us
a bit more detail. If you want more control over something like this,
you can go in here and go and add a fall off to it. And we're
going to add a spherical fall off to it. And you can play
around with this, and you can change the different
types of animation with this. You can also add different types of effectors to it as
well. And then to give it geometry, we're going to head over into our loft,
loft nerbs, and loft this guy. And then you can start to see it's beginning to
take shape and form. So, during this process, we had to bake out all of our
assets and send them over to MPC to have them drop them in their scenes.
So everything we had to do was baked UV textured and everything else.
We used a long list of plugins like NitroBake, SteadyBAKE. We probably would
have used the EasyBake even if that was a possibility. We bake pretty much
everything. And what I'm going to show you here is just how to bake it out as an
alembic file which is a little known…well, probably well-known fact is that it was
revealed in 2011 here at SIGGRAPH, the alembic file system. So it's been really
helpful in the visual effects industry since then. So it's quite simple.
You go over here to Export. The alembic file is going to bake out the entire
animation for us. We don't have to do anything else except for export it as an
alembic. We're going to hit Alembic right here, and we're going to go down to the
desktop and call it "Equalizer ABC," okay. And you just keep all the settings
as is. You don't need to change anything. Exports are quite fast.
And then we're going to go over here and import our "Equalizer ABC" file.
Okay. All right, so there you go. There we go. Okay, cool. So, it basically bakes the
entire animation. It's really helpful. We can't apply particles to clone our object
and have them stick to it. So we have to bake it out into a piece of geometry.
So this is what we ended up doing. You go over here, take the object,
and you go into your X particles system. You grab an emitter, and what we're going
to do is we're going to emit particles from the object. So we're going to go into
our Object Settings, scroll down to Objects, add our entire loft nerbs in
there and see if that does the trick. It's not really doing what we want. It's kind
of flying all over the place. What you'll have to do is click this little
box right here called Stick Particle to Source Object. And then we're going to
turn off our main piece of geometry, and you can see it's starting to work.
It's not doing exactly what we want yet. So what we're going to do is...
Because we want the particles to be born right at the very beginning of the
animation. And we want it to really give us the full feeling of the entire piece of
geometry. So we're going to go over here into our Mission Parameters
and go to Shot. And we're going to change our shot from zero and have it emit over
two frames. And we're going to have it emit 10,000 particles. So what happens
now, you'll see it starts out as a fully kind of formed object.
And from here, you can do lots of different things. You can duplicate the
emitter, duplicate that, okay. And then what we're going to do is you want to turn
off…we're going to have kind of some wispy particles fly around it as well.
We're going to turn off Stick Particle to Object, and you see they're kind of flying
all over the place. So we're going to change it back, this second emitter back
to rate. And we're going to have them change of lifespan from 90 to about 20,
kind of play around with this a little bit, add some variation to it.
And we're going to change the speed and knock that down to, like, 15.
And you can see how it's starting to kind of show some little bit of variation.
You can add other effectors to this like the turbulence effector over here,
and add some sort of turbulence to it. You can add wind to it.
It gives it a bit more variation and stuff and you can bring in the after effects and
render this out, apply transfer modes to it, different glows
and speculars, and it gives you a lot of flexibility. But
essentially, this is what we came up with, and this was
our base for creating this asset. Okay, and we did this for quite a few other
assets as well. We created this for the mechanical geisha. You can see, like, the
different layering of X particles [inaudible] that. You can also see the
asanoha pattern that I was talking about earlier is kind of still prevalent within
these designs as well. And we also used it in Aramaki's Section 9 office scene
still kind of the same idea, having particles wisp around it, some simple
geometry that we comped in After Effects. We also, as I said before,
helped envision the shipwreck scene. So, Major was told that she died on the
shipwreck and her brain was salvaged to create the shell. And basically what we
did from here was we created some sketches after we got off the phone with the
production company and figured out what we wanted this to look like. We decided we
had to have some digital kind of particles flying around, have this kind of…I don't
know if you've ever played with one of those toys when you were a kid where you
take the pens, and you push against the pens, and it creates, like, the version of
your hand on it. So this was kind of an initial concept that we wanted to push.
It's this voxel grid concept, so everything, all the elements that are
created are created from little boxes, you know, like Minecraft or something like
that. And these boxes break off from a main source and create some sort of
element. And these were some of the initial style frames that we came up with
to help convey this idea. We did some quick tests and X particles,
very simple, essentially what I did before. We take an object, bring
into Cinema and emit voxels in a volume. And X particles does this very quickly.
It was really easy to set this up, and then we began adding different speculars
and reflections to this. Like with any shipwreck, there's casualties.
We had a lot of dead people floating around. We had to emit particles from all
these guys as well and do whatever we did to the ship wreck scene to these guys as
well. They kind of look like little snowmen when they're emitted.
We changed the particle size and changed some other elements within comp.
And here is a short break down of one of the final looks of this concept piece.
Now, this piece wasn't used in the film, so this is about as far as we got with the
animation. There are different parts of the memory sequence that were added and
were not. You can see the voxel grid, the different pieces of UI and kind of other
elements that we used to populate the entire scene. If you've worked in film
before, what ended up happening was you kind of prove yourself on each concept.
So we have the initial hologlobe sequence. And if we did well,
we'd get awarded with more work. And if you don't do well, then you don't get to
stay on the project very long. So luckily, we were able to do some work that the
director liked. And the next scene was how to deal with this conference room.
And the idea was we had to envision these holograms that would be called up within
the space. And we wanted to give these holograms all a bit of their own look and
feel. They needed to feel unique and different. We wanted to come up with
several different options for them to use. We had a more particle-based layering
system for some of them, and also, you can see kind of the voxel grid pattern that we
used before and also several other dot matrix kind of looking patterns.
If you've seen the film, you're familiar with this room where they bring up these
different key elements. We had to place all these different elements within this
room and figured a grid was probably the best way to do this. So we created this
dot matrix style grid, and the actors would call up use different elements.
We had to populate it and make it look visually appealing and keep all the
elements within the same type of look and feel. Initially, when we got this brief,
we were given photogrammetry assets. And if you're not
familiar with photogrammetry, photogrammetry is essentially
when you create geometry from real life using an array
of cameras. So cameras are strewn around you, and they're capturing 3D data.
I wanted to show you kind of the density of this mesh because that's one of the
issues with photogrammetry is it's essentially used for reference.
And a lot of the times, you'll have to completely rebuild it or drop the polygon
count using a poly reduction tool, and that's what we ended up having to do.
But we took this mesh, and we began running particle simulations on it.
This is one of the first simulations we ended up doing, which I'll break down
in a second. I'll show you how to make that. And we had quite a few other
particle layering concepts where we're playing with the form of the model and
emitting from different vertices and polygons. We also created a voxel-type
grid. This gave a lot of options for shadowing and ambient occlusion and
reflection, gave a good amount of depth to all the models. And here were the five
final concepts we came up with. You can see they're all kind of particle-based,
some more organic, some more digital. And I'm going to go ahead and show you how to
make the one right here. Okay, all right. Let me just go into… Okay,
so here is the final animation. It's a bit on the heavy side, but you can see… What
we did was we did a few different tests. The idea was that we take
this photogrammetry asset that I will grab. Actually, I'm
going to not go in through there. Okay, so, this is the model
we were given. So, it's the same mesh that I showed you
previously. You can see kind of the eyes flying out. It's not a very clean model.
This is why we ended up having to clean these guys up, and you can see the density
of the mesh. It's not really workable in any type of situation but it's a fantastic
reference. So we're going to take this and copy it off and stick this in a new scene.
Okay, all right. So, we have this guy in here. You probably are all familiar with
the polygon reduction tool. This is going to be our best friend in this situation.
Let me go ahead and bring this down here. It's going to think for a bit because it's
such a massive mesh. And we're basically just going to reduce it down to 99%.
And then we are going to take it and current state to object, delete that.
Okay, all right. And now what we're going to do is we're basically going to use
this as a volume. So the idea here is that we're going to take emitters from X
particles. And the emitters are going to hit this model. And as they hit the model,
particles will spawn inside the model, and we're going to add some
turbulence. They're going to fly around. There's few ways you can do this.
This way gives you more flexibility on where the particles begin appearing which
is good if you're doing some sort of hologram kind of look because you want the
particles to reveal it over time and not just kind of fly all over the place.
So we're going to create this guy. We're going to pull it up. We're going to pull
the emitter up like that so it covers the entire model. I want to make sure it's
working correctly. Okay. Then we're going to duplicate it and create a mirrored
version of it and flip it around on the other side. Okay, all right.
And we're going to take our two emitters, and we're going
to apply the same settings to both of them. So we're
going to add…we're going to change the life span to 40. And we're going to
have a random variation of 40 as well. We're going to emit for 40 frames.
Okay, all right. And then what we're going to do is we're going to add a collider tag
to the model. So this is going to allow all the particles that are spawned within
the model to stay inside. And we're going to bring the balance down.
We don't want them to fly around too much. And then the important part comes when we
add our third emitter, and we're going to call this "Spawn" just so we can be a
bit organized. Okay. Then we're going to go down to our collision object, go
into Spawn on Collision and enable that. We're going to bring our spawn emitter
into there. And what we want to do is now take these two initial emitters, and we're
going to hide them. So they don't even need to be seen. And we're going to
hide our geometry as well. It's going a bit crazy right now, but it's starting to
work. And we're going to change in our Collider Tag that they spawn only once.
So we don't want them to keep spawning. It creates a massively dense scene.
Then we're going to take our two emitters, and we're going to add a turbulence
effector to them. All right, and we're going to take our turbulence effector and
add a curl. Curl turbulence is so sexy. It looks good all the time,
so we're going to add that. It gives a lot of variations. You can kind of see what
the particles are doing as they're coming out. And basically as they're hitting it,
they're spawning these different particles. So we want them to be…if you
want them to be spawning more in a certain place, you just move the emitters to
that place. And we're going to move this one a little bit closer.
Okay, and what we're going to do is we're going to take this null, and we're going
to add some movement to it. So we're going to take it and spin it.
If you guys have seen Thumb Wars before, they talk about spinning a planet.
We're going to spin this model. Okay, and we're going to do it at 180 degrees.
And so now it's giving a bit of variation on where it's showing up.
They're kind of floating around all over the place. This isn't what we want.
So we're going to add a modifier and a [inaudible] surface modifier.
And this is going to keep all the particles inside the model. And we're
going to bring up the pull to 100%. And you can see it's starting to do what we
want it to do. You can also increase the amount of particles within this model.
And what we're going to do is now add a trail, XB trail object and bring in our
spawning emitter into this trail object. And it's going to start giving us that
look. But we don't want these trails to be emitted through the entire scene.
So we're going to turn off that and give a trail length of, let's try 15 variation.
And also, we want our spawning emitter to stop after a while because we want it to
be kind of a transitionary element. So we're going to change it to, like, 20.
And there you have it. It's kind of…you can kind of move these guys around,
these two emitters up here and change. You can bring them up to his head and down to
his body. You can do this with really any type of object. And what you're doing is
basically, you can use this as, like, some sort of mat or some sort of transitionary
element. But you can apply this to really any type of object. Okay.
The largest deliverable that we had for this project was the solograms.
And if you've seen the film, we basically created 200 assets to populate this entire
world. And these solograms were a massive part of that. The solograms were
basically these massive, as you can see in this photo, advertisements
living next to skyscrapers. And you can see them in the trailer for the film.
And the idea is that we were trying to…the word "sologram" comes from…Rupert Sanders
coined this term, and it means solid hologram. It's a very kind of simple idea.
But the idea initially was that these holograms would feel solid,
not glowy, not transparent at all, and they'd be living in kind of a neutral
daylight type space. So they wouldn't look like a traditional hologram.
But what ended up happening over the course of the development is to have them
to kind of stand off the background in the night scenes. It began adding
transparencies and glows to really help them kind of light up the scene. And it
started looking really, really nice. Some of the other assets we created was a whole
load of civic signs and shop front animation, so not only just the solograms.
So we created a large amount of these conceptual kind of civic signs to
help populate this city from, you know, walking, do not walk, crosswalk signs,
bus stops, a whole slew of different assets. And we provide the director with
these slates, with concepts of how they might look. And then they would give us
feedback, and we'd change that and then model in Cinema 4D.
You can see some of these assets maybe in the film, in the trailer.
You saw these animated graphics on the road as they're flying around in their
vehicle on the car. These are all kind of an idea to help really bring the city to
life and give it this really futuristic feeling. Unfortunately,
in the future, we also have speed cameras as well. We really fought against this
one. We wanted it to be a fun world where you can drive as fast as you want.
It's not Germany, unfortunately. Yeah, we had one of those assets as well.
Here's a quick breakdown of all those assets living together. We have solograms
in the background. We have civic signage, shop fronts. All the shop fronts were
basically these restaurants signs, donut stores, massage parlors,
like, pretty much anything you'd find in a futuristic or modern day city.
Depending on the part of the city, the elements took a different look and feel as
Major begins going into the darker inner city type parts of town.
We're giving the textures a bit more of a worn look. They're less luminant,
slightly more muted, and especially as she's heading towards the redlight
district. It's looking a bit more dilapidated, a bit cooler, a bit less
inviting. These were one of the original shop front concepts we came up with.
This is a hot stone massage. We had quite a large list of these shop front
deliverables. And what we'd do is send these to client, they'd approve it, and
we'd build them out in Cinema 4D. We created this entire visual effects
pipeline for this because we essentially had to…with most
motion graphics artists, you don't have to UV map
your objects. You don't have to bake everything out and send
to a visual effect pipeline. So we had to create this entire process from scratch
which helped us to deliver this large amount of assets. And you have to fit this
into a visual effect's company pipeline perfectly, because if not,
they'll send it back, and you'll have to redo it. So we spent a little bit of time
on R&D to really hone this process and create the tools that we needed for it.
This is a short video of some of the night shots that we did in
Ghost in the Shell. And it'll show kind of the a lot of the
solograms and civic signage that we worked on.
♪ [music] ♪
Okay, so, this large amount of assets that we had to deliver, basically what happened
is every sologram that we had had a video of an actor doing some sort of movement.
And each video was translated into photogrammetry. So there's an array of
cameras around them capturing all their movements and all the different types of
actions they were doing. You can see in the corner of some of these concepts
actors doing some sort of movement. And then we had to create concepts based on
those. Some of those concepts were very solid concepts based on production and
kind of director notes, and others had no concept whatsoever. We were given
photogrammetry and image assets that had to be developed in-house. So this gave us
a lot of flexibility and had a really good time, actually, developing a lot of these.
I mean, there were hundreds of these videos and most of them didn't get used in
the film. But it was incredible the amount of ideas that they came up with for these
solograms. So as you can see, there's this photogrammetry asset that we were given.
We created a concept. It was signed off, and then we added some sort of animation
to this. All this animation had to be baked within Cinema 4D. We couldn't bring
any textures from After Effects. We couldn't add any, like, line work or
traditional UI stuff that we normally do. So it all had to live within Cinema 4D and
be transferable to another company. So that was quite the challenge.
This was one of those concepts that we didn't actually have a concept for.
We had a girl that was doing this kind of like miming typing motion.
And we had to sit in a room and kind of figure out what she would do,
what kind of actions and what kind of advertisement she would be part of.
We had several different assets like this. You can't put the idea of learning Mozart
in just a few minutes. The future is awesome if you have kids and you want them
to learn piano, this is the tool to use. And another one of those assets was this
idea for medical depression pills. It's not the happiest of ideas,
but, essentially, the concept, they didn't have a concept, so
we had to create this idea that you take this medication.
You're so happy. Your head explodes with confetti, and you don't really
care that it's happening. So what I'm going to do is break down in this asset
and show you how we created the confetti and just show you the photogrammetry asset
that we worked with. Okay, so, we received this really dense piece of photogrammetry.
We'd freeze the animation just to bring it into Cinema 4D because it was such a dense
piece of geometry and add some sort of X-particle-type animation to it. This
confetti-type animation is very much transferable between different types of
effects if you ever need to create, like, fireworks or anything like that,
you can do this type of animation as well. So, what I'm going to go ahead and do
is open a new scene. We're going to start with an emitter and turn this emitter
into a circle. So the idea is that the particles are going to fly out.
They're going to cone out within, like, kind of an angular-cone-type shape and fly
up, stop, and then slowly trickle down and spin. So, what we're going to have to do
is we're going to change this to ring only because we don't really want the particles
to emit inside the sphere. We're going to change the cone angle to 30, and
this is going to give this kind of, like, outward kind of explosion-type look.
And then we're going to head over into our emission and change this to Rate, keep it
on Rate and change this to 15 frames because we only want a short burst of
confetti flying out. And we're going to change the speed and really ramp it up to,
like, something like 2000 because we really want this to be like one of the
things that you go to, like, a Lakers game. They have
those confetti or shirt kind of guns, and they fly really
fast, and they slow down. Okay, and what's really important,
and something you don't want to forget, if you're using the Spin Effector at all,
you need to go into your extended data and add Use Rotation. Because otherwise, when
you add the spin effector, nothing is actually going to happen.
If you go over here to your emitter, and we're going to add our speed modifier.
And we're going to change our speed modifier from Incremental to Acceleration
and drop it from Exponential, drop the exponential number from 5 to -1,800.
And you'll be able to see this pretty immediately. It's flying up here, and
that's looking slightly better, better than flying off everywhere in every
direction. And then we're going to take a gravity object because we want these to
fall down after that. Go to Gravity, and you can kind of see how that's starting to
work a little bit. It's still kind of clumped into a single ring.
We're going to add some variation to this and go back into our emitter and start to
add some variation to our speed as well to give it a bit more. Okay,
cool, all right. And then we're going to go ahead to our generator because
if you're going to add a spin to any of these particles, you have to have it
generating some type of geometry to view the spin. And we're going to go to our
generator and grab a plane. We want to drop the segments. We want to keep this as
light as possible. It's always good to keep some sort of streamlined workflow
where you're not dealing with massively heavy pieces of geometry.
We're going to drop this down to 10 and 5. It's going to create a nice small
rectangle for us, put this into our generator, and you're starting to see it
working. It's not really doing much right now. It's just staying flat.
So now we're going to take our…go into our X particles and add our spin modifier.
Okay, and then we're just going to add a random kind of amount of spin just 10 per
frame, and go down here, turn the randomness on, change that, 10 each.
And then you can start to see it flies out and trickles down. You can change this
using a few different modifiers. You can go into your Turbulence and add a bit of
turbulence to it, and that will start to push it around and add some random values
to it. If you want to create, like, fireworks or some sort
of animation like that, you just head over to your object
and change from circle to maybe, like, a sphere.
And you'll be able to see it just flies out, and what we probably want to do is
change our emitter to emit 5 frames so it's a bit faster. Yeah, so, you kind of
get the idea. And this is how we created that confetti-type animation.
They're all flying around. You can add more spin to it if you want.
Yeah, okay. Cool, all right. And back to the presentation. So, like I said before,
we created quite a few bespoke back end workflow tools for this project.
We really had to kind of delve into the visual effects community and figure out
what tools will work best as far as organizational and file-delivering-type
streamlined workflows. What we ended up doing was creating an entirely bespoke
Shotgun toolset that was integrated with Cinema 4D