CG Environment

Coraline Production Process

Erika Garay, Emmalie Hall, and Lauren Sudak

Planning

For our scene copy, Erika, Lauren, and I decided to use the above shot from Coraline. At this point in the film, Coraline is bored out of her mind in the new house and can't play outside due to the rain. With a smaller team than most, we felt the smaller population of the scene would suit us best, and the lighting would produce an interesting challenge. To start off, we planned on splitting up the work as fairly as we could given the online format and each member's level of comfort. Lauren was in charge of the lamp, n-cloth simulations, bedside table and chair, rendering, and most importantly the rain effect we would be putting behind the windows. Erika was in charge of the white box, fireplace, door, items on the floor, shelf decorations, and creating a plate for compositing. I was in charge of the room itself, camera placement benches, shelf, windows, bed, light system, animation, lighting, and compositing. We did our best to split up texturing as evenly as we could, but the responsibilities shifted around due to Erika not reasonably being able to access the pipeline. Despite some road blocks along the way, I'm very satisfied with the way this project turned out.

Camera Placement

Erika created a white box for me to play around with before I started modeling so I would be able to place our camera and proxy models for scale. I had to mess with the scaling and placement of a lot of the objects to get the desired look, but I am eternally grateful to her for blocking this out for me. In order to achieve a comparable perspective to the reference, I had to find a good balance between changing camera parameters and warping the proportions and angles of the geometries themselves. From close observations of Burton's scene, there is no realistic way that the wide shot we see could have been created purely from camera manipulation, and certain objects set dressing the scene do not follow proper two-point perspective. Take the bed posts, for example. In this shot, the bed posts closest to the audience are actually shorter than the ones further away. These small details tipped me off to the idea that this shot must have had its own separate environment almost identical to the others used. I was eventually able to reach a happy medium through this observation and adjustment method; while it isn't perfect, I believe I've successfully captured the spirit.

Modeling

To start, I used the edited white box as an anchor point for where my geometries would be placed. Using a simple plane, I lined it up with the left wall and extruded the edge outward to follow each major wall until I had achieved the proper room profile (from a top-down view, a slight trapezoid with an octagon cut out). After this, I used the multi-cut tool to find approximate sizes for each indentation (left wall nook, doorway, shelf cubbies) and extruded those faces inward. Using the same method, I was able to delete the faces of the windows in preparation for the frames. The floor and ceiling were made with simple planes, the nook piece being extruded from one edge. To create the bed, I started by drawing NURBS curves for a bed post and revolving that curved four times. Each NURBS surface was then manipulated to match the warped perspective. For the bed frame, box spring, and mattress, I started with simple cubes and added edge loops as I felt fit to allow the subdivided models to look soft. The edges of the mattress were extruded outward to achieve the folded stitch look. For the pillow, I used a similar method, only extruding the faces inward around the edges. The light system was relatively simple, just a few cylinders I sized and added edge loops to, and in the case of the wire, extruded many times in a wavy manner. The lightbulb is made from a cylinder as well, and the finished shape was duplicated and reversed to make a single glass bulb just in case I needed to add a glass material to it.

More Modeling

At this point in the modeling phase I decided to redo the walls, as my method before was entirely too messy and added tens of thousands of faces to our poly count. This time I followed the first model I created and reused my old method up to the point of having created all my cut-outs and extrusions. However, instead of using the multi-cut tool to create edge loops and subdividing, I created simple bevels along the appropriate edges. This brought my poly-count down for the walls down from 45,000 to 700, which was a massive improvement. For the ceiling, I also remade it, using two separate geometries instead of just one and beveling the nook piece. Moving on, I imported Erika's door model so I could have a direct comparison for the trim, windows, and benches, which all share the same material composition. For the windows I duplicated the door frame (with Erika's permission, of course) and manipulated the geometries to be closer to the reference window frames. I duplicated the top piece twice, putting one on the bottom and stretching the other to place in the middle. I initially modeled each window's glass, but later decided to get rid of them as the glass is not super noticeable in the reference, and adding any manipulations would be easier to deal with in post-production. The benches were created with a simple cube that was extruded at 45 degree increments. Once the placement of the simple block-in was complete, I extruded the top and bottom faces outward and the side faces inward, then beveled everything. Finally, the trim. I used a similar method to the benches, but had to ensure my extrusions only affected certain faces in the x direction, so I had to spend a lot of time selecting the appropriate ones. Once this was done, of course, I beveled everything. This finished my modeling process by the end of the first week.

Substance Texturing

Prior to transferring everything onto the pipeline I created for our team, I created substance designer textures from scratch for all of our big-ticket items: floor, walls, ceiling, bedding, and fireplace. For the walls, I studied the pattern of the wallpaper in the reference and drew this curve in photoshop, along with a simple curved line. Both images were imported into the substance designer file as bitmaps and plugged into a tile generator, which gave slight randomness to the placement, overlap, and luminance of each shape. Then I created a gradient picker map to get the two colors, and applied a moisture map into the roughness channel with a levels adjustment for roughness variations. For the bricks and tile, I created a tile generator with "brick" as the base shape and played with the settings so I could get the proper offsets. Then a second tile generator with an inverted grayscale was created to make the effect of the mortar. Color gradients were heavily dependent on the blend nodes of different noise maps plugged in with different blending methods (such as multiply, soft light, overlay, etc). These maps were also often used for the normal maps to get the bumps to line up. For the floor, I used a similar method, except I brought my y amount down to one and varied the spacing between planks ever so slightly. For roughness maps I tried to ensure all three of these textures had inverted grayscale to allow the crevasses to be rougher than the overlying planks. The rock ceiling was not a huge focus for me as it is not seen very much, so I just used a simple noise map plugged into the color, normal, and roughness channels, playing with the levels until I reached the desired look.

Renderman Texturing

Due to the fact that one team member lives two hours away and the other was working on the rain effect, I decided to create the Renderman-specific textures myself inside the pipeline scene. Not all of them are depicted in the screenshot below, unfortunately, but I will walk through a bulk of the process. For all of these I chose the closest looking Renderman material from the preset browser and changed the parameters in order to get the closest approximation. For the door, trim, and benches, I used a pearl_paint node, changed the color to green, and upped the roughness. For the bed frame and chair, I did the same with a cherry_wood node. The green bin and frog were made with a green_jasper node with a higher roughness. The furnace was made with various metals and leathers to emulate the wires and vents, with simple paint nodes for the knob and switch. Various other small pieces, such as the flower on the chair and the facial features on the squid, were made with simple color-adjusted paint, plastic, and fabric materials. The table was the most complex, as I had to use a grainy_wood node and change the color parameters in a very complex node system, adjusting colors, grain, and spread here and there until I achieved my desired effect. The lamp was made with an inner white_fabric node and an outer blue_fabric with the edge and face colors shifted to add depth. The metal was made of an aluminum_bronze node with the saturation turned down and the roughness turned up. Connecting each substance map was a little tedious, but I made sure to keep all of my nodes clearly labeled for future reference.

Lighting Test

I was a bit worried that the shape projection was going to be a difficult effect to pull off, so I did a couple tests at home the night before lighting the scene. It was surprisingly easy to pull off. I placed a sphere light inside the lamp model and turned up the intensity and exposure, placing all the items close to a couple planes. In order for light to bounce off the inside of the lamp as well, I had to duplicate and reverse the surface of the paper. After fiddling with the parameters for about ten minutes I found out that turning up the emission focus to 100 allowed me to create pretty clear shapes on the wall. In practice this meant that shapes far away would still be a little blurry and very large, but this is physically accurate nonetheless.

Lighting

The lighting system is deceptively complex in order to create a relatively low-light scenario. What may look like one light emitting several rays in all directions actually required the creation of almost a dozen lights each focusing on particular spots. I created a set of key lights (colored key, lamp light, lightbulb, and bed key), three subtle fill lights, and several specific spotlights for the floor, ceiling, nook, and bedside. Each has a slightly varied color to create a fullness and stable warmth. Having the sphere lights inside the lamp interact with the rest of the lighting system was interesting, as the brighter  the scene became, the less intense the lights became on the walls. Having to raise the exposure so much started to make the inside of the lamp look like the surface of the sun, so I decided to play with light-linking and turn off the lamp light for the inside paper. Then I duplicated the sphere light and turned down the intensity and exposure to allow a more subtle lighting situation. I also used light linking on the floor and bedside table to keep all of the fill lights from affecting them, as they  have certain areas that must be left mostly in darkness. I was having a bit of trouble with light linking the bedside table initially, as something sort of glitched out in the viewport and made it hard to tell if the linking actually worked. After discussing with Jorge, I decided to follow his advice and check to make sure that this was not just an issue with my viewport (i.e. does it at least show up properly in my render), make sure there were no overlaps between light-centric and object-centric linking, and finally to see if duplicating said object would, in a sense, reset my light linking so I could start over if nothing else would work. This was thoroughly helpful advice that I will be carrying forward in future lighting endeavors as a newly required skill in my area of focus.

Animation

The decisions and effort regarding animation for this project was fairly low-maintenance, as we just had to key the lamp spinning and the camera rotating. We did not want the turning of the lamp to be too fast as we did not want it to be distracting, but we wanted it to be noticeable. After playing with some degree increments, I settled on turning the lamp 45 degrees at a constant rate over the full five seconds. This allowed the shapes to make their way along the walls enough to be interesting but not so much that it would take your attention away from the rain effect entirely. For cameral motion, I did not want anything too crazy, but I felt a small swivel from right to left might add a small level of intrigue. I rotated the camera one degree around the y-axis over the course of five seconds with a spline curve to allow easing in and out. I did not want more than this going on, artistically, as it would feel distracting from our key motions. And having the focus shift slightly from the right to the left allows viewers to be guided from one side of the room to the other, creating a sort of dialogue between our lamp and the rain.

Compositing

For compositing I asked Erika to create a painting in photoshop of an overcast sky that we could use as a simple plate behind the rain layer. I also asked if she could create a small photoshop layer for the tiny god rays emanating from the light bulb in the center of the room. Taking these two layers and the two rendered batches, I used after effects to composite. The order was plate, rain, bedroom, and god rays. The plate and rain were scaled to match the window openings, and both were blurred slightly to create a sense of distance and atmosphere. The god rays were keyed to follow the lightbulb over the five seconds, and I played with the opacity and HSL to better match my lighting. I created one extra layer between the inside and outside to emulate ever-so-slightly foggy windows, and then the project was comped. I sent my project off to adobe media encoder to render, and the final product was completed (shown below). This was a thoroughly enjoyable project that yielded an incredible product for me to add to my portfolio and show to my friends and family, so I appreciate the opportunity and feedback from Andre Thomas greatly, and I look forward to creating more under him.