To do this personal project i originally started researching doing a project like this all the way back in January. to not tread over the same ground that project was here: https://bradrobertsonvfxblog.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2022/01/20/term-2-maya-experimentation-with-liminal-space-builds/
When proposed with the idea of another collaborative project, i decided to take a different route and collaborate with people outside of the university. The four people i chose from my group were three friends who i could count on to help with the project, Eric Vonunnius, a Canadian based editor at Publicis in Toronto for the audio, editing and overlays we would need, Andrea Pinilla, a graphic Designer based in London Ontario, and Barbaros Saritas, a Voice Actor based in Hamburg. I originally approached them all in January with the idea of making this project, however it didn’t go a far ways as i was needing to lead the group and ended up getting covid. This ended up being a blessing in disguise as later on i learned we needed to do a collabrative project, and decided to make this project we has wanted to make a reality.
For a small recap of what was discussed in an earlier post, many animations have been appearing over the last couple years of “Analog Horror” on youtube. These videos usually follow a similar format of using video distortion effects and old vhs style formats as both an aesthetic choice and a way to conceal non studio quality animations. Some of these animations are of a very high quality and some are of a bit lower. owing to some animators not having as much experience.
We started with doing a bit of digging into some older liminal space paintings and portraits for information and inspiration. I originally made all of this information into a powerpoint to meet with my professor regarding it for clarity and as a guide for my groupmates and myself when coming back to it.
After this we took a look at a lot of different channels on youtube and in games and saw what they were doing, seeing both what looked realistic and what didn’t as some has poor animation quality due to lack of knowledge with modelling and UVing.
Many of these projects that others have done surrounding liminal spaces usually come from very small errors that result in something not being realistic and makes it obvious that the animated video is CG. A lot of these problems come from unrealistic Camera Zooms or movements looking more static than dynamic, colour grading that looks too unrealistic, walls or surfaces being either too reflective or completely unreflective, the lighting being off, not having any bump maps or having UV’s repeat too much. One of the core problems in making something like liminal spaces is that you’re intentionally making something look surreal or abstract but must look realistic enough to appear to be a real place at the same time. One of the things to focus on was to focus on making geometry and UV’s as realistic as possible, and one of the main things that would need to be done is get realistic lighting along with colour filtering.
After this we discussed a timeframe and how many scenes we would want, as well as the length of the project.
This amount of work was originally much too ambitious, and i would learn both from my professor’s urging to scale the project down and later efforts, that the project needed to be scaled down tremendously.
We then decided on some of the timeframe we wanted as well as formats and overlay ideas, these were all rough concepts that may be changed later but we wanted to get a general idea of a timeframe to base the story off of.
Originally we had intended on seven different scenes. This was later cut down to 4, and then later still cut down to 2, as we realized it would both be too long, take too much time to model, and we wanted too make sure what we did model was of better quality.
After all of this and meeting with my professor to discuss details, i decided to get to work, the main issue was that this semester i wanted to challenge myself to use blender to complete this project, however i had no knowledge of blender, it’s shortcuts or really anything about it.
I started by trying to build the hallways scene, as it was the first scene, and would be the longest and largest scene.
I started with fidgeting around with the controls in blender, learning just simple things like face, edge and vertices selections, as well as placing around shapes.
I didn’t get very far, and started up the next day with trying to build some simple light fixtures and learn extrusions, i struggled a lot with the hotkeys of doing simple things like moving objects around, learning about the different rendering methods, and simply using face selection tools. The blender hotkeys website became an absolutely invaluable source of information at this point along with tutorials.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/keymap/introduction.html
After this i began working on learning extrusions to block out the scene more properly and learning how to do UV’s in blender as it wasn’t as simple as in Maya. This was one of the most difficult things as well as learning lighting, as using emissions wouldn’t work for The renderer that i was using as i was using blender’s Eevee render as opposed to the cycles renderer that was in blender.
The way that i built these hallways was by blocking it out using cubes and then subdiving them, however this was acually making it much harder on myself, i did this as i worried about the UV’s being messed up, however it would have been better to hollow out a cube and then extrude it from there, then use the cube projection UV Fixer to fix these issues.
Once i had an okay mesh to work with and had built it out a bit, i began using the camera shake plug in add on and rendering out some test animations for our editor to put some overlay tests on. There was an issue with this render as i would later find out that things that are hidden are only hidden in viewport and not the renderer.
After this i began working on some small work for both the MCEsher and Mall scenes, trying to create some small flowerpotted areas with some displacement and bump maps to create a realistic look. However i realized that displacement maps were not supported in blender’s eevee render and i would need to change my whole render engine. Usually i would just do this, however as this was made to appear as if it was a lower quality VHS, we decoded to just use higher bump maps.
I started then working with our editor in adjusting the bump values, ambient occlusion levels and focal distances as when our editor would apply VHS Filtering it would usually crush the blacks down on our video, we went back and forth then adjusting the bump values and the filtering.
For now i decided to attempt to start blocking out the final end scene as it would include water and potentially take a long time to render.
Originally doing this i tried the same method i had used with the first hallways section using cubes, however i found this was a nightmare with UV’s, and found later on that using a hollow cube and extruding was much much easier in the long run.
I also started to do things like affecting focal distance and making sure it was using filmic colour management as well as motion blur. for what we referred to as the “sewers” scene, we modelled it after a flooded subway tunnel. For now i blocked it out and got some textures for it, and made sure to sort the UV’s, this proved very difficult at first, but later was solved by making a lot of seams in places and using a lot of seams across the object.
It was at this point i started going a lot more into shading and making sure displacements were proper on both the original hallway scene and the final scene.
I also went about creating bump and height maps in photoshop, though while this would work it would absolutely break photoshop every time i would go about doing it.
I also went about fixing a lot of the geometry that was overlapping, as well as making some doors using booleans, creating some better looking lights using emissions, and adjusting some of the colours for the textures.
This was one of the later tests when we began adjusting some of the motion blur and defocusing.
After this i went about creating doors and doorhandles, however trying to make a keyhole proved difficult, and we decided it would be better to simply just keep it as is, as it was something so miniscule.
after i finished up using texture blending and adding noise to the doors to give it a bit more texture, i also added numbers to each door as we liked the idea of multiple doors with no clear example of which one would lead a proper way out.
While talking about the story, we had Barabaros write our story. The story was in laymans terms that a man goes to a locations his friends called odd, only to become trapped in an unending cycle or corridors with a creature pursuing him. It’s meant to be slightly vague and open to interpretation as it was more important to have our environments then a fully fleshed story.
At this point i had our graphic designer go about creating some maps for each location to try and map around where each camera would go throughout each scene to get a feel for the timing.
I then spent a large amount of time going about creating the hallways map to our designer’s specifications and came about a small issue., eevee would only support a certain amount of of lights per scene, this would mean that i would need to create multiple renders of the scene and delete portions that didnt have lights being shown.
After this i started building the MC Esher scene, at this point in the project, time was running thin and we started to realize we would need to cut things, i went about using booleans and extrusions to attempt to create an mc esher scene, though after having a meeting we decided to cut the scene out entirely and rework the script as it would simply be too much time and we wanted to perfect the scenes we had. I also went about editing some of the textures of the final scene.
During this we also decided to take a look at the mall scene, and decided wether or not this would work in the time we had or if it was also too ambitious, i went about building some small plants as i had prviously done based off of a variaty of different tutorials i had found throughout youtube, using both splines, vertices smoothing and other techniques to make some proper plants that we could tweak and make variations on.
At this point we all made the decision that this would take too long to model, and if we did it may look a lot more fake then the rest of what we had, knowing this we decided on reworking the script. We would keep the two scenes, our hallway scene and our end scene as the two main areas, and we would go with all we had planned for the hallways, as at the moment the hallways scene was very long and we could do a lot more with it.
I then went back to the final scene and started adding things to the floor as well as making a single plane and using that as our water texture. Frankly it would both take too long for a fluid simulation and as it would be fairly compressed and filtered at the end anyways we decided to make an animated water plane instead. I roughly used a subway tutorial for this to figure out how to use the twist function to twist a mesh towards my 3D cursor, however other then that it came down to me simply modelling it based off of what i’d learned through tutorials and researching the blender website.
Now i went about tweaking the lighting and water to interact well together, as well as editing the world’s shading to render in shadows better down the main hallway and make it darker. I also tried using an SVG our artist gave us for the wall portraits, i attempted to make a layered portrait, however as the SVG was many duplicated squares they all came in as seperate splines, i’ve found using SVG’s is very unreliable with blender, and decided to instead use the image i’d been given, create height and normal maps and then use those to create the illusion of 3D Depth as these wouldn’t be looked at in depth.
After this i then went about doing a lot of things, fixing the railings, adding holders to the railings, lining things up properly, and adding in a big cast iron ship hull style door with a wheel well, i tried to make the UV’s on these proper, however at a certain point this would be a dark, vhs filtered red lit hallway and it wouldn’t matter too much. At this point i finished doing the camera animations after a couple hours of work, i then sent this off to our editor and we had our final scene. The run animation was a bit too quick, however we decided we would fix this if we had time as we needed to mainly work on the hallways.
After this i went about adding in the final pieces of the hallways, i added in our scratchy wall drawings making sure the alpha stayed in as an image plane, made a small hole using a boolean so the walls would connect after bridging them together, and then went about doing some lighting animations and camera animations. Originally the hole was meant to have a glass wall, however at the urging of our group i kept it open.
After this it became deleting portions of the map to render in sequences for the lights, and then simply camera animating and rendering. I then sent it off to our editor and he applied our VHS Effects. Below is the final cut
Overall i’m happy with the project and learned a lot regarding blender and animation in general. however i wish i’d had more time to animate and tweak a lot of the camera movements as some can feel a bit stiff or too quick.
I’ve also chosen to show the version without VHS effects as the vhs effects crush a lot of the detail in the final version and i’d like to show some of the detail in the texturing in a separate version just for my blog.