Post Production Part 1 - Render Tests

When it came to adding the colour to my character, I decided to use a simple Lambert effect, because I had originally had some issues issues with painting the texture onto it through photoshop. I think the reason for this was because when I unwrapped by UV, I had unwrapped my character down the front and every time I added the texture there was a line down the front centre.



 I decided to use the lambert effect and add a colour ramp so that my original idea of having the tail gradually fade into a darker colour would still work.


When I rendered this out I was really happy with how it looked, because the colour scheme of this character fit in really well with the surrounding environment as well as Ollie's robot character.

However I did encounter some problems when it came to putting her into the water..

When rendered, the parts of the character that were in the water seemed to be going white and her upper body which was out of the  water was going much darker.


After getting Ollie to take a look, and after moving her around a bit, it seemed apparent that when ever I moved the actual character around, it was also moving the cooler scale on the UV map around too.

This was causing the head to pick up the darker end of the colour ramp, depending on where she was placed. After getting my tutor to take a lot, and after A LOT of problem solving, it seemed that the best route to take was to treat the texture as an image projection. To do this, I needed to:

• Select the mesh and assign a  new material as a lambert
• select Colour and right click "Ramp" and select "Assign as Projection" 
• Select Fit to BBOX
• select the character and the lambert shade and in the hyper shade window select "file to texture"
• Make sure Anti-Alias is turned on and then convert and close. 

This could then be saved as an image in the source images folder so it could be applied to each scene. This stopped the moving of the texture so things stayed the way they were supposed to. 

HOWEVER..

I did like the result this gave, however I decided that the colour ramp was a bit extreme and her upper body was far too white. It was when I was trying to fix this that I encountered another problem..

I was sure that the UV map was the same in each scene, so therefore it would have been easy to just place the image on to the character in each scene separately, but the positioning of the maps were not consistent, I assume this was because I have must have moved them about with out realising, because I was confused at first as to why they weren't all the same.

The way to get around this would have been to move each part of the UV map around until things fit and looked right, but I was unable to position it with out there being a break in one of the  shoulders or the front of the head.

After getting Ollie to give me his opinion on the situation, we both decided that the mermaid could do with having a slightly different tinge of colour, which would possibly help bring her out from the background slightly. So instead I went through and applied a lambert effect to each mermaid and gave them a slight green tint, which actually, in our opinion looked much better than the original idea of just having her grey.

Another reason as to why we were happy to go down this route instead is because the mermaid's tail is for the majority of the time, not visible, so not having the colour ramp didn't really feel like a loss.

Environmental designs

Since Ollie and I had been slightly too ambitious with wanting to create a proper ocean scene, we decided that creating two flat planes with transparency between them would work much better, because it allows the characters to be seen not just above it but also partially below, making it look more realistic.

Original Ideas 

 At the start we were considering having 2D style water in After Effects, where the waves could be animated and looped. However, we knew that this would not have worked well with the storyline of our animation, we needed the water to be calm and for the attention to not be taken away from the characters.




There was the possibility of having
a proper ocean setting in Maya, however we realised that this would take a very long time to render, and we wanted to be realistic with our goals.


We decided to go with the sun and sky render setting to give the effect of natural light.



Our main scene

For animating we both worked from the main scene Ollie had put together, because this made sure everything was the right scale. The two planes set down for the water worked really well, especially in the scene when the mermaid is swimming under the water, because she is still visible from above which made it look much more effective. We thought this technique for the water was much simpler but would still go far. 

"For Those Who Fly"

My second piece to be submitted to this competition focuses on "Fantasy" I knew that I wanted to produce something which incorporated wings, as well as being a much looser piece of work, since I spent much longer on the previous piece. I knew I wanted to use a mixture of inks, so I started by throwing some stuff out (even if some of it really was a mess) into my sketch book.

At first I played around with different types of wings because I was pretty unsure about the kind I wanted to produce for the submitted piece.

For these first few experiments I used a mixture of gouache and ink. After looking at these and getting further into experimenting, I decided that they looked a bit too precious and I wanted to go a little bit wilder with the ink.


 I carried out some research on bird wings, because I really liked the idea of creating the look of feathers, and the ink would allow me to create some quite heavy tones.

I knew that the main colours I wanted to use were blue and black, sticking with the original colour scheme of the emperor butterfly wings I had originally produced. This time I decided to try dragging the ink across the page with the end of a straw (my original plan being to blow it across, but it didn't look how I wanted it to) I literally just made blobs of ink and then started dragging them in the direction I wanted. I much preferred how these looked and I definitely was a lot less precious about these, but I thought they turned out to look much more effective. 

I wanted the wings themselves to be the main focus of the piece, so I drew the rough base of the body before hand, so I knew where I would be painting. 

I started by using black drawing ink and a straw to drag the colour upwards in the direction I wanted. After it had built up slightly I started gradually dragging in the blue. 

Change of plan

I noticed that the surface I was working on wasn't taking to the ink too well so I decided to stop, allow it to dry, and work into it further with a mixture of water colour, fine liner and pencil crayon. This added on some time however I was much happier with the result. 

Another thing I decided to add on was some watercolour to the background to it a bit more depth. I felt as though it all looked a but plain with just a white background. 

I'm glad I decided to put in some pencil crayon because this made it much easier to add lots of tone.

I was much happier with this after i'd spent some time tweaking little bits, to be honest I could have carried on but I had to stop at some point! 

Further Progress With Animating

After getting the majority of my scenes animated, the three I had left to complete were all focused on my character. For all of these scenes the movements were quite repetitive, and only focused on the chest upwards of the mermaid, so luckily I didn't have to spend long amounts of time trying to move the whole body, like I did with the swimming scene!


At this point, there was still no colour or texture on my mermaid, so she still looks quite dead in the eyes, because..well, you cant see the emotion in them. This is all something I had planned to incorporate after the animation stage was complete, but before rendering.

Problems I came across

• When animating the arms, and after talking to Ollie about his experience with animating my character, it became apparent that they weights I had painted on the model were not all 100% accurate. There were some small areas that were influenced by certain movements which didn't look right. 
• Also, because these shots of the mermaid were quite close up, I didn't worry too much about where I placed her, however this meant I would need to figure out the positioning for the lighting so it wouldn't look as though it is constantly going from light to dark!
• Some of the movements were just a little too slow or too fast.

How I solved these

• Luckily, the majority of the mermaid's body is in the water, and not completely visible for these scenes, so I didn't need to worry about going back and re-painting the weights. If the problematic areas were noticeable, then I would have had to go back and do this.  However, I wanted to be realistic with myself and my time, as well as my partner's. 
• For these scenes, I will need to spend some time making sure the lighting looks consistent by moving it around and doing some render tests!
• For the adjustments to the movement, I kept referring to the Graph Editor where I could simply move the key frames across forwards or backwards with in the time frame. 

Final Crit Feedback

In all honesty, before this final crit, I was not feeling happy about what I had to show, because I was spending much longer on the rigging and binding of my character than I had anticipated. I had animated the swimming for the mermaid, which was 4 seconds long, so it was better than nothing, and I actually got some really confidence boosting and helpful feedback! People seemed to be impressed with the movement of the mermaid's tail, especially once she was placed and positioned in the water.

The main bit of advice we were given was simply to "Keep going!" because it seemed quite obvious that Ollie and I had reached a bit of hurdle and had lost a bit of motivation, so this crit really did make the both of us feel a lot more confident and motivated.

Organising The Work Load!

Since Ollie needed to spend longer focusing on rigging his model, I began with the animating of my own character. By the time he was at the stage of being ready to animate, we looked over the animating I had already done and decided to split the work load by working on specific scenes and not characters, this meaning we would also need to be prepared to animate each other's character.




We decided to go through the animatic and note down the key scenes to then decide who would animate what. My final list of scenes to animate had quite a nice balance between the two characters so I was glad to get the chance to animate Ollie's robot too.



Passing on the work

Ollie and I spent some time arranging our files and created a specific shared project folder that we would both have and simply pass the individual scenes on to one another through this folder.

Ollie had created one "Ready Scene" which would be the starting point for the rest of the animating, to save time having to drop in the characters and position them accordingly every time.


Robot Time!

Apart from the two scenes that I had previously animated (Scenes 3 and 4) I decided to work through them in order so I could tick them off one by one.


The scenes in which I needed to animate Ollie's
character, he stays quite stationary, and the majority of the movement was in just the upper body, apart from the occasional movement of the feet and legs to show that this character is very uncomfortable.

Also, apart from the first scene where we see the camera pan slowly at quite a distance from the robot sat on the raft, these scenes all consist of quite close up shots with not a huge amount of camera movement, so the animating of these first few scenes wasn't too time consuming.







Problems 

Through out the process of animating this character, things went pretty smoothly, however there was a small problem with the eyes of the robot. I noticed that if the head was moved too far to one side, the eyes began to sink back into the head. After getting Ollie to take a look at his model, it seemed apparent that it was to do with the grouping of the eyes.

After both Ollie and I playing around, it seemed that the best thing to do was to not move the head too far in one direction (which wasn't a problem because apart from this one scene, there are no scenes where the robot's head turns with the camera staying at it's eye line)


How did we fix this one scene?

The movement of the head was only too far by a very small amount, so I simply pulled it back slightly, it didn't look any different, apart from the fact that the eyes no longer moved back into the head.

Time to Start Animating

I wanted to get the scene with the mermaid swimming out of the way first, because this is the bit that requires the most animation. Ollie had created the surrounding above water scene in which the majority of the animation would take place. I began however by animating in the scene which I had originally built my model, because I found it easier to see if I was on the right track and that way I would just need to drop it into the scene later.

How did it go?

The whole process of creating this motion of of swimming was quite challenging because I kept making the mistake of moving the tail the wrong way in relation to the fin. However after playing around a lot and positioning her correctly in the scene, as well as adding in the key frames to make her move through the water, things were starting to look much better.


What problems did I have?

The animating process was much less stressful than the stage of creating and orienting the controllers, however I did still have to rectify somethings.

• Some of the influence weights I had previously painted weren't quite right in all areas, so I had to go back and black out some of the influences to make the body move better and more realistically. 
• I also had to play around with the graph editor because originally it all happened a bit slowly so everything needed pulling in to fit the time frame.   

Hello, its me! 

The first time we see the mermaid, she is simply coming upwards from under the water, up to her shoulders. This obviously wouldn't take a huge amount of time to animate, however it required a bit of playing around in order to get the timing right. There is some movement in the mouth as she comes up realises what she is looking at, so I did experiment a bit with how much to manipulate the mouth. The first attempt I did showed the mouth dropping open more dramatically, I also did a second which was more subtle, because I wanted to be able to sit with Ollie and see which he thought looked better.

When it came to animating the cameras, we decided that it would be good to have some movement in them, so give it a bit more life, also it made the shots look much more effective. 

 

Wiggle of the Tail

After Ollie and I settled on having just a flat plane for the water in our animation, it became apparent that the lower body of the mermaid wouldn't be visible for the majority of the short. That took off some of the pressure of needing to animate the tail, however I still wanted to experiment with giving it some movement because I still thought it would be necessary to play around with it.

I got quite frustrated with the tail whilst trying to animate it for the first time (I think some of the controls were having too much or not enough influence on other parts of the body) However, I managed to give it just a simple wiggle, which would be the kind of movement it would have if she were visibly swimming. Even though the majority of the animation will be going to the top half of the body I'm still glad I did this because I now feel that I will be able to produce the movement of the tail much quicker.  

Problems

My main issue with this experiment was that I noticed that the tail doesn't stay completely smooth as it moves, it looks quite ridged. I think this had something to do with the influence weights. This is something I'm not going to spend too much time trying to fix because the tail wont be noticeable for most of the time, however, if it appears to be an issue for the upper body then I will have to figure out what went wrong. 

"Love Struck"

After my set back, I got cracking on producing something new. Before I was even 100% sure what exactly I was going to be drawing, I starting using Brusho to create a background, because I figured this would drive the direction I went in.

Before continuing I carried out some rough sketching to get an idea of what I was aiming for. I needed to do some practice drawing faces with wide mouths because that isn't something I usually draw (but have come to realise I love how it looks) I liked the idea of having something going through a face, such as an arrow or a knife. I thought an arrow would be better because it would be slightly more elegant looking. 

 I had originally wanted to have quite an up-close piece, but as i began the drawings, I realised it would be good t get an entire body in there, because I could also use that to give it more edge. Also, it opened up the opportunity to have some dripping in there, which has helped make the piece as a whole seem much more morbid. (yay!)

I wanted to put lots of emphasis on the anatomy of the girl, but I wanted her to look withered and demonic, which I think I managed.

For this piece I used a mixture of Brusho, pencil, watercolour, gouache and acrylic. The white acrylic was pretty necessary because it brought the body out from the paper and allowed it to look more three dimensional.

My epic failure

After carrying out some helpful research, I decided just to crack on and start producing some work that could potentially be submitted into this competition. The first piece I wanted to focus on was the "horror" piece. 

Problems with research 

After carrying out my research, I think in some ways I filled my brain up a bit too much, I came across so many inspirational things, I didn't quite give myself enough time to settle properly on one of the many ideas I had. The problem with this is that the first piece of work I produced was not one I was happy with at all. 

Even during the creation of this piece, I felt like something wasn't quite right. It was only when I had completed it I realised it had several problems;

• It looked like the same old same old 
• It wasn't very good quality - I knew I could produce something better than this! 
• IT WAS NOT SCARY ENOUGH
• It just didn't really seem that interesting to me 
• It just looks like a normal person with weird stuff coming out of their mouth for no reason
• It is boring. 

However, I decided to keep this piece as an example to show how my work develops though out this process, and it is really good to be able to physically see the changes in my work. 

It is safe to say I wont be submitting this into any competition but I suppose I had to start somewhere!

Animatic & Storyboard

For our interim Crit, we needed to have a basic storyboard and animatic put together, eventhough they give us a good understanding of the timing etc, I am going to try and put a much neater storyboard together which includes colour.

Animatic 

Responsive - and so it begins!

For this module, we have been given the task of choosing 3 external briefs to focus on, before our collaborative brief kicks in after Christmas! One of the briefs I have chosen is the "Infected By Art - Volume 4" book competition. This competition focuses around drawing and each artist can submit up to 10 pieces. I will be submitting at least 3 original pieces in order for it to be a substantial amount of work. (each submission costs $10 so I also need to think about the financial side of it!)  

Out of the chosen topics we are provided with for this brief, I have chosen "Horror" "Fantasy" and "Sci-fi" I am quite used to drawing things that go down the road of horror, however fantasy and sci-fi could be a bit more of a challenge for me so I'm looking forward to it! The acceppted media is very broad, so I will be trying to use a mix of different kinds for each piece.

Mediums to Consider:

• Digital
• Acrylic
• Brusho
• Watercolour 
• Pen
• Charcoal 
• Ink

These are all mediums that I am either very experienced with or the complete opposite, so I think it will be good for me to mix it around.


For the Sci-fi theme, I actually felt like I needed to do the most research because this is an area I am not as experienced in when it comes to drawing it. I created a mood board of imagery that was sparking off potential ideas. For me, the next best stage is just to begin some sketching  instead of beating around the bush!

There are some really quite frightening Sci-fi horrors that I love, such as Alien, Alines and Prometheus. I have taken quite a lot of inspiration from the work of HR Giger because I love the edginess of it, and the fact it is pretty disturbing.

After doing some mapping for these areas, I just wanted to crack on, because sketching and drawing is often one of the best ways for me to come up with new ideas!

"Made You Look"

During one of our twilight sessions we watched "Made You Look" which is a documentary which introduces us to a number of different artists who talk about what their area of expertise. They  ranged from young, old, male, female, some individual and some partners in crime. All of these artists worked with different media, some worked primarily with 2D such as paper cut outs, screen printing and digital.

What did I like about this?
I really liked the fact that every artist in this film was completely different, and some of them had really obscure professions , some of which I had never  really thought about, for example there was a "Professional Doodler" who came across this by accident one day when working behind a bar.

What didn't I like?
Although I found this film interesting, it was a shame that there was not much relation to the field of animation.

What have I taken away from this? 

The main thing I have taken away of this is the fact that digital art, should in no way be seen as a replacement for the more traditional techniques, and that having the ability to create digital art alone does not make somebody a better artist, there should be an equal respect for all forms of art.

Binding and Weights

In order to bind everything together so that the geometry would move with the controls, I selected everything and then used the "Smooth Bind" tool. I needed to do some altering in the settings so that as much volume would be retained as possible when it was binded, in order to do this is selected the "Dual Quatterion" and lowered the max influence to 3 (which effects how far the influence of each control would spread over the geometry) 

Once this was done, I noticed that when the controls were moved, there was still a lot of influence across areas that i didn't wants. for example when I moved the arm around, it made the underarm and chest area sink and and out. This is where the adding weights came in. 

I used the paint weights influence tool which enabled me to see visually in colour how far the influence of each control was spreading.  Each colour had it's value, for example black had the lowest value meaning it suggested zero influence, so it was a matter of just painting the appropriate colours in the right places. The places with maximum influence needed to be painted with a higher value which meant orange/yellow. 

Putting in a Heirarchy

One of the most important stages was to add a hierarchy for the controllers, so that it would move realistically. This was a pretty simple and quick process because it was just a matter of selecting the child controller such as the hand, and then shift selecting the elbow and pressing "P"
This resulted in the appropriate controls being influenced by their parent joints when moved, for example, when the arms were raised, it had an influence on the chest, clavicle and shoulder areas.




Connecting the Controllers 

Once the hierarchy was all sorted, I needed to create a relationship between the controllers and the actual joints of the skeleton. Again this was a matter of selecting the controller, for example the head controller and then the joint and orienting them together so that the movement of the controller would have an effect on the positioning of the joints. I began with the head.

 I had to think about what areas would be effected by which joints, for example the top head control would have an effect on the head, the jaw, eyes and neck. It was just a case of working from the head down.

However I didnt create a heirarchy for the tail because there was an IK spline included, and I wanted each section of the tail to be moved individually.

WOOPS

After thinking I had completed the orienting stage, I came to connect the controllers, only to find that something had gone wrong further down the line. It became apparent that I had orientated it in the "world" view and not the object view so when I clicked "orient" after selecting the head controller and the head joint, things went a bit wonky...

However, this was easily fixable. I un-parented the controllers from the orient groups and had to re-orient everything, this time making sure it was in the "object" view.

What did I learn from this?

In all honesty I did find this frustrating, however it was easily put right, and it was a learning curve. It has taught me to constantly check that I am doing things in the right view and to not get too ahead of myself.

Orienting

For this stage, I needed to make sure that each controller had the same orientation as the joints. Similar to how I did this for the previous model, I created a Null Group for each joint, all of which were named appropriately. It was then a matter of orienting the joint and the group together, deleting the unwanted garbage inside the group, and then parenting the controller to the group.

Luckily this time it didn't take me as long, because I was wary of making the mistake of parenting the joint to the group and not the controller. I oriented each control as normal, apparent from the master control at the bottom, because it wouldn't be rotating like the other joints.

Adding the IK Spline

Once the controllers were all in place, I needed to add an IK Spline t the tail to enable it to move how I wanted it to. Once again I did this by clicking on the IK Spline Handle Tool and I then inserted the curve by clicking on the root joint of the geometry and the joint on the top of the fin.

I had originally clicked right to the end of the tail, however my tutor suggested just clicking it to the top of the fin, because it would still follow through the movements because it would be influenced by the movement of the upper tail.

 Once the curve was in place, it was a matter of creating a cluster for each of the verts. I clustered the top and bottom two into pair, and the verts in-between were clustered individually. Before reaching this stage I was quite apprehensive because I didn't have a full idea of how to go about it, but once it was demonstrated for me, I was able to understand what I needed to do!


Something that I needed to remember for the orienting stage, was not to parent the Root Control to the back control because I wanted the tail to be able to flow independently from the upper body.

Adding the Controllers

For this Stage I added the controllers for the upper body in the exact same way as I did on the previous model, as well as colouring them the same. For the tail, I have added a controller for each joint as normal, as well as the master control. I needed to go through each controller and make sure that their pivots were snapped to their respective joints. 

During this stage I knew that I needed to create an IK Spline for the tail, so I knew there was a possibility of maybe changing the controls for the tail, but at this current point I was unsure how to go about it, so I tried to get myself as close to that point as possible. 

I also needed to go through some of the joints and parent them to where was appropriate. For example, I needed to parent the clavicle to the shoulder, the chest to the clavicle and the jaw to the head, and the head to the neck. 

Mirroring and UV Mapping

Once my model was mirrored I was able to see that the shape of the face was slightly more threatening than I had intended it to look, and after some discussions with Ollie and working together, we both decided that the shape of the eyes needed changing. Originally they were going to be quite big and round, but once the model was mirrored it actually didn't look too nice. 

Change in the eyes

The way of resolving this, was to use flattened down spheres instead which were more disc like. We preferred these because they looked much less intimidating. Instead of using controllers in the eyes, we also decided that using multiple textures instead would work better. 

 Here we can see a comparison between the original result and the new one. The original below looks much more unpleasant, and her character is not supposed to look that way so after some playing around with the eyes and the shaping and placing of the mouth, she ended up looking much nicer!

UV Mapping

The UV mapping process was needed in order to allow me to be able to texture my character later on. It was a matter of cutting each limb away from the centre of the body with in the texture editor and then cutting down the edges so that they could be unfolded. I separate the tail from the upper body because I want to colour change to be gradual!

Modelling the head

This process took around 3 times the amounts of time I spent on building the body. In all honesty I wasn't surprised because the heads design was still pretty complex, because it included tentacles and a pointy ear, as well as quite large eyes and a smoothed out nose.

 After much contemplation and playing around and much internal struggle, as well as figuring it out with my pier, I decided the best way to go about creating the ear was to leave a hole where it would be, and then extruding those edges outwards, and I then used the Cut Edge Tool to add in some more faces to allow it to curve at the edge. Also, to make the hear sink inwards on itself slightly I added another face to the front an then extruded that inwards.

 For the dreaded tentacles I spent a long time trying to figure out the best way to go about it. In the end after seeking some advice from my pier, I did the same as I did with the ear. I brought the head shape out but left the holes which is where I began to extrude the edges outwards. I needed to incorporate some new edge loops so that they would bend. It was a matter of extruding a bit, and then pulling down slightly so that the tentacles would stay near the head. At the very end, I scaled everything in and then merged those verts so it all ended at a nice neat point!




Any Issues?

Despite this process taking a long time, and me getting slightly frustrated in some parts, I can safely say it has taught me a lot. If I was to model something similar to this again I would have a much better idea of how to go about it and hopefully this means it wouldn't take as long!