Now you may have noticed that there are further additions to the pages panel. Firstly is the Demo Reel page, and I've created a rigging demo reel, which you can view there. It's a trimmed version of the Monk Demonstration video which I posted earlier, with a few extra filmed bits, and, well… go take a look! Lastly there is the Downloads page. I have put my making of and technical Document there. I have other plans for this page too.
Of course you can also get to all these things in this post too!
And these template designs are for anything just related to A Flock of Pixels.
I'll re blog the business card here too.
And here is the ident by itself.
This has been a very enjoyable and most satisfying project to work on. Most importantly though I've felt very much in control of the whole thing and although there were a few moments when I thought I was falling behind schedule, these last few weeks have been the least stressful of any 'last few weeks' of other projects.
And finally, I leave you with an extra 'feature', the animation progression reel; a collection of my animation play-blasts, showing my progression from blocking to final animation. Just to clarify, it's not a 'demo reel'.
The blog has had a bit of a re-design, including a new page (more to be added in the coming months) and I've given myself a bit more width for posting in.
I shall start by posting the accompanying business card.
Rendering is practically finished and most of it is already composited. While that has been happening I have also been working on the intro sequence for the animation. Almost all the graphics have been painted and added into the sequence. Here is a selection of them. And here are a selection of stills from the animation.
Animation is practically over. While for the last week I have been finishing off all the animation, I have also had to tackle some other interesting challenges too.
There's no doubt that you have seen in my pre-vis some cones, which were supposed to be representing either piles of socks or coins. Piles of something anyway. So one of the challenges this week was to actually make those props, and I can tell you that the pile of socks particularly, was a pain to make. More on that in a bit, but first the pile of coins.
The first and most obvious way to make a pile of coins would be to use dynamics to drop coins into a pile, although I knew straight away that it should be a hollow pile so I would need some sort of mesh shaped like a pile to drop coins onto.
It didn't work very well. It was slow and no matter how much stickiness and friction I added, I couldn't get a decent pile made efficiently. That's when I turned to Maya's Hair System!
The hair system generates (what Maya calls) hair follicles all over a mesh from which hairs are placed. I don't need the hairs, just the follicles as they gave me random positions over the pile mesh that I can parent geometry to.
I created a simple script to automate the duplicating and parenting of the coin mesh so that I had hundreds of coins stuck all over the mesh, creating my basic pile.
I had a small and large coin so it also made sure that both sizes were randomly placed over the pile.
I then had another similar script to randomly assign three variations of a coin shader to all the coins in the pile.
The last step was to check for the intersecting coins where they were too close to each other and manually move them to create the final pile of coins.
A similar technique was used to create the sock pile, but with one slight difference.
It was necessary to have the socks lay over the pile rather than be rigidly stuck to the pile. So the main difference was that I generated the socks (with Maya Hair) onto a flat plane, which I then used a wrap deformer to make the plane control the socks, and the plane was dropped onto the pile with cloth dynamics.
It was a pain because applying the wrap deformer to 900 socks not only took a very long time (half an hour at least), but after that was done, calculating those socks was extremely slow. Once it was done though, I could remove all wrap deformers and cloth sim stuff and all was fine.
In one of the last scenes the Monk crash lands into the pile of socks. This again was tricky, as I had to animate the pile mesh, and again used wrap deformers to control the socks around it. In this case I did end up caching the socks, so that it was just reading a file rather than calculating stuff, which improved performance a bit.
The good news is that it is all done now.
There were a few other effects I have needed to create for the animation. The kitten running through a puddle of ink, and the candle flame.
The ink splashing was achieved with Maya's nParticle System...
…and the candle flame was done with soft-body dynamics.
In the case of the candle flame I was following a tutorial from The Gnomon Workshop.
So currently I am at the texturing, lighting and rendering stage. Two scenes have been rendered, but there is still a long way to go as there are 28 more shots to left to finish.
Then there's the intro sequence, the making of, technical documents, show reel, and an updated blog design all to be done in the next two weeks. No pressure then!
Yep, I'm posting a bit of everything today. I have been animating all week and as it is requiring 100% of my time and dedication, other areas (like texturing) have come to a halt.
I did however find an opportunity to render one frame from my animation (with temporary textures) and with a lighting setup that I experimented with a week or so ago. No passes or anything fancy like that yet, but I did take it into After Effects to mess around with the colours and even adding some focal blur, although it's completely faked as I didn't have a depth pass to work with, but you get a rough idea of what I'm going for.
I will be lighting the character with separate lights to make sure he is shaded clearly in the final render and splitting foreground and background elements to achieve better focal blur in post. Also might make a backdrop other than just pure white.
Here were some of my earlier lighting tests of the same set that I did a few weeks back.
Now for some animation. I'm well over half way through animating the entire animation. I'm now at a stage where I am tackling some of the toughest scenes, but I have given myself extra time to get these right. That's not to say that what I've done so far was easy… it wasn't. For now though, here is a very small snippet of the animation so far.
The last thing I'm posting is the presentation of the interim crit. Not so much for having new content, but instead just so that the blog isn't missing anything.
Last time, I posted the animatic. This time, I'm posting the pre-vis. The whole animation has been blocked out (very roughly), which means now I'm officially going to start animating the final film using the pre-vis as a starting point; refining the animation until I can refine it no longer, over the next three weeks.
Doing the pre-vis has had it's benefits. So for example, I can see what scenes are going to need the most attention, having already experienced certain difficulties in pre-vis, while some of the smaller shots are looking 80% finished already, so I know better where to spend my time over the coming weeks.
There is just one scene which I will probably re-animate from scratch though. I call it the 'recovery' scene, and it is the scene straight after the monk falls into the sock pile (represented by a cone.)
The reason for this is because the monk is sitting on the floor, and he just happens to find next to him a collar with a label (of which you don't really notice or see properly until the close up shot showing it in his hand).
Go back a few months and a certain character named Arthur Winters fell on the floor and in the exact same place he finds his pencil next to him.
Go back another year, and a certain bear character with no name, is sitting on a mattress, and just happens to find a chocolate flake next to him… in the same place!
So basically, I want to slightly alter the way the monk finds the collar with the label!
So the next set of tasks are animating (and any dynamics that go with it), a bit of textureing, and refining the intro sequence.
Lots to show today! It may be the holidays, but the project is still moving forwards.
So first of all, both characters are completely rigged, and shaded. The Monk even has his interface, fully working.
I've done a final posed turnaround of the Monk, and there will be one for the kitten coming later.
Here are just a frame render of what it should look like. I have started to model a few props too. The crate is the most finished, and all it needs is a final texture. (The current one is noticeably tiled!)
I've experimented with squashing and stretching the crates to an extreme (maybe just a tad too much), but is probably how I would like to have them in the final animation.
Ok, so going back to the rigging, I've made a video showing how the rig and it's interface works. It's similar but different. For starters, the whole interface was re written from scratch… but differently of course… and for the better.
So the interface improvements are: - scalable interface (meaning it is not stuck at one size, like the last one was) - takes namespaces into account (This is vital as the rig has a very large file size, and I will have no choice but to reference the rig into the scenes to animate) - more organised tick boxes, and less of them - generally, things have been moved about a bit to make it more accessible
I've split the interface into two sections; a lower and upper section. The lower has the switches and the mesh visibility. The upper has the main control buttons and sliders for the monk and his clothes, split over two tabs.
Now what you would have seen in the last post was that there were a lot of control dots around the clothes. Put simply, they allow you to re sculpt the overall shape of the clothes over time. It's not a replacement for a cloth sim of course, and there is nothing to stop me from cloth simming, but it does mean that I can animate the clothes, and even make a simmed version follow the animated version, to get a stylised simulation.
I don't have to worry about the ropes as they follow the clothes, but then again, they also have a few controls so I could animate them swinging.
Check out the extra controls on the hands and fingers too.
So here is the video.
The last thing to show is the introduction of the animation (as a previs) with a re-edited animatic of the whole animation. My original intention was to use After Effects for the intro as it's meant to be good a motion graphic stuff, although, only if you know what you're doing. So I gave up on that and went to Maya… and used nurbs curves! A valid alternative to the pen tool in AE, only I also know how to animate stuff quickly and am not dealing with lots of layers.
It is not very colourful and isn't perhaps as easy to look at as there are no fill colours, but you get an idea for the pace and feel of it.
Now I did find some music to animate to as it really needed it, and found that at AudioNetwork, which is where the music came from for the last project. I have actually re-edited the animatic to include this music track throughout as I liked the style and tone of the piece.
So here's the new animatic with intro.
Now imagine that introduction, but with 2D graphics that could look something like this.
The only thing that will be different when I previs the main animation, will be the mood of the monk so those places where he currently appears sad or confused, will be happier and more determined; this will better fit the mood of the music without affecting the story and outcome.
It's another short post today. I've been rigging the Monk character and he is almost finished, so I've got a few screenshots of what it is looking like.
Controls and skeleton (Ik arms / legs)
Controls and skeleton (Fk arms / legs)
Controls and skeleton (Both!)
So there are a ridiculous amount of controls, but I can assure you that they will never all be active at any one time.
The rig has many layers of controls; the standard body rig in Ik and Fk, then there are the control dots scattered around the clothes. Most of these will be hidden while the body is animated.
I will upload a full demo video of the rig once it is finished, which should with any luck, be within the next few days.
The main things left to do are to clean up the rig and make some kind of interface. Oh, and I still need to rig the kitten, however I will keep that rig simple. The kitten has already been properly bound to the joints at least.
As soon as rigging is over its back to the animatic / intro, and then animation!
Lastly, I leave you with two shading experiments for the kitten.
This was achieved with a velvet shader.
And this was with fur. (no fur direction maps or anything else fancy)
Just a quick update today. This is the model of the kitten so far. There are a few slight tweaks to be made around the face (like the rather squashed nose) , but it is mostly done.
I've also started binding the monk to his skeleton, and here was a quick pose test to see how well it was working.
I will be continuing with the rigging all throughout this week.
Two things to show today. Firstly is the monk, this time in full 3D. I've put some preliminary textures / shaders on him to get a better idea of what he will actually look like in the final animation, however I will be refining those and also adding a bit of sculpting to the monk too. Nothing too drastic, but enough to make close up shots look just as interesting.
So I've rendered a quick turnaround of him, both with the full costume on, and his body. Don't worry, he is still wearing pants! This also doubles as a lighting test.
I've just noticed that there seems to be some flickering, which is strange as there is no glow or final gather. I have a sneaky suspicion that it could be the depth map shadows! Anyway, a final turnaround will be made once the final textures and lighting is sorted, and that will be posed and include wireframes and clay etc.
The second thing to show is the design of the kitten. I went to the tutorial meeting yesterday, and we were mostly talking about the kitten; what aspects work, and don't work etc. The latest design I took to show was this.
While I thought it was one of the better ones, I feared that in doing so many variations in front and sides, I had probably lost something from the really early sketches. However I was still happy with the overall shape and pose. But basically, most people seemed to agree that the blue shaded kitten here was also a most successful shape. In some areas more than others.
The only problems being that it is clearly posed (not a default pose) and didn't have a face. My attempt at neutralising the pose (by tilting the head back down) and adding a face went a bit wrong as you can see below.
In the end we came to the conclusion that I have all the right features of the kitten, spread across several versions, so my main task was to merge the best bits into one design.
I've gone with the black and white cat design as a base to make the tweaks and this is what the kitten has finally turned into.
If you compare the two side views, I've made tweaks to the tail, the eyes, the nose area of the face and defined the front legs better. The head in the front view changed quite a bit, but really all I've done is realigned the features with the side view better, which has forced the shape of the head and ears to be a bit bigger, which I think has helped in improving the proportions from the front.
The last few tweaks while minor, have seemed to show how really tiny mistakes can have a big impact on the shape. I am about a week behind behind schedule (nothing unusual there!), but I am confident that the kitten is now ready to be modeled in 3D. While the monk translated perfectly, since this is my first attempt at a quadruped I expect I may find other oddities in the shape that will only reveal themselves when seen in 3D and will just fix them there and then. So for now I will start blocking out the kitten, and if I do make any little changes to the design I think they will be easy to re - tweak in 3D.
So you know where I'm at in my schedule, I planned to start animating in 2 weeks time, but I may have to postpone that by (hopefully no more than) 1 week to catch up with everything else. That's modelling, texturing, rigging, adding sound to animatic, and storyboarding the intro sequence.
Based on some feedback at the last tutorial I had, I have tweaked the face of the monk from the side view to better show the form of the face.
The eyes are slightly further back and the brow is now more pronounced, the cheeks are now present and the mouth is shaded better, with the chin curving into the mouth area. Definitely an improvement on the original if I say so myself!
I want to make sure I've got enough details of my character sorted before modelling. One of the things I want to get right are the hands. I've actually photographed my own hands and then roughly painted these.
It is my intension to then make the hands chunky, since he is a pretty chunky character.
So far I've created a silhouette of the hand from above.
I will then be properly painting the details from top and bottom, and maybe even the sides, but in all honesty the thinner hands above are probably going to be good enough reference.
And now we come to the kittens. I can safely say that kittens are more difficult to draw than hands!
I've been trying desperately to draw the kitten from the front and side. Because this is a CG kitten, I don't really want it to be too styalised in terms of proportion, which is why I've looked at a lot of images of cats and kittens, both real and cartoon; Studying diagrams of the bone structure, only to keep finding ways of how to not draw kittens.
Its all to do with the shape. Here are the first wave of drawings.
I never should have put the ears forward. They look more like puppies! The legs slowly improved as I compared the shapes of kittens to the diagrams of the skeleton, although at this stage there is still something not quite right with them. I did do a front view, but I have a feeling that by the time I've got the side view right, the front view wont line up.
So here is the second wave of kittens. I pretty much started from scratch, and you can see that the pose of the kitten has changed a bit.
After I painted the kitten that is blue I thought that was the nearest shape I had ever got to a kitten, so as you will see, I cleaned up the lines to get a better silhouette. Two problems. The head is posed looking up and isn't really a good default pose. The second is that when I tried to draw the details of the face, it just looked wrong. I slowly shifted the head to looking forward, but I'm still not happy with the final shape as it stands. In case anyone is wondering, the first kitten in the second row down is what I think has the best shape.
Hopefully it will all come together If I look at this again another day.
