Metal Bum storyboards

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I learned a few lessons from what I’ve shot of Metal Bum so far; one of them is the great benefits of storyboarding. I tried to storyboard everything before I began shooting at all, but it took far too long so I elected instead to go with just a shot list. This works fine for most cases except when almost every shot in the film requires VFX, i.e. a CG robot.

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Even with a shot list, it’s a little vague what needs to be shot. What ended up happening was a run and gun style of shooting more appropriate to documentary films, trying to get as much coverage as possible to cover my ass in the editing room. This made it harder to lock down the edit to be ready for VFX implementation!

According to Cinefex magazine, The Dark Knight Rises mad use of previz in the opening prologue despite Christopher Nolan’s preference to shoot without storyboards. His decision was driven by the need to deliver this prologue months before the film’s release which demands efficiency. This way he and his crew were able to shoot only what they needed – nothing more, nothing less.

District 9 is a VFX heavy movie shot in a documentary style. This made it quite difficult for the FX team at Weta and thay’re a world class FX house. I’m just a one man army, so I want to take all the steps I can to make my work on Metal Bum easier and more efficient.

Faces from figure drawing

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When it comes to figure drawing, I’m a fan of the ball point pen. I’ve tried all kinds of pencils, marker pens, and whatever else I can borrow. But I keep coming back to the ball point pen because I have consistent control of line weight, can use it to shade, and it has a nice smooth feel as I move it across paper.

These are portrait drawings from my last figure drawing session when I decided to focus faces rather than the whole body.

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I brought scans of my sketchbook into photoshop and added color from there.

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My dad, who’s also getting into fine arts, asked me how I could just draw straight up in pen. It’s so permanent, what if you make a mistake? It’s true you can’t erase pen drawings but here’s the trick: I actually sketch in the rough pose before committing to the line drawing. The beauty of the ball point pen is that you can make your strokes so light that it’s barely visible in the final sketch. Without this step I would have difficulty getting proportions right.

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This is a dude I sketched when I got bored of the model and decided to draw a portrait of one of the sketchers instead. I took some artistic liberties mind you. I’d say it’s half based on a person in the studio and half from my imagination.

Tank in a frozen field

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Concept art of a tank robot for Metal Bum’s opening sequence

Software: Photoshop CS6

Hardware: Wacom Intuos4 Large tablet

Computer: 24″ iMac 2009

Time spent: 2-3 hours

Inspiration: Valkyria Chronicles art book I purchased just yesterday. Line work is the focus while painting and rendering takes a back seat!

You talking to me?!

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Photoshop CS6 contains a handful of brushes that mimic the look of traditional mediums. On this portrait I experimented with those brushes, namely pencil and watercolor to see how close I can get it to look like I used pencil, paper, and watercolor. Comes pretty close!

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What’s nice about the photoshop’s pencil and watercolor brushes is that they don’t require a lot of tweaking in the brush panel to get it to feel right. The default round brush requires some finessing in order to mimic pencil drawing or any other traditional medium, which in turn takes time. This portrait took half an hour and it was PAINLESS. Check out the simple steps I took below.

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I’ve reached a point where I feel I’ve used the default round brush long enough. After this it’s gonna be hard to look back.

From metal SOLDIER to metal BUM

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Making of posters

Man, I had some fun making these posters! The bottleneck that’s been keeping me from really diving into the editing of the movie was all the work that needed to be put into the robot (modeling, texturing, rigging). Adding controls to the animation rig is all that’s left to do before I take the big dive into editing and integrating the robot into the footage. I was making renders to test how my textures looked, but with a little extra work I quickly turned them in to cool posters that can hopefully generate a little excitement. It’s certainly boosted my moral and confidence in the project from seeing tangible evidence of the work I’ve been doing on the robot.

Some technical details on the robot: I decided the geometry was too heavy on polygons – close to 200,000 triangles – so I created a simpler mesh over the torso and head to which I baked in small details like seems and holes with normal maps. This helped bring the polygon count down to less than 60,000. In the long run, this will drastically reduce the amount of time to render. As for textures, I’ve considered handling the texture creation in a 3d painting application such as Mudbox but decided to go with a purely photoshop workflow. I’ve learned from colleagues at work that this is the quickest and easiest way to deal with textures. Yes, there are some inherent flaws with seams but I don’t care for perfection, nor do I have the time for it.

UV mapping tedium and quick texture work

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UV mapping can be relaxing and fun… for a while. But when it takes all day and then some, that’s when the tedium kicks in and you think to yourself, “Oh God, l just want to get this over with please can I be done with this now!!” Thankfully, everything afterwards was a breeze. I simply laid down a base color, some layers of photographic details to give teeth and variation to the surface, a custom camo pattern I whipped up, and tons of dirt and grime textures from random photos I’ve been taking. There was only very little hand painted work for touch ups and polish. I made 2 versions of Metal Bum’s texture – one from its time at war and the other when it returns home and ends up on the streets. The snow camouflage pattern was inspired by my recent ski trip. I took some beautiful HD footage of the vistas with my phone and decided I could use as a backdrop for the opening battlefield scene of the film. While I was initially leaning toward a desert setting there was no real reason I needed to stick with that.

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Film doesn’t have the polygon and texture limitations of videogames. With that theory in mind, I imagined how sweet it’d be to match the CG fidelity achieved in Real Steel in Metal Bum. I quickly realized that even if somehow I had the technical knowhow, my 3 year old iMac wasn’t gonna be able to handle it. Case in point, I started out with 2 sheets of 2048 texture pages and Maya halted to a near stop, chugging hard as I struggled to even navigate in the viewport. Now mind you, 2048 is way smaller than the size of textures typically used in film – could go up to 8k I think. Well, I gotta work with what I’ve got right? I downrezzed the textures to 1024’s and quit working directly with psd files, instead using a custom photoshop action to output jpegs (a pro tip I picked up at work) and Maya returned to life. It’s funny that in the end I’ve adopted a workflow closer to one appropriate for videogames. Truth is, when the going gets tough VFX houses take all manner of shortcuts like these to get the job done.

Creating assets with both quality AND speed

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These props were created with a very quick turnaround. I spent only a few of hours on each of the 3 components of work required: modeling, uv mapping, and texturing. This was possible because I forwent the idea of creating high resolution 3D work, and instead adopted the low poly route. Neither the rifle nor the helmet were ever going to be seen in closeup shot so that’s fine. If it’s something I can get away with, I’d happily save myself the extra work any day.

Announcements of things to come

Do I really want to do this? Okay, here I go. You can look forward to a 30 second preview of Metal Bum by the end this April and the the film will be finished by July 12 (can’t confidently say I’ll release it to the public right away as I want to explore my options for a festival run). Mark you calendars and God help me.

Metal Bum 3D Completed!

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I did a detail pass on the model and it’s a huge improvement from what I had before. That just involves adding things like bolts, seams, nooks, and crannies to make it come alive with some realism. I looked at stills from Real Steal (the robot boxing film starring Hugh Jackman) for ideas and I was also inspired by Chris Durso’s 3D portfolio and the 3 point lighting on display in his images, so I tried to imitate that look.

I had the pleasure of meeting him at the figure drawing studio I go to on wednesdays. Cool dude. I like his design sensibility so I when I asked about it, he said his personal rule of thumb is 70% design and 30% detail. Detail in the right places, not on every damn square inch! I agree. The robot designs for the Transformers films are the antithesis of this philosophy – way too much detail all over the place. Chris calls it the LA style of design.

On the film side things, I’ve started putting together the rough assembly of the footage I’ve shot so far. And man, it’s pretty rough at this stage. Can’t wait to finish filming the remaining scenes sometime next month.

METAL BUM: WAR HERO

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In the short film I’m working on, Metal Bum, the opening sequence requires the robot protagonist to be depicted in a soldier’s outfit. I painted the above image in order to figure out the look of the robot in wartime. I wanted to sell the idea of the robot being a war veteran in the quickest, most visual, and efficient way possible. To that end, I gave it an iconic soldier helmet (as silly as it may be since it’s already made of out metal) and a olive green color scheme. Of course I also threw in the standard issue assault rifle, grenades, and combat knife to complete the picture.

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I started with line art and flat color shading, which took about 2 hours. Then I elaborated on details and rendering after a break of a couple of days for an additional 4 or so hours. I’m getting quicker, but I could still be improving on speed. Another artist with skills superior to mine would be able to take the rendering much further given the same amount of time.

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Nothing wrong with a little traditional pencil and paper approach to concept art. I was inspired by the traditional pencil sketches done by Alan Lee and John Howe for The Hobbit and the Rings Trilogy, and Matthew Nava’s work for Journey. The above was drawn with a mechanical pencil loaded with 2B lead during a figure drawing session. I got bored of the model towards the end and started doodling this battle scene. Took me roughly 40 minutes. For the sake of my sanity this would be presented as a war photography still in the film, not full motion!