May 12, 2017

The Beautiful Side of "Ugly": How Film Incorporated Errors and Happy Accidents into CG?

Nikita Diakle's short film "Ugly" is called that for a reason. This experimental animated film about a Native American chief and a cat named Ugly is intentionally made with "flawed" dynamics.

That approach to simulation gave "Ugly" its distinctive look. There were also errors and happy accidents that Germany-based Diakur took advantage of during production. The film will be screened at Animafest Zagreb this June after a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2015. [The film was also produced with the support of the German Federal Film Office and Cartoon Brew.]

To learn more about how Diakle produced this film, we asked him how he arrived at the "ugly" treatment from a technical point of view, what some of the more unusual approaches to animation were, and how he obtained the best, or even the worst, errors and they used?

Indeed, at least that's what Diakle and his team call it. The first name that came to mind was "Ugly Dynamics". Probably because we couldn't find anything better than the title of our film plus 'dynamics,' which is the definition of a 3D package simulation," Dierkle said.

Dierker added, "Looking at the results, 'Ugly Dynamics' actually fits, but I think the most appropriate name is 'Interactive Animation. There is an interaction between the animator and the animated object or character. It's like the character really has a say in the outcome and the animator has to work with it. It's similar to a director having to work with actors on a live-action film set."

The ugly side of "ugly dynamics" arose from a technical flaw in the simulation process (tuned into the software.) Cinema 4D was the platform of choice to make it work. the manufacturer of Cinema 4D, Maxon Inc. Dierker, who was also a beta tester for Maxon, the manufacturer of Cinema 4D, says, "It helped us get things done without being forced to deal with unnecessary details."

Ugly's characters are ragdolls. They were built with connected dynamic body parts that can collide with their environment. When a character is dynamically set up and a scene is acted out, the character falls to the floor. Dierker and his collaborators jumped on this aspect of the simulation and tried a typical ragdoll experiment where, for example, the character falls down a flight of stairs.

But contrary to what they saw on YouTube, Cinema 4D's tuned simulation engine caused their test character to get stuck in the middle of the stairs, first trembling and then exploding into the air. Says Dierker, "It was realistic in one time frame, busted in another, and we felt it fit our concept and story pretty well."

Still, the character had to interact with other objects. So the team created controls that were effectively connected to parts of the ragdoll's body by simulated threads. The movements of those controls could then be keyframed or recorded to simulate specific actions. Says Dierker, "It took a couple of months to get practical results, but the more we got used to it, the better and better it worked."

It wasn't just the quirky ragdoll animation that was quirky in the final look and feel of "Ugly. It also came from the deliberate and incomplete approach to texturing and camera projection. Here, the camera projection was made to look normal from one angle, but broken from another.

"Again," Diacre said, "it fit the context and saved time. We took pictures of the environment and objects that needed to be built and modeled everything from the exact angle from which they were taken. Then we used video textures for dynamic effects of particles like smoke, fire, and water."

Errors and totally incorrect images were a major part of the project. For example, Diakur used a lot of lens flare and even more glitching. The cloth glitch in the carousel scene resulted from an accidental error caused by using the wrong settings. It is in the film, however, and was later reused in other scenes. In another sequence, a giraffe explodes, which was both accidental and intentional. Once mastered, the same effect was used to disassemble other animals.

"And one Cinema 4D beta had a hair bug that I really liked. Maxon fixed it right away, but I still have that version to reproduce, just in case."

During the animation, the team plugged in a Sony PlayStation 2 controller to control several of the vehicles, especially the car and drone that appear in the film. However, they found that they could also rely on the PS2 controller for more complex setups, such as a tornado with flying leaves and plastic bags.

"There are so many settings that need to be adjusted quickly that it's a little difficult to use just the mouse," Diakle explained.

In one scene, Ugly the cat is chased by three dogs while he is tied to a car with a rope. Dierker quickly realized that this would be a complex setting with many unpredictable variables. In fact, he says, "The computer calculations here were so complex that the shot could have unfolded very differently from one take to the next."

As originally storyboarded, the chase included shots of a rope ripping, a cat flying through the air, and a dog hitting him. However, after several simulations of this event, the results were always different, and the dogs never collided as expected (because Ugly always landed in a different place).

"To increase the likelihood of a collision, we created about 50 dogs and spread them out in space. But still we had no luck. So, as in the first experiment, we had to concentrate on the parts that worked. Thus, we simulated the scene in separate shots and cut them into a single sequence. As a byproduct, we got a lot of behind-the-scenes footage that didn't make it into the final film."

Thus, the appeal of "Ugly" is that it is a film that seems to have come about spontaneously (and indeed it does), and while its crazy action unfolds, it warrants multiple viewings for the snippets of action that you may have missed.

More information about "Ugly" can be found on its official website or Facebook page.