Table of Contents Show
Our first ideas emerged from this sketch: What characterises the robot, what is the relationship between it and the dog, what kind of world do they live in? We are in the near future. People and seemingly all life have disappeared from the city and countryside. Posters, camps, cars and facilities left behind bear witness to the vanished culture.
By Edgar Bauer, Franz Stöcker and Felix Zachau. They are studying image design at the HFF Munich, specialising in VFX. All three found it exciting to tell the story of such different characters coming together, which is why they joined forces as a team.
The rusty old household robot has also been left behind. It still works and seems to mechanically fulfil its old routines. The dog is playful, it eats and seeks closeness.
In doing so, he gradually brings the old, cumbersome, stuck machine to life. He takes it out of its routine and humanises it. The robot becomes a humanoid that can care, play and feel. You watch as the years pass, the dog grows older and the robot becomes more human. It all ends with one last special evening when they watch fireflies together.
This sets the cornerstones of the story, focussing on their relationship and the development of the robot.
In weekly meetings with Prof Jürgen Schopper and Dr Rodolfo Anes Silveira, we presented our respective progress and discussed how best to proceed. Team assistant Petra Hereth coordinated the project organisation for us, including the lectures and all associated seminars and workshops.
Storyboard
With the script ready and a precise idea of the aesthetics, it was time for the storyboard. Professor Michael Coldewey helped us to break the story down into a few images, which we then drew in the “Procreate” drawing programme. The focus was on the comprehensibility of the images and not on details, but at the same time we were also able to think about the camera settings.
The aim was to tell and structure the script visually in such a way that an outsider could look at the storyboard and understand what was happening.
Right: The final look of the film – about a year later
Animatic and pre-visualisation
The animatic can be divided into two phases. First comes the drawn animatic and then the PreVis, a rough 3D animated version of the film. The drawn animatic is an animated version of the storyboard. We used the images from the storyboard in the “Premiere Pro” editing programme. We also tested how long we should leave the shots for and created a rudimentary version of the sound. This allowed us to consider what should be shown visually and what could be told via the sound. That was very good for getting a rough feel for the story. The next step was the PreVis.
We modelled and rigged rough versions of the dog and robot in “Blender” and created very simplified sets. The scenes were then quickly animated and rendered in Workbench to see where the characters were, how well the camera was placed and whether a viewer could understand the film at all. Our focus on speed meant we could quickly see which shots worked and which we needed to rework. Telling a long period of time in a short film was a particular challenge. Over 28 versions, we considered shot sizes, moved characters to different locations and added, replaced, moved in the timeline, changed or discarded entire shots. In the end, we had a plan of how long each shot had to be, how the camera should be placed and what should happen in front of it.
Music
With a rough idea of what kind of tonality we wanted to create in our film music, we were very lucky that the composers Arezou Rezaei and Jiro Yoshioka from the Munich University of Music agreed to compose the score for us. It was ideal that we started collaborating even before the PreVis was finalised.
This allowed us to give each other feedback and they were able to advise us on which scenes we should keep longer or shorter so that the composition could unfold its full effect. The music also provided plenty of inspiration and the insights the musicians were able to give us based on their expertise had a significant influence on the development of the story.
Pipeline & Workflow
Without the help of our Pipeline TD Jonas Kluger, this film would probably still not be finished. He familiarised us with the project management software “Shotgrid” and made sure that possible errors caused by the communication between “Blender” and “Shotgrid” did not affect us as much as possible. We initially created tasks for all environments, characters, assets and shots. We then divided the tasks among ourselves and uploaded the results to “Shotgrid”. This pipeline makes it possible to work on sets simultaneously so that the updated assets are also opened when a scene is opened.
Modelling, Texturing, Rigging
It was important to us that the last dog and the last robot should be archetypes. The robot’s shapes should convey a fascination for its technical abilities and yet still look old and capable of development.
We took a lot of inspiration for the design from older tractors. The approach behind this was that it is obviously a simple machine – its functionality and components are revealed in the little remodelled design. It is an industrial machine whose original reason for being should be as far removed as possible from a social or cautious function, so that its transformation towards the human becomes clearer and its action contrasts with its appearance. small details such as a colourful child’s handprint subtly tell of his past as a helping hand to a family. In “Procreate”, we first roughly sketched the robot in order to find a design language that we could agree on as a team. The sketches were then turned into technical drawings, which also looked at the individual body parts in detail.
The robot consists of over 200 individual parts that move mechanically depending on each other. Each part was drawn in great detail and then modelled in Blender with the help of our lecturer Benc Orpak. It was a very complicated but rewarding job to create the mechanisms that would eventually make the robot move. The individual parts had to fit together exactly and yet not clip into each other when moving. All parts were individually drawn, modelled, textured and rigged. Berter Orpak was on hand as a 3D mentor to answer any questions we had.
Unlike the robot, the dog is very organic, it should look playful, lively and cute. We researched the anatomy and bone structure of dogs and tried to model it as closely as possible to reality. We showed the ageing of the dog mainly through different textures for the young and old dog.
Hauses von Roboter
und Hund
setzen sich wie
ein Bühnenbild zu einem Hintergrund zusammen.
von Hand
gemalt
Settings
The film shows a contrasting world. It starts in a destroyed, abandoned city and then switches to a rural, old-fashioned landscape where nature is slowly returning.
Both landscapes were modelled in 3D in Blender. The textures were then drawn in “Procreate” from a camera perspective and then projected onto the model in “Blender”. In some cases, we also used the drawings directly as backgrounds. The backgrounds had to be coherent and picturesque without distracting from the actual action.
Look
The look development is more than just the selection of colours and designs. It defines the visual language of the film, gives it character and lends the story a unique aesthetic. This process is crucial to how viewers perceive the world of the film and how they connect emotionally with the characters and the plot.
The process is iterative and required many feedback loops. In the beginning, we aimed for a photorealistic, Pixar-like look. Partly to save render time, but also because we wanted to focus on the relationship between the robot and the dog, we decided to use a mix of drawn textures and a 3D animated film.
This change was one of the most difficult decisions we made for this film. We had already completed several sets in photorealistic style and had fallen in love with the look of the test renders.
But when we saw the dog in motion with a drawn texture, the decision was easy. It looked much more lively in the new style. We were also able to emphasise the character of the robot better in the new style.
Rotation
To recreate a movement realistically, it helps to collect as many references as possible. We planned a day of shooting for this purpose. Studio masters Andreas Beckert and Peter Gottschall let us use the HFF’s internal television studio for this.
We filmed with a younger and an older dog to cover him in both the younger and older scenes.
For the robot, our fellow student Julius von Diest slipped into Xsens’ in-house motion capture suit. David Emmenlauer explained the correct operation of the suit to us in advance. We only used the data collected with it as a reference so as not to make the robot appear more lifelike than the dog.
We took each shot with three different cameras. Each was responsible for a selected perspective. The first one was placed as close as possible to the camera position defined in the PreVis. With the other two, we filmed from the front and from the side so that we could then jump 90 degrees from axis to axis when animating.
Animation
The animation was a big part of our work process. We wanted to show the slow humanisation of the robot and the ageing of the dog in the animation. The recorded references from the studio shoot came in very handy.
We also got help from Professor Melanie Beisswenger. As an experienced animator, she had a trained eye for our animations and was able to give us very good suggestions for improvement, especially for the dog, which made it appear even more natural.
One thing that made animating technically much easier was that both the dog and the robot had a very detailed model for rendering and a less detailed one for animating. When animating, we could deactivate the body responsible for rendering the characters at the touch of a button. Thanks to the saved computing power, we were able to animate in real time in the viewport.
Rendering
The film is rendered in Blender via Cycles. We used the HFF render farm to save rendering time and stay on schedule. We also rendered out masks for the dog and robot so that we could edit them better during grading.
Grading
We were very lucky to have Claudia Fuchs, a professional grader, at our side. Together we made some colour corrections and matched the colours of the shots to each other.
Sound design
For animated films, in which every visual component is created from scratch, the creation of realistic soundscapes is a major challenge. Stefan Möhl took on the sound design for us. We discussed our ideas with him about how the robot and the world should sound. We felt it was a great privilege to be able to look over his shoulder as he worked. It was fascinating to see how he creates a soundscape from different sounds that seem to have nothing to do with each other and breathes life into the film. He surpassed all the expectations we had beforehand.
Retrospective
A strongly humanoid robot leans against a car, smoking. A year has now passed since this sketch was made. A lot has happened in that time. We have spent many days and nights at the university and have grown together as a group. The collaboration led to creative solutions and a film that we are proud of. Only now do we realise how many steps and how much work is actually involved in the development of an animated film. It was a long process with many ups and downs. We have learnt a lot from it, we would like to thank everyone involved and look forward to the next project
