Hair and water

Support Modeling
1

Hello, I first had a hard time to get registered since I’m not the only Bart in this forum… :slight_smile: . But I definatly wanted to post my question here. Since long I want to make an animation movie of a book I’ve written quite some time ago…
Thank god I found Blender…:stuck_out_tongue: …
But like everyone, I’ve got some questions. Since I’m thinking drawing, dreaming, writing so long about my movie, I’ve got a pretty detailed idea of what it should become.
Anyhow, I just started, doing is the best way in learning. Now I’ve almost come to the point I can start adding more detail to the character, I came up with a problem.
In the story she will swim in the ocean, and a storm will come up. She will almost drown, and that moment is a very important moment. She will have to struggle for her life, fighting against the water. Thinking about that I had this image of her head just above the water, shaking her head, her hair waving up in the wind, and drops of water detaching from her face and hair… Now this would be a close-up of her head, and I want see the drops of water detaching from her hair.

I think it’s quite a challenge to let this animation work. I’ll need detailed animatable hair, and waterdrops releasing from her skin and hair. I’ve read quite some tutorials about hair-design, using particles… or dupliverts…
The way I think it could work is this: making the hair in dupliverts, animating the scene, using forcefields to let the hair swing around, then turn the actions of the forcefields into ipo’s, converting the dupliverts to real, editable objects, and use these as emitters of particles that would produce the waterdrops…

Is my way of thinking about it correct? All sugestions are welcome…

Thanks,
Bartje

2

You mite want to check out the specail fetures on the Incredables DVD. Hair is real hard. Water is Hard. Wet hair is nuts. I would probably avoid using the fluid sim, but you mite get it too work. Otherwise use meshes with shape/vertex keys particles (metaballs are slow but quite good at “drops”) etc. With the new hair system you can animate (i think) the guides.

But getting hair to look wet. Someone else will have to answer that.

delt0r… my 2c or really only 0.5c worth

3

Thanks for the comment, delt0r. I haven’t been thinking about the fluid sim yet. I sure wouldn’t use it to make the waterdrops flying away from the face and hair, because I would use particles for that… I don’t even know if particels can be used together with fluid simulation… But the fluid simulation, together with the necessary force-fields, could be verry usefull for making the waves…

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Sounds like a good scene… but insanely hard is right. You’re doing good with your planning. Even more planning is key.

You might want to think about how to get the same atmosphere without having to actually render water flung off wet hair. If you really want to do it though, go for it. ASAIK, it would be a first!

What style do you want? I.e., what level of realism?

Anyway, some suggestions.

Its night right? So its dark. Don’t waste model and render time on anything if you can’t see it. Suggest. Use low-level/sudden/spot lights to help. If there’s an intermittent light that’s always good, eg lightning, spotlight, lighthouse. The darker scenes can be rendered a lot faster (if you’re careful)

Wet hair is dark and will be more shiny than dry, how much depends on how wet it is, and probably high fresnel values. Look for some velvet tutorials - I bet that would be close enough.

Maybe “shoot” with a layered approach - mostly have water spraying in front & behind at a low angle so you can’t tell where the spray is, instead of right on her. Maybe even composite it. Works in the movies. Just have a little bouncing off her face maybe.

For the near drowning scene, maybe something like…

Above water shot: spray, damp head, wave goes over (slight backspray when it hits her

cut to:
Below-water shot: mostly silhouette, hair spread in or under the water

cut to:
Above water: her head popping up again with water(particles) streaming down (basically a number of small waterfalls). As for throwing her hair around, nice visual, but don’t think she’d be wasting time nor energy flinging her hair around, she wants AIR.

Do it a couple of times - the more angles and shots and the faster the cuts between shots the better - more cuts is more “frantic”. And along those lines, the closer the camera gets, the more “emotional” it will seem.

Just like in real-life movies, cheat by using multiple camera angles to record the same event and show them as if they were sequential in time! :slight_smile: So start further way and progressively zoom in (from different angles) to show how she’s getting more frantic.

Of course, if she gets knocked out, the standard method would be to the cuts build up in in speed and intensity (along with the sound/music), have one last wave wash over, cut to a longer view as the wave collapses or rolls on, hold for a few beats and then fade to black and silence.

5

Ah that reminds me, in the incredibles, in the story they were going to have the people underwater, with all the hair floating around. However, the script writers decided to ditch it and the “great monster of pixar” sighed huge sigh of relief =D. Even the people at pixar would find it difficult to animate hair like that it seems =)

But who knows? Maybe blender can do things that Maya can’t? =P

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I think some ppl need to realize that pixar and co make movies with 2 teams. One artistic team and one programmer team (this is a lot of people all with decent salary). The programmers Write the code that does this stuff while thay are making the movie. They don’t buy off the self products (but you buy theres). It takes the teams month/years to create these tools and don’t think that they are artist friendly. The interface is often talking to the programer looking and the result and then talking to the programer again.

Water, hair and the like is HARD.

But clever people can find clever solutions. aka Cog with oceans

delt0r

7

Thanx for the replies, and surely the tips from dgebel. I’m sure they’ll be very usefull. It won’t be in the night though. She’ll go for a swim in the morning, but the storm will come up, and darken the sun. So it will be dark indeed. I now already know I’ll need some advice on how to make the clouds coming up, the lightning etc… The ideas on using short shots of her under water, and above water, is indeed a very good idea. I’ll definatly use it. On how to produce the waterdrops releasing from the hairstrands I’m not sure yet… I’ll probably have to model a different object for that, we’ll see. The music is a different thing indeed, and can be used to build up the tension. I’m a musician, so I already have a prety good idea on how it will sound like. She’ll faint, and be saved after the storm by some kids that will drag her onto the beach. The storm is caused by a huge, fire, in the north of this imaginary world. It devours everything alive when it passes. But one thing at a time… lol, first things first, but planning is needed to keep every action I want possible. I don’t want to remodel time and time again, because I haven’t thought of something that I’ll definatly need.

Sorry my reply is a bit late, but I’m in the middle of exams…

Greets,
Bartje

8

A few more suggestions - because it sounds like you’re planning on doing a good, full job on your story.

There are a number cloud and lightning tutorials and plugins around various places, just search.
One thing you mentioned, you have some drawings. Strongly recommend you do a full storyboard (like a comic). Search on that too. The key is to show motion, and new frame every time you have a new camera angle.
You also will want to look up “animatic” or a “pre-viz” (pre-visualization - although this is usually a term in live movies).
A low-polygon version of models and a low-resolution/texture/etc version of the animation is used to get all the timing and make sure the story works. Try to get the full armature working if you can, so you don’t have to go back for that either. You might be able to get away without a low-res character, and just use the rig, depending on what you need.

Then you sub in your full-poly model & full-size textures & renderings. Probably in layers and composite after that.
If there’s a lot of human action, you might look at the BVH import script, which loads motion files from various programs. Central Source I think, has a slew of sample BVH files.
Get the Elephant Dream downloads - I’m sure there’s lots of info & tips.
Also look for http://www.digipuppet.com/ The guy has/had a large number of articles about doing a thorough job of computer-animating stories, though I don’t think he’s discovered Blender yet :slight_smile: and you can download lower resolution PDFs. I think you can order older back issues as well.

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thanx man…yes, I really want to do it as good and professional as possible, and because I have to, with as less cost as possible… lol… the biggest problem is actually time…

I’ve got the first scene in the story drawn out in a storyboard. My goal is to make this first scene, to get the routine in using blender and painting programs, in every aspect of it… so I don’t have to worry about practical techniques… and when I’ve finished that part, I already have a result…indeed… low polly trial would be very interesting…

Thanx for the tips…

10

Time? What’s that? :rolleyes:

I’ve got the first scene in the story drawn out in a storyboard. My goal is to make this first scene, to get the routine in using blender and painting programs, in every aspect of it… so I don’t have to worry about practical techniques… and when I’ve finished that part, I already have a result…indeed… low polly trial would be very interesting…

Thanx for the tips…

You’re welcome, I hope its of use!

One other suggestion. You said you just started on here, and apparently new to Blender. Do you have much graphic or any other software experience? If this is basically your first movie and/or 3d project… take it easy. You might want to try doing it as a “picture book”, i.e. still pictures, rather than a movie to start with. An animation is much more difficult to get right, and if you are pressed for time, you may be disappointed with your results.

Especially if you’ve never done 3d graphics before, work on ONE sample scene and use the forums here for feedback. You may decide its easier to do it live, by hand drawing or in 2d. Depending on your expectations, you may be right! :cool:

11

Another thing that could make your life easier with this - - -

DON’T go for photo-realism.

I’m not sure what the drawings in your book look like, but by attempting to render the animation in watercolour or line-drawing or block-colour or some more obviously CGI stylisation might make rendering the scene easier and is just as valid for a CGI short, prehapse making the film more interesting. You may be able to mix in 2D animation for some section that is very hard to do in 3D - hair underwater for instance?

Feel free to tell me to shut up as I’m missing the point.

12

I think the easiest way of doing a scene like that would be to get some dirt on Pixar or Blue Sky Studios then blackmail them into doing the scene for you.

I agree with delt0r and dgebel that you need to have realistic expectations in what you can achieve. For example one person and blender probably can’t compete with Maya, PRRenderman, Real Flow and a team of animators and MEL scripters. That doesn’t mean you need all that to make movies though. You just need to be aware of your limitations and find ways to work with them which is pretty much what yogyog is suggesting.

13

verry funny… nabeshin,

thanx for your comments, all of you guys.
so far I got a lot of tips on how to avoid having to model the scene I want, from drawing by hand, using ‘look a like’ scenes, to blackmailing people who could do it… lol, but none on how to accually do it…

thanx anyway… I’ll wait for it a bit, it will take some time until I get to that scene anyway… maybe then I’ll have some more ideas on how to solve it.

and to let some people who’ve asked to know: I do have some experience in 3d, but never made a thing that I found good enough to see it as ‘finished’, and never made a real animation, apart of some things used for special effects. I’ve tried maya before, but with the learning edition one can’t make something ‘officially’, because of the watermark problem… and the program is way out of my budget. As far as I see, blender only misses one element, and that is something that you could compare with ‘maya-live’, to mix 3d modeled elements into an existing video.
Ofcourse the paint-fx of maya is very interesting, but these are things that can be achieved in blender too, with some python-scripting, which I want to learn too.

My mind is set… I’ll stick to blender… :slight_smile:

1 Like
14

Getting experienced in Blender before you get to the hair/water part is imperative because you’ll not be able to handle it as well as you want otherwise.

If you want some specific suggestions… just do the hair tutorials.

There’s several methods - you may want to use a several solid meshes normally to save time, but switch to a particle-based one when she’s floating.

While she’s in the water, don’t bend the hair down from gravity if she’s trying to float or moving down, spray it out and up if she’s going down - that’s why you need particles. If she’s moving up or out of the water, lay the hair flat. You need to pose all this, remember. At least now you can use are particle guides for this. This will be clearest to the viewer of course, if they’ve already noticed her hair is not usually a completely straight style.
And don’t make the hair too long, it will really slow everything down and make the animation more difficult.

And I agree - don’t go for photo-real on your first project. I’d suggest starting another WIP thread for your basic character. Get most of the low-poly modelling (at least) out of the way and get to your animic to get the story & timing nailed. Then you can see how much detail you need.

15

You said it right bro! I am also trying to achieve similar kind of wet hair effect in a bathroom shower scene. Don’t know how to achieve it quite convincingly. I also have animation in my scene. The girl runs her fingers on the hair as it get wet…God…I have done mostly NPR and freestyle renders so its a Herculean task for me. Plz share your progress as you go.

16

You’ll make your like easier if you manage to avoid the transition between underwater and overwater. That way underwater hair can be particle hair with no gravity, and overwater hair can be a mesh - no physics - it’s plastered to her shoulders so it basically shares her rig Her hair will have cumped together at this point, so that will work ok.

Storybarding the whole thing will help a lot - you may need a different solution in each shot.