...I'm trying not to lose my head (unlike Zeth's thesis). This was running through my brain when I woke up this morning--pretty appropriate for the state I'm in. I'm actually far more on target than I expected, but I am feeling the pressure of everything ending.
So, to calm myself down I've decided to create a checklist to organize all I have left to do.
At the moment I'm animating shot 10, fixing the camera and have yet to spline the animation.
Pre-render checklist:
1. FIXES and tweaks I haven't yet gotten to
2. DUPLICATE AND ANIMATE PIECES to float as stars and for the meteor shower in shot 6b
3. LIGHT LINKING on all the duplicated pieces
4. IMPORT everything so I don't have any rendering errors
During and post-render checklist (assuming the render comes out well--fingers crossed):
1. 3 RENDERS--galaxy, animation, ambient occlusion
(at the bottom of this post are notes on how to do the ambient occlusion pass for when I do it)
2. COMPOSITE in After Effects, throw music video card in lower right at beginning and end:
Justin Catalino
"When the Sky is Falling"
Welcome to Vacationland
Rizzo Records
Director: Matt Kushner
and, after fading to black, add a card that says:
©2007 aniMATTic productions
New York University - Center for Advanced Digital Applications
3. FINISH JOURNAL by copying it and pasting it into Word, write ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, and POST THESIS CRITIQUE
4. PRINT and BURN two copies of paper, DVD and data disk
How to: Create an Ambient Occlusion Pass
-Make a new render layer with all geometry
-Apply a new lambert, color white
-In the shading group, go to mental ray options>custom
chaders>material shaders options
-In mental ray shaders, choose ambient occlusion
-Then play with the sample #s to make it more smooth, and take longer
-This render layer must be rendered with mental ray
Another option is to just use defaults...
-Make a new render layer with all geometry
-Right-click on the render layer and choose presets>occlusion
-This layer will automatically render with mental ray
COMMAND LINE RENDERING
After a bit of research, I have constructed a line of code for command line rendering that should be really helpful for organizing all the data I'll be rendering.
Here is the full test render code I wrote, and its deconstructed below:
/Applications/Alias/maya7.0/Maya.app/Contents/bin/Render -proj /Users/mattkushner/Documents/maya/projects/Thesis -rd /Users/mattkushner/Documents/maya/projects/Thesis/images/Camera1 -im Camera1 -of tif -s 0000 -e 0001 -cam Shot1Cam_Free -n 2 /Users/mattkushner/Documents/maya/projects/Thesis/scenes/Master/WorkingFiles/041607Shot9b.mb
The first section calls the Maya renderer to do its magic.
-proj project to be used (in case maya is confused)
-rd render directory where the images will go (can create new folders to organize images
-im image name (excluding frame #, and image type)
-of output format
-s start frame
-e end frame
-cam camera to be used (doesn't have to be set to be renderable in Maya)
-n number of processors to use
The last section calls the file from which Maya will render.
April 17, 2007
April 11, 2007
Final Group Meeting
Today was our final group meeting before thesis is due. We pretty much all showed something, and after spending about a week reworking the entire first half of my piece based on the industry critique, I felt a lot more confident--though I must say I'm surprised that upon seeing the other character pieces, it doesn't seem that they incorporated the critiques they got last week. Perhaps they're working on them and didn't want to show work in progress. Personally, I felt it was far more helpful to show half of my piece as a playblast since it was my most updated work.
Regarding my progress, I'm a little worried based on the "one shot per day" schedule that I set up--I only have a week to do the rest of the splining and polishing...definitely not much time--I still haven't finished polishing 6c and 6d and then I have 6 more shots. I'm hoping to be able to double up with a couple of them--6c is a really short, simple motion and 8a and 9b are similarly minimal in terms of length and complexity of the animation. It does seem feasible to get through the rest of the shots, though there are still things I want to go back and fix in the earlier shots (and I'm sure that after getting through the rest of the shots I'll want to work more on the later shots too). If I can get a render going by next Tuesday night, the 17th, of a first final pass (hopefully with meteor shower and floating pieces) I will have a sense of how long the render takes and can gauge how much time I have to tweak. Lauren's new laptop arrived today, so once I finish redoing the cameras I can start the galaxy render on her computer while I tweak the animation pass.
Regarding my progress, I'm a little worried based on the "one shot per day" schedule that I set up--I only have a week to do the rest of the splining and polishing...definitely not much time--I still haven't finished polishing 6c and 6d and then I have 6 more shots. I'm hoping to be able to double up with a couple of them--6c is a really short, simple motion and 8a and 9b are similarly minimal in terms of length and complexity of the animation. It does seem feasible to get through the rest of the shots, though there are still things I want to go back and fix in the earlier shots (and I'm sure that after getting through the rest of the shots I'll want to work more on the later shots too). If I can get a render going by next Tuesday night, the 17th, of a first final pass (hopefully with meteor shower and floating pieces) I will have a sense of how long the render takes and can gauge how much time I have to tweak. Lauren's new laptop arrived today, so once I finish redoing the cameras I can start the galaxy render on her computer while I tweak the animation pass.
April 5, 2007
Industry Critique
Tonight was our industry critique, and though I felt rather flustered--rushing to pull together my stuff and get there on time--I got some good feedback regardless. Here's a breakdown of the criticism and where I'm hoping to go with it:
Bordering on funny
My piece has a kind of sappiness to it that is hard to balance so that the audience gets caught up in it and it doesn't go over the top. Its especially hard for me since I'm so used to comedy and comedic timing--so I have to work really hard to get it to feel right. Jared suggested that I tone down the facial expressions--he can still be all the emotions I want him to be, but it becomes comical the more extreme they go.
Trash the Lip sync
Jared also suggested that I remove the lip sync--not only does it add to the "over-the-top-ness" of the piece, it also adds redundancy...it feels as though Justin is singing about what he's doing, instead of an omnipresent voice commenting on Justin (Omri suggested that I can leave in the large version lip syncing, then i get to do it some and its as though the large Justin has been singing the whole thing looking at the small Justin--I really like this idea). Frankly I added the lip sync because I felt I needed to and now I feel okay about getting rid of it---most of it wasn't working with my blocking anyway--it just means I have to figure out more body posing---SHOOT REFERENCE!!!
Slow emotional change
Nick made a good point that a character who is so down in the dumps isn't going to be so happy and surprised by a random piece falling in his lap...he should slowly transition as the pieces arrive...becoming less dejected, more curious and interested and then completely absorbed. (This comment was a reminder that this instant surprise is really a hold over from my original concept that one piece would fall, Justin would be delighted, and then all the other pieces would come together...having them fall one by one should draw out this gear change).
Change camera moves
Todd pointed out the most glaring error in my piece--the opening shot ruins the reveal--you should start close up and not make it obvious that Justin is sitting on a puzzle piece. In fact, when the camera pulls out at the end perhaps it should only be the green piece still and not the whole planet--the big Justin could be just starting to put together the puzzle--the connection between the big piece and the first piece would be far more obvious that way...(this may change some later camera shots...we'll see). Todd also commented that the last shot is kind of jarring...that the big Justin feels like a menace, not a caretaker...if the camera could somehow spiral outwards then the movement would be a little less of a jerk of the camera and could portray the big Justin in a better light---not sure yet how to do this, I'll work on it. Its definitely important that the big Justin is revealed in the right way.
Basically, it seems I've gone a little over the top in the amount of posing I've done and the range of extreme emotion Justin goes through. It seems its my style to go too far and then to slowly push back until a good balance is met--but this is good, definitely better than going too far. I'm hoping that by ditching some posing and working within some of the main (better) poses I already have, I can tighten my piece substantially. Hopefully this won't take too much time as I still have about half of the piece to spline. However, I've decided that I had better go back and figure out the beginning before dealing with the end because it could potentially change the ending poses. I'm definitely worried as to whether I have enough time to go back and rework the beginning with so much left to do at the end. But I'm realizing how much I care about this coming out well and the suggestions I got tonight were really good ones--so I should take them into account.
I've already redone the first shot--the camera starts really close and only pulls in a little very slowly. The breath that Justin takes is a lot more readable, so I like that, and I added a finger scratch on his leg and a slow eye blink.
The second shot needs some serious reworking--the change in his back arch is too much...if he is only mildly interested and not excited when the first piece lands in his hand his reaction wouldn't be so big. The whole right side of his body would barely move and his left hand would react to grab the piece almost unconsciously. I haven't figured out yet what to do about his right leg sliding down...this may wait until later. Shot 3 may stay in this pose---I definitely need to get rid of the surprise (too big regardless, and definitely too much this early). Jared also mentioned that this pose is way too symmetrical. When the camera spins upwards, maybe Justin slowly looks up, confused as to where the piece came from.
Shots 4 and 5 can probably be combined now that theres no close up on the lips for "Hey". This shot would be best as him vaguely curiously playing with the piece...some nice hand and finger manipulation.
Then in 6a and 6b he can become more interested and begin to play with the pieces.
As he takes cover in 6d and 7 he can really start to care about the piece...as he does, but it will mean more since his build up has been slower.
8a and b are probably fine...I like 9a and 9b too...though at this point maybe his face should be really eager...wanting to finish the puzzle...big surprise in 10 works well...then work on the camera, maybe have the big Justin in a different orientation relative to the piece to allow the orbiting camera concept to work.
Thats all for now, shooting reference in the morning!
Bordering on funny
My piece has a kind of sappiness to it that is hard to balance so that the audience gets caught up in it and it doesn't go over the top. Its especially hard for me since I'm so used to comedy and comedic timing--so I have to work really hard to get it to feel right. Jared suggested that I tone down the facial expressions--he can still be all the emotions I want him to be, but it becomes comical the more extreme they go.
Trash the Lip sync
Jared also suggested that I remove the lip sync--not only does it add to the "over-the-top-ness" of the piece, it also adds redundancy...it feels as though Justin is singing about what he's doing, instead of an omnipresent voice commenting on Justin (Omri suggested that I can leave in the large version lip syncing, then i get to do it some and its as though the large Justin has been singing the whole thing looking at the small Justin--I really like this idea). Frankly I added the lip sync because I felt I needed to and now I feel okay about getting rid of it---most of it wasn't working with my blocking anyway--it just means I have to figure out more body posing---SHOOT REFERENCE!!!
Slow emotional change
Nick made a good point that a character who is so down in the dumps isn't going to be so happy and surprised by a random piece falling in his lap...he should slowly transition as the pieces arrive...becoming less dejected, more curious and interested and then completely absorbed. (This comment was a reminder that this instant surprise is really a hold over from my original concept that one piece would fall, Justin would be delighted, and then all the other pieces would come together...having them fall one by one should draw out this gear change).
Change camera moves
Todd pointed out the most glaring error in my piece--the opening shot ruins the reveal--you should start close up and not make it obvious that Justin is sitting on a puzzle piece. In fact, when the camera pulls out at the end perhaps it should only be the green piece still and not the whole planet--the big Justin could be just starting to put together the puzzle--the connection between the big piece and the first piece would be far more obvious that way...(this may change some later camera shots...we'll see). Todd also commented that the last shot is kind of jarring...that the big Justin feels like a menace, not a caretaker...if the camera could somehow spiral outwards then the movement would be a little less of a jerk of the camera and could portray the big Justin in a better light---not sure yet how to do this, I'll work on it. Its definitely important that the big Justin is revealed in the right way.
Basically, it seems I've gone a little over the top in the amount of posing I've done and the range of extreme emotion Justin goes through. It seems its my style to go too far and then to slowly push back until a good balance is met--but this is good, definitely better than going too far. I'm hoping that by ditching some posing and working within some of the main (better) poses I already have, I can tighten my piece substantially. Hopefully this won't take too much time as I still have about half of the piece to spline. However, I've decided that I had better go back and figure out the beginning before dealing with the end because it could potentially change the ending poses. I'm definitely worried as to whether I have enough time to go back and rework the beginning with so much left to do at the end. But I'm realizing how much I care about this coming out well and the suggestions I got tonight were really good ones--so I should take them into account.
I've already redone the first shot--the camera starts really close and only pulls in a little very slowly. The breath that Justin takes is a lot more readable, so I like that, and I added a finger scratch on his leg and a slow eye blink.
The second shot needs some serious reworking--the change in his back arch is too much...if he is only mildly interested and not excited when the first piece lands in his hand his reaction wouldn't be so big. The whole right side of his body would barely move and his left hand would react to grab the piece almost unconsciously. I haven't figured out yet what to do about his right leg sliding down...this may wait until later. Shot 3 may stay in this pose---I definitely need to get rid of the surprise (too big regardless, and definitely too much this early). Jared also mentioned that this pose is way too symmetrical. When the camera spins upwards, maybe Justin slowly looks up, confused as to where the piece came from.
Shots 4 and 5 can probably be combined now that theres no close up on the lips for "Hey". This shot would be best as him vaguely curiously playing with the piece...some nice hand and finger manipulation.
Then in 6a and 6b he can become more interested and begin to play with the pieces.
As he takes cover in 6d and 7 he can really start to care about the piece...as he does, but it will mean more since his build up has been slower.
8a and b are probably fine...I like 9a and 9b too...though at this point maybe his face should be really eager...wanting to finish the puzzle...big surprise in 10 works well...then work on the camera, maybe have the big Justin in a different orientation relative to the piece to allow the orbiting camera concept to work.
Thats all for now, shooting reference in the morning!
March 30, 2007
Its the end of March as we know it (and I need time)...
As the title says, here we are at the end of March and boy do I wish it was the end of February. I am starting to feel like I have a grip on things, but only so far as now I can start really working on animation. I've done lighting and finished texturing, so aside from a few potential problems with the render (I'm keeping my fingers crossed), I can pretty much solely animate for the next couple weeks. That gives me about a day a shot to really go over it, spline and smooth everything out. In talking to everyone else, it seems most people are aiming to start rendering on the 18th--that gives me a good 17 days or so (minus a couple for the last two days at Jarnac, so 15)--i.e. exactly one day per shot including weekends. Though I'm hoping my rendering doesn't take very long (3 days ideally--1 per pass [galaxy, animation, ambient occlusion]) who knows what geometry won't show up in the render or what texture/lighting problems there will be...or even worse, animation problems I didn't see in playblasting. So a full week will give me some wiggle room hopefully to go back and rework sections if need be and re-render.
March 27, 2007
Pass 2 & Shelves
Lip Sync
I started out this week much more confident--Norman's textures are basically complete, and the eyebrow dilemma is over...so for the most part I can focus on his animation, start adding more in-betweens, and really hone the movement of the piece. Watching the blocking at the beginning I was having serious trouble figuring out what additional poses were needed--the movement is very simple and subtle, and there isn't much of it. I realized that a lot of the focus of these shots is the lip sync--I set everything up to allow certain shots that showcase the lip sync.
As with any music video, the singer can't be doing very much or the viewer won't see the lip sync (unless they strap a camera to the singer's face--but thats for a very specific effect). So I unintentionally started working on the lip sync--and lo and behold I got renewed excitement for the piece generally. The lip sync was why I wanted to create a music video in the first place--honestly there is just something inherently cool about bringing a character to life to the point that they have a voice. As I worked on the lip sync I started to remember what Leif and Nick had said last semester about letting the voice inform the character's movement...pay attention for where they breathe, make sure the body moves accordingly---etc. We was shown the video below last semester as proof that the body movement is far more important for selling that the voice comes from that person than the lip sync. The video is a commercial for Stroh's Light Beer where they really convincingly took footage of Fidel Castro and changed the voice, but his gestural emphasis matches the new voice, so it works even though the lips obviously don't match:
Leif was also right on in choosing to build Norman with mouth blend shapes but no specific blend shapes for phonemes--the rig allows mouth shapes to vary depending on the expression on the face. It makes for a really natural looking lip sync with a lot of flexibility---instead of the entire mouth reshaping for each shape, the rig allows subtle movement, like real human lip movement.
Up to this point I had it in my head to wait to do the lip sync--everyone told me to hold off and get everything else done first. As a result I wasn't animating to the lyrics--I did have the body movement relate to the music, but not to the voice--the most important part!
So, between yesterday and today I did the first pass of the lip sync and I'm pretty happy...it definitely needs work, but parts of it look really good. After finishing the lip sync this morning I spent most of the day duplicating the planet pieces and constraining them to his hands--really trying to hone the movement and putting together of the puzzle. It's definitely feeling more solid and the movement makes more sense--though I have had one technical problem thats just cost some time. Since I created the planet with levels of groups so that I could snap each piece back to O and animate the group above it once pieces are fit together, the duplicating and constraining process was more complicated than I had envisioned. I had to figure out how to match the constrained pieces to the referenced ones so that I could switch back to the referenced version when each piece is added. Unfortunately I didn't know a better way then to try to match the pieces as closely as I could. Fortunately, the side benefit is that instead of the pieces sliding in seamlessly, they now jiggle in, a much more realistic movement--by animating the hands accordingly, it really feels as though Justin is coordinating these pieces realistically instead of robotically, perfectly sliding them together. So far this solution seems to be working nicely--we'll see what happens when I spline!
Customizing Shelves
I've been slowly coming up with solutions to automate actions that I do all the time to save me some energy. I started by creating really simple keys to snap the timeline to individual shot lengths--this allows quick viewing of shots and an easy way to see all the keys of a shot on the timeline without needing the graph editor. Then when I created the texturing, having them visible slowed the computer down significantly just in tumbling through space--so I created keys that use a for loop to turn texturing visibility on or off for all the pieces currently selected (I need some of them to be visible--like the eyes, or I can't see the pupils). Finally, Stephan gave me a highend3d shelf (pictured above) for the Human rig that he modified for Norman last semester. Its a simple shelf, the buttons merely select the corresponding control curve--but the image buttons are really helpful--and save a few modifications I had to do to the script because of reference prefixes, it was really easy to convert the images for a mac and get the buttons to work on Justin.
Finally, for when I move from blocked to splined animation, to make sure that everything is keyed at every blocked pose, I created two buttons, a trans and a rot button which select all controls that have either translate or rotate key-ability. I will have to select the extra attributes separately (eyebrows, eyes, mouth (+ tongue), hands, and feet--not to mention the pieces. However, this will automate my locking down of poses much more efficiently.
I started out this week much more confident--Norman's textures are basically complete, and the eyebrow dilemma is over...so for the most part I can focus on his animation, start adding more in-betweens, and really hone the movement of the piece. Watching the blocking at the beginning I was having serious trouble figuring out what additional poses were needed--the movement is very simple and subtle, and there isn't much of it. I realized that a lot of the focus of these shots is the lip sync--I set everything up to allow certain shots that showcase the lip sync.
As with any music video, the singer can't be doing very much or the viewer won't see the lip sync (unless they strap a camera to the singer's face--but thats for a very specific effect). So I unintentionally started working on the lip sync--and lo and behold I got renewed excitement for the piece generally. The lip sync was why I wanted to create a music video in the first place--honestly there is just something inherently cool about bringing a character to life to the point that they have a voice. As I worked on the lip sync I started to remember what Leif and Nick had said last semester about letting the voice inform the character's movement...pay attention for where they breathe, make sure the body moves accordingly---etc. We was shown the video below last semester as proof that the body movement is far more important for selling that the voice comes from that person than the lip sync. The video is a commercial for Stroh's Light Beer where they really convincingly took footage of Fidel Castro and changed the voice, but his gestural emphasis matches the new voice, so it works even though the lips obviously don't match:
Leif was also right on in choosing to build Norman with mouth blend shapes but no specific blend shapes for phonemes--the rig allows mouth shapes to vary depending on the expression on the face. It makes for a really natural looking lip sync with a lot of flexibility---instead of the entire mouth reshaping for each shape, the rig allows subtle movement, like real human lip movement.
Up to this point I had it in my head to wait to do the lip sync--everyone told me to hold off and get everything else done first. As a result I wasn't animating to the lyrics--I did have the body movement relate to the music, but not to the voice--the most important part!
So, between yesterday and today I did the first pass of the lip sync and I'm pretty happy...it definitely needs work, but parts of it look really good. After finishing the lip sync this morning I spent most of the day duplicating the planet pieces and constraining them to his hands--really trying to hone the movement and putting together of the puzzle. It's definitely feeling more solid and the movement makes more sense--though I have had one technical problem thats just cost some time. Since I created the planet with levels of groups so that I could snap each piece back to O and animate the group above it once pieces are fit together, the duplicating and constraining process was more complicated than I had envisioned. I had to figure out how to match the constrained pieces to the referenced ones so that I could switch back to the referenced version when each piece is added. Unfortunately I didn't know a better way then to try to match the pieces as closely as I could. Fortunately, the side benefit is that instead of the pieces sliding in seamlessly, they now jiggle in, a much more realistic movement--by animating the hands accordingly, it really feels as though Justin is coordinating these pieces realistically instead of robotically, perfectly sliding them together. So far this solution seems to be working nicely--we'll see what happens when I spline!
Customizing Shelves
I've been slowly coming up with solutions to automate actions that I do all the time to save me some energy. I started by creating really simple keys to snap the timeline to individual shot lengths--this allows quick viewing of shots and an easy way to see all the keys of a shot on the timeline without needing the graph editor. Then when I created the texturing, having them visible slowed the computer down significantly just in tumbling through space--so I created keys that use a for loop to turn texturing visibility on or off for all the pieces currently selected (I need some of them to be visible--like the eyes, or I can't see the pupils). Finally, Stephan gave me a highend3d shelf (pictured above) for the Human rig that he modified for Norman last semester. Its a simple shelf, the buttons merely select the corresponding control curve--but the image buttons are really helpful--and save a few modifications I had to do to the script because of reference prefixes, it was really easy to convert the images for a mac and get the buttons to work on Justin.
Finally, for when I move from blocked to splined animation, to make sure that everything is keyed at every blocked pose, I created two buttons, a trans and a rot button which select all controls that have either translate or rotate key-ability. I will have to select the extra attributes separately (eyebrows, eyes, mouth (+ tongue), hands, and feet--not to mention the pieces. However, this will automate my locking down of poses much more efficiently.
March 20, 2007
Eyebrow Solution
After wrestling forever in an attempt to solve the wrap deformer problem with no progress--trying directly connecting various attributes of the face to the eyebrow geometry, trying to wade through the layers of blendshapes on the eyebrow ridge to try to reconstruct the network for the brows--I've given up on the idea. Instead, I trashed the eyebrows and selected the faces on the face where I had positioned the eyebrows initially and textured them with the hair texture with an added bump map on top that I constructed in photoshop using the face UV layout. I'm quite pleased with the result--he now has eyebrows that will without a doubt move with the eyebrow ridge and will have no problems with scaling!
March 16, 2007
Final Touches on Justin's Texturing
So its taken about three days to finish laying out Justin's UVs, draw all of his textures, add posterization, and add outlines to it all. I'd say a pretty efficient few days, n'est ce pas? First, here is an image of Justin in his entirety, completely textured, and with very subtle outlines:
The outlines are a little too subtle from far away--I'm wondering whether I can use a distance between node and have the distance between-lets say-the shot cam and Justin's torso determine the width of the outline. Unfortunately, I can't set this up in the reference file because the shot cam only exists in the animation file...hopefully I can still use referenced nodes to create this network. It might not be worth the time to attempt this--but its an exciting idea nonetheless...we'll see.
I am glad that I spent some time creating outlines for the geometry, they give a sort of ambient occlusion effect since I don't have a hard edge between the outline and the geometry. Ironically enough the outlines make Justin look more 3d, not less. Below are two identical images except that the top doesn't have outlines. Its a very subtle difference, but definitely visible on the left edge of the right eye.
I still have some texturing problems to solve, below is an up to date list on the texturing still needed:
A. Problems
1. pinching of the planet texture
2. faceting of the planet faces
B. Textures remaining
1. Justin's inner mouth (Tongue)
2. Universe
i.one texture for the inside of a sphere
ii.paint effects for atmosphere
3. Interior of planet pieces
Despite this list, I feel much more on task and ready to focus on animation. I intend to leave lighting and rendering for the last couple weeks and finish off the texturing list (and the eyebrow issue) when I'm worn out from animating.
The outlines are a little too subtle from far away--I'm wondering whether I can use a distance between node and have the distance between-lets say-the shot cam and Justin's torso determine the width of the outline. Unfortunately, I can't set this up in the reference file because the shot cam only exists in the animation file...hopefully I can still use referenced nodes to create this network. It might not be worth the time to attempt this--but its an exciting idea nonetheless...we'll see.
I am glad that I spent some time creating outlines for the geometry, they give a sort of ambient occlusion effect since I don't have a hard edge between the outline and the geometry. Ironically enough the outlines make Justin look more 3d, not less. Below are two identical images except that the top doesn't have outlines. Its a very subtle difference, but definitely visible on the left edge of the right eye.
I still have some texturing problems to solve, below is an up to date list on the texturing still needed:
A. Problems
1. pinching of the planet texture
2. faceting of the planet faces
B. Textures remaining
1. Justin's inner mouth (Tongue)
2. Universe
i.one texture for the inside of a sphere
ii.paint effects for atmosphere
3. Interior of planet pieces
Despite this list, I feel much more on task and ready to focus on animation. I intend to leave lighting and rendering for the last couple weeks and finish off the texturing list (and the eyebrow issue) when I'm worn out from animating.
March 15, 2007
Back in UVland
I began the week by going over the remaining notes on my poses and addressing each one.
In addition, I started duplicating pieces and constraining them to Justin's hands so that for certain portions of the piece--where he is holding a piece/group of pieces in a single position--the hand animation will lead the piece. To avoid the visibility switch problem Lauren had (where Mental Ray rendered all the pieces regardless of their visibility), I took her suggestion and did a scale switch instead where over one frame one piece scales up from zero and one scales down to zero, having the same effect as the visibility switch but not having the possibility of rendering problems.
I still have a few things I want to deal with in these basic poses, but I decided it was time to go back and work on skin weighting (just briefly) and texturing.
I spent a day attempting to figure out the eyebrow wrap problem with no success, so instead I fixed the weighting on his right shoulder and finished laying out his UVs.
At the moment I've drawn textures for all of Justin except his shoes, eyebrows and hair pieces. I also still have to texture the insides of all the planet pieces (perhaps I can draw one texture that I apply in various ways to each of them...), and figure out the stretching of the outer planet texture on the green piece.
Below are a couple renders of Justin currently, with almost all of his texturing done.
Each texture is a lambert shader with the color map an imported scan of colored pencil drawing on vellum. From far away they look soft and hand-drawn, but I posterized the images in photoshop to give an edgy, grainy look so that close up the "innocent, childlike" nature that is seen from afar actually has an older, edgier sensibility to it.
There are also some drawn details to bring a sense of reality to the piece, while the geometry itself is still fairly boxy and simple. This adds a playful sense of puppetry to the piece--and an artisan/craftsmanship of carefully laying out the textures and UVs for each polygon as though done by hand.
I'm trying to find a balance between adding detail and making it stylized. As can be seen with the hand above, there is an obvious effort to denote fingernails, but only subtly, a little detail to emphasize aspects of human anatomy and clothing, while keeping it simple enough to not even vaguely suggest an attempt at realism.
I haven't yet decided whether the outline idea that I used in the elephant piece will be applied here, but it feels very 3d at the moment and I'd like to "funkify" it. I think using outlines could prove effective, though not the built in toon shader outlines that feel separate from the character--id rather using the facing ratio node the way toon shaders used to be created, which gives a more organic (as in part of the geometry--not as in part of nature) feel to it. I intend to finish up Justin's hand drawn textures in the next day or two and experiment some with the outline concept. But I have to get back to animating early next week, so hopefully my aesthetic will come together quickly!
In addition, I started duplicating pieces and constraining them to Justin's hands so that for certain portions of the piece--where he is holding a piece/group of pieces in a single position--the hand animation will lead the piece. To avoid the visibility switch problem Lauren had (where Mental Ray rendered all the pieces regardless of their visibility), I took her suggestion and did a scale switch instead where over one frame one piece scales up from zero and one scales down to zero, having the same effect as the visibility switch but not having the possibility of rendering problems.
I still have a few things I want to deal with in these basic poses, but I decided it was time to go back and work on skin weighting (just briefly) and texturing.
I spent a day attempting to figure out the eyebrow wrap problem with no success, so instead I fixed the weighting on his right shoulder and finished laying out his UVs.
At the moment I've drawn textures for all of Justin except his shoes, eyebrows and hair pieces. I also still have to texture the insides of all the planet pieces (perhaps I can draw one texture that I apply in various ways to each of them...), and figure out the stretching of the outer planet texture on the green piece.
Below are a couple renders of Justin currently, with almost all of his texturing done.
Each texture is a lambert shader with the color map an imported scan of colored pencil drawing on vellum. From far away they look soft and hand-drawn, but I posterized the images in photoshop to give an edgy, grainy look so that close up the "innocent, childlike" nature that is seen from afar actually has an older, edgier sensibility to it.
There are also some drawn details to bring a sense of reality to the piece, while the geometry itself is still fairly boxy and simple. This adds a playful sense of puppetry to the piece--and an artisan/craftsmanship of carefully laying out the textures and UVs for each polygon as though done by hand.
I'm trying to find a balance between adding detail and making it stylized. As can be seen with the hand above, there is an obvious effort to denote fingernails, but only subtly, a little detail to emphasize aspects of human anatomy and clothing, while keeping it simple enough to not even vaguely suggest an attempt at realism.
I haven't yet decided whether the outline idea that I used in the elephant piece will be applied here, but it feels very 3d at the moment and I'd like to "funkify" it. I think using outlines could prove effective, though not the built in toon shader outlines that feel separate from the character--id rather using the facing ratio node the way toon shaders used to be created, which gives a more organic (as in part of the geometry--not as in part of nature) feel to it. I intend to finish up Justin's hand drawn textures in the next day or two and experiment some with the outline concept. But I have to get back to animating early next week, so hopefully my aesthetic will come together quickly!
March 5, 2007
Solutions and Problems
First off, heres a list of some of the problems I have yet to solve.
1. Teeth and Tongue missing
2. Penetration of hair into face and eyebrows into hat
3. Eyebrow Wrap deformation
4. Right shoulder skinning
5. Stretched texture on planet
6. Roughness of polygons on planet surface
So I've started to go down this checklist, attempting to do some detective work.
Problem 1:
Solved--I discovered that somehow I accidentally included the teeth, the inside of the mouth (dubbed boca burger) and the tongue in my hidden blend shape layer, so I removed them from the layer and after realizing the tongue was in NURBS and I didn't have NURBS visible, I have solved that problem. However, this has brought about some new problems.
1. Penetration of Inside of Mouth Through Cheek
2. Tongue deformation
I think I've fixed the penetration of the inside of mouth through the cheek by moving the vertices of the "boca burger" inward as close to the teeth as possible.
As for the tongue deformation, I've discovered that the tongue deformation gets really weird as a result of scaling Norman down. Below are two images, the top displays the way the tongue looks when Norman is at scale=1 and the bottom is when Norman is at scale .016 (the one I'm using).
After hours of attempting to deconstruct Norman's tongue, I've finally fixed the problem.
Within the Local part of the rig itself there are three different groups that relate to the tongue:
ZGr_Cn_TongueA_Bind
contains the actual joints with an effector that connects to a spline IK outside of the rig
ZGr_Cn_TongueA_Driv
contains a series of groups, clusters and locators which manipulate a curve that in turn controls the deformation of different parts of the tongue
ZGr_Cn_TongueA
contains the controls to manipulate the locators, clusters and groups
In addition, there is a World Group that contains the Spline IK and the curve that the clusters are on.
I discovered that the problem was a double transform, as evidenced by the fact that the joints collapsed on top of each other when scaling the rig as small as I was attempting, and stretched the tongue out when scaling larger. After many trials of using multiply/divide nodes with different parts of the rig to attempt to cancel out these double transforms with no success, I realized that the double transform was in translate X, so I had to figure out how to control translate X of the joints. Lo and behold, there were already in place a series of utility nodes that controlled how much the joints, and in turn the tongue itself moved in translate X based on the spline IK.
A curve Info node, which queried the length of the spline IK curve, was fed into the first channel of this node and was multiplied by a pre-determined number, presumably a proportion of where that joint should fall along the length of the spline curve. There actually didn't seem to be any problem with how these utility nodes were set up--the spline curve scaled with the rig and the second number stayed a constant, so the ratio remained accurate. However, there was a double transform somewhere in the rig that didn't seem to be controllable elsewhere, so I figured using these nodes was the best way to counteract the problem.
To counteract the double transform, I needed an inverse proportion of the placer's scale. So I created a multiply/divide node, set the first input at 1, input the scale value for the placer as input 2 and set the function to divide. Then I duplicated the already existing nodes (there was one for each joint in the tongue chain) and put the pre-existing ratio as the first input. The output of the multiply/divide node (the inverse proportion) was fed into input two, and the result was a ration that would counteract the double transform. This value became input two in the already existing nodes, with the length of the spline curve as input one. Finally, this result multiplied out to become the new translate value in X of the joint.
Below is a screen grab of the connections I set up between the various nodes:
In simpler mathematical terms, lets say Justin's placer scale is A, the original proportion of the curve is B and the total length of the curve is C.
The original node setup read as follows:
B x C = translate X of joint
With my additional node, here is the new set-up:
1/A x B = B/A
C x B/A = new translate X of joint
In addition, the World Utilities Group doesn't scale with the rig, but the IK needs to. However, the pivot of the IK isn't in the right place to scale from, while the World Utilities Group that the IK is in has the pivot in the correct place. So I directly connected the scale of the placer to the scale of this group. The spline curve is also in this group and already scales correctly because its clusters are in the rig, so I merely unchecked the "Inherits Transform" box in the Attribute Editor so its parent group's scale doesn't affect its scale.
Unfortunately, solving this took all day. However, Problem 2 should be a simple modeling fix, and the right shoulder skinning can be copied from the left shoulder to fix Problem 4. Problems 5&6 are texturing problems and while they need to be dealt with, I can attack them a little further down the road.
Its really the eyebrow wrap problem that I want to solve next. Hopefully, I can do it a little more efficiently than the tongue.
1. Teeth and Tongue missing
2. Penetration of hair into face and eyebrows into hat
3. Eyebrow Wrap deformation
4. Right shoulder skinning
5. Stretched texture on planet
6. Roughness of polygons on planet surface
So I've started to go down this checklist, attempting to do some detective work.
Problem 1:
Solved--I discovered that somehow I accidentally included the teeth, the inside of the mouth (dubbed boca burger) and the tongue in my hidden blend shape layer, so I removed them from the layer and after realizing the tongue was in NURBS and I didn't have NURBS visible, I have solved that problem. However, this has brought about some new problems.
1. Penetration of Inside of Mouth Through Cheek
2. Tongue deformation
I think I've fixed the penetration of the inside of mouth through the cheek by moving the vertices of the "boca burger" inward as close to the teeth as possible.
As for the tongue deformation, I've discovered that the tongue deformation gets really weird as a result of scaling Norman down. Below are two images, the top displays the way the tongue looks when Norman is at scale=1 and the bottom is when Norman is at scale .016 (the one I'm using).
After hours of attempting to deconstruct Norman's tongue, I've finally fixed the problem.
Within the Local part of the rig itself there are three different groups that relate to the tongue:
ZGr_Cn_TongueA_Bind
contains the actual joints with an effector that connects to a spline IK outside of the rig
ZGr_Cn_TongueA_Driv
contains a series of groups, clusters and locators which manipulate a curve that in turn controls the deformation of different parts of the tongue
ZGr_Cn_TongueA
contains the controls to manipulate the locators, clusters and groups
In addition, there is a World Group that contains the Spline IK and the curve that the clusters are on.
I discovered that the problem was a double transform, as evidenced by the fact that the joints collapsed on top of each other when scaling the rig as small as I was attempting, and stretched the tongue out when scaling larger. After many trials of using multiply/divide nodes with different parts of the rig to attempt to cancel out these double transforms with no success, I realized that the double transform was in translate X, so I had to figure out how to control translate X of the joints. Lo and behold, there were already in place a series of utility nodes that controlled how much the joints, and in turn the tongue itself moved in translate X based on the spline IK.
A curve Info node, which queried the length of the spline IK curve, was fed into the first channel of this node and was multiplied by a pre-determined number, presumably a proportion of where that joint should fall along the length of the spline curve. There actually didn't seem to be any problem with how these utility nodes were set up--the spline curve scaled with the rig and the second number stayed a constant, so the ratio remained accurate. However, there was a double transform somewhere in the rig that didn't seem to be controllable elsewhere, so I figured using these nodes was the best way to counteract the problem.
To counteract the double transform, I needed an inverse proportion of the placer's scale. So I created a multiply/divide node, set the first input at 1, input the scale value for the placer as input 2 and set the function to divide. Then I duplicated the already existing nodes (there was one for each joint in the tongue chain) and put the pre-existing ratio as the first input. The output of the multiply/divide node (the inverse proportion) was fed into input two, and the result was a ration that would counteract the double transform. This value became input two in the already existing nodes, with the length of the spline curve as input one. Finally, this result multiplied out to become the new translate value in X of the joint.
Below is a screen grab of the connections I set up between the various nodes:
In simpler mathematical terms, lets say Justin's placer scale is A, the original proportion of the curve is B and the total length of the curve is C.
The original node setup read as follows:
B x C = translate X of joint
With my additional node, here is the new set-up:
1/A x B = B/A
C x B/A = new translate X of joint
In addition, the World Utilities Group doesn't scale with the rig, but the IK needs to. However, the pivot of the IK isn't in the right place to scale from, while the World Utilities Group that the IK is in has the pivot in the correct place. So I directly connected the scale of the placer to the scale of this group. The spline curve is also in this group and already scales correctly because its clusters are in the rig, so I merely unchecked the "Inherits Transform" box in the Attribute Editor so its parent group's scale doesn't affect its scale.
Unfortunately, solving this took all day. However, Problem 2 should be a simple modeling fix, and the right shoulder skinning can be copied from the left shoulder to fix Problem 4. Problems 5&6 are texturing problems and while they need to be dealt with, I can attack them a little further down the road.
Its really the eyebrow wrap problem that I want to solve next. Hopefully, I can do it a little more efficiently than the tongue.
February 28, 2007
The Midterm Cometh
Today was our midterm presentation and I reached my goal of posing Justin and figuring out the cameras in time. Unfortunately, because of two corrupted tiff files, I couldn't show my full story reel. However, I did pull it together, so here it is:
I feel like I'm on pace relative to the rest of the thesis class, though I have a lot of work ahead of me. March is serious animation month--ideally I finish the animation in March and get down to the nitty gritty texturing and lighting and rendering in April. Thats the plan for the moment at least.
I feel like I'm on pace relative to the rest of the thesis class, though I have a lot of work ahead of me. March is serious animation month--ideally I finish the animation in March and get down to the nitty gritty texturing and lighting and rendering in April. Thats the plan for the moment at least.
February 21, 2007
Pieces in the key of Justin
(Image found on Head Injury Theater's website for Art Crash in September of 2006)
I've set the goal of having a completely posed, camera ready story reel for next week. So I've been spending a lot of time figuring out how to end the piece. After posing Justin all the way through attaching the red piece I had animator's block and couldn't figure out how to have the last yellow piece arrive.
In talking to Jenny, she referenced choreography advice that she had gotten--establish a pattern and then break it. It seemed like sound advice, and I'd already established this pattern of the pieces falling from the sky. What if the last piece existed already? This would inextricably bind up Justin as fated to construct this puzzle (if there was no way for this puzzle to be completed without the piece he possesses, then only he can finish it). But where to put the piece? It has the shape of a key, but unfortunately the piece is too big to fit in a pocket or go around his neck.
So I started thinking about somehow having the piece be a part of him...its somewhat outlandish, but after watching the Oscar Nominated Shorts at IFC Film Center, and seeing Maestro by Geza M. Toth (below), I reminded myself--push for stylized animation!
I didn't want him to lose a piece of himself--i.e. ear, nose, foot...so I'd rather the piece be imbedded in him. I couldn't seem to resolve how to do this, make it visible to the viewer and seem integrated into the world. I did like the idea of it in his neck and he goes back to scratch his neck and finds it, but it ended up being a little too complicated--and not in keeping with the world I've constructed.
In the end I decided to imbed the piece in the rock and what draws his attention to it is a smaller version of himself sitting on a rock on the piece--I love this idea (thanks to Lauren) because it enhances the idea of worlds within worlds. So, now I just have to pose it all and figure out cameras!
February 14, 2007
Setting new goals
To start, some inspiration...
The following video was made by a band called The Cobbs(formerly Mad Action). The song is called Smile and the video was created by Jonas Odell who works for a company called FilmTecknarna which is based in Sweden. I discovered a partially completed version of the video submitted at www.ralphrocks.com for a competition, but heres the finished version...damn impressive compositing work:
After meeting with Hosenfeld last week I was again reminded of a Radiohead video that is entirely CG with an unsmoothed Polygon look to it. I hadn't been able to find the video, but I finally buckled down and searched for it pretty hard and discovered it, for the song Go to Sleep:
Now for an update:
I've been working pretty hard this week on posing Justin, especially putting together the first three pieces--attempting some positions that don't work and then figuring it out. I've given him two failures and then a success each time so far, three is always enough to seem feasible but not too much to get monotonous. Of course, with three more pieces to add I intend less attempts for the others, probably two for the white piece and the red and yellow are pretty obvious once everything else is in place, so he'll probably just turn it over and inspect the puzzle and figure it out on the first go with those two. I also deleted the FPO (for placement only) cube and created a reference file for the rock, with a preliminary model. At the moment its bigger than I imagined, but it looks pretty good.
Some issues that have arisen as I've been working:
Shot 1, towards the end, when the camera starts to pan up to reveal the first piece falling. I'm realizing that he will be singing throughout the piece (though I'm only showing his lips here and there, so I will only be creating a lip sync occasionally, but I want it to feel as though he is singing the whole thing)--and I don't really want him to be singing "You were sent to me, fallen from the sky" before the piece lands in his lap...so I need to figure out what to do with the camera so you don't see his face when the lyrics start. Maybe I can cut to shot 2 earlier--at around frame 400 the camera has pulled in and not yet panned up to show the piece and the lyrics haven't started. I could just have the second shot follow the piece from further out.
Shot 6, the one after the close-up on "hey" and before he is down crouching on the ground has been broken into two shots: 6 and 6a. In 6 the camera pulls across to the right as the orange piece lands next to him. Then it pulls up over his left shoulder as he figures out how the green and orange fit. Shot 6a is still in the works. Somehow I need to show the blue piece land on his right side without completely disorienting the viewer. Cutting from over his left shoulder to a medium shot on his right side is jarring to say the least.
Shots 7, 8, 9
At the moment shot 6a pulls in slowly to show him fitting the blue piece in. Shot 7 then starts out again and follows the same long slow pull in to show his eyes reflected in the puzzle during the lyrics, "But no one can find me when I'm lost in your eyes." Both shots suggest a long slow pull...I just have to figure out how to make them different...shots 8 and 9 currently pan back and forth as he climbs back up on the rock and puts together the last few pieces--I need to minimize the panning, its a little much, and I'm toying with the idea that he doesn't get up and sit on the rock again...that maybe all the pieces land within reach on the rock or the ground and he finishes the puzzle sitting on the ground---this could mean that as he realizes that its a little planet, he stands up in shock...nice change of pose to denote change in emotion...this would completely change all of the camera movement...
So, my current goal is to try to get basic poses and cameras done for the whole thing by the end of the week...its a lot of work as I've only done about half of it so far, but I've done the harder part--it gets easier and there are less major poses. If I can get some more textures done early next week then for my wednesday meeting with Hosenfeld I can render out the whole thing. Ideally I'd reference in the puzzle ball twice more and place pieces floating in space as well as texture an environment sphere. That may be pushing it, but it would be a lot of progress from two weeks ago.
The following video was made by a band called The Cobbs(formerly Mad Action). The song is called Smile and the video was created by Jonas Odell who works for a company called FilmTecknarna which is based in Sweden. I discovered a partially completed version of the video submitted at www.ralphrocks.com for a competition, but heres the finished version...damn impressive compositing work:
After meeting with Hosenfeld last week I was again reminded of a Radiohead video that is entirely CG with an unsmoothed Polygon look to it. I hadn't been able to find the video, but I finally buckled down and searched for it pretty hard and discovered it, for the song Go to Sleep:
Now for an update:
I've been working pretty hard this week on posing Justin, especially putting together the first three pieces--attempting some positions that don't work and then figuring it out. I've given him two failures and then a success each time so far, three is always enough to seem feasible but not too much to get monotonous. Of course, with three more pieces to add I intend less attempts for the others, probably two for the white piece and the red and yellow are pretty obvious once everything else is in place, so he'll probably just turn it over and inspect the puzzle and figure it out on the first go with those two. I also deleted the FPO (for placement only) cube and created a reference file for the rock, with a preliminary model. At the moment its bigger than I imagined, but it looks pretty good.
Some issues that have arisen as I've been working:
Shot 1, towards the end, when the camera starts to pan up to reveal the first piece falling. I'm realizing that he will be singing throughout the piece (though I'm only showing his lips here and there, so I will only be creating a lip sync occasionally, but I want it to feel as though he is singing the whole thing)--and I don't really want him to be singing "You were sent to me, fallen from the sky" before the piece lands in his lap...so I need to figure out what to do with the camera so you don't see his face when the lyrics start. Maybe I can cut to shot 2 earlier--at around frame 400 the camera has pulled in and not yet panned up to show the piece and the lyrics haven't started. I could just have the second shot follow the piece from further out.
Shot 6, the one after the close-up on "hey" and before he is down crouching on the ground has been broken into two shots: 6 and 6a. In 6 the camera pulls across to the right as the orange piece lands next to him. Then it pulls up over his left shoulder as he figures out how the green and orange fit. Shot 6a is still in the works. Somehow I need to show the blue piece land on his right side without completely disorienting the viewer. Cutting from over his left shoulder to a medium shot on his right side is jarring to say the least.
Shots 7, 8, 9
At the moment shot 6a pulls in slowly to show him fitting the blue piece in. Shot 7 then starts out again and follows the same long slow pull in to show his eyes reflected in the puzzle during the lyrics, "But no one can find me when I'm lost in your eyes." Both shots suggest a long slow pull...I just have to figure out how to make them different...shots 8 and 9 currently pan back and forth as he climbs back up on the rock and puts together the last few pieces--I need to minimize the panning, its a little much, and I'm toying with the idea that he doesn't get up and sit on the rock again...that maybe all the pieces land within reach on the rock or the ground and he finishes the puzzle sitting on the ground---this could mean that as he realizes that its a little planet, he stands up in shock...nice change of pose to denote change in emotion...this would completely change all of the camera movement...
So, my current goal is to try to get basic poses and cameras done for the whole thing by the end of the week...its a lot of work as I've only done about half of it so far, but I've done the harder part--it gets easier and there are less major poses. If I can get some more textures done early next week then for my wednesday meeting with Hosenfeld I can render out the whole thing. Ideally I'd reference in the puzzle ball twice more and place pieces floating in space as well as texture an environment sphere. That may be pushing it, but it would be a lot of progress from two weeks ago.
February 7, 2007
Group dynamics
After a lot of prep work I've begun the process of animation...Yay!!!
(Above is Justin's first pose that I worked on yesterday)
Lets recap on what has occurred to this point:
The problem of the IK/FK switch that stopped working when scaling Norman was fixed miraculously with the aid of Morgan Loomis (who wrote the script). Leif had me contact him, saying that he wasn't sure it could be fixed, but Morgan might be able to help. As doubtful as this made me that there was a solution, I pressed onward and contacted Morgan, who (again) miraculously, had a newer version of the script in which that problem has been fixed...so far so good.
My attempts at reskinning Norman are utter failures, as evidenced immediately upon posing Justin. (You can see the shoulder problems somewhat in the above image) I intend to go back and restore the skinning to the original settings. Along these lines, after having my first meeting with Hosenfeld today, he emphasized that I make sure not to push too much towards realism...stay stylized. With this in mind, I'm giving up trying to unify the arm and leg Geo...Justin will be puppet-like...perhaps I'll have holes in the knees or patches of different colors, but the simpler the geo the better.
Now, to what I am working on at the moment.
I have begun to create poses for Justin--attempting to put some timidity and childlike behavior into them...first I'm just trying to get the basic concept down, then I intend to go back and work on silhouettes and body arc lines. Below is one of the poses...
As is evident in the image, I'm beginning to get him to put together the pieces. As of yet I haven't decided when and where and how to constrain the pieces to his hands. However, I did decide to create a grouping system in the reference file so that there are nested groups for the putting together of the puzzle. I can animate the green piece alone until the orange piece gets slid into place. First off, to make sure that the green and orange piece lock solidly, I reset their translate and rotate to zero so they are at default position, where they are already together. Then, there is a group above orange and green that contains the two together. So I switch from animating them individually to the group above them. This group is then grouped with the blue piece to create a new set, and so on...giving me a tiered system to animate different groups for each phase of the puzzle. I haven't quite figured out how I will go about making sure the pieces don't jump around as I switch groups, but for the moment its a very helpful structure for blocking out the poses.
February 1, 2007
Reality Check
Above is my original Production Schedule as I planned it last semester during PreVis. Based on its progression, I am behind schedule, as I am finishing week 2 of the semester and should have completed shots 1-3 preliminary animation. In retrospect the schedule was a little too optimistic about my ability to model and texture everything in a couple weeks. However, I feel I gave myself way more time to do animation than is necessary (of course, the more time I have, the better then animation would be--but I have to balance the time spent on animation with completing all the other elements as well), so I'm not too worried--I expect to start animating in a week or so and believe I should be able to do a first pass of the entire piece in 2-3 weeks, and that should put me back on track.
Once the cameras are set, beginning animation should be fairly simple--I plan to reference in the two Justins into the Master File and scale them based on the Normans that are currently in the scene. Then I can block out my animation based on the simple poses I created for Norman--but with quite a bit more thought put into silhouettes, body curvature...etc...
I was a little worried that since I changed my cameras between my second animatic and my final Previs materials (because of slight story changes), that it would be a lot of work to fix them. Fortunately, they are all iterations of the original cameras, and it looks like I only have to change a couple shots. So the goal for the day is to get all the cameras set so next week I can begin animation!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Later that day...)
I've not only set all 9 of my cameras according to my shot sheets, but I've created a new camera rig where all 9 cameras are inputed into a new shot cam so I can quickly see what an edit would look like. Of course, I can still render out from each individual camera, however, this way I can play blast the whole piece quickly and get a sense of how the camera movement and character animation are looking over a number of shots.
As well, I've referenced in both Justins and scaled them according to the corresponding Normans that I used as placeholders. I still haven't figured out what to do about the IK/FK Switch issue, but I'm going to move ahead and hopefully will not need to use it. If a solution comes about, it shouldn't be difficult to scale the placer back to 1 (if necessary) so I can make the proper adjustments.
Starting next week I'm going to pose the small Justin based on the original poses I created for Norman and can begin to nail down the blocking.
I expect that the camera will have to change some since the blocking I did for Norman was so quick and dirty. Fortunately, since each shot is its own camera, adjusting for pose changes should be really easy. As such, I don't plan to render out anything until I have the cameras set. I can create new playblasts as I'm altering the poses and cameras to further my story reel from the animatic, but its just a waste of time to render before I have anything that can be deemed "final."
Meanwhile, I plan to continue fleshing out (literally) Justin and the planet modeling and texturing as I begin the animation process. Theres only so long you can animate before you start to lose it!
January 31, 2007
References available upon request
Referencing
In the past couple days I have entered the land of references, building my scene files out so that I can begin to animate. I'm spending quite a bit of time on naming conventions and testing various aspects of my files to make sure that all the manipulating of files I will be doing is feasible. I've already dealt with quite a number of problems...
I began by reorganizing my scene files into subfolders, as below:
These folders (Animattic, Environments, Justin, and Master) allow me to continue working on the planet, its modeling, texturing and other environmental elements separately from remodelling and skinning Justin. I can, within a subfolder of each of these categories (as is visible in the Justin folder), continue to hone each element, saving regularly, and then resaving as the _Ref file when an element is completed and the file is clean (doesn't have extra Geo, Layers, Utilities or Shaders). The changes will ripple through the pipeline and when I open the Master_Ref file, everything will be updated.
Originally I was going to have separate files for each Shot so as to keep the files very light, however, this makes a couple things very difficult. I would have to animate linearly so that the end pose from shot 1 matches the beginning pose of shot 2, I'd either have to resave Shot 1 as Shot2 or copy all the numbers, which is a waste of time. Also, the one huge benefit of a camera rig is being able to playblast the entire piece very quickly. If I do all the animation in one file with separate cameras for each shot, I can always create a new camera, orient and point constrain it to all the cameras and key it so it jumps from shot to shot, allowing a quick playblast of all of my individual cameras. I can then delete and recreate this rig whenever I need to.
So, I've decided to do all the animation in one Master file, where the environments (the planet referenced twice as the Big and Small, and global sphere for the universe, as well as floating planet pieces throughout), and Justin (also referenced twice) are all referenced into one central file where all the animation exists.
Problems
The first problem I have come across during my referencing stint is with the IK/FK Switch script that is designed to allow seamless transitions from one to the other. Its a really useful script, and, like much of the Norman rig, a great thing to take advantage of since I have it.
After referencing Justin into my Master file I discovered that the script didn't work, causing a downward spiral of depression and self-loathing. No, but seriously--it meant I had to go back and figure out at which point the script stopped working. Fortunately, after some exploration, I discovered that none of my modifications to the rig were the problem, and since I was using distinct namespaces for each referenced rig, the reference wasn't the problem either. Unfortunately, something I expected to do very easily is now a problem--scaling Justin. Apparently, when the Placer is scaled it completely screws with the IK/FK script. I'd love to figure out how to fix the problem, but I have yet to attempt any rewriting of the script or creative grouping.
The real issue with scaling (in addition to the fact that I have two Normans that need to be scaled differently) is that the smaller the scene is the better--as Lauren pointed out, render times are exponentially faster the smaller the scene is--less calculation time for lighting, and the smaller the numbers, the less processing overall. So, I could potentially leave the small Justin at a scale of 1 so the switch would work, but that means that the planet is bigger and the big Justin is enormous. I probably won't need to use the switch on the big Justin since he basically holds a pose, however, then the scene is very large. My plan had been to make the large Justin at scale 1 everything else would be smaller. As of yet, I have no idea how I'm going to deal with this...
Moving along, I decided to take my camera rig and duplicate out each shot as a separate camera. In my hasty stupidity, this ended up taking many tries. I figured out fairly quickly that the duplicate options allows you to keep keys when duplicating. However, I discovered this using the Duplicate Input Connections box, which means that all duplicated objects share the same keys and deleting keys from one deletes them from all the others. After multiple attempts I realized this was the problem and changed to Duplicate Input Graph which creates a distinct set of keys (a distinct graph) for all duplicates, allowing modification without affecting the original.
So I'm currently at a crossroads where the cameras from my animattic are separated out and I can begin to get them set permanently. I'm a little unsure about the scaling issue but I'd rather sacrifice the IK/FK Switch and have lower renders, so for the moment I'm continuing as planned. I hope to set the cameras by the end of the day tomorrow so I can update my story reel with some beginning textures, my Justin rig thus far and some solidified camera movements and positions.
In the past couple days I have entered the land of references, building my scene files out so that I can begin to animate. I'm spending quite a bit of time on naming conventions and testing various aspects of my files to make sure that all the manipulating of files I will be doing is feasible. I've already dealt with quite a number of problems...
I began by reorganizing my scene files into subfolders, as below:
These folders (Animattic, Environments, Justin, and Master) allow me to continue working on the planet, its modeling, texturing and other environmental elements separately from remodelling and skinning Justin. I can, within a subfolder of each of these categories (as is visible in the Justin folder), continue to hone each element, saving regularly, and then resaving as the _Ref file when an element is completed and the file is clean (doesn't have extra Geo, Layers, Utilities or Shaders). The changes will ripple through the pipeline and when I open the Master_Ref file, everything will be updated.
Originally I was going to have separate files for each Shot so as to keep the files very light, however, this makes a couple things very difficult. I would have to animate linearly so that the end pose from shot 1 matches the beginning pose of shot 2, I'd either have to resave Shot 1 as Shot2 or copy all the numbers, which is a waste of time. Also, the one huge benefit of a camera rig is being able to playblast the entire piece very quickly. If I do all the animation in one file with separate cameras for each shot, I can always create a new camera, orient and point constrain it to all the cameras and key it so it jumps from shot to shot, allowing a quick playblast of all of my individual cameras. I can then delete and recreate this rig whenever I need to.
So, I've decided to do all the animation in one Master file, where the environments (the planet referenced twice as the Big and Small, and global sphere for the universe, as well as floating planet pieces throughout), and Justin (also referenced twice) are all referenced into one central file where all the animation exists.
Problems
The first problem I have come across during my referencing stint is with the IK/FK Switch script that is designed to allow seamless transitions from one to the other. Its a really useful script, and, like much of the Norman rig, a great thing to take advantage of since I have it.
After referencing Justin into my Master file I discovered that the script didn't work, causing a downward spiral of depression and self-loathing. No, but seriously--it meant I had to go back and figure out at which point the script stopped working. Fortunately, after some exploration, I discovered that none of my modifications to the rig were the problem, and since I was using distinct namespaces for each referenced rig, the reference wasn't the problem either. Unfortunately, something I expected to do very easily is now a problem--scaling Justin. Apparently, when the Placer is scaled it completely screws with the IK/FK script. I'd love to figure out how to fix the problem, but I have yet to attempt any rewriting of the script or creative grouping.
The real issue with scaling (in addition to the fact that I have two Normans that need to be scaled differently) is that the smaller the scene is the better--as Lauren pointed out, render times are exponentially faster the smaller the scene is--less calculation time for lighting, and the smaller the numbers, the less processing overall. So, I could potentially leave the small Justin at a scale of 1 so the switch would work, but that means that the planet is bigger and the big Justin is enormous. I probably won't need to use the switch on the big Justin since he basically holds a pose, however, then the scene is very large. My plan had been to make the large Justin at scale 1 everything else would be smaller. As of yet, I have no idea how I'm going to deal with this...
Moving along, I decided to take my camera rig and duplicate out each shot as a separate camera. In my hasty stupidity, this ended up taking many tries. I figured out fairly quickly that the duplicate options allows you to keep keys when duplicating. However, I discovered this using the Duplicate Input Connections box, which means that all duplicated objects share the same keys and deleting keys from one deletes them from all the others. After multiple attempts I realized this was the problem and changed to Duplicate Input Graph which creates a distinct set of keys (a distinct graph) for all duplicates, allowing modification without affecting the original.
So I'm currently at a crossroads where the cameras from my animattic are separated out and I can begin to get them set permanently. I'm a little unsure about the scaling issue but I'd rather sacrifice the IK/FK Switch and have lower renders, so for the moment I'm continuing as planned. I hope to set the cameras by the end of the day tomorrow so I can update my story reel with some beginning textures, my Justin rig thus far and some solidified camera movements and positions.
January 25, 2007
Editing Norman and Rigging Dilemmas
Editing Norman
In the past couple of days I've been on the Spline Doctors Blog where I've seen a bunch of uses of Norman remodeled to make various characters. Students at the Academy of Art in SF taking the Pixar classes have taken Norman and remodeled him a dozen times, as witnessed by all the characters below:
For one of their classes they have taken Norman and turned him into a space captain (below, top) for a short film the entire class is creating together, a clip of which is below.
and turned him into a space astronaut for the video below:
Rigging Dilemmas
Most of the characters use Norman's geometry and minimal remodeling, mostly of the face. However, a few of the characters are smoothly bound with single mesh geometry for the upper body. It seems that all of them have kept the legs as is, with a few creative flairs to hide the knees and make the lower leg into a boot. The one model that is completely smooth bound is the kid (shown with both blond and brown hair) and, as is obvious from the animator's website, Aaron Koressel built this character (Hordy) himself, whereas all the other characters are Norman.
To some degree I would love my character to have a uniform mesh as an upper body, however, it seems I would have to sacrifice some capabilities of the rig to make this happen. Here are my options:
1. Wrap Deformer
I could use a wrap deformer and wrap a single mesh to geo that is already skinned...however, this takes forever to render and wrap deformers are quite quirky...so moving on...
2. Rebuild/Reskin Geo
I could delete the upper body geo and build my own and reskin...however, the current geo is skinned to the bend bones which are the lowest level of skeleton and therefore respond to all the other parent skeleton systems. To get a smooth bind, I would have to skin the single mesh to a higher level of skeleton, causing me to lose bend bone and stretchy functionality. Plus forearm collapse and shoulder collapse is a worry, especially since the rig doesn't have extra joints built in to counter arm collapse
3. Blend shape
I've been using blend shapes fairly effectively, but the geo remains separate pieces...looking at the space captain above, it is possible to keep the geo as separate pieces and still have it look damn good--so perhaps I should continue along this path.
3a. Substitute Geo
I've discovered a skinning tool that allows you to swap geo that has exactly the same parameters as the one already skinned. Limitations are that it can't have blend shapes on it (so this can't be used with the face), and of course, that, as with blend shapes, there is no appending to the geo. However, because it is possible to smooth skinned geo and delete the non-deformer history, more detail is possible....
This option can be used in conjunction with the blend shapes, start with blend shapes and then delete them and just swap geo, this will minimize history.
After a lot of thought on the subject, I've decided to go with the third option. Since modeling and rigging are not my focus, I would rather minimize the time spent on them. As well, being that my piece is whimsical--the less realistic my character is, the better he will match his environment. So, instead of seeing the Norman rig's "rigid" bind as a stumbling block, I aim to play up and incorporate these elements into my remodeling. First off, I am a big fan of the patchwork look.. a la Sally the rag doll in Tim Burtons Nightmare Before Christmas. (below)
Unfortunately, patchwork generally has stitching across seams, not along them, so the idea of drawing stitching along the edges of geometry (especially since it separates) is not really a solution to my problem. I could play up the edges by using toon shader edges, something I'd been wanting to incorporate through previs. By drawing the textures in colored pencil and creating black outlines of all the geometry, perhaps I'll get a new twist on subtlety in the form of the hand drawn colored pencils, with in your face graphic art in harsh black outlined edges. I'll have to see how this looks with the Nose, Ears and Hair. Adding edges might have to be a selective thing so it doesn't overwhelm the character..
To be continued...
In the past couple of days I've been on the Spline Doctors Blog where I've seen a bunch of uses of Norman remodeled to make various characters. Students at the Academy of Art in SF taking the Pixar classes have taken Norman and remodeled him a dozen times, as witnessed by all the characters below:
For one of their classes they have taken Norman and turned him into a space captain (below, top) for a short film the entire class is creating together, a clip of which is below.
and turned him into a space astronaut for the video below:
Rigging Dilemmas
Most of the characters use Norman's geometry and minimal remodeling, mostly of the face. However, a few of the characters are smoothly bound with single mesh geometry for the upper body. It seems that all of them have kept the legs as is, with a few creative flairs to hide the knees and make the lower leg into a boot. The one model that is completely smooth bound is the kid (shown with both blond and brown hair) and, as is obvious from the animator's website, Aaron Koressel built this character (Hordy) himself, whereas all the other characters are Norman.
To some degree I would love my character to have a uniform mesh as an upper body, however, it seems I would have to sacrifice some capabilities of the rig to make this happen. Here are my options:
1. Wrap Deformer
I could use a wrap deformer and wrap a single mesh to geo that is already skinned...however, this takes forever to render and wrap deformers are quite quirky...so moving on...
2. Rebuild/Reskin Geo
I could delete the upper body geo and build my own and reskin...however, the current geo is skinned to the bend bones which are the lowest level of skeleton and therefore respond to all the other parent skeleton systems. To get a smooth bind, I would have to skin the single mesh to a higher level of skeleton, causing me to lose bend bone and stretchy functionality. Plus forearm collapse and shoulder collapse is a worry, especially since the rig doesn't have extra joints built in to counter arm collapse
3. Blend shape
I've been using blend shapes fairly effectively, but the geo remains separate pieces...looking at the space captain above, it is possible to keep the geo as separate pieces and still have it look damn good--so perhaps I should continue along this path.
3a. Substitute Geo
I've discovered a skinning tool that allows you to swap geo that has exactly the same parameters as the one already skinned. Limitations are that it can't have blend shapes on it (so this can't be used with the face), and of course, that, as with blend shapes, there is no appending to the geo. However, because it is possible to smooth skinned geo and delete the non-deformer history, more detail is possible....
This option can be used in conjunction with the blend shapes, start with blend shapes and then delete them and just swap geo, this will minimize history.
After a lot of thought on the subject, I've decided to go with the third option. Since modeling and rigging are not my focus, I would rather minimize the time spent on them. As well, being that my piece is whimsical--the less realistic my character is, the better he will match his environment. So, instead of seeing the Norman rig's "rigid" bind as a stumbling block, I aim to play up and incorporate these elements into my remodeling. First off, I am a big fan of the patchwork look.. a la Sally the rag doll in Tim Burtons Nightmare Before Christmas. (below)
Unfortunately, patchwork generally has stitching across seams, not along them, so the idea of drawing stitching along the edges of geometry (especially since it separates) is not really a solution to my problem. I could play up the edges by using toon shader edges, something I'd been wanting to incorporate through previs. By drawing the textures in colored pencil and creating black outlines of all the geometry, perhaps I'll get a new twist on subtlety in the form of the hand drawn colored pencils, with in your face graphic art in harsh black outlined edges. I'll have to see how this looks with the Nose, Ears and Hair. Adding edges might have to be a selective thing so it doesn't overwhelm the character..
To be continued...
January 24, 2007
Face Texture
Images of Justin's face Texture:
Just Colored Pencil:
Posterized:
Posterized with Color Adjustment:
From the Side (same as Above):
I'm happiest with the last, but the stubble is too large, it should be dots, not strokes...and the lips are smeary and large, it looks like he is wearing lipstick...needs some work, perhaps a larger texture so I can go into more detail...
Just Colored Pencil:
Posterized:
Posterized with Color Adjustment:
From the Side (same as Above):
I'm happiest with the last, but the stubble is too large, it should be dots, not strokes...and the lips are smeary and large, it looks like he is wearing lipstick...needs some work, perhaps a larger texture so I can go into more detail...
January 23, 2007
Further Skinning and Rigging Issues
Rigging
I've solved the eye issues---the rig includes a number of locators and clusters that control the eyelid deformation and they all have to be centered at the same place as the eye to work properly. So, in addition to detaching the head Geo with history on, moving the parent eye joint and reskinning the head so the eyelids didn't move with the eye, I also had to move locators and cluster pivots. All in all the eyes work fine, though the eye aim doesn't work anymore--I tried to realign the curves with the new position of the eyes, but the aim has a bunch of utilities built in that I couldn't figure out how to fix, and honestly, I should animate the eyes locally anyway.
Modeling
I've spent a lot more time on the face. I finished the hair modeling, added eyebrows and continued to tweak the eye sockets. They are far more almond-shaped now and look much more human. I made the nose a little less childlike by pulling the tip in a little so it doesn't look so much like a cherub. As well I pared back the cheeks some. Using my own advice I scaled the rig to get the head and hat/hair geo to have more depth and used that geo as blend shapes so the controls aren't scaled. I worked on the modeling of the upper body and the arms, as well as adding a hood to the sweatshirt he's wearing, with a pull cord. I've remodeled the pelvis and the thighs some the start to get pant-like legs instead of thin sticks. Below is a 3/4 shot of the model at the moment.
Skinning
I've worked on the skinning of the shoulders and am fairly happy with the result. There is a fairly smooth transition between the three pieces of geometry that merge at the shoulder--the upper arm, the shoulder ball and the torso. I'm a little worried that the intersecting geometry will look bad in renders, but I am hoping to give the texturing a very funky, stitched look. It will match the bohemian, hippie/skater style that I'm going for and hopefully I can get the stitching to fall along the edges of the various pieces of geometry. Below is an image of the back of the model with the shoulders in extreme positions. As well, the modeling of the hood is evident.
The problem I'm having currently is skinning at the elbows (and I am guessing I will have the same troubles with the knees, though I haven't tried to skin them yet). Because there are bendable bones built into the rig the arms are weighted to joints for the purpose of bending them. Instead of having a sphere as the elbow, I would rather weight the upper arm and forearm end vertices the same so that it becomes one continuous arm in the same way I skinned the shoulders. However, I'm having trouble figuring out which joint to weight the vertices to so that they move with the elbow. I've tried a number of the joints but none of them seem to do anything. I will have to keep experimenting...
I've solved the eye issues---the rig includes a number of locators and clusters that control the eyelid deformation and they all have to be centered at the same place as the eye to work properly. So, in addition to detaching the head Geo with history on, moving the parent eye joint and reskinning the head so the eyelids didn't move with the eye, I also had to move locators and cluster pivots. All in all the eyes work fine, though the eye aim doesn't work anymore--I tried to realign the curves with the new position of the eyes, but the aim has a bunch of utilities built in that I couldn't figure out how to fix, and honestly, I should animate the eyes locally anyway.
Modeling
I've spent a lot more time on the face. I finished the hair modeling, added eyebrows and continued to tweak the eye sockets. They are far more almond-shaped now and look much more human. I made the nose a little less childlike by pulling the tip in a little so it doesn't look so much like a cherub. As well I pared back the cheeks some. Using my own advice I scaled the rig to get the head and hat/hair geo to have more depth and used that geo as blend shapes so the controls aren't scaled. I worked on the modeling of the upper body and the arms, as well as adding a hood to the sweatshirt he's wearing, with a pull cord. I've remodeled the pelvis and the thighs some the start to get pant-like legs instead of thin sticks. Below is a 3/4 shot of the model at the moment.
Skinning
I've worked on the skinning of the shoulders and am fairly happy with the result. There is a fairly smooth transition between the three pieces of geometry that merge at the shoulder--the upper arm, the shoulder ball and the torso. I'm a little worried that the intersecting geometry will look bad in renders, but I am hoping to give the texturing a very funky, stitched look. It will match the bohemian, hippie/skater style that I'm going for and hopefully I can get the stitching to fall along the edges of the various pieces of geometry. Below is an image of the back of the model with the shoulders in extreme positions. As well, the modeling of the hood is evident.
The problem I'm having currently is skinning at the elbows (and I am guessing I will have the same troubles with the knees, though I haven't tried to skin them yet). Because there are bendable bones built into the rig the arms are weighted to joints for the purpose of bending them. Instead of having a sphere as the elbow, I would rather weight the upper arm and forearm end vertices the same so that it becomes one continuous arm in the same way I skinned the shoulders. However, I'm having trouble figuring out which joint to weight the vertices to so that they move with the elbow. I've tried a number of the joints but none of them seem to do anything. I will have to keep experimenting...
January 16, 2007
PreSemester Progress
I've been alternating between modeling and texturing, I've had some progress and some setbacks with each.
Texturing:
The texturing is coming pretty well as a basic start, below is a quick render of the planet as it currently looks.
At the moment the image gets pretty pixelated when the camera moves in for close-ups so I'm going to have to scan the image at higher resolution. There is obvious faceting which doesn't seem to be solved by smoothing. The problem is solved by softening normals, however, because they are separate pieces, if I soften the edge normals the image fades to black along the edge and the individual pieces are obvious--this can be seen below.
I may have to do a visibility switch where I use a sphere for the end when the camera pulls out. The faceting shouldn't be an issue for the small pieces the smaller Justin manipulates, so a visibility switch won't be necessary.
Modeling:
As far as modeling Justin goes, I've been tweaking the face, smoothing out the cheeks and softening the chin. I also imported the ears I created for my original model of Justin and replaced Norman's ears. I created a hat/hair piece and am in the midst of extruding faces to make his hair stick out. He's looking more and more like a human and like Justin, which is encouraging.
I'm having some trouble with the body--unlike the head which is skinned to only one joint, the body is skinned between joints and it seems that adding a blend shape doesn't deform the geometry fully.--Just solved the problem...Because I smoothed the geo after it was skinned, there was unnecessary history active, so I deleted the nondeformer history, recreated the blend shape at front of chain and it works!
The one issue I'm still having is with the eyes. The twist controls on the eyes are on the parent eye joint, which i never moved, so the eye is rotating around an external pivot. This seems to be the issue with the lid twist controls as well. Still trying to figure out what to do about this...
Here's a screenshot of the model at the moment:
Also, it seems that I've discovered the reason the mouth flapped open and closed when rotating the head last semester--scaling the head control does it. I noticed that the head is very flat from front to back, as is obvious in the side view below.
I attempted to scale the head to fix the problem but I guess since scaling the head control scales the other controls, somehow distortion occurs and the geometry gets deformed bizarrely.
An easy solution to my problem is to duplicate the geometry while the head is scaled to the shape I like and use this new stretched geometry as blend shapes.
Texturing:
The texturing is coming pretty well as a basic start, below is a quick render of the planet as it currently looks.
At the moment the image gets pretty pixelated when the camera moves in for close-ups so I'm going to have to scan the image at higher resolution. There is obvious faceting which doesn't seem to be solved by smoothing. The problem is solved by softening normals, however, because they are separate pieces, if I soften the edge normals the image fades to black along the edge and the individual pieces are obvious--this can be seen below.
I may have to do a visibility switch where I use a sphere for the end when the camera pulls out. The faceting shouldn't be an issue for the small pieces the smaller Justin manipulates, so a visibility switch won't be necessary.
Modeling:
As far as modeling Justin goes, I've been tweaking the face, smoothing out the cheeks and softening the chin. I also imported the ears I created for my original model of Justin and replaced Norman's ears. I created a hat/hair piece and am in the midst of extruding faces to make his hair stick out. He's looking more and more like a human and like Justin, which is encouraging.
I'm having some trouble with the body--unlike the head which is skinned to only one joint, the body is skinned between joints and it seems that adding a blend shape doesn't deform the geometry fully.--Just solved the problem...Because I smoothed the geo after it was skinned, there was unnecessary history active, so I deleted the nondeformer history, recreated the blend shape at front of chain and it works!
The one issue I'm still having is with the eyes. The twist controls on the eyes are on the parent eye joint, which i never moved, so the eye is rotating around an external pivot. This seems to be the issue with the lid twist controls as well. Still trying to figure out what to do about this...
Here's a screenshot of the model at the moment:
Also, it seems that I've discovered the reason the mouth flapped open and closed when rotating the head last semester--scaling the head control does it. I noticed that the head is very flat from front to back, as is obvious in the side view below.
I attempted to scale the head to fix the problem but I guess since scaling the head control scales the other controls, somehow distortion occurs and the geometry gets deformed bizarrely.
An easy solution to my problem is to duplicate the geometry while the head is scaled to the shape I like and use this new stretched geometry as blend shapes.
January 10, 2007
Mindful of additional inspiration
As I plunge into thesis land, I've begun to notice aspects of other media that are good examples for me to follow, and reminders of some of the ideas I've come up with to solve the complexities of the work ahead.
Sdrawkcab Krow (Work Backwards):
A video that is circulating the internet (below) and available on "YouTube" shows Michel Gondry, the music video master, solving a rubik's cube with his feet. As with most Gondry videos, it is an illusion of trick editing. In this case he took a solved rubik's cube and used his feet to mess it up and then played the video backwards--with some sound editing and cutting, the video is pretty convincing aside from a few odd quirks that are pointed out by the user "BeyondBeliefMedia" in his video "How Michel Gondry Faked His Rubik's Cube Stunt".
The video points out the concept of making sure the puzzle is solved by working backwards. I expect this idea will be invaluable in having Justin solve the puzzle ball--by starting with the final pose of the just completed puzzle and working backwards, I can make sure the puzzle is solved successfully and in a convincing manner.
Near and Far:
While watching "The Little Mermaid" the other day I was reminded of a concept I have been developing to minimize the amount of animation necessary while still being able to convey the video and complete the piece. I have been planning to intercut between close-ups of Justin with the puzzle ball with wide, sweeping shots of the entire planet to alternate the focus from detailed, convincing animation to storytelling and expressive camera movement. Disney did just this--I bet--for the same reasons, and its very evident during "Under the Sea" (below). The close-ups allow for really nuanced movement and lip sync which keeps the audience aligned with Sebastian, while the wide shots allow far simpler animation of Sebastian and shows the performance of the other fish, fulfilling the narrative purpose of the musical number.
Dreamweaver:
To some degree I intend this video to function as a dream sequence...a place where fate seems to have a way of directing everything that happens. I'm currently reading "Neil Gaiman's" "American Gods" and a comment he makes about "dreams" stuck with me as a great way to word the "dreamworldly" quality I hope to create within the video:
"It was a dream. and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began."
(p. 303)
Sdrawkcab Krow (Work Backwards):
A video that is circulating the internet (below) and available on "YouTube" shows Michel Gondry, the music video master, solving a rubik's cube with his feet. As with most Gondry videos, it is an illusion of trick editing. In this case he took a solved rubik's cube and used his feet to mess it up and then played the video backwards--with some sound editing and cutting, the video is pretty convincing aside from a few odd quirks that are pointed out by the user "BeyondBeliefMedia" in his video "How Michel Gondry Faked His Rubik's Cube Stunt".
The video points out the concept of making sure the puzzle is solved by working backwards. I expect this idea will be invaluable in having Justin solve the puzzle ball--by starting with the final pose of the just completed puzzle and working backwards, I can make sure the puzzle is solved successfully and in a convincing manner.
Near and Far:
While watching "The Little Mermaid" the other day I was reminded of a concept I have been developing to minimize the amount of animation necessary while still being able to convey the video and complete the piece. I have been planning to intercut between close-ups of Justin with the puzzle ball with wide, sweeping shots of the entire planet to alternate the focus from detailed, convincing animation to storytelling and expressive camera movement. Disney did just this--I bet--for the same reasons, and its very evident during "Under the Sea" (below). The close-ups allow for really nuanced movement and lip sync which keeps the audience aligned with Sebastian, while the wide shots allow far simpler animation of Sebastian and shows the performance of the other fish, fulfilling the narrative purpose of the musical number.
Dreamweaver:
To some degree I intend this video to function as a dream sequence...a place where fate seems to have a way of directing everything that happens. I'm currently reading "Neil Gaiman's" "American Gods" and a comment he makes about "dreams" stuck with me as a great way to word the "dreamworldly" quality I hope to create within the video:
"It was a dream. and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began."
(p. 303)
January 9, 2007
Parallel Pipeline Setup & UV Layout
As hard as it is to get back into the swing of things with the holidays only recently gone, I am attempting to focus on getting the preliminary setup done. And, if I use references for the rig and the planet, I can continue to update modeling and texturing for both as I'm animating, creating a sort of parallel pipeline where I can alternate which aspect I work on without affecting the others. Of course, this means some setup is required--i.e. laying out UVs, applying basic textures to make sure the look is basically what I want and some basic modeling to make sure the blend shapes don't ruin the skinning or the other facial blend shapes. So I've begun to do the UV layout for the planet, which is coming along, but is far more time consuming than I imagined...in addition to having to select all the outer faces of each piece to create one spherical projected UV map for the outer shell of the planet, I also have to have separate planar projections for each internal plane and layout all of these relative to each other within UV maps for each piece. Fortunately, my scripting knowledge has come in handy, so for the outer shell I created a Quick Select Set and wrote a two line code to add additional faces to the set:
{
string $x[] = `ls -sl`;
sets -edit -forceElement FacesSoFar $x;
};
This way I can create a Quick Select Set, and then select outer faces for each piece individually (with the others hidden) and add those faces to the set.
This makes it far easier to make sure no internal faces are in this set.
In total it has taken me two days to layout all the UVs for the planet pieces. Below is an image I created in photoshop, using UV snapshots of each piece and then I colored them relative to their original color (see post "Constructing the World" for photo of actual puzzle ball). Using a printout of this UV Layout I intend to draw in colored pencil the texture map for the planet. Instead of offsetting the image in photoshop and having to edit the edges to allow for tiling, I will fold the drawing and draw across the border to prevent seams.
I have also completed laying out UVs for the inside surfaces of all the pieces, however, it remains to be seen whether they will need some tweaking when I attempt to draw their images. Below are the UV maps for the six pieces.
As far as setting up referencing, I intend to use the animattic scene from my previs since it already has basic camera movement setup...However I will have to delete the rig and the planets because I need to import the new files I've worked on as reference. (I was hoping to just transfer UVs for the planets but the pieces had some extra faces that I hadn't noticed, which required some changes in geometry, so I will have to start over with that...oh well).
{
string $x[] = `ls -sl`;
sets -edit -forceElement FacesSoFar $x;
};
This way I can create a Quick Select Set, and then select outer faces for each piece individually (with the others hidden) and add those faces to the set.
This makes it far easier to make sure no internal faces are in this set.
In total it has taken me two days to layout all the UVs for the planet pieces. Below is an image I created in photoshop, using UV snapshots of each piece and then I colored them relative to their original color (see post "Constructing the World" for photo of actual puzzle ball). Using a printout of this UV Layout I intend to draw in colored pencil the texture map for the planet. Instead of offsetting the image in photoshop and having to edit the edges to allow for tiling, I will fold the drawing and draw across the border to prevent seams.
I have also completed laying out UVs for the inside surfaces of all the pieces, however, it remains to be seen whether they will need some tweaking when I attempt to draw their images. Below are the UV maps for the six pieces.
As far as setting up referencing, I intend to use the animattic scene from my previs since it already has basic camera movement setup...However I will have to delete the rig and the planets because I need to import the new files I've worked on as reference. (I was hoping to just transfer UVs for the planets but the pieces had some extra faces that I hadn't noticed, which required some changes in geometry, so I will have to start over with that...oh well).
January 4, 2007
Back to work - Modeling Technicalities
After a brief break for the holidays, I'm back to work, aiming to stay on top of my production schedule by completing modeling and texturing before the semester begins. My preliminary issues are how to model and texture Justin when the Geo is already skinned. Lauren discovered a great texturing trick during her thesis where you can layout UVs on a duplicated version of a piece of Geo and transfer to the original as long as they are exactly the same in terms of number of vertices. Within the Modeling Menus, under Polygons --> Transfer there is an option to transfer UVs. So I can use all of the blend shape Geo I will be building to lay out the UVs of the skinned Geo. As for modeling, the biggest issue is making sure not to ruin the facial blend shapes. With the kid I modeled for character 2 moving the eyes ruined the main Lid controls. I had moved the joint itself, which Leif had seemed squeamish about. So this time I unlocked the translate of the eye control and moved the eye control--something I had tried originally with the kid, but didn't seem to work. I'm realizing the reason this doesn't work is for eye rotation because the center of rotation is where the joint is, not the control...so when I move the eye aim or rotate the head the eyes pop out of the head---I guess I will have to move the joints themselves.
The issue with moving the joints is that there are 4 joints for each eye, making it kind of complicated to determine which to move. There is an EyeArea joint that has the innermost eyelids bound to it so that for extreme movement, the eyes can pop out of the head and still be attached to the skin. Because of this skinning, I can't move any parent joint of the EyeArea joint or the Geo will be affected. So the only joint I can move is the jntRig_Rt_Eye (& JntRig_Lf_Eye). This is the joint I ended up moving in the kid last semester which for some reason ruined the basic eyelid controls. After moving the joint now the eyelid controls still work, so I'll have to check periodically and make sure moving this joint isn't the problem.
The issue with moving the joints is that there are 4 joints for each eye, making it kind of complicated to determine which to move. There is an EyeArea joint that has the innermost eyelids bound to it so that for extreme movement, the eyes can pop out of the head and still be attached to the skin. Because of this skinning, I can't move any parent joint of the EyeArea joint or the Geo will be affected. So the only joint I can move is the jntRig_Rt_Eye (& JntRig_Lf_Eye). This is the joint I ended up moving in the kid last semester which for some reason ruined the basic eyelid controls. After moving the joint now the eyelid controls still work, so I'll have to check periodically and make sure moving this joint isn't the problem.
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