Project Mata Nui Rising - Supervising a BIONICLE Fan Film

BIONICLE Ignition, Battle for Power: Episode 1- Arrival - Free to view on YouTube.

I joined Project Mata Nui Rising back in November 2023 after seeing a call for visual effects artists on their YouTube page. I joined their VFX team and as the leadership team saw my existing work and a few shots I helped finish up, I was assigned the largest and most daunting sequence that no other editor had touched - the Village Attack sequence. My work on this sequence, combined with my reliability and leadership in the project led me to be promoted to the VFX supervisor on the whole project. Village Attack was a behemoth of a sequence and consisted of over 100 stop motion shots which needed to be integrated into CG backgrounds with FX and lighting to match. I approached the sequence a way no other editor had before, instead of pulling the footage into a video editor like after effects and rendering flat CG backgrounds, I opted to build everything in blender. Bringing footage in directly as image sequences on planes allowed for an extreme level of control over how I placed cameras and characters within environments, as well as allowing cameras to move dynamically through the scene as characters move throughout it. About halfway through the completion of this sequence, I discovered SwitchLight, a tool that uses AI to decompose images and videos into their component materials, like color, roughness, and normal maps. These maps allowed me to relight image sequences directly in blender using lights to help ground characters into their environments, no longer being limited by the lighting conditions they were captured in during stop motion filming. Additionally, some footage was either not usable or not impactful enough for the direction I had in mind, so I animated a select handful of shots entirely with CG characters, allowing for the FX, cameras, and impactful performances necessary for the sequence.

VFX Breakdown video for the Village Attack sequence showing the many techniques we deployed

Because this project is a fan film with work contributed from all levels of expertise, the organization and file consistency was a challenge to pull together at the beginning, leading me to work with our Technical Director, David Eagan, to develop a totally new workflow designed around previsualization, and using Kitsu, a shot and asset tracking software similar to shotgrid so that files and tasks remained organized and visible at all times. The lessons we learned from working with the files we had been given allowed us to create a streamlined and consistent set of instructions to follow for Keyers, Rotoscopers, Animators, and Editors so that the future episodes are higher quality, more consistent, and much quicker to produce.

VFX Breakdown video for the Matoro Sacrifice sequence along with extra tech used throughout the project

Additionally, in the spirit of community and shared resources, we noticed that despite a growing number of 3D animators in the BIONICLE community, there were hardly any publicly available models and character rigs. This vacuum, partnered with the need for previsualization in future episodes led me to develop several universal resources designed specifically for BIONICLE characters. The first of which is called the Universal BIONICLE Rig. This is a preset rig combined with a collection of python scripts that allows anyone to import a BIONICLE model file from stud.io (LEGO's digital assembly program) and create a fully functional, industry-standard rig in around 15 minutes or less. The rig functionality is complete with naming conventions, and compatibility for characters with both single and double jointed limbs with accurate animation re-mapping between the two.

Our finished character rig, makutaAntroz-main, with IK Controls enabled. Completed by team member Kacks

Additionally, it works hand-in-hand with another resource I developed, called the VBM Shader (Virtual's BIONICLE Material). This is a plastic material that can match any type of plastic LEGO produced for BIONICLE, including solid, transparent, and pearlescent plastics. It has 23 separate material controls, with presets for the aforementioned material types. We design our environments to be human-scale, our characters need to be human scale too, so the toggle on the Universal BIONICLE Rig also drives the VBM shader, so that no matter the scale, materials act the same way in regards to bevels, edge scuffs, and textures.

These resources and character rigs we've developed will soon be publicly available for anyone to download and use through the Bionicle Community Database, and we hope to enable more artists to create BIONICLE animations and projects quicker and easier because of these resources. Lastly, leading a team of volunteers can sometimes be challenging because everyone has different availability and schedules across many time-zones, however the enthusiasm our community has for BIONICLE and for learning is greatly rewarding. Being able to share my expertise and what I've learned from my professional experiences, followed by seeing artists improvement and pride in their work has been an amazing experience. I've met so many friends and fellow creatives in this great community, and it makes me very glad I joined the team in the first place. I can't wait to show what we've been developing for Episode 2 and beyond!