For my project I needed a ghost. So I created one.
It consists of a piece of cloth with some eye holes cut out, over the top of a pillow! Pretty scary huh?
Well maybe not, but it was a good excuse to do a cloth sim!
So in two ghost Train scenes I needed the pillow to be covered with a sheet that would be pulled away by the bear. (Still haven't thought of a name yet)
This is what I have come up with. I created a flat plane, and nClothed it. After letting it drape over the pillow, I then set the deformed mesh to be the default position. I then created a constraint that is animated to pull the cloth off the pillow. From here I did a few tests.
The first test I did (after some tweaking of settings) I got pretty good results, but wanted the sheet to be pulled off quicker.
I moved the ground plane further back so it didn't fall out of the scene and made the constraint pull quicker. Sadly though, a little to quick and due to the plane being CG smooth the cloth slid right off anyway!
One final test and I got something that I was totally happy with!
If anyone is wondering how animation is going, it's going fine. Some scenes are better than others. So far I have three favourites. The rest have far more room for improvement, and depending on what time I have left, depends on how well they look in the end.
Here are a few screen shots, from some of the scenes. (not necessarily final render) Notice the fur looks a bit different after the splash. I animated some of the fur attributes.
The last couple of days I have been doing some set modelling. I have two sets to show.
The first is the Ghost Train.
The skeleton graphics weren't done by me. Not the originals anyway. I found some photos of a Ghost Train that I had taken a while back, and borrowed them, but edited them to fit my 'bear' Ghost Train. This was my an attempt at converting the human skeleton faces to bear skeleton faces.
Yeah, I know, not brilliant, but not bad. Anyway, that's the Ghost Train.
The other set is the River Splash, which is luckily just a wall and a sign, so it didn't take as long as the Ghost Train.
Animation wise, I've decided that I will organise all the shots into some sort of priority, so that those that require the most attention will be done first, so that I can get them done, knowing that the rest of the shots shouldn't be as difficult, so if I need to compromise anything, it won't be the most important shots. Of course everything is important though! This way I am making sure that I can hit the deadline, without sacrificing all the animation.
Sorry for the delayed posting, but I've now got a workaround for playing the animation with sound, without messing up my Youtube account.
Presenting a pre vis today. It's really just the key poses of the animation, and is only rough, but will eventually become a refined animation. There's not much in the way of sets and props, most of them are stand-ins or just unfinished sets. There are also a few scenes that I haven't even started yet and are therefore missing. I have however found out that my rigged bear has a few limitations, that make it a pain to pose.
Here is the pre-vis.
This pre-vis has helped me see that there are still many timing issues. You may have noticed that the River Splash scene looks different. I found that there isn't enough time to have the bear walk into the ride and walk out, all wet. So instead he takes one step, then splash! The weight of the soggy pillow pulls the bear to the ground.
So what of those limitations I mentioned. Well, the elbow joint is too far up the arm (oops), which is causing some problems, in that it was impossible for the bear to hold an ice cream in front of his big nose. His arms were too short, but it didn't help that the elbow wasn't a decent distance from the shoulder either.
This also caused problems when the bear puts his arm around the pillow (which is for most of the animation.)
The arms were again being a problem when I had to pose him holding a golf club.
So basically I have a bear that manages to fail to do mostly everything that is required of him for this animation. And its all down to his short arms with an elbow right next to his shoulder! Never mind. I know for next time right?
On a more positive note, I have spent a little bit of time on creating some dynamic feathers! Luckily we had our first tutorials on particle instancing which have come in useful. Although I have messed around with particles for a while now, I've never really looked at instancing until now.
Here are a couple of tests.
I don't know why I would want to fill up a glass with feathers, but I couldn't resist. (if anyone else is wondering, this used the nParticle system in Maya, which makes self colliding a whole lot simpler. Using nParticles is probably not necessary for most of the feather effects though.)
OK, now the second one is more useful. Here I am shooting feathers into the atmosphere. The feathers then drift downwards slowly. This is basically what I need for the opening shot.
No doubt though, that I will need different set-ups to achieve some of the other feather effects.
Its taken a lot of tweaking, some painful fur combing in Maya, and then scrapping that and just doing it all in Photoshop, and now the furry bear is completed.
Now I know what you are all thinking. How does a bear go from flat n' grey to gold n' fluffy!
Well simply adding fur to the bear and changing the colour and length etc gives you something like this.
Which is mostly great, except for the visible seams where the edges of the UV shells are on the UV map and the hands particularly have too much fur.
Now to fix this, the most important attribute in the fur is the fur direction. This has to be painted in Maya. Little did I know at the time, how unintuitive and time wasting it would be. Every time I did a test render, the fur direction map, would not always update, and so I would make changes, render, see no changes, try again, and so on. Switching renders or Saving As seemed to fix this. Although that's not what I found unintuitive.
The display fur preview (the 3D view), was set at 128. Any higher and Maya just couldn't handle displaying such dense fur in the preview. But that's fine, as there was just enough fur to see what I was painting. The point is that, I set the image map resolution size to 1024 by 1024. Both in the fur settings and the painting settings. So as far as I was concerned, it was painting at a decent resolution.
After a lot of painting, and still having seams and random fur splodges that wouldn't go away I decided to look at the image file it was creating. I almost wanted to laugh at what Maya had done, but at the same time I wasn't in a good mood. Take a look at this.
A 1024 resolution image, with a 128 pixel size (and with a lot of random splodges). The display settings for Maya actually have an effect on how it renders, because the file that is painted is stuck at that resolution, no matter what actual resolution you change the map file to.
This was when I decided to paint it in Photoshop. It took me a while to work out what the black and white values represented in terms of fur direction. Here's a diagram I made to show what it all means.
White and black are down, and all the levels of grey are the 360 degrees of rotation. Simple really. With that knowledge, I painted this map.
And together with a base and tip colour map, and a length map, I got the final bear. Fur Length Map
Fur Base Colour Map
Fur Tip Colour Map
Here are three images showing how some of the variations in length. I might still need to make the eyes more visible, but its basically done.
So what I've learnt from all this is that fur isn't really that hard after all, but Maya fur IS hard.
I was still in for one last surprise though. I wanted to apply the fur to a bear with some animation, to see how it all deforms. I created a new scene and imported the bear rig with out fur. Applied the fur preset and attached the map files. I then baked the map files and Maya had one last change to make. When baking the files, the images were up-scaled to the intended 1024 resolution and smoothed out. There was only one problem with that. I didn't want my images to be changed. If you look back at my direction map, you will see that the body is half white and half black. (still technically the same rotation value). Up-scaling the images, blurred the crisp line, (producing grey in-between) thus producing a seam.
Also when baking, the clumping seems to be more noticeable. You will see that the squares of clumping are quite noticeable in the video.
Although I'm not sure about the clumping, I do know how to fix the image up-scaling problem.
Anyway, for all those good enough to have listened to me for this long, and maybe even learnt something you didn't know before, I leave you with a video of the bear running with fur. And just for fun, he is being chased by an invisible cannibal! (might need to go to fullscreen HD to see the benefit of the fur)
I copied the animation of one of the invisible cannibal characters run cycles, and quickly adjusted some of the curves. It's not a perfect transition, but for the purposes of this test its good enough.
While all this fur stuff has been taking place I have also been blocking out the whole animation. The idea is to have everything roughed out first. Then I will go back and refine every shot one by one. In theory I should be able to finish this within a day or two (the blocking out) and present a sort of pre-vis pretty soon. And from then on, its animating like crazy!
Yep. I was so close to having both done within a day and a half, but due to some complications, I had to go back and edit a few mistakes, but now, after about two days worth of working, I have a ready to animate bear. He's still missing his fur though, but that's for another day!
On the last group project, we had seven characters. All of them rigged by Shahbir, and, I think it was three of them had IK - FK switching arm rigs built into them.
Anyway, I wanted my bear to get the same treatment, so I had a go myself. I had a rough idea of how it worked, but wasn't sure about any of the little problems that I might encounter. So I had a go... and... it worked! Basically the technique was to rig an IK arm on one set of joints, and an FK on another. Then constrain the main joints to both the IK and FK joints. Then create an attribute to switch between them.
Here is what the rig setup looks like in FK...
...and IK.
The skeleton
I've also made a video demonstrating nearly all the controls on the rig.
Notice the pole vector controls. They actually point to the IKs they effect. It's a remarkably simple little touch I added to the rigs. Just use an aim constraint.
With this new rig I thought I better test it with a pose.
Next on my list of things to do is set and prop modelling, while starting to animate, or at least work out in rough how the shots are going to work.
Today I have finished modelling the bear for my animation.
It's take quite some time with a lot of tweaking in places, and am now happy with the outcome.
Since the last update I've tightened the join between the face and the nose and added a few bumps on top, to make his nose appear more squashed against his face. Not that I ever showed you a smooth preview of the bear before, it did originally look like his nose was just a blob coming out of his face, with no real definition.
The ears are now stuck to the head properly. They were originally separate bits of floating mesh. The hands are modelled. (like mittens) There is geometry underneath the feet now. The curves are ever so slightly more shaped, and he has an extra bump under his nose. (which gradually dispersers around the neck) Generally the whole model has been tweaked to fit the character better.
There were also some issues with the geometry around the arms which have been adjusted.
One of the main things I like about the bear is it's simplicity. (the look) I've tried to keep the use of circles in the drawing, consistent in the model by keeping the body and the head relatively spherical. The main difference with the 3D bear is the length of the legs. I purposely made them longer than in the storyboards, so that they would be more practical to use for walking etc. I still kept the overall shape the same though.
I've unwrapped the UV's too, although this time I'm not so worried about straightening the edges for ease of painting as I'm going to be using fur. And from what I know, I have to have very evenly laid out UV's, with minimal stretching, so that the fur is evenly distributed over the mesh.
I'm sure there will be more to come soon.
Oh, and one more thing. Here is the second (and last) animatic. It's got the title 'My Pillow' although it's likely to change as it's not necessarily the final title. It's just there to fill a blank space for now. Talking of blank spaces, there is one other snag with this animatic... It has no audio :(
Unfortunately, I hadn't realised at first, but an automatic email was set to me from Youtube, saying that It had detected content that is owned or licensed. Although nothing had actually happened yet, I wasn't going to wait and find out so I've taken both versions with the audio down. After speaking with Alan, we came to the conclusion that it is just something that I have to put up with. Basically, its never going to be seen with audio on the blog (unless anything changes). Which is a shame. This explains why I posted the second animatic and then very promptly took it off the blog.
Of course when I'm in Uni, I can show it to anyone if they ask.
I've got a little bit further with the head. Although I'm still convinced something could be done to improve the edge flow. I think the shape of the bear has come out well in 3D, especially considering this isn't even smooth previewed.
I've started blocking out the bear character for my animation.
So far the main body is blocked out. He is missing his hands/paws, and the soles of his feet though.
Here's the drawings I'm modelling from. I've lengthened the legs slightly to enable better control for walking etc.
The head is in the process of being modelled, although I've been finding it tricky to figure out the correct flow of geometry. Unfortunately his ears aren't by the side of his face, so I can't follow the basic human head edge flow. I can't even follow a CG bear model as I can only find realistic CG bears, i.e. my bears neck is coming out of the top, where as a standard four legged bear has his neck coming out from the front. I have a rough idea how it should work, but am not totally sure.
Alan, if you could take a look at this and see if I'm going in the right direction, or if not, tell me where I'm going wrong, I would be most grateful.
