Pond Dude Animatic

woooo-eee I'm all full of updates today! I have started my SESI mentor shot with David Davies from Sony last week. I pitched my story boards and have the ok to move forward with it so I did a quick animatic:



Some concept art for the dude's face:

Color Concept: Baby Dragon

I wanted to put down some ideas for what the baby dragon would look like:

Birdie

Quick color study for the bird in my thesis comic:

Matte Painting Previs

A robot in the woods!!!

Comic Concept Art

Some concept art for my thesis comic:

Massive Trouble

By Sunday I had finished the bulk of my animations and then on Monday I wanted to get them into Massive. When I switched from shadow monsters to townspeople for the Massive sim I tested out the townsperson rig in Massive with a quick animation. He seemed to hop along fine. When I imported my run into Massive it looked ok at first glance. The animation played properly but was jumping back t the origin. No problem, I thought,just need to set it up to loop. So I got the animation trimmed down and blended so it looked smooth. But when I took the camera off of "follow" mode I quickly realized that something was terribly wrong. He would run forward through the loop but when he reached the end of the loop e would get pulled back. Its important to note that he would get pulled back but not to the origin. As it turns out his axis moves slowly along in the z direction while the character moves quickly. So when he reaches the end of his loop he gets yanked back to the axis, which has only moved a little.

I spent a great deal of (frustrating) time yesterday trying everything that I could think of to fix this but nothing seemed to work. What drives me crazy is that the hop test worked properly with no issues but the animation that I spent two days on won't work.

In other news, here is a render of a couple of shadow monsters.



*EDIT: OK, they work now. Apparently I was just doing it wrong.

Massive Cycles

Now that I've officially switched the crowd from the shadow monsters to townspeople I had a whole new set of animations to get ready for Massive. This is a playblast of the carver rig going through the following cycles: standing still to run, run, run to walk, walk, walk to stop, 5 or 6 idles, and standing still to walk. Additionally I have turns for both walking and running, and a walk to run. This completes the basic motions for the towns people crowd. I will add more as needed.



For the remainder of the week, I'll be working on getting smoke sims set up and getting my completed animations into massive.

Skull Variation

The crowd shots will have at least 6 different heads. I made one base skull and then modeled interchangeable horn/antlers that fits into the skull. Perhaps not always anatomically correct according to the skull but it should do for a crowd.

Fisher Texture Update

Thought I'd update this real quick... thinking about dirtying his vest a little.

Texture Tests

Two quick renders of the environment with some textures and basic lighting. The render settings are pretty low for them and the textures are only at about 60 - 70% complete. I will use matte paintings for the more distant backgrounds in the compositing stage at the end of the project. I'd like to get some haze and some particles floating about the air to give the scene some atmosphere and of course volume rays if I have time.



A render of the fisherman with a slightly updated texture map from the Carver. I might add more fur in different parts of the body like the arms and chest. Obviously the pipe and hat have yet to be surfaced and I am planning on modeling him some makeshift glasses.

Pandora Preproduction: Scene Modeling

The scene is at roughly 85 to 95% complete. This is a rough estimate because the rest of the modeling will be dependent on how the renders look once there are textures and animation in the scene. The rest of the set modeling will be done on an as needed basis when I get to the animation and rendering stages.

Pandora Preproduction: Refined Previs

Taking into account many of the critiques I got over the last week I refined the story a bit. The previs is still fairly rough but is sufficient to show the shots in sequence.

I received a lot of good advice over the week but ultimately I decided to keep the actions simple. My weakest part is my character animation so I decided to minimize that aspect without ruining the story. The biggest change was keeping the character on the initial part of the dock after he releases the shadow army instead of returning to the end of the dock and continuing to fish. Instead he watches as another villager runs by in fear from a shadow monster. This is what prompts him to kick the box off the dock. The end closes with the fisherman looking at the "no fishing" sign that was just revealed by the shockwave of a big explosion.

I had received some good feedback about modifying the story so that the fisherman was unaware the whole time of what he unwittingly unleashed upon the world. However, upon reflection on how long I would need to complete the character animation I soon realized that it was not within the scope of this term.

PREVIS

Model Update

A work in progress of the village. Only the front three buildings will be fully modeled. The rest of the village will be matte paintings.




The shadow monster without any of his skulls or armor. The character will be rigged and his props will be randomly applied through massive for the crowd shots.



One of the heads for the shadow monsters. There will be two or three more of these to be assigned to the crowd.



The dock where the animation begins and ends.

Pandora Preproduction: Story Change

I wasn't very happy with my previous story idea. I didn't like the lead in and didn't know how to resolve it. I would have had to model and rig two different characters and that seemed an impossible task by myself. Therefore I changed my "wrapper" story and kept the Pandora's box core.

The hero is a slightly dull town yokel who is fishing at the start of the animation. He is starting to nod off when he gets something on his line. After a bit of a struggle he gets pulls a small evil looking box out of the water. He opens it and black smoke spills out in tendrils. Everywhere the tendrils land a shadow monster appears. Once assembled, the shadowy figures rally and go about the town, breaking things, setting buildings on fire and generally causing great mayhem. There will be a birds eye view of the town incorporating a massive simulation of the shadow monsters running through the streets and breaking things. Fire will sprout up on the buildings in the far shots. The hero is stunned by what he has caused and subtly kicks the box into the water and returns to his pier to fish wincing every time he hears an explosion or crashing sounds. The final shot is the hero sitting down in the position that he started in except in the background the town is on fire. Once he sits down a piece of debris falls from a "fishing" sign that he had been sitting next to the whole time only to reveal that the sign had said "NO fishing."

Story Boards:















PREVIS

The advantage of the new story, aside from an improved story, is that I will be repurposing the Carver rig and model. I will remove his glasses give him a hat and some other props and modify the texture but the weight painting will remain the same.

I am happy with this story and have no plans to significantly change it.

Pandora Preproduction

I like to use mythology for inspiration when I begin thinking of a story. It gives me an idea and story elements to build from. For my combined Advanced CG and Massive project, I decided to go with the story of Pandora’s box. According to the myth, Pandora is given a jar and then told not to open it. The jar contained all the evils of the world and when she opened it they all escaped and all that was left in the jar was hope. I am adapting that basic story to fit my own needs by changing Pandora into a male anamorphic chipmunk creature and a jar into an ornate box. I have no thematic reason for changing the character from the original story beyond that I will be able to make a cuter more sympathetic chipmunk in less time than I would be able to make a human woman.

Hero Character:




Evils:



The “evils of the world” will be represented by shadowy figures wearing various skeletal armor. When the box is opened, tendrils of smoke will burst out of the opening. Each of these tendrils will form a column that when they touch down to the ground one of the Evils will emerge. The actual body of the Evils will be geometry rendered out with a constant black shader applied. In Nuke I will blur and use various noise or 2d smoke effects for an alpha of the character pass. Ideally the bodies would be volumes but the simulation time and storage would be unreasonable for the scope of the project. On top of the bodies of the Evils will be various parts of armor or skeletal objects including skulls for heads. These objects will not be blurred or shadowy. I will use Massive for the crowd shot of the Evils closing in on the Hero and to randomize the skeletal parts that they wear. There will be one main Evil that I will hand animate. For the smoke tendrils/columns I will use Houdini volumes emitted by particles following a curve. For reference I found almost the exact effect I am looking for in the Harry Potter trailer. 1:50 at this LINK.





In all there would be 4 distinct effects.
1. Smoke billowing from the box.
2. Tendrils following a curve.
3. Smoke on the impact of the tendrils.
4. The Evils dissolving into particles.


Storyboards:












PREVIS


Problems:

Scale is the main problem with this project. Each individual element is not difficult but there is a lot to handle. There are 4 main effects. I have done simple volumes tests in Houdini and I think the tendrils and smoke will be fairly simple to set up. The dissolving people should also be easy. The difficulty will lie in integrating these elements with the characters in massive and getting them to render properly. The second problem is character animation and creation. My storyboards and previs feature the Carver from an earlier project of mine not the character I described. I do not think that the Carver fits the story, he is an older character, not one that would be searching around ruins. If I decide to go with a new character that could potentially add a lot of time to production. The solution I have to that problem is to enlist outside help for the rigging of both characters. Modeling and texturing is added work but both are jobs that I do quickly, efficiently, and with pleasure. If I can not find someone to rig the characters I will switch back to the Carver and the story will take the hit. Overall scale is the last problem, I am not sure I can finish the entire piece by the end of the 11 weeks. Once I have a better idea about how I will handle the aforementioned problems I may decide to cut it down to a trailer type of animation. Right now I feel the story and character need more development at the beginning of the animation to get the viewers to care about the character.

Pre-Production

For this Summer's New Media project I'll be once again focusing on look development in computer animated graphics. Instead of experimenting with several looks as I did last quarter I'll be focusing on a single look for a short animation. The short will be a character driven animation with a bit of story. What I will be primarily focusing on is seamlessly integrating 2d backdrops with 3d animated scenes. For this I will be using locked off camera angles so that I can use painted scenes with the 3d elements. Additionally, if the story calls for it, I will use 3d projection techniques in Nuke to create parallax effects with the 2d painted backdrops.

Inspiration for this piece has come from a variety of places. A short animation created by students two years ago demonstrates a way of mixing 2d and 3d animation for a very attractive piece. In it they used painted backdrops and a cel shader similar to the one I used last term as my third look to get a painterly feel that is reminiscent of an older Disney or Miyazaki animation.



These Gobelins shorts are an inspiration as well for their detailed painterly look.

A short animation based on a children's book by Shaun Tan. Hints at a little bit of the painterly approach.

A music video of a Gorillaz song. Animation by Passion Pictures of Australia. Some nice matte paints for the backgrounds and one shot with the character inside the windmill as pieces are falling are especially notable.

Past projects I have worked on that I am building upon are a dynamics test and Flight, an animation from last quarter.

Bottle Toss was a quick dynamics test I completed at the end of last quarter. I didn't want to construct and render an entire outdoor scene so I kept the camera still and painted over the unrendered parts and added detail to others. Here are the layers that were composited together and the final piece. There are some issues with the perspective and I unfortunately didn't get to do a shadow pass which would have integrated the pieces a little better.







Animated Sequence

A rough cut of my animation final for last term. There are obvious rendering and animation issues with this piece as well but what I wanted to point out was the painterly effect I was trying to convey with the textures and background. While I am planning on polishing this piece I had hoped it would have more painted backdrops as well. Something I am incorporating into this quarter's short animation.

Flight rough cut

The story for this summer's animation is in the rough previs stage. I have the beginnings of storyboards and this t-pose for a main character. The old turtle creature is a wood carver and the animation opens with him sitting at his workbench carving a miniature unicorn or some other mythical creature. He finishes and turns away from his work. There is a sound and he turns back to his work and the statue is gone. Sounds keep drawing his attention around the workshop as if he is not alone. He finally corners the noise behind some objects (maybe a curtain) When he uncovers the source of the noise it turns out that it is the carving as a full size creature of light. As he looks at it in awe he reaches out to touch it. As his fingers make contact with the glowing essence of the creature it dissolves back into the miniature wood carved toy.



Project Timeline

Week 2 - Story outline and preparatory research presentation.
Week 3 - Full storyboards and begin character modeling.
Week 4 - Set designs, begin set modeling and effects R&D.
Week 5 - Finish Modeling, projection, and effects R&D.
Week 6 - Texturing and Lighting, camera previz.
Week 7 - Animation and effects.
Week 8 - Animation, effects, and rendering.
Week 9 - Rendering, matte painting, and compositing.
Week 10 - Compositing and re-renders.

It is important to note that my focus in this class is look development, art direction, and directing. I may combine new media projects with Dan for the main visual effect and potentially have an animator for the bulk of the character animation.

robot

Preliminary model for my Animation 2 final.

More Test Renders

Some more frames from my animation final. I render out these frames to check on lighting. When placing lights I can't see anything but flat shaded objects so creating a light set up requires a lot of placing objects and lights and tweaking settings then rendering to see what it looks like.

Moth Render

Some close up test renders of the character of my animation final...