You are on page 1of 15

Mothers Days

Technical Document

How the Cigarette Smoke and Burning Embers were created for Mothers Days

About
This document is a guide to how I approached the task of creating and compositing computer generated smoke and burning embers to the cigarette of my stop-motion character in the mixed-media, short animation, Mothers Days.

This is an original frame from the stop-motion animation segment of the project. Within this, I needed to add smoke and burning from the end of the cigarette.

I imported the frame sequence into Adobe After Effects and removed the green screen using Keylight. I then cropped the characters into place and composited them into the CG Car I had previously made. With this, I then exported the frames as a jpeg sequence so I could take it into Autodesk Maya.

In Autodesk Maya, I created a Polygon Primitive Plane and applied the animation as jpeg sequence texture. Once this was established, I lined up the plane to my camera and its resolution gate so that it would t perfectly. Making it t meant that I could accurately use it as a reference to animate a uid dynamics emitter. I had already locked the camera settings so I couldnt accidentally move it out of line.
Lining up the plane with the cameras resolution gate

View of the plan applied e with texture and UV Texture Editor W indow

An example of one of the texture frames

With the reference animation set up, I created a Maya Fluid Dynamics emitter in a 2D container. The container was made slightly bigger than the resolution gate, using the Attribute Editor, to aid in the illusion that the smoke was to ll the car, not just the viewed area. I then went into the script editor and made 2 buttons, one was to select only the emitter, (not the emitter plus the container), and the other was to key the translate coordinates of the emitter. This made things so much easier to animate. To match the style of stop-motion with the emitter, I went through every frame and lined up the emitter to the end of the cigarette. In the image, the red lines at the bottom represent the key frames throughout the clip.

Once all of the animation had been keyed, I wanted to play it back to check how well it matched and to see what the smoke looked like. However, due to the nature of the jpeg sequence, it caused a lot of lag. I was satised about the accuracy because I had been through every frame, so I proceeded by turning off the image plane and allowing the uid dynamics emitter to simulate the outcome without the characters in the scene. To test it more accurately I cached the smoke after tweaking a few settings such as the buoyancy, diffusion, density and dissipation and set the frames to batch render. This didnt take very long as its not a heavy piece to render.

Theres not an awful lot to see in this image, but it is an example of one of the rendered tiff frames from the rst smoke test. I took these frames and imported them into Adobe After Effects as a premultiplied - Matted With Colour tiff sequence. This enabled me to just drop it into the composite and everything was transparent, lined up and ready.

Smoke

From the rst set of renders I could see how the combination of CG smoke and stop-motion footage would combine. It worked out just as I had hoped, and so the next stage was tweak and animate the smoke according to the animation. I noticed from the composite that the smoke was too weak, so the rst thing I did was to increase the density slightly. I then noted down where the animation called for changes in the smoke. The rst of the changes, was where the cigarette seemed to start smoking immensely and ll up the car. For this, I key frames the density, dissipation and diffusion to be normal at rst, then gradually build up into a thick fog in the car. The next step needed to show that the smoke was reacting to the car window being opened. I keyed the velocity swirl, velocity noise, turbulence strength and turbulence frequency, as they were, at frame 523, then adjusted the settings to replicate wind gusting around the car and keyed this at frame 525 so it was a sudden change in atmosphere.

n i s e g n a h c y f i n g i s o t s e m a r f y Ke e h t g n i r u d e r atmosphe animation

Velocity & Turbu lence settings keyed

This created the exact effect I was trying to create. I kept these settings for the rest of this scene as the window stayed open.

These are two rendered frames from the second set of smoke renders. This time they show a difference between the atmosphere by having different density, shape and turbulence. The top, grey image, is a demonstration of the car lling up with smoke and the cigarette that would be underneath the point of origin seems to go mad at this point of the animation. The bottom image, shows the atmospheric pressure and turbulence inside the car once the window has been opened. It is clearer in the rest of the frame, where the smoke has dissipated and been blown away, and the continuing smoke is swirling around in very turbulent manner.

After nishing the smoke and checking that it worked perfectly when composited into the scene using After Effects, I moved on to creating the burning embers at the end of the cigarette. 1) I downloaded a high resolution, royalty free image of a cigarette from Google, and imported this into Adobe Photoshop CS5. 2) Using the lasso tool with a feather of 15 pixels, I cut out the end of the cigarette from the image. I no longer needed the rest of the original image so discarded it and kept the cutout on a fresh layer. 3) I inverted the image, which made it a neon blue & white, then opened the colour balance menu to adjust the image to an intense burning red, orange and white colour to represent the end of the cigarette as it glows. This layer was then saved out as a png le so it has transparent surrounding edges to blend smoothly with the scene I composite it into.

1)

2)

3)

With the burning png image imported into after effects, I thought I would try using the built in tracking option to track it to the end of the cigarette. This worked for around 150-200 frames of the animation, where the cigarette didnt move much within the frame. Then the character moved to cough and the tracker kept losing track of the object/pixels . Obviously this isnt a good thing. After a few attempts and tweaking, I decided this wasnt what I wanted, so I went for the more accurate route. This meant animating the png image frame by frame just as I did with the smoke emitter in Maya.

Tracker information

Cigarette e nd - with n o tracker....

Animation Keys

This image shows the information about where the burning image has been key framed into position to match the location of the cigarette end, each dot with a square around it represents a key. There were lots of tiny movements where I had to move the puppets slightly when stop-motion animating so these needed to be tracked to create a convincingly seamless blend between the two medias.

Showing the movement of the cigarette end

s y e K n o i t a m i An

These images demonstrate the amount of movement blocked out to track this cigarette end. There were moments in the animation where it didnt move for a while so it wasnt necessary to put a key on those frames, however, there were a lot, and the majority of the 824 frames did have a position tracked to it, this was necessary to produce accuracy. After the location tracking was completed and I was happy with the result, there were three nal elements that needed tweaking. One was to make the image look like it belonged to the cigarette, so I changed the layer mode to Original Colour Burn which let it pick up the changes in light reecting from the real cigarette end and the burn image altered with this, creating a more interactive movement. The second element was to create the illusion of inhalation from the character. This was done by animating the opacity of the burn layer. The opacity adjustments gave the impression of the cigarette resting, then burning more intensely as the character would breath the air through. One last nal tweak was to duplicate the burn layer, delete the opacity key frames and place the layer above the smoke layer with a constant opacity of 16% so there would always be some kind of ember showing.

s r e b m e d n a e k o m s h t i w e t i s o p m o C l a n i F

Check out more about Mothers Days at: www.skygecko-nat.blogspot.com

You might also like