Animate!

So here is an update of where I'm at blocking/animation wise.



And I have started doing some texture tests for my character (these are maybe like halfway done I guess). Texturing is probably the part I'm least confident in tbh which is why its taking me so long to do. I've decided I'm going to get it all done by say mid next week at the latest though so I can start rendering as soon as we get the R drive back.

After having a chat with Brendan on Tuesday I decided to rearrange my story slightly. Brendan felt that the end of my story didn't really have a conclusion and that I should add more tension in the middle. So now I have it that the picture frame is in danger of being destroyed and my character saving the frame is actually what restarts the engine. I actually like the flow of the story better like this. I still need to adjust some camera angles obviously but I'm happier with the actual narrative now.

So now that my character modelling is finished I moved onto rigging and blendshapes. I created the bones and control shapes for my character before I gave it to Krish so he could skin her for me. Krish fixed any control shapes i got wrong (mostly the arms) and added a few bones i had forgotten (I only put two bones in the fingers instead of three) and then skinned it for me.

[EDIT: ADD VIDEO OF RIG]

I then moved onto creating blendshapes for my character. I'm pretty happy with my selection of blendshapes right now but I may end up adding more as I progress on with the project.

Some slight revisions. I'm still working on it

So this is the first suuuuper rough cut of my previs. Just watching through this I can see a whole bunch of shots that need to change. I'm going to do maybe one more pass of it on monday to fix the things that I think should change and add some audio before I start getting help and/or feedback from the rest of the class. (Unless any of you are reading this and have any suggestions now =) ). The environment model I'm using in the background is not finished yet jsyk but it gives a rough idea of the setup.

Progress

I drew some slightly more comprehensible storyboards. I can see a few things that still need to be changed. I'm going to design a quick layout for my set which should help me to get better camera angles as then I will know where everything is. I'm actually better at doing camera angles in previs so I will probably change some more stuff when I get to that stage as well.

So today I drew/got together my super rough thumbnails and put them into premiere to make sure that my story was flowing right.

This was the first version which was exactly as I had drawn it after the story workshop. After looking at it I went back and edited the first half to change the pacing and cut some unnecessary scenes.

This is the current version, the timing is a bit all over the place and at this stage im sure some of those drawings are completely incomprehensible but its helping me to plan my story. Now I'm going to draw up some proper storyboards, and add in a few boards that I think are missing, before editing it again and getting some feedback to make sure my story is reading as I want it to.

I also had a quick go at doing my character's face in mudbox. I have found that if I start sculpting without really having a plan my character's tend to come out semi realistic which isn't really the style I wanted to go for. I'm going to go back and properly draw out my character's head then remodel it on Friday.

So as we only have 10 weeks left (terrifying) for our project I have revised my schedule. I had fallen behind where I wanted to be quite a bit due to Going Live but now that I can fully focus on this project hopefully I can get myself back on track.

This is where I'm at right now and this is a link to the Google spreadsheet
 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cyXKHxq3qjLk2EFtCzWA3pmTzWPjvjKa4_QmtPAHRjY/edit?usp=sharing

It seems like I have a lot of things to do this week but most of them are already started and/or nearly done.

So today I also finished my rough thumbnails (I'm going to put them into premiere tomorrow and see if I need to add any shots/re-arrange anything before I draw them up into storyboards) and I also took another look at my character design. My plan was to sculpt the character in zbrush unfortunately the uni only has 2 zbrush licences and one of them is in a computer that isn't working so I ended up using mudbox instead. The character is still pretty rough right now especially the face but with a few more days work I should manage to get it to where I want it.

So our first day of semester 3 (I think? Or our last day of semester 2? There isn't really a break so I'm not sure) we had another story workshop with Mark Gindle. We got to show him our Going Live film and then talk to him individually about our projects. He was so helpful, I had been really confused this entire semester about what the point of my story was, which is probably why I had like 10/15 different versions of my storyboards, but he talked through what I had so far with me and helped my look more at the character's emotional journey in the film.






 I'm so happy I actually know what I'm doing now and I can quickly do some new storyboards and get started on an animatic/previs.

Going Live is finished! I'm really happy with the final outcome and we presented the film to Axis on Monday and got some pretty good feedback. Axis pointed out some things that could be fixed by the degree show (some of the things were things we had noticed in the editing room and didn't have time to fix so it's good that we managed to identify some of the same points) but overall it was pretty positive.



We also did a report and a presentation talking about our individual parts of the project. I hope my report explained my contribution well because I think by the time I got to the presentation I was completely braindead. I really just crashed as soon as the Axis presentation was over so I hope my presentation wasn't quite as ineloquent and nonsensical as I think it was.

So its less than a week till we present our Going Live film to Axis. Everything is rendered out and we only have 2 more shots to comp together (barring and quick re renders we find tomorrow). Looking at the film right now I'm pretty proud of it. Iv'e spotted a few thing I would have liked to have adjusted animation wise but overall I'm pretty happy with everything. Comparing what we have now to what we had even a few weeks ago I think the look of the film has improved so much. I will write a proper evaluation thing of the film after the Axis presentation but for now here is the nearly finished edit we did today (there are no credits in this version as they were still rendering).

(Also apologies for the low quality but youtube said my 1GB video was going to take like 2 hours to upload so)

So today Andrea, Li, Stathis and I took the shots that had been comped already to the edit suite to cut them together to make sure they all looked consistent and to pick up any problems in the animation/lighting/rendering/comp. Overall the shots looked really good together I think. There are some minor problems in some of the animations and occasionally the smoothing of the models but overall we are pretty happy with the shots we tested today. We fixed a few of the issues we found in order to re-render if we have time. We are going to do the same thing on Monday with (hopefully) the rest of the shots to see how the whole thing looks.

(Its very odd seeing it with bits missing, I can basically recite the dialogue in my sleep now so it really throws me when bits aren't there)

(And here is us awkwardly posing for a photo as things rendered out of premiere.

So here are some (very) rough thumbnails for my personal project. I'm still having a bit of trouble with the beginning of my story. We have a story workshop on the 18th so I'm aiming to have an animatic and hopefully a mostly finished character model finished by then so I have something to work with. I'm currently working on refining my thumbnails into storyboards which will hopefully help me to work out a better way to start my story.

So last week we had a Skype session with Axis to get feedback on our renders and they told us our lighting was very flat. Looking at our renders again we totally agreed so we decided to re light and re render everything. Despite deciding to do this with like two and a half weeks to go we have actually managed to get through it quite quickly. I think we have all of the shots out now with just some re renders to go.

So I got to light a few of the shots (with a lot of feedback/help from Andrea, lighting is not really my forte but I gave it a shot) and I took some renders of my lighting progress with one of the shots. So these are going to be a lot of very similar images as I tweak the lights about but it should give you an idea of my process.

[EDIT: ADD MORE IMAGES. (I forgot my pendrive)]


On Friday Matt Cameron came up from London to give us a lesson on NUKE. I have used it very briefly before to camera track but that was like 3 years ago and I really couldn't remember much about it. We had a talk about the kind of work Matt had been doing in London and his experiences working in both London and Scotland before we moved on to the practical class. Matt showed us around the interface then showed us how to comp out a tracking marker with a plate from a short film he had worked on. In the afternoon we showed Matt the one of our renders with our new lighting set up and he went through how he would composite that in NUKE. He showed us how to use our depth pass to blur the background and give our shots a sense of scale. He also went through how to add grain to our shots to make them look less cg. The results we managed to get from NUKE were a lot better than we had managed with after effects and after briefly talking it over we decided to comp our Going Live shots in NUKE.

I really enjoyed working with NUKE, i thought I would be more intimidated by the node based interface as i'm much more used to working with timelines but after a little while getting used to it I actually found it much easier to see what I was doing using the nodes. I think I'm going to, if I have time, maybe do some NUKE tutorials and try some more compositing stuff out.

Now that we are in the final stretch of Going Live its probably time to talk about my final project again.

Here is my character for my final animation. (The suit won't be grey in the final film that was just to help me work out the sections.)

I'm still thumbnailing the exact story (and we have another storytelling class that will hopefully help me completely lock it down) so in the meantime I have been getting on with my character.