Iconic work analysis (Avatar)

A work that has visually inspired me is the movie avatar by James Cameron (2009). (Imdb, 2015) The movie illustrates an alien world Pandora where most of the planet's land is covered in jungle. What makes this jungle unique is that while the environment may imitate a jungle here on earth the movie also brings in elements of alien plants and animals of there own design. Fascinating thing about this movie is that it managed to avoid the uncanny valley even though the movie was rendered photoreal and tried to depict allot of fictional plants. To achieve the atmosphere of the film there was a lot of study that went into botany and animals to achieve both a good aesthetic and authentic design. While the environment may look appealing it also needs believability for immersion.
A good example is how the direhorse breaths. (Wikiacom, 2015) The movie revelas a shot of the direhorse breathing through its neck when Jake Sully is learning how to ride the horse.

A lot of the functionality was considered to evade the uncanny valley. When animating that shot they had to consider the muscle deformation of the neck to make it look like the holes swallowed and exhaled air. Instead of quadrupeds a lot of the ground animals contain 6 legs instead of 4 making these creatures more alien but they still had to consider muscle anatomy when animating They even had to construct their own muscles for the rig.

This movie was also a milestone in vfx technology. (Discovery, 2010) infact james cameron used this movie as a project to drive and advance the technology in computer graphics. In 1995 James earlier brought this to the vfx studios and the film was too demanding but in 2005 he saw how technology was developing to achieve specific goals in film such as Titanic and Terminator so he decided to use this project as a drive to further develop vfx.

There is a special plant in the movie called the heicoradium spirale. (Pandorapedia, 2015) This plant will retract and coil up once touched. The reference explains that it is to avoid being eaten by herbivores but the movie doesn’t describe why it retracts. This shot only tells us there are foreign plants in that world. A botanist who did research for the film Jodie Holt (Holt, 2015) says that ‘there is a lot of real science that accompanies this movie.’ A lot of the research she provided was used by the artists.

The movie also referenced a Neolithic culture for the aliens both in design and character. Similar to the aboriginal and torres strait islander culture the designs of the aliens tools, weapons and clothing are an adaptation of their traditional assets.

As a 3D artist myself I aim to go photoreal with the art pieces I create. whether it be fictional or nonfictional my goal is to make my art believable. Looking at this movie it takes a lot of study and research to develop a believable imagination and for me that is part of the joy of creating photoreal assets. Combining research from different areas to create something beautiful and believable.


Imdb. (2015). IMDb. Retrieved 18 December, 2015, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/



Wikiacom. (2015). Avatar Wiki. Retrieved 18 December, 2015, from http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Operculum



Pandorapedia. (2015). Pandorapediacom. Retrieved 18 December, 2015, from https://www.pandorapedia.com/flora/herbaceous/helicoradium_spirale
Discovery. (2010). Youtube. Retrieved 20 December, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt-XCDjyDNs



Holt, J.H. (2015). YouTube. Retrieved 19 December, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-l9fuumJ8w

Reflective response

This trimester was very tough for me. Being exposed to a major group project, I learned the seriousness of putting in your weight and team effort. The project will only come together if everyone is putting in honest hours into the project.

At the beginning of the project in weeks three and four I started modelling the character and wasn't taking it very seriously. It was by the beginning of week five I submitted a sub standard mesh to the team that didn’t really follow the art style of the characters model sheets. What made it worse was that there were technical issues were it complained about faces with zero geometry area and turning on subD preview crashed maya. This made it difficult to skin the character and so the only thing the team was able to do was create the skeleton of the mesh without skinning it. My team then gave me another job and I thought that this would be the chance to redeem myself but sadly there were technical issues again and it was my fault. I created 12 blendshapes sculpting different facial poses in zbrush for the team to use. Having deleted 1 edge loop on 8 of the blendshapes screwed us over and so I learned that my actions and participation had a major impact on the team.

It's fair to say that by week 6 I lost allot of ‘cool points’ from the team.

Week 7 I had the KPI meeting and the producer gave me the task of remodeling the character and to submit it by next Wednesday(week 8). The mesh had to show a stronger relationship with the characters model sheets and had to contain better topology then the last mesh. It also needed more cloth tapering. To be safe I modeled without subD preview and only work with soft/hard edges. If the meshes requirements were not delivered by Wednesday week 8 then I was going to be fired by the executive producer.What I did to save myself was do some research on low poly characters specifically characters who had similar shirts and share with everyone on slack my plan of attack. I made sure I was having proper communication with the director while working on this to lock in any decisions on its aesthetic. (His micromanaging saved me and I thank him for that)

The mistake I made with my first character was that I did minimal research on low poly characters and there was a lack of testing. This is was also the first time I came across the issues of zera face area and subD preview crashing maya. I only thought of these issues as trivial and I didn’t consider how it would effect my teammates. Even when I completed the blendshapes I didn’t bother to test each one before handing them over.

Whenever modelling or doing any kind of 3D art I need to know what the assets I create are going to be used for. Not every 3D asset I create is going to be used as still life. There will be assets I create which will be animated and I need to make sure everything works for them, outliner is clean and there are no technical issues before handing over.Later down the track of the major project I slowly started gaining back my cool points as I was developing still assets in zbrush for my team to implement into their scenes. Not all the zbrush assets I made were used in the short film but I had a lot of fun learning zbrush and finding out good methodologies to be used later which is what happened. Having shown my team my research and development in zbrush they gave me the responsibility of sculpting a monster for one of the scenes. So I did a base low poly sculpt in zbrush and then imported the mesh to mudbox for texturing. It was actually the texturing in mudbox which made it more detailed because I painted bump map onto the sculpt. 

Throughout this project I did many different tasks and half the tasks I did were outside my speciality. I was texturing, Base matte painting (which I struggled in) and compositing. I was glad to be an extra pairs of hands for areas that weren’t my speciality. We didn’t have much time left so I did what I could to help.

As a 3D artist I am aiming for photoreal rendering in my future career so I’d be looking at Ray Tracing instead of NPR. But this trimester I had to work with a project that was not my style and we were using npr rendering and this is not the field I’m aiming for. Even though this project was not my style I still had a job to do and I made sure I did what I could to not only to redeem myself but to also have initiative helping produce something beautiful for the team. When working in studios I don’t doubt I will be asked to do tasks that are outside my of department or even my comfort zone.

Nuke Compositing

I'm a newbie to nuke composoting. Allot of my knowledge about composoting mainly comes from after effects, Photoshop and adobe premier. I do have a little past experience on composoting in nuke but ever since Sunday (2 days ago) I started to take it seriously seeing as I was put on the job of composoting scene 2. I have some idea of what to do with the basics but I still had to research and experiment with the nodes to progress with composoting the scene. The thing that took up most of the time was having to learn how to navigate nuke and be able to work with what I've got.

Here I Animated the mattes with transform nodes. Separately animating the foreground and overall canvas. I never got to animating the background matte. The curve editor and motion path I used to my advantage to construct a neat animation. Using the playblast as a reference I am eyeballing and making the mattes move around similar to the playblasts.

There was an issue with roto so what I had to do was go in photoshop and cutout a specific part of the matte to mask out the character. Seeing as the research for roto was taking so long and I had a limited amount of time this was the best solution I could use.

Allot of the nodes I am figuring out and I am sure there are better ways of using these nodes but due to limited time I am just making sure it looks right in the viewer screen.

Matte painting

Being an extra pair of hands on the matte painting stage. I did base mattes for scenes 3 and 4. Nothing too complex. Just using multiple photoshop filters(Mainly the cutout and pallet knife filter) and some digital painting to make the whole matte look cartoony. The refinements were given to the art director.

Out of all basic work I did in shots, this shot was my most favourite shot to paint.
For the textures I used the warp transform tool to give the textures some form and to mimick the direction of the topology in the scene.





Even though matte painting or texturing wasn't in my profesion I was glad to do them anyway. As a 3D artist my skills shouldn't just be aimed at 3D modelling, sculpting or unwrapping. I should be able to assist in areas of being a 3D artist so that would include. Knowledge on lighting and rendering, Able to do some digital painting and a good ability to navigate through Photoshop.