"An astronaut accidentally drifts into deep space. Will his subconscious self be strong enough to survive?"
Astroman (2018) is a short movie project for the master course Computer Animation at Utrecht University. We created the movie in a group of five (also known as Team 4), where I was mostly responsible for post-production stuff that includes editing up until rendering. The movie project goal was to familiarize the team with industrial 3D motion capture and animation techniques. Most of the 3D models were free assets that can be easily obtained from the internet.
The motion capture lab utilized for the movie uses a Vicon Blade system, able to capture humanoid and rigid object movement but cannot capture facial expression. We used one actor during motion capture and streamed the capture data directly from Vicon Blade onto a rigged 3D model inside Autodesk MotionBuilder.
During motion capture, we used Autodesk MotionBuilder to record the streamed motion data to the rigged 3D model. After we finished recording, my mission was to clean-up and smoothen jagged or missing animation data using interpolation. I also modified some animation data to ensure the natural movement of the character.
Blender was used to create, modify, and convert some 3D models. An example in this movie is the sandstorm, which was created from a cylinder and animated by fiddling the model modifiers using random numbers over time.
The last scene in the movie used Autodesk 3ds Max for manually animating the woman's 3D model frame by frame as the model did not have any motion capture data.
Our team used Autodesk Maya for compositing inside the 3D environment, to combine the animated characters and dozens of static models into a wholesome scene. Each scene was carefully crafted by accurately placing the assets and precisely animating the camera movements so that they look best on screen. This whole process of compositing the scenes in Maya took the most time of the project.
The movie was entirely rendered using a global illumination rendering engine. To speed things up by rendering simultaneously, we set up a small render farm by using our team's personal computers and giving each remote access. By using four computers in parallel, the whole movie took a couple of weeks to render, with each scene taking almost half a day to finish.
All the rendered scenes were imported into Adobe After Effects to give them additional visual effects. The effects include the depth of field and particle effects using a 3D particle system by utilizing the z-buffer. Applying the effects in Maya or 3ds Max was not viable as the team did not have a powerful enough machine to render the scenes in time.
Final editing and color grading were done in Adobe Premiere Pro with the sounds edited in Adobe Audition. This last stage ensures that the movie scenes were well-timed and the sounds had the correct gain levels across the whole timeline.
