The Storyboards and Scripts

I didn't really enjoy the script writing exercise. I really struggle to come up with interesting stories and tend to stick to more cliche stuff. I needed to spend more time developing my story as i thinks it came across a bit boring. I also found it difficult trying to fit my story into 90 sec, but i think in the end i manage to do it. The found the storyboarding exercise to be allot more enjoyable although again i needed to pay more attention to certain areas. I did get some of the geography muddled up and some of the shot could of been improved to make it more dynamic. But on a whole i think i did OK and look forward to doing some more story boards.

The Final Renders

So now the last bit of our production, the rendering. Now not much you can do during this time but slowly render each shot. This also tends to be the time when you discover problems, nothing major just little bits which either need to be re rendered or changed. So yes a very time consuming time and at the end of production can get quite stressful. But everything is rendered and all problems fixed so im quite happy. This whole production has been quite enjoyable; I have really enjoyed working with people on a production and having my own role to play. Although I never really got to do what I am really interested in which is character animation it has still been a learning curve. If I had to do it again I would deffinatly try to be more organised, as things can really get confusing when handling so many shots. I also think I wouldn’t create the library as one huge scene but rather lots of scenes. I think it would make it easier to work and keep things more organised, but on a whole I a happy with the work I have produced for this production.

The Lighting

So once that was done the only thing left was to do, and that was lighting. Now me and Sam needed to keep the lighting as similar as possible so we decided that we would bath take an area of the library to light. Now the scenes needed to look quite 2d so the character would blend in, so this meant no shadows and almost over lighting the scene so it looked kind of 2d. The only shadow that was being cast was that of the light shining through the window, which really looks nice against the golden colours of the library. This was a really time consuming part of the production as every time you lit something you had to do a render to see how it was looking, and with such a busy scene the render can take a few minutes. Now I know a few minutes doesn’t sound that bad but when you have to keep doing it over and over again it can chew up a lot of time, which really isn’t good when you have a dead line. But we got through it and everything got lit.

The First Render

Now before I could do the lighting, I needed to render out some block ins so the 2d animators could start animating on top. At this point Sam came onto the project so we shared out the shots to be animated and rendered. What we had to do was to follow the story board and create each shot and do any camera movements or animations that were needed. I can say that I really enjoyed this part of the process as it was really quite boring but some shot which had a bit of animation in them were more enjoyable. We never really had any problem at this point either; just trying to get the shots out as soon as possible so the 2d animators could begin work.

The Textures

At the point the library was really starting to come together, I had completed the modelling and was ready for lighting and texturing. Now the texturing was going to be very simply so it would blend with the 2d animation. So it was mostly just different shades of a plain lambert material. Some things needed a little extra like the reflections in the TV and the windows and I also had a texture to put on the animated books. This did mean I had to layout some uvs which is a really painfully boring job, but it was only for a book so it was ok. Then the texture for the book was created by someone else. The pallet for the library was to keep to very neutral colours a lot of golden colours. I had help with the colouring from our producer Pete. And was rendered and it was looking really good.

Props for the Library

Next up were the props in the library. There was the book trolley, the reception desk, the television, the cds, a lamp, the information sign, and a stamp. Most of this was quite basic modelling so I never had any problems along the way, and once again I had wills designs to work with.

The Library Door

Right, so the first shot is the character walking into the library and the doors swing open. So I needed to create the doors for the library and then rig them so they had controls which would open and close the doors. I did this using set driven key. I never came across any problem when doing this and I am quite happy with the results.

The Books

Now with the book shelves done I moved onto modelling the books to go in them. Now during the animation I needed a book to fall off a shelf and land on the floor open. This means I need to create a book and rig it so it can open and close. For this I start of by creating a book cover that was closed. I then rigged the book cover with a skeleton and then skinned the book to the joints. This means that when I rotate the joints the books geometry should follow. Now with the book cover rigged I moved onto the pages inside. Now when the book open the pages need to part and go both ways, as well as deform so it looks like open pages. So to this I created to separate squares and added detail to make it look as if they were pages, then I did the same thing again but this time for open book pages. Now I added a blend deformer so that the geometry would deform from a closed looking page to an open looking page. So the last thing I now needed to do was to create attributes which would control the book so an animator would be able to open and close the book. I did this using set driven keys and this is my end result. I have to say out of everything I have created I am quite proud of my book as it looks and works a lot better than I thought it would.

Now here is when I make a huge mistake. I had created the book and along the way I had saved a simplified version. I though I would just be able to use this and copy it through out the library for all the shelves. The only problem being that there are loads of books in the library and the book I was duplicating was still quite detailed. Anyway, I ended up copying this book throughout the library but then Maya kept crashing as it couldn’t handle the amount of detail in the scene, So I had to redo all my books with a lower detailed model, creating books without backs and bottom panels .I got it done and the books were looking good on the shelves so I could move on.

The Book Shelves

Once the basic building had been created I moved onto creating the bookshelves. Now there were no exact designs for these but rather some concept art. The idea was to have the book shelves quite large in comparison to the character. The shelves were also meant to kind of bend over the aisles, and be warped in shape. So with this in mind I started work on the shelves.

This was the first shelf that I created and was intended for the opening sequence when the character first walks into the library. I also decided to have various types a few different types of shelves throughout the library which would better soot the shot.

The Library Project

The Library Project
I started working on the library project during week two of our group production. By this stage most of the pre production work had been completed and I could move onto production. The idea for the library animation was to have a small boy venturing through a library searching for a particular book and he find himself exploring other worlds on his journey. It was decided that the main library would be made in 3d and the rest of the animation would be 2d. So this was my chance to do some work in 3d which is an area I want to get involved in. My role would involve modelling the library, animating shots, lighting and texturing. So I began modelling the library. Now pre production design had already been made so it was my job to follow these designs whilst creating the library.

Above is one of the designs for the library, produced by Will. The shape of the library is quite odd, so what I did was to take an image plane of will design so I could work beside it in Maya to get the right shape. The design for the windows was also on one of wills design so I worked closely with that when creating the windows.

Student Project

For our final year project our whole class was given four different projects to work on. The idea being that we would work together on the different projects, in the areas we were most interested in. I began doing some design work for the student project. For the student project we were given some student interviews which we planned to animate over , kinda like a creature comforts rip off. So together as a group we went through the script and looked for parts of the interview which could be interpreted in a funny way. Anyway I got two pieces of the script to create some characters for. The first character was going to be a gold fish and the second a dung beetle. So I did research and some designs untill I ended up with the images below. I had also done some general designs of different characters before this. So I was asked to create a character sheet and some concept art of my characters. I then went onto the library project so did not carry on with the pre production for these characters. I did quite enjoy creating these character although it isn't the area I want to get into. It was nice seeing the characters I had designed going on through the production and coming to life. I think I could of spent more time developing my designs but I spent most of my time on the next project.

Maya Animation

For this exercise we had to animate three bouncing balls, a soccer ball, a ping pong ball, and a bowling ball. This gave us a chance to really explore different weights and how this affects the way in which you animate an object. So first off I started with the soccer ball, which has a medium weight, is quite soft and tends to bounce. So I need the ball to fall to the ground at a medium speed, bounce a few times as it gradually settles. I also wanted the ball to feel natural as it landed and took off so used the squash and stretch method to achieve this. When looking back on the animation, I am quite happy with how it looks, the only thing I would pay more attention to would be the ending as I think the ball may need to slow down a bit more, before it comes to a stop.



The next ball I went to animate was the bowling ball. Now this is obviously a very heavy ball so would fall to the ground quite fast and as it is very solid and heavy there would not be much of a bounce. The ball would hit the ground at some force and since it’s too heavy to bounce I decided to carry that force into the ball rolling off to one side. So I decided to use hardly any squash and stretch and only a small bounce as the ball hit the floor. Looking back at the finished piece I am happy with how heavy the ball feels, again the only thing I think need more attention would be the speed at which the ball rolls off to the side. I think it needs to slow down more before it comes to a stop and it may also be going at too high of a speed to begin with.




And last off was the ping pong ball. Now this is the lightest ball of the three, and tends to bounce a lot when you drop it. So when the ping pong ball landed I wanted it to bounce quite high because it is so light and bounce quite a few times before it came to a stop. I dint want to use too much stretch and squash either as the ball is quite airy and doesn’t seem to have much of a impact when it hits the ground. So when watching the animation there are a few things I would change. First off the ball seems to bounce a bit too fast for a ping pong ball and secondly the ball needs to slow down a lot more at the top of its arcs as it looks like it’s going the same speed through out.



The ball project on a whole was a good and helpful when trying to get to grips with animation in Maya, or any animation. It is especially good when trying to understand the graph editor, which is so helpful when animating in Maya.


Ok on I next project we had a choice, and I chose to animate a human character picking up a heavy box and placing it on a table. I really liked the idea of this animation and really wanted to give some character to it. I decide to have my character start off looking down at the box and then stretch out as she got ready to pick up the box. She would then step forward to the box, spread out her legs a bit as she got ready to pick up the heavy box. She would then crouch down to the box, stabling herself has she went and then start to pull the box towards her so she could get a good grip on the box. She would then slowly lift the box up bending her head back and having her arms stretch slightly to show how heavy the box is. Once standing, but still slightly crouched as the box is heavy, she would stumble over to the table. As she came towards the table she needed to lift the box up high and push it onto the table. Then take a moment to rest and wipe her brow. Sounds simply enough, well I did have a few problems. First the rigged model I had to work with did not have any type of clamp on the hands which meant every time I moved her body her hand would move into the wrong position, which did make it quite difficult to keep the hand stable. Next problem was there was no way to rotate her arm from the shoulder. The rig gave you the option of moving the hand with an ik handle but would not let me rotate her joints. So this again made it even harder to keep the arm stable especially when she was stretching her arms out. When watching the final animation back I can say that I’m that happy with it. There are places where the arms are twitching a bit and the stretch just looks really robotic. The hands aren’t animated that well and need more attention. I also needed to have a few pauses in there like when she first puts the box down. I think the point where she lifts the box up and takes it over to the table looks quite good and I’m happy with how heavy the box feels but I think the way in which she puts the box down seems a bit too light and robotic, there also needs to be some more anticipation before she picks up the box. Some of the poses at in the animation could also be a bit better and do make the animation fell less dynamic especially at the end, and the legs don’t look quite right which need to be fixed, but over all I think I did ok but it could be a lot better. I did enjoy the exercise as I am really interested in doing 3d animation and definitely want to do a lot more in the future.