More Design Work

So continuing on from my last blog all I have really been doing is more and more design work. I decided to draw out a rough storyboard so I had a better idea on what I needed to design and what kind of background i will need. It is just a rough one so I am not happy with it and there lots I need to change and think about. I was quite surprised to see how long it turned out, took up 80 post-its, which is quite worrying I guess because I am meant to be aiming for 3min and not too sure if it may take longer. But again it’s very rough and there is lots of room for change. So anyway went onto doing more design work some water colour painting of my main characters as well as the three extra children I will be using. So far quite happy with the designs although I am thinking about changing Timmy’s eyes back to the way they use to be as they have gotten a bit too big I think, so will be playing around with that a bit. I have also decided on the ending on my story and so will be adding a pet for Timmy. This will be a pet spider which he carries around in a jar. I think this will also give me a great chance to animate something with more than 2 legs which could be good for my innovation project. Other than that just trying to keep the work flowing, I have been pulled away quite a bit and haven’t done as much as I have planned but Im still happy with what I got so far so hopefully it will continue.

Some Inspiration

Came accross the website for oktapodi a student film created at gobelins l'ecole de l'image. Its a really great fast paced animation. The site is quite nice as you get to see the making of and all the design work that went into the film. Really shows the importance of getting lots of good designs done befoe going into production, and I would like to do the same.

Further Developement

Ok so been thinking more about my story line and how im going to have it layed out. The story will begin by introducing you to this world where everyone has special powers and when they are young they are sent to this old ladies house. She encourages the children to find there abilaities but not in the gently caring way you might expect. She pushes the children through dangerous and scarey situation to the point where they need to use there ability to save them selves. The old lady has reputation to uphold and will make sure all the children find there gift. We then meet Timmy a strange little boy who is pushed through all this obsticles and fails them all. He is squashed battered and burned but still no special ability. We see Timmy dissapointed as the other children dicover there gifts. There will be a long series of little skits going on here. We see Timmy alone and depressed after all this abuse and here we see the old lady start to feel for Timmy and as she goes to comfort Timmy he eats her. Well that was my initail idea but since the feedback session I have decieded to change the ending slightly and give Timmy a more significant power which Im still working on. I have also further developed some ideas for other children and the designs for the main characters. I feel my designs for the main characters have improved and Im starting find their final image. Timmy is a strange dark little boy while the old lady will be quite a comical character but nasty and bitter.

Moving on to Designs

Ok so we need to get a proposal in by the 3rd June so really need to hurry up and start working on story and designs. I have started thinkng about my storyline and would like it to about a child who is struggling to find his gift in a world where everyone has powers. Children are sent to this ol ladies house where she encourages them to find there abilities and then meets this little boy who can find his and something happens. Well thats the first general idea I still have lots of work to do on it. As I need to get this in I have done some initial designs for the two main characters which will be the little boy who I may call Timmy and the old lady so here you go.

Beginning Final Project

Ok so we now have our brief for our final project and we really hae total freedom to be able to do anything we want. So I will be creating a 3min short aimed at children aged around 8-13 but hopefully will also be appealling to an older age group. We did have a choice to work in group on this project but since doing all the past group project I want to be able to do this one on my own so I can have total controll and not have to relly on anyone else. So initiall ideas at this point is to create something that is quite funny and filled with little skits. I recently watched pixar short "Presto"





which is such a funny and well put together short, it really inspired me to create something which had the potential to have lots of little skits in it. I have been thinking about creating a story which could be converted into poem form and this could then be narrated over the top of the animation. It is an idea that im still playing around with and im not sure if will persue, I really enjoyed Dr Sues book when I was young so this was kinda an inspiration. Another big inspiration for my story would be Tim Burtons book, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy.

Its full of dark strange and twisted poems which I really love and has made me want to create a story which is a little bit dark. I have also recently watched Coraline which looked great and I really liked the colour scheme they used through out the film.

Running out of Time

Ok so now we had the block through, we were able to move on to animating the characters for each shot. I shared the shots out between Adam, Sean, and myself and created a file system where we would all reference in the finished characters into the block through shots and work from there. The animation was definitely the part of the production which I most enjoyed, but again time was an issue. At this point we only had two weeks left and allot of shots to get through. The first shot I went onto was the trumpet shot where I needed to create an ncloth for the flags. Something strange did happen in this shot where the ncloths stop working and wouldn’t let me reapply it. So I had to copy the animation I had done on the trumpets onto some locators and then move these locators into a new scene along with the cameras and then re-reference in the trumpets and then start the ncloth from scratch. This did work out for the best as I wasn’t really too neat in my previous attempt at creating the ncloth. Anyway got the ncloth attached played around with the attributes and finally got it just the way I wanted it. And then my shot become corrupt and I lost all the work I had done. I had also recently changed computers and didn’t have incremental save on so didn’t have a previous shot to work from ... great.

Well that was a huge waste of time I didn’t have so I decided to move onto my next shot and come back to this a bit later. So for the next shot I referenced in my characters and animated them, and all seemed to go smooth which was nice. So I animated a few more shots and no problems yet. Now we were really running out of time so needed to start lighting and rendering out any shots we had animated. Now one thing we needed to do to the referenced characters was to turn on the smooth when rendered setting in the approximated editors, which was fine for most characters but we did have a few problems. The little squire’s topology was a bit illegal so I and Adam had to go through these models and figure out where it was going wrong and fix it. Another thing taken up time we didn’t have, but managed to get them fixed, except now Adams quires would render out smooth but when we tried to reference them into the shots they would crash Maya. So we couldn’t really render all the shots with the red squire in. Anyway I moved on to lighting the shots that would work and render them out. We really had no time at this point so it was just a quick throw a few lights in check it looks ok and render. We decided it was best rendering out the characters and shadows on different passes so we could then play around with these in the comp to get them looking right. Then moved on to rendering, and putting the shots together as best we could in after effects. The shots that we did finish were starting to look quite nice and it was a real shame we couldn’t get more done for the deadline, but I just put what we had into our block through and gave this in, but I am planning to get the project done anyway.

The Knights Project

OK so been a while since my last entry, just been so busy with this project and the Easter break was a real pain, and set us back quite a bit. So since last time I have continued working on the models I had made and moved on to rigging them up for animation. This has taken a lot longer than I wanted, but I have rigged and finished them and all Five characters are ready to be animated. I never really found any major problems when rigging most of it did come together quite smoothly.





One problem which did come up was when I was trying to constrain the eye aim controls into the hierarchy so it would follow the character when animated. The problem was with the aim constraint and the lattice I used, where the was a double transformation when the character moved or rotated his head, meaning the eyes would follow the aim constraint twice. I had to use the lattice as the characters eyes were oval and so needed to deform when rotating so it would'nt come out the eye socket. To solve the problem, I had to create a locator in the middle of the eye which the eyes rotation was connected to and then the locator was aim constrained to the eye control. Cant really claim the solution as Georg figured this out, but glad it worked anyway. The other problem I recently had was when i was creating the IK_FK blend controls i had a problem where my orientation of the controls was not matching that of my joints so made it spazed out but was'nt really a big problem just needed to reorientated the controls to match up with my joints. I did enjoy the rigging process as i usual do but would of been nice to have a bit more time to spend on it, as there are some areas I would like to tidy up a bit, like making sure all transformations are zeroed out and making sure my controls all move the same way but still happy with what I've done in the time I had, really had to work my ass off over Easter to get it all done.

So once the characters were all rigged I then needed to move on to painting weights which is just a really boring time cconsuming process but needs to be done. Everything went pretty smooth here only thing I would do if I had time was spend a bit more time only the smaller knights shoulders as I could make them move a lot better.

And next after that well actually it was before this , but anyway I had to lay out all the UV's for Justin to paint yet again another really boring and really long process. I do hate doing UV's, we did have a bit of a problem where what Justin painted was'nt really following the smooth mesh, which I think is because the UV's were low poly ones and I made a really low poly model so when it was smoothed it did stretch a bit. A bit of a solution to this was to smooth the mesh save the UV's and then unsmooth the mesh so Justin had a bit more accurate UV's to copy from, but still having a few problems especially around smooth corners but might just need to tweak the UV's in Maya to get those little bits right.

OK so after all that was done, someone had to do the block through and yip that someone was me. I did'nt really mind its just there were so many shots to do (76) and i was really starting to worry about time but just had to get on with it and it took me ages to do but its was really helpful as it brought up so many problems which we need to really watch out for when doing the actual animation. Things like the scale of characters, making sure the animations flows and characters don’t end up swapping positions and also the knight sword seemed to jump from one hand to another which we need to watch out for. We also discovered what backgrounds need to change or be scaled up and we did another edit where we did cut some shots that were'nt really need and changed shots around so it just made more sense. So was definitely worth it .

OK so that's all been done, we have two weeks left to do the animation, render out the different passes, comp it all together and add extra effects and then do the final edit. Oh and the sound needs to be done as well. So the next two weeks are going to be so so busy, really wish we had more time, just hope we manage to get it all finished in time