Presentation Feedback

• Remove Newspaper gag, add more ball gags, or something new
• Lighting is great and approved, tank needs to be seen more though as eyes are drawn to the sofa instead of the turtle tank
• swap the desk and tank around, also potentially move window
• Yes to the creative style, apartment looks great. No more models required
• Consider quicker cuts
• find free sound with same slow monotone beat, animate to it
• Look at Kevin Macloud for free sounds
• lyrics that help the story, help us
• most animation needs done as soon as possible and sent to Alec or Conann for feedback
• Watch Daffy Duck and look at how he has teeth only when he needs teeth
• Look at the worms from the game “Worms” look at their facial expressions

Overall we got pretty positive feedback. I do feel like the lecturers have the faith in us that we can pull this off with their guidance, tips and advice.

What we now need to put our efforts into is…

• Give the turtle teeth and eyelids
• Check the rig can work as we need it too. E.g head can go into body etc
• get matte painting done
• reorganise apartment
• get animating!

Creating a Showreel | Walk Cycles

For my showreel i felt it was important to show some animation/walk cycles. Using rigs that were made available by Joe Daniels http://artofjoe.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/new-rigs.html

I decided to use the rigs ‘Stella’ and ‘Fred’. I chose Stella because she is a larger figure with great curves. I decided this would be most exciting because i could really animate her hips wiggling/swaying and give her a proper confident strut. Personally i am not the greatest animator and do need much more practice, however i thought this piece of animation worked pretty well. Here it is…

I decided to use the Fred rig as he is off a slim build and appears to be an elderly character, i thought this would be fun to work with as i could bend his back over in an over exaggerated manner and have him do a slow almost grumpy walk. I am not as pleased with this walk cycle as i realised later that the rigs arms cannot move up and down, only sway side to side and i found that it looked awkward when this was animated in so left him without the arm sway, here is the finished product…

Talk with Greg Maguire

One of our tutors, Greg Maguire decided to give us a talk on his animation career, which was so interesting.

greg@inlifesize.com

@greenboots

• went to our uni (university of Ulster Belfast) from 1985-89
• Did foundation year at Belfast Metropolitan then went on to do his degree in design.
• Failed a few modules before realising he wanted to work with computers
• Left uni and got a job in Dublin for knowing Boolean, when there he saw there was animation wanted in Belfast.
• Ended up having to work on commercials for the shop chain, Spar. Obviously, he hated it and ended up phoning a friend who worked at Don Bluth, managed to get into Don Bluth by a fluke of running down to Dublin for a day to hand in his portfolio.
• Did a job there by doing everything no one else wanted to do like installing software until finally he was asked to model. When working here he got to go to conferences around the world and got to meet the likes of John Lasseter.
• Everybody was geeking out about everything in the animation field because it was all new and no one had done it yet.
• Don Bluth badly managed his money, he got money for one movie and used it to finish the previous until finally, he lost everything.
• Greg went onto work in LA for a month, he lived in a  garage for 3 weeks because the hotel he had been staying at was cockroach infested. Won a grammy for what they created in that month though.
• By the time he got back to Ireland Don Bluth had got back on his feet financially.
• 3 months later the guy he had been working with in LA worked at his company for 2 years doing stuff MTV, Coca Cola etc
• After a while he got an interview at Pixar, he wanted to be an animator but Pixar offered him a lighting job, so he said no. Disney rang him about a month later, he took there job, they gave me a lovely cottage to live in and had 40 hours a week work which was brilliant compared to the hours he had been doing.
• When he started he realised the guy above him was a prat, he started learning how to rig and ended up rigging over 80 characters for the film Dinosaur.
• He started going to 2D animation and Storyboard classes as well as sculpture, performance and improv classes, all to learn to a be a good animator. He then got to animate in dinosaur and realised how crap teh rigs where, so he started re-rigging. This went down really well!
• After that he moved to a teeny 3 man company and was the first company Lucasfilm reachec out to. Around that time Maya became the big thing.
• Lucasfilm was working with Maya and Greg knew nothing about it.
• They then started working on Curious George. His visa was great so he could move to whatever company he wanted.
• Curious George got cancelled and got offered a job at ILM which was an amazing experience.
• Got taught simulations for Pirates of the Carribean.
• Good job he learnt it because it came in useful when he did the dementors for Harry Potter.
• Got phoned to work on Happy Feet and had to rig again but problem being every rigging this was created was owned by the company and not him, so he decided to start his own company. Had the rigs ready for Happy Feet in 3 months.

Gregs Advice

• Make sure your CV is PDF and easily reachable with keywords like ‘maya’, ‘mel’, ‘creature animator’ etc
• make sure your cover letter is to a person and not whom may concern.
• Make sure to send website and showreel
• Always put your best bits at the beginning.
• Names, addresses, contact info at begninning and end of the showreel and on every page you send

Rock ‘n’ Roll- Final Film

Here is our final film, i am pleased with it, however there are a few problems that we were aware of as soon as we saw the render that we plan to have fixed before the January deadline, for example, the camera jump in the middle, the bottom right hand corner were a texture didn’t render, and the fact that the scale of the characters isn’t correct, but anyway, here is our final film.

Model Design and Rigging

When it came to designing the heads we all had different ideas, and here are some of the designs…

What we finally decided on was a stye that was quite basic, i drew it out in front and side view so that we could import it into maya and make it easier for ourselves to model a character with the same similarities and features.

We then began modelling from this, however some members from the group still found it hard to follow this and some models still didn’t look similar enough, here are some screenshots of the many heads created.

Blaines model

Marks model

Julies model

my model

Marks Model

We spent so long modelling and fixing, retopologisng models etc that we didn’t have time to go back and remodel, we just had to move onto rigging, texturing and animating. So we ended using mine, Mark’s and Blaine’s models in the final film, to try and differentiate from them a little more, i painted double textures for the same models, so that they could be the same model with a different texture and then they can be scaled bigger or larger, this makes them look like very different models, even though truly they are the same.

Once we did this Blaine then took the models and rigged them. Sadly, we had some problems with the rigs and they had to be redone quite a few times which held us back a few days, we also had some problems with the blend shapes which lead to them being redone too, but in the end the rig and blend shapes worked well and we were able to animate quite well.

Learning Z-Brush

After learning and struggling how to UV Map i decided to learn Z-Brush as i had found out from researching that if you export your model from maya and import it into Z-brush, you can then unflatten the model and get Z-brush to create the UV Map for you, then export model and map separately, paint the map and import the model into maya and assign the newly painted texture/material to the model. I found this so much easier and was able to paint the textures for the entire film this way.

Here are some of the painted textures before assigned onto the models

Mark Lisk and i stayed in uni for a whole weekend and i got all the textures painted and assigned into the film, we were then able to start preparing to animate on the Monday.

Playblasts

Now we have met our next deadline we assigned ourselves and have all our animation playblasted and put into imovie, i am currently editing it so that we can see how the film is working together and what needs changed/fixed/altered etc. We have luckily timed our film very well and with 5 second opening and credits at end the whole film comes to the 25 seconds allowed. The animation is coming ever so slightly over 15 seconds but with some editing we can fix that 🙂

Here is the screenshot of the timeline

 

Here is the story told in print screens of our playblasts…

Opening scene

camera begins to fly around

Camera stops to show were scene is taking place

Shot changes to show bird in tree singing/moving/dancing

transitions to show other smaller bird inside tree

 

Bird in tree, begins to panic, smoke emerges 

Bird flies away

Lands on his bum beside larger bird

Little bird begins poking larger bird trying to get attention

Big bird continues to sing, smaller continues to poke.

Finally big bird acknowledges smaller bird

Big bird lifts his arm as if he is swinging his arm to sing 

Big bird hits smaller bird out of the scene. 

Big bird smuggly smiles about what he has done

then opens mouth as he about to continue singing

he turns around

opens mouth is shock at what he see’s

smoke comes into scene

covers bird entirely

smoke fades to reveal a cooked chicken.

credits role.

 

Obviously there is still many tweeks to be fixed and altered, but we would hope that by this time tomorrow all our computers will be rendering.

Blend Shapes!

We used blend shapes to give our characters emotions and expressions, Scott really got good as this and here are some of the expressions we can give our characters.

Fear/scared

 

Happy/smiling

 

Terror/horror

Happily suprised

 

The Set

One of the thing’s that i wasn’t primarily in charge of was the set. Niamh was mainly in charge of this with a little help from the rest of the group.

I helped her create mountains on the terrain so that it wasn’t a flat set and together we worked and got frustrated with the sky dome. We needed the sky dome to be blue like the sky also have floating clouds. We had lots of trouble getting our heads around this but finally we achieved this.

Shelley created the fire and camping tent, i created the tree’s and Niamh created the fence. We worked on this whilst Scott was fighting with rigging the characters.

Here is out set at various angles.

Here is the shot we will see most, the birds on their tree branch.

 

here is a long shot, the camera will fly in from here at the start of the film. 

Here is  a shot that needs fixed, as you can see the clouds are in one small part of the scene.

And here again, i really like the colours of our set

Here is our old title in the set, it is now called Verdi Cooked Chicken, and is still in the process of being made.

Character Changes

When presenting 2 weeks ago we were told the characters we had modelled and rigged weren’t working with the story. We were told they had to connection to one another as they were two completely different birds in two very different colours, that was our intent of course but we didn’t realise this would cause questions and confusion to the story, so we have redesigned, modelled and rigged two new characters which we have now started animating with.

These are the original characters we had made

 

Here they are in the scene, as you can see the larger bird hadn’t even been put in colour at this point and we had no back ground or sky.

I personally thought they looked well, particularly the blue bird, but of course we took all criticism aboard and this is how they look now…

This is the birds after i assigned the Shader- Ai standard materials. I chose to blue colours to help explain that these birds are related. Scott and Shelley modelled these birds and they tried to make them look similar is shape, this could be two brothers, or a father and son, or even cousins of some sort.

Here they are in a rendered shot of our set.

Here is a longer shot, to help set the scene, and show the scale of the birds in correlation to the set.

Here they are close up in the set in a screen shot, before rendering.

 

At this point we have started animating and would hope to start rendering out the shots no later than Tuesday or Wednesday (4-5 days from now)