Making of project "Endless love" by Carla Krey and Garry Runke Once upon every semester we have to produce a final film in which we include the stuff we learned. Teams had to be formed and we managed to get an approvement for a two headed team.  We can give you thousand reasons why a two headed team is better than a group and thousend reasons for the opposite. However, it was the best solution for us, as our style and ideas differ quiet a lot of the standard commercial style featured by our student colleages. Chapter I: The Beginning First of all there was the need for a story to be told. And it was the hardest part of the project, or so it seemed. We both can't remember how we made up the idea of a potatoe and a tomatoe falling in love, but we had it, a lot of friends and our parents helped improving the idea and there it was "Endless Love". We didn't go the regular procedure. We started with an animatic and after figurring out that this idea was pretty stupid we produced a storyboard. Although everybody says it's not a very good way it worked pretty well for us. At the same time we started to make several model-sheets and took close looks at our kitchens to recognize what makes a kitchen look like a kitchen. Dust, dirt, scratches to name some of the attributes we had to include in our textures.  Chapter II: The Setup We decided to make a "Scene01" that would be our reference scene for all the other scenes we would need, so every scene would include the same objects and textures. With this method we had the freedom of starting to animate while not having all the objects and textures. When copying files into the "Scene01" Maya file, all the other scenes were changed with it. It was just great. The Light-Setup was another problem. We tried several lightdomes and came to the conclusion that everything looked pretty nice but the render times were way too long and just not necessary. We then used classic lighting setups with main lights, fill lights, bounce lights. But in the end we created a genius four light lightdome that perfectly did its job while keeping render times at ten minutes per frame. Chapter III: The Animation Our main idea of not using any bones in our animations to keep everything "real" and not "cartoonish" turned soon against us. It was so hard to animate a "sphere" (like the tomatoe or the potatoe) in a way it can carry feelings and emotions. After two days or so, we figurred it out and everything became easier. We can't describe what we did, just take a close look at the animations and try to figure it out. It's all about the little thoughtfully useless keyframes that make it look nice. For example an object that turns pretty fast doesn't stop at once, it will bounce back a little bit. Another hard part were the leaves of the tomatoe. We tried to use bones for animation but totally failed. We wanted them move and had to pay the price for perfection. We ended up using a jiggle deformer with neatly painted weights. The camera movement wasn't that easy either. In the beginning we had a start key and an end key for the pans. It looked pretty dumb so we put the tangents of the keys to flat and after that the camera didn't abruptly stop but faded a little bit. It's hard to see in the final animation you could see the problem big time when not using this method. We also wanted to the eyes of the tomatoe morph to hearts and in another scene make them grow while sweat rinses in the eyeballs. We made that possible with animated displacement maps with the mental help of Moritz Krappel. Chapter IV: Texturing As our main idea was to keep everything as realistic as possible we used a lot of pictured we took with the great Olympus C-2100UZ and the Kodak DC4800. We edited the pictures with Adobe Photoshop and used tricks like "Offset" and "Stamp" to make several textures seamless. The rest was just standard extracting work, color correction and a lot of tweaking. C. Krey did a great job tweaking the textures for the potatoe and the wooden chest. Chapter V: Dynamics Ok, if you ever have to ask yourself: "Hmm. Should I animate it with my skills or use a dynamic simulation?" USE YOUR SKILLS !!! We wasted so much time with this stupid particle crap. Well, in the end we were rewarded with some great animations. In the scene where the french fries are dropped in the fry and the boiling oil. We used a dynamic simulation for the fries. Well, after spending a day for it we were better off having it animated by hand. The boiling oil is a plane, a little bit transparent with a displacement shader on it. The bubbles have a facing ratio connected to their transprency and are controlled by a air and turbulence field to make them drift to the edge. We had to create another plane for collision as drifting along the original oil plane made them not come over the surface although the perspective told us they definetely are OVER the surface. Now they are pretty high above the surface and it looks like they are in the right place. Hmm, couldn't figure that out. Maybe it's because of the displacement map. G.Runke also wrote a gigantic mel script that made bubbles emit from the fries when entering the oil. If you put the fry slowly in the oil bubbles will just be emited beneath the surface, just great, but totally not to be seen in the final animation. The Ketchup in the end scene was also possible thanks to a script of G.Runke.  Chapter VI: Rendering Yah well, click render and it renders ? We made ourselves the great pleasure to write some nice batch renderings and achieved the not yet copied method of rendering a scene with particle simulations on several computers, starting on different frame numbers. You might say, huu, that's easy. But it definetely is not THAT easy. Use a particle disk cache and when using a batch rendering or MAYA on a different computer make sure to set the project right !! After loading the scene you should be able to scroll in the time slider left and right and the particles should move forward and backward. If not, the project setting is not right or you killed your cache. Chapter VII: Conclusion Our team had the hardest time with their project. But no one else learned so much as we did. And what we learned was not just Maya, but friendship. To interpret-quote some great german guys: "Hier gibts soviele Fassaden wie in den Dörfern Potemkins." The villages of Potemkins were small villages that used facades to make them look huge and glory. A great special thank goes to Christian Bleier for his support and all of our students for their annoying gossip, support, friendship, hatred, jealousy and love. Very high pitched voice: "We love you!" M.J.