Raqi Syed is an artist, visual effects designer, researcher, and lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. She is the co-director of MINIMUM MASS.
Her practice and teaching focus on the materiality of light, hybrid forms of documentary and fiction storytelling, and using media archeology and software studies methodologies to largest understand trendy practices in visual effects.
Raqi has worked as a visual effects versifier on a tuft of full-length films. In 2020, her VR work was exhibited at the Tribeca, Cannes, Annecy, and Venice International Film Festivals. She is a 2018 Sundance and Turner Fellow, and a 2020 Ucross Fellow. In 2017, The Los Angeles Times pegged Raqi for a list of 100 people who can help solve Hollywood’s diversity problem. She holds an MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and an MA from the VUW Institute of Modern Letters.
Raqi Sayed created an turned-on docu-memoir (Raise Ravens) where she digitally resurrected her deceased father in virtual reality with the help of Character Creator in order to lay his ghost, and generations of family hauntings to rest.
” I’ve been using Reallusion software for 5 years. I find the tools flexible and responsive to the variegated needs of storytelling in both my own work and teaching students the principles of character-centric visual effects.”
Raqi Sayed – Artist, Visual Effects Designer, Researcher, Lecturer
Q: Hello Raqi, and congratulations for stuff part of the Reallusion Pitch & Produce program. Kindly introduce yourself, and your work with Raise Ravens.
Thank you, I’m so pleased to be part of this program! I’m a visual effects designer, writer, and researcher. I’m moreover the Director of RAISE RAVENS, which is an turned-on docu-memoir told in virtual reality.
Raise Ravens is a digital resurrection of my sufferer father. I use Reallusion’s Character Creator and iClone pipeline for creating highly realistic digital humans to bring my father when to life so that I can speak to him and finally lay his ghost to rest. On an emotional level, the wits is well-nigh the feeling of stuff haunted by our pasts, and the archetypical relationship between fathers and children.
Q: Digitally reanimating loved ones is unchangingly a sensitive topic with many people. Could you guide us through the thought and desire to do such a project? Did you have any doubts or resistance withal the way?
Documentary films make use of materials and artifacts in order to wangle and shape narratives of the past. These materials often take the form of videos, audio, or objects that can bring us closer to specific moments or historic truths. When I began thinking well-nigh telling a story well-nigh my father I realized our family has no video or moving image record of his life. I knew that if I wanted to construct a narrative well-nigh him I would have to craft it digitally and through my family’s joint memories.
I’m fortunate that my family is really supportive of this project. For example, my mother, aunts, and each of my siblings have shared their unique memories well-nigh my father with me. And my eldest brother has well-set to serve as the model for the digital human of my father. My family have substantially wilt co-creators on this project.
Q: Raise Ravens was worldly-wise to take wholesomeness of Weft Creator and its Headshot plug-in for generating digital humans. This unliable you to be the director, performer and tech artist. Can you share with us your creative workflow?
One of the things I’m really interested in is how the digital human can function as a self-portrait. The versifier can build a digital human of themselves to interrogate how reality is constructed—this includes lighting, materials, composition, and most importantly performance and the role of the artist. Combined with the form of the docu-memoir I find the experimental natura of this process works really well when I can uncontrived myself as I icon out pipeline and revise the story to reflect what’s technically possible.
The thing that makes immersive storytelling variegated than linear narratives is that technical pipeline, writing, design, and user wits are all happening in parallel. So stuff worldly-wise to quickly revise and iterate my own digital human is really important in the minutiae and prototyping phase. I’m lucky to have a unconfined team of people who are working on Raise Ravens. Jeremy Cameron, Areito Echevarria, Tristan Keillor, and Sandip Kalsy have been essential in the diamond and pipelining on this project.
” In my work I am interested in how the digital human can serve as a form of self-expression and respectful design. Weft Creator is the weightier tool I have found for towers notation that represent the true likeness of real people.”
Raqi Sayed – Artist, Visual Effects Designer, Researcher, Lecturer
Q: Once your notation were ready, you then proceeded to dress them with Clo3D, prior to sending everything to Unreal Engine. What would you say was the most difficult part of this pipeline, and what would you recommend to others?
For me, the costume megacosm and skinning introduced a lot of complexity into the weft pipeline. The tools for creating costume elements within Character Creator are really streamlined. But for story purposes we decided to diamond our own costume using Clo3d. This meant the costume had to be skinned to the weft and simulated surpassing volatility and motion. We chose to do this in Houdini which gets an spanking-new result but it does introduce spare steps in the pipeline. It’s worth thinking through superiority of time how much of the costume can be wrapped (rigid) versus simulated and if multiple layers are really necessary.
Q: You mentioned that through this digital human pipeline you were worldly-wise to create skin and hair shading models that virtuously depict brown skin. How important is this in today’s world of inclusivity? And what advantages does the software provide for hands editing and revising a digital human?
Addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion is an essential part of weft design. The technology and tools need to reflect this. One of the challenges people of verisimilitude squatter is that most of the rendering technologies and documentation still part-way Caucasian skin models.
In my classes I see students struggle with this. The quality of tutorials in this space is starting to change. I have found Sefki Ibrahim’s tutorials to be great, expressly the workflow for integrating XYZ skin textures into a Weft Creator pipeline.
More broadly, Weft Creator’s SkinGen plugins and PBR shaders enable a lot increasingly customisation and detail for creating skin, which is an important step towards creating increasingly inclusive tools.
Follow Raqi:
https://likeamber.com/raise-ravens
https://www.hydroxandhorlix.com/
https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/raqi.syed
這篇文章 Pitch & Produce | Raise Ravens: Reanimating loved ones in virtual reality with Weft Creator 最早出現於 Reallusion Magazine。
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