backgrounds and props wip

I went through some of the things that must be done in order to get the technical things aside and be able to focus on the creative when I start animating.

There are numerous cosmetic fixes and changes here and there on both characters, their skinning and controls. There is no reason to post pictures of that now, because I will show it later on anyway.

The new things that I made are the spear weapon( with it's controls ), and some of the elements of the backgrounds. I am also compositing the shots right now and thinking about the background and it's colors.

The spear was really easy to make in maya, and I also Uv-ed it in maya and made the texture with photoshop. Here are the controls that I made for it:



And here are the background elements this far:



Ignore the ugly procedural textures- I am going to change them later. Almost everything is made out of nurbs curves, circles, bend deformers and so on. There is a lot of duplicating and variating going on too.. but I think this will do,after I put some nicer textures

mammoth -the set up

I finished the Mammoth character set up yesterday and while skinning frustrated me at first, I managed to get it done way faster this time. Thanks to some help I got at university. I am getting a lot of valuable feedback from more experienced students at uni. Anyway, here are some shots I took yesterday:




There are several blend shapes used this time. I got some assymetrical face expressions controls on the brows and the cheeks put into single controllers.




I like having one control do as much as possible. That simplifies the work later on. These characters are far from perfect, there is still a lot to learn. But I guess that they will do for this animation short.

Cave dude - the set up

I finished the cave man's set up completely a couple of days ago, but forgot to rant about it. There is still more to desire in regards to the skinning, but meh..

Here are some of the controls that I have set up. I know its pretty basic but it's my first rigging/skinning work ever. Took less than a week...










And while being at it, I guess I will also show you my progress on the other character. Just to experiment,I decided to use a mel script to generate a rig for me this time. It's called the setup machine2...But of course what I got out of it was overcomplicated and had some joint orientation issues.,so I deleted half of the rig (legs) and redid them myself. That also took care of the skinning issue it gave me.



blend shapes are prepared for applying after i get the weights right...

Mammoth mesh

Yesterday I created a mesh for the second character of my upcomming animation short for Bradford University. The mammoth is a low-poly mesh that consists of 820 quads, 4 textures and uv maps. I did the whole thing from scratch in 5 hours, using mainly Maya, but also Z-brush for the UV mapping and Photoshop for the texturing and transparency maps.



You can see a better quality render at my flickr gallery, which is previewed in a small window on the left side of this blog.

I found out how to embed 3d in flash content, so from now on, I will be able to post actual 3d viewers instead of static pictures :P

UV mapping and texturing of cave guy

Today I cleaned up the topology and finished the UV mapping and texturing work of cave guy. I used Z-brush to do the UV and Z-brush and photoshop to create and edit it's texture. There are no seams visible. I might have over saturated the skin tone. There'll be a couple of test renders later.



name of mesh: Cave dude
number of polygons: 3559
texture size: 1024x1024
Time taken: 3 days- one to sculpt,one to retopologise, and one to uv and texture...

Another thing I did was softening the Normals of the whole mesh and then hardening them on some of the edge loops.


It might not be a very good idea to uv it before it's boned, skinned and tested, but I just had to do it today.This was something I wanted to learn from ages. Now that I know how it's done, I think I will enjoy texturing organic stuff in the future.
I have to say though, I am relying too much on my tablet. If I didn't have a wacom tablet, this would have been very hard to achieve in 3 days.

3D character animation assignment- storyboard and topology

I just started planning out my short 3d animation for character animation assignment. The deadline is the end of April or something like that.

My idea is a bit too ambitious for such a short deadline, but I also came up with a plan B story for it, that doesn't involve me modelling and animating a mammoth.


(animatic done with toonboom storyboard trial)

The production pipeline path that I am going to take is going to be slightly different from every one else's in the class. Since I've been using z-brush for almost two years now, I decided that it will cut some of production time.


1 modelling:
sculpt in zbrush---->retopology in zbrush--->export to maya and do some tweaks on topology


Making an animatable topology mesh in Z-brush and exporting it to maya is incredibly easy, though it had some quirks. Some people might say that it will take more time to do it with Z-brush, because then I have to redo the topology after I sculpt the character. To those people I say- no. It's far simpler and empowering. I get the shape to look exactly as I want it and focus on topology afterwards. So I do better at both shape and topology and I have greater control over the end result. I sculpted my mesh and then redid the topology in z-brush (If I export a high poly mesh it will just crash maya) so I made an adaptive skin (copy of the hi poly mesh) with proper topology and 2 subdiv levels stored in it. I just needed to add some extra edgeloops in maya.

Exporting the animation to video file, compression settings and colors

The last part of the job was of course getting a video file out of flash.



FPS---
The first problem I had was with the fps in the video file. Since the animation of Toast!/malfunction had movie clips with applied effects on them (some of the backgrounds) that really slowed it down. To get over that problem, I exported the background as jpg and imported it back to my libraries and replaced the movie clips with jpg files. Don't use too many effects on your movie clip symbols, that will slow it down. The ending result still had some slight slow downs on some of the shots. The slow downs didn't occur in the swf file, which leads me to believe that it had something to do with the way flash renders the animation to video files. I could still play with the settings there.

Encoding--
The second problem was getting a small file size with a relatively good quality. The defaut settings of exporting a mov file will give you a huge file,that is not internet-friendly. I had to set up three things (quicktime settings):

>settings: compression type:mpeg4 video,quality:best
>filter: you can play with the color settings ,but this will slow down the rendering time,so I didnt use any filters.
>size: 720x576 PAL , 4x3 , keep aspect ration with letterbox

>sound> I didnt touch the sound settings

Colour--
I had to go and upload the file at Bradford university's horton labs. One thing those computers are useful for is downloading and uploading. After seeing the animation again, I found out that the colours look awful there. The boy's shirt was over saturated red, the robot's head is too purple. The lesson to be learned here was monitor calibration. While drawing my character's , I should have thought more about how they are going to look like on other people's screens. I have to find out- is the monitor at the labs set up badly or is it my own monitor. I tend to set mine in a way that doesnt strain my eyes. Changing the default settings to lower saturation, I also lower my brightness and contrast slightly. The weird thing was that it also had a slightly different hue (the robot's purple head). All and all, after I fix all the annoyances of the animation, I will export it properly as a big file and edit and encode it with Adobe after effects.

Adding sound to Toast! animation

The name of Toast! was changed to "Malfunction". Decided that I don't want to give away the ending too much with the title.


Adding sound to the animation

The sound in Toast! is really low on quality standards. After seeing it for the first time with sound, I thought that it was horrible.

Some of the sound effects were recorded by myself. For the robot , I used the creaking door of the kitchen at the halls. The title screen sound was made by a real empty tin can (from mexican beans) and a pencil.




The bucket sounds, electricity and so on were taken from the internet, after carefully examining their license.

The Music in the end is made by me, with my Nintendo ds. I used "Jam sessions" imitation of guitar. You might notice that the rhythm is the same as the title sceen sound.



The voices were recorded and edited with Audacity. My brother did his goofy/mickey mouse rip-off voice, as my voice is too deep to imitate a boy's.

All and all, I hate the sound in "Malfunction". It's messy and badly edited.You can even hear some static sounds in the background. Flash has a real nice way of setting the volume ease out and ease in and I played with that too alot.

How to work fast with flash

Toast animation is complete now. It's well over one minute, but I've set up everything in a symbol hierarchy that will let me easily cut out shots or shorten them without much effort. All in all,it took me 1 week to come up with it and make the animatic, and two more weeks to draw everything and animate it in flash. And I didn't work on it all that much really (I'd say no more than 2-3 hours a day, and some days I didn't work on it at all). Some people might think that I went through like 18 hours of work every day or something.Those people just have no idea how to use flash efficiently.

The reason I managed to complete it that quick is because I knew how to take advantage of fash's features.

So here's how to work faster with flash animations:

- The storyboard animatic is key to good planning. It will help you figure out the timing of the scenes and you can even draw over it in flash (if it's drawn well).

- Good character libraries and fla file structure - is key for efficient production. Keeping everything in symbol hierarchies will enable you to layer animations, time them and position them quickly.It will greatly simplify your work flow. Some people don't want to do it,and will go with frame by frame. I think thats just crazy.

Using symbols and tweens and even armatures will also make your fla file easier to further edit. Imagine you are working on something like this in a group. If you don't have a well structured source file, taking out animations out of it and reusing them will be a living hell for your colleagues.

-Reusing graphics - In flash, you can easily reuse a lot of your graphics. If you draw the base of a head once, you dont have to redraw it every time your character changes expression. To do that, you must separate the base, the eyes, the eyebrows (and even the nose if you like) on layers and symbols. You can move and transform everything too. And even while drawing, keeping everything on separate layers means that you can copy and alter easily.If you have separated your character to: head,torso,upper arm> down arm> hand, upper leg> down leg> foot symbols, you can reuse some of them- no need to draw them all over.

- Reusing animations- The eyes symbol will contain variations of the blinking animation. The mouth symbol- variations of the mouth. And you can tell flash when is that variation or animation going to be played and replay it. You don't have to draw all the expressions all over. The same applies for body animations. If you have something that can be looped, just loop it. If there is a movement of the character or his head that is kind of like in a previous shot- just take the one from the previous shot and alter it slightly. You will be able to do that easily if your symbol hierarchies are good.