Time for another inspiration post!
Phil suggested we try photogrammetry to help model the toys for our animation. Photogrammetry is a technique where you take a series of photos around an object from different angles and use the data from those photos to create a 3D model. Earlier in the week Stathis used this technique to get a model of He-Man's head so the rest of us decided to give it a go with the troll dolls Andrea bought.
Rob gave us a quick tutorial and helped us set up the camera and the troll.
We then took pictures all around the troll at three different angles (the software can only use 70 pictures but its better to take more rather than less).
We took two sets of photos: one of just the troll's head and one of the entire troll.
And these are the results we got. Obviously if we were to use these in our project we would need to retopologize them but I'm pretty happy with the results. Whether we actually use these models or we just keep them as a reference it was a really useful (and fun) technique to learn.
As we are nearly ready to start the previs for our project Phil suggested we find some examples to put on our blogs.
The first example that comes to mind when I'm thinking about previs is The Third Floor, they are a company specialising in previs. They did the previs for the Avengers films, Iron Man 3, Skyfall and a lot of other vfx heavy projects.
This is a link to their website with their showreel: http://www.thethirdfloorinc.com/#home-7a225
I also found this previs reel for World War Z from Halon Entertainment, another company specialising in previs.
I'm really looking forward to starting the previs for our project. It's something I've always been interested in but have never really had a chance to try properly. I think doing it will also help my storyboarding as it will give me a chance to experiment with camera angles a bit.
The first example that comes to mind when I'm thinking about previs is The Third Floor, they are a company specialising in previs. They did the previs for the Avengers films, Iron Man 3, Skyfall and a lot of other vfx heavy projects.
This is a link to their website with their showreel: http://www.thethirdfloorinc.com/#home-7a225
I also found this previs reel for World War Z from Halon Entertainment, another company specialising in previs.
I'm really looking forward to starting the previs for our project. It's something I've always been interested in but have never really had a chance to try properly. I think doing it will also help my storyboarding as it will give me a chance to experiment with camera angles a bit.
This week we have been getting on with modelling the assets for Going Live. I was in charge of making the model sheet for the Sylvanian family rabbit and with modelling the robot.
The next stage is going to be rigging and pre vis which I am very excited about.
This is the rabbit model sheet, with additional reference images down the side.
And here is a quick render of the robot model (with no proper textures).
The next stage is going to be rigging and pre vis which I am very excited about.
So on Friday we had a refresher lesson about natural lighting. The lighting in our Going Live project is going to be very important so we requested this class to remind us of the lighting techniques we learned last semester.
This is the final image lit with IBL.
And this is the final image using our own lights.
Personally I prefer placing the lights myself as opposed to IBL just because I can get it looking exactly like I want it to (for a piece thats entirely animated anyway, if I was doing a VFX shot with live action plates then IBL would be ideal). At the moment, having discussed it briefly in the group, we think we will just place the lights ourselves. We hope to have the modelling for the project finished by the end of this week so we will look more in depth at the lighting set-up then.
So this Friday's lesson was back to the very fundamentals of animation the bouncing ball. We got to really use the graph editor a lot more this class which is good as I have never been that comfortable with it and this lesson has really given me much more of an understanding of how it works and how i can use it to improve my animation. We also made use of the animation layers, something I hadn't used before this course, to add secondary animation on top of what we had done.
Today we had a second skype call with Axis and they seemed really positive about our new idea. Based on their feedback we refined our animatic even further, cutting some unnecessary dialogue and characters to make the story tighter, and this is the finished result.
(images by Andrea, audio by Stathis, editing by me & Krish)
We have cut the pigs out of the story as they weren't really adding anything and having three groups of characters was confusing the conflict, some of their dialogue has been cut and some has been given to one of the trolls. We are also changing a few of the shots to reuse cameras more as in the original version we were cutting around a lot, (i think we counted like 30 different camera angles? too many anyway), this will probably also give it more of a Jeremy Kyle look as they tend to use maybe 5 cameras all the time.
Next steps are to produce some concept art of our environment to show the look and feel of the animation and to decide on the design for the characters.
We have cut the pigs out of the story as they weren't really adding anything and having three groups of characters was confusing the conflict, some of their dialogue has been cut and some has been given to one of the trolls. We are also changing a few of the shots to reuse cameras more as in the original version we were cutting around a lot, (i think we counted like 30 different camera angles? too many anyway), this will probably also give it more of a Jeremy Kyle look as they tend to use maybe 5 cameras all the time.
Next steps are to produce some concept art of our environment to show the look and feel of the animation and to decide on the design for the characters.
In this weeks 3D class we covered lip syncing. I have done a tiny bit of lip synch before but I learned a bunch of methods in this class that will make it much easier and look much better than the way I had previously been doing it. Sang taught us how to first create all the extreme phoneme poses (AI, O, E, U, L, WQ, MBP, FV) and save them as presets to a shelf then use these extreme poses to find the final pose that will be used in the animation. He also taught us that the pose should happen 1 or 2 frames before the sound is made whereas previously I had been putting the pose on the same frame as the sound, Sang's method gives much more realistic results.
This is the final result from the lesson using audio from the matrix (this is just the lip sync no other facial animation).
We have had quite a few production meetings now to work on our story for the Axis brief. After being told our initial idea was a bit dark we changed track completely. The new concept is focused on a group of toys that come to life and re-enact the Jeremy Kyle show. We managed to edit a bunch of clips of the show together to give us a rough script. We are still refining it but its pretty much there.
We then moved on to working out the set.
And began to storyboard (boards drawn by Andrea)
We also built a little model of our set with objects we had in the studio to try and help us work out camera angles or whether we were crossing the line.
Sonic is playing Jeremy Kyle, Gonzo is the rabbit (with little chocolate rabbits as his family members), the robot is the lie detector, I think the glove is playing the pig and Mr Motivator is playing the trolls.
