3D Festival 2003学院奖CG短片
<IMG src="http://www.cgnetworks.com/cgfilms/film_files/dronez/droneztitle.jpg
在哥本哈根举行的3D Festival 2003 数字媒体盛会上，4位来自德国电影艺术学院学生制作的CG短片: Dronez征服了在座的观众，也为他们赢得了3D Festival 2003学院奖的荣誉。
下面是关于影片的具体报道：
About Dronez
Leif Arne Petersen: We wanted to create a high quality, action-oriented animation. The main idea was to do some live action integration and to try to achieve better photorealism than in our earlier projects. One day we found some old military ruins that inspired us. The building that serves as the test center in the film really exists and was used in WW2 as a command post for the German artillery. We created a digital replica of the architecture and started with an animatic for the action sequence. Luckily, we were able to borrow lighting and camera equipment from a music video crew that were also using this building as a set. We could use all the camera positons and timings from our animatic to shoot all the background plates. We also shot a lot of photos to reconstruct the building for more elaborate camera moves.
Alexander Hupperich: After we did some tests with our digital set we found out that it worked even better than the real footage because of timing and camera animation issues. We then used the digital set in even more shots. After comparing our shots with the real set, the difference turned out to be minimal. We ended up throwing away all of our live action plates and doing the whole thing in CG.
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Distribution of Responsibilities
Manuel Macha: At our school we are trained in all aspects of digital production. This means that everybody on our team could jump in and help out with various positions, doing animation one day and compositing the next. Most of the time we tried to split the work in a way that enabled everybody to do the things that they liked and did the best.
I was primarily responsible for modeling the robot. I animated about half of the shots and also did some dynamics and texturing work. Beyond the 3D-related part, I was responsible for compositing all the live action elements and designing the animated computer screens and credits.
Alexander Hupperich: I reconstructed the building, textured the robot and also modeled and surfaced all other sets. And the entire lighting and rendering. And I did all the concept art on the project. Normally Leif or Manuel would animate the robot and pass the shot on to me to render. I did most of the animation of the flying drones, some particle stuff and also setup the rendering passes. In addition, I was responsible for compositing the full cg-shots.
Leif was responsible for modeling and texturing the flying dronez. He also rigged everything and animated the robot in many shots. But as outlined above he also jumped into several other positions doing dynamics, like the snow elements, compositing, creating the opening titles, and editing.
Finally, Paul Dreisen worked on the corridor shots and the creation of CG fire. Moreover, he helped us with some animation and dynamics.
<IMG src="http://www.cgnetworks.com/cgfilms/film_files/dronez/DRONEZ3095.jpg
The Robot
Alexander Hupperich: After doing some initial research on robots and mechanics, I started to sketch the robot parts in detail, keeping functionality in mind. It was designed to be a Russian answer to the US AMEE robot featured in Red Planet. Having finalized the design, Manuel modeled the entire robot using polys and NURBS. When the model was finished I began painting all the textures and working on the shading. At the same time Leif started to build the animation rig and did some test animations like simple run cycles. Afterwards we combined our work.
Live Action Integration
Manuel Macha: We wanted to try some live action integration. We shot all elements on Digibeta in front of a bluescreen. We had already prepared the lighting in the CG shots before shooting the actors to achieve believable integration. We didn´t shoot the smoke seperately, which turned out to be a really bad idea. A lot of rotoscoping was necessary in order to key the actor and smoke apart.
Animation
Leif Arne Petersen: The idea behind the animation was to create a highly agressive, acrobatic robot, that performs complex moves no human being could ever do. Having this in mind motion capturing was not possible. I did a quite complex IK-FK setup and added a user interface to make the animation a little bit easier. In several shots we used 360° rotations around the pelvis to give the animation an agressive, robotic touch.
Manuel Macha: Another important aspect was to keep the animation consistent throughout the movie. Since Leif and myself have different approaches on how to animate characters, we had to compare our progress frequently.
<IMG src="http://www.cgnetworks.com/cgfilms/film_files/dronez/DRONEZ3465.jpg
Compositing
Alexander Hupperich: The helicopter shots involved no matte paintings, but I mapped real mountain images onto a highres poly plane which I deformed like the real rock structures in the texture. Indeed there were no real matte paintings at all in the project, but a lot of 'paint-overs' on rendered images as in the 'landing platform' shot. It´s a fast way to add more detail to a locked-off scene without spending way too much time on modeling and texturing.
Challenges
Leif Arne Petersen: Having in mind that we are just a small team of students and also our time and resources are limited we wanted the best possible quality. We encountered the whole range of the problems we're all familiar with, like rendering times, rigging problems, file management, creation of fire elements.
Timeframe
Alexander Hupperich: We started with planning and shot the live action in August 2002. We also had a lot of lessons in the whole time of production and couldn't work full-time on the project. It's pretty hard to tell what the exact time amounted to, but we definitely spent some sleepless nights.
<IMG src="http://www.cgnetworks.com/cgfilms/film_files/dronez/DRONEZ3998.jpg
Equipment
Paul Dreisen: Hardware: 4 single CPU Intel workstations for animation, up to 8 dual Intel PIII for rendering and 1 fileserver.
Software: Maya 4.5, After FX, Combustion*, Edit*, AVID Media Composer, Photoshop, DeepPaint and several plugins.
We also used the Lenscare DOF plugin and were quite excited with the results. It really helped us a lot, in achieving a more realistic look.
Comments in Retrospect
Leif Arne Petersen: All in all I'd say that from the technical side there are a lot of shots that could certainly use some tweaking. But I think the main problem is that this short film would work great as a cinematic for games but there really isn't a story. If you do some action oriented stuff I think it is pretty hard to present a story that is worth being told.
Manuel Macha: In each and every production you will find stuff that you would like to enhance. We learned a lot during the production and in retrospective we would do some things in a different way. I think that motivates us to keep trying harder, each time.
Related Links
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.dronez.de/" target="_blank" >http://www.dronez.de/</A>
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