Gettin it Done

Kaaaaay. So I haven't posted for freaking aaaages again. At this point school is actually over for the year and my animation is finally finished. Yaaay.

But here's what I've done since the last post...

So I came up with a new idea of how to set up and animate the scene. I decided that it'd be cool to create a sort of old attic where the marionette theater was sitting on a desk with some other junk. So first I did a super quick concept of the new scene along with some visual research.

 

Then I also did a quick storyboard V2 where I added some nice shots to show off the room.

Then I started modeling the room.

I kept the room fairly simple. I just used planes for the walls and floor and I made a desk out of boxes. I imported a couch that I had made for the previous version of the stage.

 I modeled a new stage to look like a simple cardboard toy stage. I built it out of planes and circles that I merged together, then I edited the meshes and extruded into 3D shapes.

 

I added a roof and back walls to close off the room. This way light could bounce more accurately around the room. I also added a window which is the main light source for the scene and some curtains which were edited from the stage curtains.

 

Next I started modeling various things to place on the desk using the visual research as reference.

 

 

  

Then I decided to do rendering tests to see what rendering engine to use. To start with I used a previous version of my stage to do this. I switched around settings and eventually settled on the MentalRay renderer with a physical sun and sky. MentalRay takes much longer to render but it looks far better than the Maya software render.

Then I UV-mapped the models and made textures in photoshop. I also experimented with generated textures using noise and fabric nodes in Maya as well as Bump maps, transparency maps, and specular/reflection maps. I did rendering tests as well to see how my materials were working.

 

 

 Next I began to import these models into my scene and did more render tests.

I continued to play around with material settings inside of the scene. Instantly the physical sun and sky settings in MentalRay lit my scene fairly well. I adjusted the sun direction to come through the window at a better angle and added an ambient light to fill the scene a little better as well as an area light to bring out the details behind the stage.

At this point the scene was essentially finished so I moved on to animation.
First I made 7 different cameras for the 7 shots I had planned and I framed each of them according to the storyboard. I also placed my characters in the scene and rendered out a first playblast of the whole thing to start getting my timing/pacing right for the shots.

Once I was happy with that timing I started blocking out the character animation.

Then I did my voice recording. I wrote my lines and used Google translate to get them in Spanish. My older brother helped me out with the recording by hooking me up with some equipment and doing the recordings while I said the lines. I took the audio files and matched them up to the first playblast to make sure I was happy with the timing. I imported the playblast with the sound into Garageband and used some loops to make some simple background music and timed it all to the video. I then exported all of that audio as a single file to use for lip syncing in Maya.

To lip sync I just had to import the audio file to my timeline and then match the mouth movements to the sound. Since I was just using puppets the lip syncing was pretty easy, just moving the jaws up and down. With a more complex rig lip syncing would be much more difficult.

Once I had the lip syncing all done it was fairly easy to animate the characters in time with the talking. I also animated the cameras in time with the shots so that they moved at the right times. Using the graph editor I was able to clean up the movements of the characters and fine tune things a little more.

While I worked one one shot I always had another shot rendering in the background. I was rendering on two seperate computers to speed it up because the render times were outrageous.

After rendering the first shot I discovered a lot of noise in the render. After some playing around I found that I had 3 main issues. My shadow quality was too low under my lights settings, my anti-aliasing quality was too low, and my final gather quality in indirect lighting was too low. Raising these values fixed the noise issues but made my render times even higher. I decided to raise them until there was little enough noise in the shot that I could de-noise it later in after effects. That way my render times stayed a little lower.

From there I only had to edit the shots together and do some post work. I rendered the shots out as jpeg sequences and each time one finished I imported it to after effects and synced it with the audio. After having a lot of failed renders due to crashes, animation errors, computers being unplugged half way through, lighting errors, and many other human errors, I had more than run out of time and had to settle with rendering out some shots with the Maya Software renderer. I figured I should still try to match the lighting and look of the shots as closely as I could. So I added new lights, changed some material properties and tweaked some render settings and I managed something that looked halfway decent.

I brought the rest of my shots into After effects and got to work. First I had to colour-correct the Maya software shots to match the MentalRay shots. Then I de-noised some shots and checked that eveyrthing was nicely synced and the timing was good. I did some small effects like light rays coming through the window using solids tracked to the footage and light effects.

Then I used a plugin by Red Giant called magic bullet on an adjustment layer to colour grade the whole short. Inside of that plugin I added multiple coloration effects including chromatic-aberration to give an old VHS look to the video.

Once that was all done I just had to add my credits and I was done. I rendered it out and put the video through Adobe Media Encoder to compress the video to a reasonable file size.

And there it is.
All finished.
Crazy late but finished.
I need to work on time management.
And realizing how much I can achieve. I aim way too high.
But oh well. It's done. Enjoy.
~Sayonara Blogger-kun <3