The color-shifting system: One of the coolest things I’ve ever worked on

It all started when I received an email from Barbara (the professor) containing this video and something along the lines of “can we make the octopus do this?” She was referring to the way the octopus’ change in color looks like a wave washing over its body, the strongest examples being at 0:43 and 2:40. Having Eleanor change color was already developing into a critical element of the film, specifically for aiding the visual communication of how she’s feeling. At this point she simply interpolated from one texture to the next— one phasing in uniformly over the other like clicking and dragging an opacity slider. My initial reaction: “absolutely not," and that was that. The end.

Just kidding. This is the exact level of challenge where I thrive. This felt so far beyond my understanding, borderline impossible, but a tiny spark of an idea kept the dream alive that it could be done.

Enter: the most efficient meeting I have ever been a part of. Cody, Emily, and I jumped into a Zoom where I proceeded to outline exactly how I thought the system could work, drawing the above diagram as I spoke to keep everyone on the same page.

On the left: I learned earlier in the year about layered textures— we were already using one for Eleanor’s current color shift— but I didn’t see anything preventing us from nesting them. I explained this and dubbed it Layered Texture-ception.

In the middle: the user interface. How would the animator be able to go from node 1 to 4 without 2 and 3 getting in the way? I didn’t know how the exact code would be written, but I outlined a system for how the user could interact with the nodes simply by turning two of them “on” and moving between them using a slider. One technical layer deeper, the red numbers labeled on/off in the channel box directly control which branch of Layered Texture-ception Maya will look for the texture in.

On the right: the masks. If somehow we could create a 2D animation of black and white masks that tells the new texture where to show up on top of the old, then link that to our slider, we will have accomplished the wave effect and the process will be fully automatic. The abstraction is maintained for the user to just understand the two active textures and a slider.

I compare this meeting to a round of Olympic table tennis. We rallied this idea back and forth so fast that we could barely keep up with ourselves, clarifying, ironing out the logic and accounting for pitfalls. 45 minutes later we adjourned, each with a task suited to our specific skills. Cody set out to program Layered texture-ception and its interface, Emily to figure out how to animate the masks, and I to design the masks and the underlying octopus textures.

To create the masks and the colors I used the Substance Painter file I’d already built for Eleanor’s neutral color. First I turned every color in the file to pure black— a black mask, 100% old color. Then, with careful review of the reference video, I turned sections of the texture white and exported it frame by frame to create the wave effect until I reached a totally white mask, 100% new color.

One of the things I noticed in the reference video and from up-close footage of an octopus’ chromatophores was that the color shift travels not only over the body like a wave, but originates from each cell-like bump on the octopus’ body. Like pixels! I had outfitted the Substance Painter file with a bunch of features for fine adjustment, one of which specifically allowed for graduating colors originating from the center of each cell that could be used for exactly this purpose. It turned out really nice.

This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on. It looks so cool— Cody, Emily and I freaked out when we saw it in renders for the first time. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this section, it was right in my goldilocks zone of challenge— wildly ambitious, but not impossible. It pushed my current understanding of Maya and Substance Painter to the absolute limit.

While the result was extremely satisfying, my favorite part of working on this was the teamwork. Each of us brought something unique and indispensable to the table. By putting our heads together we were able to accomplish something that none of us could have done alone (except Cody, he could have done it alone but at the expense of his sanity). On top of that, the comradery and support we provided each other as we encountered hurdles was really refreshing and motivating. I’m really looking forward to having more experiences like this in my career.

Modeling in Maya

I co-lead the modeling team for the film and my excitement for modeling never slowed down over the course of the year. I loved receiving a piece of concept art then meticulously constructing and sculpting it Maya, until it matched. I pushed my ability beyond its limit by getting faster, finding shortcuts, and solidifying concepts like quad-drawing and retopology. I also learned how to present my models (and iterations of them) to the people I work for— using rendered turntables to provide a complete picture of them. I really enjoyed thinking about how to optimize the turntable (the placement of the models, the poses they were in, etc.) to best communicate what I had made.

Developing expressions for an octopus

In summer 2020 I took the optional capstone course on facial expressions taught by industry expert Gary Faigin. I learned that since the human face is how we interface with the emotions of others, good facial expressions are a critical driver of your story in film. We spent 5 weeks covering the six cardinal expressions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Surprise, or as I prefer to think of them: the characters from Inside Out and their estranged cousin.

Each came with a rubric outlining THE qualities of each expression across every feature of the human face— every detail from the position of the eyebrows to the amount of sclera (eye white) you could see to exactly how taut the top and bottom lips where. Each facial feature— the brows, the eyes, the mouth and the nose— is a key differentiator between the cardinal expressions and all the mixed emotions between them. My secret strategy for the assignments was taking a picture of my face making the expression, posing it fittingly on the character, reviewing it against the rubric, then banishing the reference image to the depths of my digital trash can, never to be seen again. It was a fascinating class and I did quite well in it.

As the sole student in the capstone who had taken the expressions class, I found myself the lead of a small team tasked with developing facial expressions for Eleanor. The thing about Eleanor is you have… eyes. And nothing else. None of the other critical elements of each expression. Gary, now serving as an advisor for the film, was most displeased with this. But we persevered, using the facial controls to produce poses to the best of our ability. We’d then send them off to Gary, who would return them with feedback and notes about our varying levels of success:

We continued to iterate and refine them. We canned disgust and replaced it with the more inherent octopus emotion of curiosity, since that would be more useful for our story. And since Eleanor never experiences raw anger in the film, we rebranded it as determination. During this process we also came up with the idea of using her color shifts to aid how we convey her emotion. Finally we reached a set of expressions that we thought would get the job done. We uploaded them to the pose library and made resources for the motion team to reference while applying them to the film, including a reference reel and a style guide.

Developing Eleanor’s expressions is one of the most difficult creative challenges I’ve ever undertaken. It felt so open— there genuinely was no right answer and we just had to try things and see what worked. I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish.

Visualizing the shark (regular & nightmare)

I worked as part of a small group of concept artists to conceptualize the antagonist of our film: the shark. The director (professor) gave us the initial parameters that it had to be based on a pacific sleeper shark and that we needed to come up with a normal and nightmare version. Each day I came prepared with a new iteration of each that applied the previous day’s feedback, then took extensive notes on what the director said she wanted to see in the next. Sometimes this was to apply something she liked from another teammate’s drawing. We went through about seven iterations before settling on a design to send down the pipeline.

I am really satisfied with the final design of the shark, it turned out as a mash-up between every member of the team’s design as well as some final additions by the staff. I am also really excited about how much better I got at digital drawing throughout this process.

Mouse bounce - CSE 458

This assignment was more practice with the principles of animation. For this mouse I focused especially on anticipation, squash & stretch, and overlap. I also really enjoyed adding subtleties to the motion that breathe life into the character, like the little shake it does to psych itself up before the jump.