In the first few weeks of the semester, I have been pushed to submit assignments that have required a somewhat tricky workflow capable of producing and delivering work within a one-week timeline. I in this article I reflect and share some of the compromises and creative streamlining techniques that it has taken to produce these projects on time and how my workflow would compare against that of a proper studio pipeline or environment.
Concept development\Previsualization.
One phrase which I have heard my instructor use a lot in the past few weeks is "If you had more time". Time is the first and perhaps greatest difference between the process that I have used to deliver most of my assignments in the last few weeks and perhaps what would apply in a studio environment. Since the whole project has to be completed in one week, most of the previsualization and concept development is mostly an internal mental process rather than a one requiring a lot of drawings and sketches. Most of my story boards have had to be mental storyboards. This would not be the case in a studio environment. I tend to create a rough sketch of the animatics more as a written script rather than a drwan storyboard. Within a proper production studio and timeframe, adequate sketches of the main scenes and shots would be drawn by a dedicated art department that would layout possible angles and cloth and material textures for the set and its props. Rough or more polished previsualization shots would be done to see and narrow down what works.
Modelling
Apart from my first assignment project, most of the others were done with free pre-rigged characters downloaded from the web. This was also another attempt to speed up the time it would take modelling characters, rigging and skinning them. In a proper studio house, 3d artists will be tasked with this process, for highly detailed characters, powerful 3rd-party software such as Zbrush would have to be added to the pipeline. Rigging in itself is a whole different process that could take from a whole day to possibly weeks, depending on the scale of character flexibility needed by the animators.
Animation, Framing, Texturing and Lighting
The process of animation for me takes the greatest time within that one week spell. Typically around 3 to 5 days could be spent fiddling with controls and key frames. Like in most genres of design, a sequence of animation can always look better so there exists that temptation to continuously refine. In my case as is the case in most projects, the schedule intrinsicly limits how far fine tuning can go since the scenes need to be ready for lighting and texturing. I have labelled this stage as Animation, Framing, Texturing and Lighting because most of these processes take place at the same time interchangeably. As soon as I map in textures, I immediately check to see the ligting and ensure that it works while still continuing with animation. Once I get proper motion and timing, I set up the framing of the shot and get it ready for render. Ofcourse in a production environment, this would not be the case. Animation, texturing and lighting are all seperate processes handled by different departments and one process has to end before another can begins. Animation first and then interchangeably texturing before lighting. In even more advanced pipelines, a special effects stage is needed before texturing and lighting.
Rendering
Both the 2GB file storage limit available in school and the large file sizes of EXR files have continuously conspired to make rendering a challenging stage of the one week projects. I have at times had to resort to jpeg, png, targa renders just to save on file space and rendering time. Technically, rendering times should not be different when comparing EXR to other file types but with the added processing of Ambient Occlusion passes, raytracing, 4 x 32bit channels, rendering times can go way out the window. A work around that I recently began to use required rendering the normal beauty, diffuse, shadow, reflection and specularity passes at once and then redoing the AO pass as a seperate render layer. This way the AO pass took less time and reduced rendering times by at least 2 times. This process takes about 1 to 3 days. One option I may look at for later renders will be to bake the ambient occlusion into the textures before mapping textures back in maya so that there is no need for another AO pass during rendering. In a studio environment, since there is ample time, there is no need to compromise on quality hence render farms with thousands of nodes are used with as many passes as needed being rendered as EXR files since adequate storage is available in the form of multiple terrabites of external hard drives.
Compositing
Although Nuke can be used for linear editing, the node based workflow works best when there are effect heavy shots or where CG is being comped with live action footage. I didn't find Nuke to be applicable for my one week projects because it still required another pass of rendering before I brought the shots into After-effect for final editing and rendering. In a big studio scenario, with multiple passes, the Nuke process is integral to producing quality output with its superior tracking, grading and 3d world space. Final editing would be completed in packages such as Avid or Premiere. My workflow utilized mostly After-Effects, since I didn't usually have many shots per sequence or that many passes to work with per shot and the shots were never effects heavy. For me, this effectively saved on time and I was able to add and edit all the shots, colour correct and add sound fx and soundtracks in a quick and intuituve way in layers which are the things incidentally that After-Effects excels at. This final process usually took a day at most to complete.
In summary, my workflow made use of quick compromises and shortcuts which though would seem to have worked for a one week assignment, but would be unacceptable or grossly inadequate in a Big studio pipeline. I will continue to strive to improve the process to meet up with frontline industry standards as more time is made available.
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