Hi I'm Hamish. This is a documentation of my wonderful adventures as I make my way from a flailing animation student, to a powerful and successful art ninja (I hope.)
I'll be posting my work from Animation College NZ fairly regularly (at least that's the plan) as well as my own personal work. So hold onto your socks or they may get blown off. If you like what you see, good for you. Hopefully there'll be more soon enough.

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Wednesday 2 December 2015

Rationale

To start this project I had to come brain storm to come up with my animation idea.
 
My final idea was a Marionette puppet Spanish soap opera recreation of the ‘I am your father’ scene from Star Wars. I chose this idea for the same reason Pixar created Toy Story, because toys are much easier to animate and render than humans.

Once I had my idea down I had to go about creating concepts for my character and scene, as well as a storyboard. I designed my character with 3D in mind, considering basic shapes and how I would model him.
 
 
 
I also designed a second character made of the same pieces as the main character to save time. Then I made turnarounds of each character so that I could put them into Maya as modeling reference.
 
With the turnaround imported into the front and side views of Maya I was able to model over the image using x-ray view. I built the characters out of the basic shapes I mentioned earlier. 
    
I had two attempts at modeling. The first worked well enough but the mesh was messy and didn’t smooth very well. The second time I planned how I would build the mesh more carefully and it came out much cleaner. I also made sure to keep the character low-poly so that I could smooth later and keep Maya running faster. Low-poly is also much easier to UV map than high-poly.
  
I modeled the body, head,and hair as single pieces rather than halves that I could mirror because stitching halves together can be messy and the pieces were relatively simple shapes that could be modeled using just world symmetry on my modeling tools. I did however model all of the limbs on only one side and mirrored them. I found that mirroring objects inverts normals on the mac version of Maya which meant that I had to flip the normals back and delete their history. As this was my second attempt at modeling I had already discovered that not deleting history can lead to some horrific crashes and glitches so I made sure to keep my project clean.
 


I made a sheet of colour concepts for my character and then picked my favorite so that I could paint my textures.
 
I had to UV-unwrap my objects so that I could texture them. I used multiple techniques such as plannar mapping, cylindrical mapping, and automatic mapping. Each has it’s own use for different types of objects. I did a lot of stitching to make the maps easy to paint on.
Next I painted/photoshopped my textures. I made some out of heavily edited pre-existing textures and painted other parts by hand.
 

When I went to un-smooth my meshes to start rigging I discovered that un-smoothing ruins the textures if they were created on a smoothed model, so I had to go back to some previous versions to retrieve unsmoothed meshes and fix some textures for low-poly.
Once I fixed the textures I started placing joints to build the skeleton. I didn’t plan the structure very much to start with and my first attempt didn’t work out very well. I also had a lot of crashes due to some history on certain meshes that I had left.
   
Once I’d figured out how joints and constraints worked by playing around, following Keat’s tutorials, and watching some Digital Tutors tutorials, I started my second attempt. I had a plan in my head for the structure and it worked well. My original idea was to keep the puppets fairly rigid with just toy-like joints but I decided to make some of the pieces flexible by adding more joints inside them to give a better performance.
    
I was careful to place joints in the centre of where I wanted parts to pivot by using snapping and I ordered my hierarchy as I’d been instructed along with consistent naming conventions. I managed to keep everything very clean and had no issues this time.
    
I made all of my controls using curves and constrained and parented them in the hierarchy. I also used set driven keys for the mouth and for the fingers so that I had a simple hand control and so that the mouth had limited movement. I used IK on the legs and arms with pole vectors on the knees and elbows so that I could control the limbs more naturally.
 
Next I made a fairly simple test animation to make sure I had all of the control over the rig that I wanted. It was very easy to animate with so I was happy with the rig.
 
I then repeated all of the texturing and rigging steps for the Grandma character and found that it went a lot faster than with the first character.

Next it was time to set up my scene. I had a sudden idea of how to change the scene so I did some new concepts for the stage and a new storyboard. The new concept was about a 1 minute long video rather than 10 or so seconds.
 
I started to model the room and desk, and I also modeled a bunch of objects to litter around like a bottle, candle stand, and some books.
I also had to UV-map and texture these objects, I also tried bump mapping, transparency maps, and specular maps, and played around with all kinds of material types and properties.
 
 
I started doing rendering tests with different rendering engines and settings. I settled on the MentalRay renderer and built a physical sun and sky in the render settings. I really liked the look of this render even though the render times were immense.
 
Once the scene was more or less built I started laying out my shots according to the new storyboard. I made 7 different cameras for the 7 shots in the plan and placed my characters into the scene. I rendered out single frames of the shots and put them together in After effects to get my initial timing.

I began to block out the major movements and figured out where the words would be placed. I recorded myself saying the lines I had planned and put together some simple music in Garageband. Then I imported the audio file into my Maya timeline so that I could match up the movement with the sound.
I roughed out all of the lip synching and started to clean up the character and camera animations. I did various playblasts along the way, mostly of single shots. In order to save on rendering time I usually had a shot rendering while I was working on another shot so I didn’t have a playblast of all of the shots to watch together until the final renders were mostly finished.
 
I found that the renders were taking even longer than I expected even though I was rendering on two computers so I had to render some of the shots using the Maya software render engine to save time. I optimized my scene for this renderer by changing some materials and adding more lights in an attempt to more closely match the look of the MentalRay renders.
 
I rendered my shots a jpeg-sequences and brought them into after effects to edit them together. I could have used Premiere to edit but I had a lot of effects I wanted to include so I chose AE. I did some color correction, mainly on the Maya Software renders to make them match the other shots. I also added some atmospheric lighting using solids, masks, and various built in effects.
Then I did a final colour grade using Magic Bullet and added chromatic-aberration to give an old VHS type feel. I added simple titles, credits and subtitles to the video and then it was finished.
 

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