Mkali’s Mission: Creating a 3D animated sequence remotely during a pandemic

KEN LARUE: Hi, my name is Ken LaRue, and I work for Autodesk. I am part of the Technical Marketing and Workflow team. And my focus is on the Media and Entertainment division.

I've been with Autodesk for 17 years. And my first 10 years I spent working as an application engineer, focusing on compositing and editing products, such as Flame and Smoke. Now I create digital content to engage and connect with our community in film, television games, and design visualization industries. I hire, manage, and collaborate closely with artists to build compelling practical material that spotlights all the amazing things our products do.

In early 2020, as the pandemic took hold and studios around the world sent artist home to work, we very quickly realized that while the way studios would work and how artists collaborate with one another was changing, sharing a common physical space for projects to progress wasn't always necessary. It was at this point that the M&E team decided to lead with empathy. We wanted to put ourselves in our clients' and customers' shoes by setting up a small remote studio to create a 3D sequence from concept to final render.

We're calling the sequence "Mkali's Mission." We wanted to experience firsthand the new challenges our customers now face. And we wanted to arm them with a practical set of resources and material that they can utilize in their own projects.

We gave ourselves the added challenge of using many of the tools in the Media and Entertainment Collection as we could. This is the showcase of the breadth and the power of this toolset. This includes Maya, 3ds Max, Mudbox, Arnold, just to name a few. We also utilized Sketchbook for our concept art and storyboards, ShotGrid for production management and review process. And soon, we will be using Flame to do the final compositing.

The project is not completed yet. But it's important to underscore that this project is more about the journey than the final result. All told, we have worked with 16 different artists in seven different countries. And I believe it's 10 different time zones, if I'm correct.

Again, the intent was to lean into real world experience of a remote production. And we have learned a lot. And this presentation is all about that process and the learnings we've gained from this project.

Once we knew what we wanted to accomplish, we needed to figure out the story of our 3D sequence. I knew I wanted to feature the following three components. I wanted to have a biped, a human.

So I chose a strong female character. Her name is Mkali. And then for her companion, because I wanted a creature, she's going to have a wolf as her sidekick.

And they're going to be performing various locomotive actions using powerful character creation tools in Maya. I wanted a snowy mountainous environment to showcase 3ds Max's world building and asset creation tools. A snowmobile will demonstrate hard surface modeling in 3ds Max. And I also wanted to have some effects, such things as explosions and an avalanche, flying snow to demonstrate the power and the versatility of Bifrost, specifically the MPM solver, the aero solver, and the particle system.

From there, I began to write my script for the sequence shot by shot. And in the sequence, Mkali and her sidekick Suluwo-- it is the name of the wolf-- are in a snowy mountain region, where there is a bunker housing the evil empire up in the mountain. And they need to destroy that bunker.

So the next step was to research the possibilities for the environment, the props, the snowmobile, the wolf, and Mkali herself, what might she look like. So I used Google, and I searched a collection of different images that captured what I had in my mind. Then I created a PowerPoint presentation to share my idea with the product owners of 3ds Max, Maya, Mudbox, et cetera. I wanted to get their feedback and their suggestions. And they gave a lot of advice.

But something that stood out to me that was recommended was that I build a deeper backstory for the sequence. As I was told, the more information we give the artist about the story and these characters will allow the artist to be more creative. And this will help them create what my vision is.

From the concept artist to the modeler, to the animators, look dev, lighting, they're going to want more than just the fact that we have a female with a wolf blowing up a bunker on the side of a snowy mountain region. So I created the whole backstory as to why and what led Mkali and Suluwo to this mountain region, and why do they need to blow up this bunker. And if you want to read that backstory, I recommend you visit "Mkali's Mission" blog on AREA. In fact, I invite you to follow it and join us as we continue into the final phases of this project.

Now, when it came time to find the talented group of artists for each step of the production, I started by visiting AREA. And I'm scrolling through our gallery for work that really stood out to me. I also visited other online resources, such as ArtStation.

Now, to be authentic and truly put ourselves in the shoes of our customer, we knew it was important to hire an international team of artists. As today's productions typically rely on teams all around the world, most studios work around the clock in some fashion, whether it's through multiple facilities of their own or while collaborating with other studios on a single project. This globalization enables studios to produce content faster, literally using all hours of the day.

And they also hire the best talent for the job. It also poses a challenge through the many different time zones and different language barriers. But this was something that we are going to deal with as we work on our production.

I browsed artists, looked at their work, read their backgrounds, and I built a list of those I would like to reach out to. I also received some recommendations sourced internally from our Maya and 3ds Max beta programs. And in the end, I met with close to 50 different artists.

And as of today, I have onboarded and worked with 16 different artists on this project so far. And as I met with each of these artists, I presented them the PowerPoint presentation. I explained the project and what exactly I wanted them to work on.

As I mentioned before, I knew I wanted to use ShotGrid as my production management and review tool. So I created a ShotGrid site and started to populate it with the data about this project. Now, I would later use ShotGrid to review all the versions and communicate directly with our artists on the different versions they were submitting. Now, speaking of communicating, outside of tracking and the review process, I created a Slack channel that all the artists joined. And we use it for daily communication as the production moves along.

And lastly, I created a Box folder and a file structure, where all artists can log in and share files in one location. I'll admit that the folder structure did change as production increased based on the suggestions from artists that I was working on. But this was just another great learning stage for me.

To start the production, I would need to find a concept and storyboard artist who uses Sketchbook as their main tool. I met with four different artists. And while all of them were very talented, some had schedule conflicts or different styles than what I was looking for.

I ended up hiring an artist out of the UK named Callum Alexander Watts. I had a meeting with Cul to discuss my vision, the overall story, then details of the characters and the environment. And I shared the images that I had researched for what I wanted Mkali to not only look like but who she was.

And that included images of Nakia from Black Panther and Cara Dune from Mandalorian. I felt like they truly represented what I envisioned of Mkali, this strong, fearless hero. I also gave him reference images of mountain landscapes, wolves, bunkers, snowmobile to use all these as inspiration. And after seeing all the amazing work that Cul has produced, including what he created for Star Wars-- Rise of Skywalker, I made sure to give him a lot of artistic freedom.

From there, Cul hit the ground running. And after a short time, he was ready to share some of the work in progress. It was very exciting to see Cul's early concept of his art as it was the first time that I was seeing represented visual format of my story, of my character.

Cul gave us some assorted styles of clothing, different looks for Mkali. And he shared rough sketches of the storyboard. And after a few rounds of revisions, we approved the final concept art and storyboards.

And I shared the final assets with multiple internal stakeholders here at Autodesk. And they received nothing but excitement. How could they not? Here are the final drawings of the concept art and the storyboards created by Cul.

About the same time, I was searching for a color key artist. And again I had met a couple. But in the end, I ended up hiring Han Zhao from Vancouver.

If you are not familiar with what a color key is, it's very similar to a storyboard, but it will have more detail. And the main purpose is to represent the feel of the shot based on the use of color. Also, it will help keep the mood and feeling consistent throughout all the different shots. In the end, Han did a great job, delivered something truly beautiful.

Once the concept art, storyboards, and color key were completed, it was time to start modeling. And I had already started the process of reaching out to different artists. And I had met with several 3D artists just to gauge their interest in this project.

For modeling, I separated what work needed to be done. My plan was to hire four different artists-- two 3ds Max artists and two Maya artists. But before we can start the artist modeling, we needed to establish some rules of the structure of this project.

As I said earlier, we were using Box as our online storage. And with the guidance of Patrick LeMay, who's from the Maya team, we created naming conventions that everyone would use. We determined what the scale the scenes would be so everyone's working at the same scale.

We also chose the color space everyone would be working in. We will be sharing assets from 3ds Max, Maya, and Mudbox, just to name a few. By clarifying these workflow standards now, we can avoid issues later.

For the environment, I wanted a 3ds Max artist. And I found Andres Saarnak from Estonia. He is the founder of a company named the Highlight. His work looked amazing, not only his architectural work, but all of his environment work. And that's what really drew me toward him.

In fact, his company, the Highlight, had just finished working on a movie called The Autonomy of a Decision, which was all filmed on green screen. And for that job, he had a similar role, where he had to create all the 3D environments, all the backgrounds based on concept art and storyboards. Sounds kind of like my project. So that's why Andres seemed like a perfect fit.

We met to discuss the project in more detail. And after a few more meetings, he was finally ready to start modeling our snowy environment in 3ds Max. And except for the iToo Forrest Park plugin, Andres used all of native tools within 3ds Max for his work.

For our hero Mkali, I wanted a Maya artist. And Jacques Dell, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, came highly recommended from some internal people here at Autodesk because Jacques has worked as a contractor for us in the past. Now, looking at Jacques' work, I had no doubt he was qualified to take on this task.

But the 15-hour difference-- you know, Jacques is in Melbourne, as I said, and I'm in the Chicago area-- that made me a little nervous. But in the end, it actually became a benefit. And I'll explain that in more detail in just a minute. We met, and I shared the storyline, the backstory, the concept art, the storyboards, color keys not only with Jacques but with all the modelers that I ended up hiring.

Speaking of other modelers, while Jacques is working in Maya and Mudbox modeling Mkali, I found a 3ds Max artist to model Mkali's snowmobile. His name is Adrian Wise, and he lives in the UK. I found his work and tutorials on AREA.

And I noticed his strong design visualization portfolio. And when I met him, I learned that in addition to being a very experienced 3D artist, he also worked in industries such as mechanical engineering. I knew his experience and his background would make him a perfect fit to model Mkali's snowmobile.

Next, equipping Mkali with the proper gear to complete her mission was essential. So I needed to find an artist that can tackle the modeling of her weapons, including her mighty crossbow. Luckily, I managed to find Steve Talkowski on ArtStation.

Now, he's based out of the LA area. And I really like the style of his work. And I notice he really liked robot characters also. Not that I needed him to model a robot, but seeing how he modeled those robots really gave me confidence that he could handle modeling the gear and all the weapons.

And as I got to know Steve, I learned that he has a long history in 3D dating back 20 years. He even started his own company in 2008 named Sketchbot Studios. And his extensive experience and passion for his craft convinced me he was the right person for this job.

So now I have four modelers all working at the same time. And we had several different Zoom calls in the beginning to make sure the communication was clear and each artist had the proper information they needed to do their job. And balancing the time differences was a challenge, especially with Jacques in Melbourne, Adrian in the UK, and I'm in the Chicago area.

For example, one meeting we had, it was 6:30 AM my time, it was 12:30 PM for Adrian, and 10:30 PM for Jacques. But we made it work. We needed to make sure that Jacques' Mkali fit properly on Adrian snowmobile. And here's where the time difference actually helped the production. Since Jacques was ahead of Adrian by several hours, if Adrian needed something from Jacques, Jacques could work on it and have it waiting for Adrian when he started his workday.

Another big piece of advice I received from the internal product owners was the suggestion to purchase the wolf model. This would save us the time of modeling, grooming, and rigging the wolf from scratch. So I purchased a wolf from Massimo Righi. His company has worked with Autodesk and other marketing projects in the past, so I knew the quality of what we were going to get. And if you ever need to purchase models of animals, fish, birds, even dinosaurs, I recommend you checking out his website.

Once we had the environment created by Andres, the next step in the production was working on the animation blocking. And the artist I hired was Benoit Prevost from Montreal. Now, Benoit used the storyboards and my direction to start creating the animation blocking.

Blocking is an animation technique in which key poses are created to establish the timing and the placement of the characters, the props in each scene or shot. This is where action is roughed in or blocked in, and the camera's positions will be set. But as I learned later, nothing is really ever final with so many moving parts in the production, as we would make some artistic judgments later and change some of this once we got into final animation. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Next, it was finally time to find an artist to work on the visual effects for "Mkali's Mission." So I worked with the Bifrost team at Autodesk and asked their suggestions for possible artists. Numerous people recommended Phil Radford from the UK. He's an active beta tester with a strong online presence on Autodesk forums and is widely known as "Maya guy" on YouTube and Twitter, where he posts a lot of his work and different tutorials.

When I reached out to Phil, I gave him a rundown on the project and the type of effects work that entailed. His actual response to me was, wow, exploding bunkers and avalanches? Sounds like fun, I'm in.

And since the scope of the work entailed simulation work for multiple shots, a bunker explosion, avalanche, and some smaller snow effects, I originally thought I would hire multiple artists for the job. Though after meeting Phil a couple of times, I realized he would be able to tackle all the effects work on his own. The work he presented online speaks for itself. So seeing his excitement and his past work, I was convinced I had the right person.

We had several calls to discuss how we wanted the explosion in the bunker to occur. There were many ways that we could approach this, especially with the power of Bifrost and Maya. I knew we wanted to have two explosions-- a small one in the lower side of the bunker, then a larger one that ultimately leads to the demolition of the bunker. And Phil started to experiment with different explosions, using aero solver in Bifrost. Who knew it could be so much fun digitally blowing something up?

At the same time, I had hired a 3ds Max artist named Eloi from Montreal. I needed Eloi to create how the bunker will break apart when the explosion takes place. I saw Eloi present his work at SIGGRAPH, and I was very impressed by his work. His work of effects focused on destruction of anything and everything. So I knew he'd be perfect for this job.

We later set up meetings with Eloi, the artist creating the destruction of the bunker in 3ds Max, as he and Phil will need to work closely together as part of the sequence. Eloi managed to export the bunker's destruction work as an FBX file. And Phil then imported that into Maya and then added the final explosions.

And there were many elements to consider-- the timing, the strength of the two explosions, the intensity of the flame, the amount of smoke, just to name a few. We had also to underscore several edits to both Eloi and Phil's work to ensure that everything lined up. And despite the back and forth, it was fun seeing everything come to life, or rather come to destruction. And this was just the beginning for Phil's work. As I mentioned, he was going to go on to create the avalanche, the drifting snow, and smaller effects from the characters and the props interacting with the snow on the ground.

At this point in the production, I added a rigging artist to the team. His name is Charles Wardlaw from Toronto. Charles is a very experienced artist with many talents, but rigging is his specialty. And our hero and her snowmobile needed to move, so we needed to have the rig created.

Now, while the modeling of Mkali was continuing at this point, Adrian had finished modeling the snowmobile, so I was able to have Charles start working on the rigging for the snowmobile. Again we used the FBX format to export the snowmobile out of 3ds Max, and then Charles brought it into Maya for rigging to continue on that. And then, when Mkali's model would be completed, Charles could start rigging her also. We had several different meetings between models and riggers as communication needs to be very tight on a job such as this.

Once the animation blocking was complete and approved, I needed to hire an animation artist to animate the wolf. And I knew exactly who I wanted to work with. His name is Konstantinos Zacharakis. And he was originally from Greece, but he's currently living in Finland.

Now, Konstantinos had worked on a Maya marketing video for Autodesk, where he animated a lion's walk cycle using a model and a rig from Massimo Righi's company, the same company we had purchased the wolf from. After meeting and discussing the project with Konstantinos, he jumped right in and started working on the wolf, with us working closely together with my vision and his artistic vision. And after several different versions, he completed the animation of the wolf. And in the end, it's the subtle touches to the animation that really brought the wolf to life, such as the movement of the ears and the tail. I loved what Konstantinos had done.

With most of the assets created, the animation blocking complete, I wanted to start the look dev stage. So I brought in Arvid Schneider who lives in Vancouver, onto the team. Arvid is very well known in the 3D community as he's posted an endless amount of videos and tutorials on his YouTube page. And I knew he would be a valued artist added to the team.

Knowing the look dev stage would be a big job, I asked Arvid for a recommendation of another artist he might know who we can hire to help. He recommended Alexandra from Toronto. Now, Alexandra was very excited to join this project. And she and Arvid would start working on the look dev part as a team.

It was also at this point that I made a creative decision and a change based on something that Alexandra had told me. She told me she had a friend who resembled Mkali quite a lot. And after seeing a photo of her friend, I totally agreed with her. So we decided to refine the model of Mkali to look more like Alexandra's friend, which would bring more of a realism to our character, more than I had originally intended on.

And Alexandra created a 3D scan of her friend and was able to import that into Maya and refine the face of our hero. Once the model of Mkali was completed with the refinements, Charles came back to the team and started creating the rig for her. Charles uses custom scripts that he creates to automate different processes and tools inside of Maya to help speed up the process of rigging

The next step for Mkali was her grooming. I hired a groomer to focus on Mkali's hair. Creating realistic hair is artistically and technically one of the biggest challenges in CG.

So I reached out to several artists and eventually I found Vini from Sao Paulo, Brazil. I found him on ArtStation. And I knew he was the right choice just looking at his work.

And in the process of working on Mkali's hair, Vini made a suggestion to change the style. And we loved his suggestion, so we let Vini work his magic. And in the end, he delivered the new hairstyle with a slick, cool look.

Now, at this time, we now have Mkali and her snowmobile modeled and rigged. So it's time to bring out an animator to bring her to life. And I found Melanie Cordan, who lives in California.

She has a long history and a background in animation for film and television. And she was happy to join the team, and she started animating Mkali and the snowmobile. And after a couple of iterations, we had our final blocking animation completed and approved with the high-res models.

Now, I'll bring something up at this point. Melanie, like almost all the artists that I've worked with on this project, they have full-time jobs. And the "Mkali's Mission" was something they worked on at night and on the weekends. And it was at this point, unfortunately for me but great for Melanie, her daytime job was getting so busy that she had to step away from "Mkali's Mission." I just want to say she did an amazing job, and we're grateful that she was part of this team for the period that she was.

But obviously, it's now time for me to find another animator. And that person is a gentleman named Fabio that I found out in Belgium. And he's going to start working on this team next week actually.

So with all the assets being completed, the animation is moving along, Arvid and Alexandra are focusing on the look dev stage of the production. They'll focus on one shot right now to make sure everything is working properly. We'll do a test render of it and apply that same look dev then to all the other shots. So that's where we're at in this production right now.

Now I want to discuss some of the biggest challenges that we dealt with. First and foremost, I want to remind you that 3D production is new to me. My background is compositing and editing, which is what I will be doing on the project when it comes time for that.

But my lack of experience has affected the production at times. And a good example is that I never hired a layout artist. I didn't think it was necessary.

But it did cause some issues when it was time to animate Mkali. And it was then that we realized that the center origin in Maya was off. And this was due to importing the cameras being FBX from 3DS Max and importing them into Maya.

Now, normally, it's not a big deal to fix this. At that point in the production, you have a layout artist that would catch that and say, hey, we need to move this. But we didn't find that out until the animation started working with Melanie.

And at that point we were like, holy cow. We're like 99% done with the modeling. We've got the rigging done.

And there were so many pieces that could get broken by shifting everything at this point. But thank goodness, we were able to fix the issue via a script that was given to us from the Maya Q&A team. But there's an example where my lack of experience did affect the actual production.

The next thing was the pandemic. I mean, this delayed many artists, especially when the lockdown started happening. For example, Jacques was modeling Mkali in Melbourne. He went from going into the office and working on this project or working on any job to having to work at home, with his wife and kids now all at home doing virtual school.

And he wasn't the only artist affected. All the artists ended up working out of their houses, whether they're full time, work with another company or just on this project. So work would definitely be delayed due to the pandemic, no doubt about that.

OK, we're coming to the end of this presentation. I want to remind you, though, before we end, to visit the "Mkali's Mission" blog on AREA to get more information if you want it. And also, this way, you can see as this production does finish up, which is hopefully going to be soon.

And there's a lot more information on the blog than I'm presenting here. Also, there is something called the Autodesk University interactive experience that you can visit online and see more video and footage of the different artists working on this production. You can click and go into different stages or pipeline stages of the production, see the artists that are working on it, see different interactive videos that you can watch of them working on each part of this project.

So as I said, at this time, during this presentation, we are still working on look dev. We have lighting and rendering and then final compositing in Flame that still needs to be done. But I want to show you the sequence, where it is at right now with the animation blocking of the models. So watch this, and then when you come back, I want to show you some of the assets that are already done as far as look dev.

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So hopefully you enjoyed that. And like I said, I really like the way it's all coming together. Let me now play back a little video showing you some of the assets that are already done, including Mkali, our hero. After that, we'll start the Q&A.

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