Comedy Short Evaluation

For this comedy project, I wanted to do something based in my own humour. This includes quite a lot of things, but solely revolves around the simple pain infliction. E.g. girl slips over on ice and lands horizontally, child walks into lamp post, and man hammers on fingers. It’s the simple things that make me laugh, but children do it especially. They’re just so naive and stupid, everything they do is funny. Therefore I did a video, based on a child being hurt. That sounds a bit cruel, but it still makes me laugh. I visualised a lot of different scenes for this idea, with different endings and even background characters, but a lot of this became too much, and a lot was cut out.


I removed the background characters from my original plot, because I rightfully thought that I would not have the time to model and animate them in the background. This is a shame, as it would have given more to the story. Billy (no-mates) was supposed to choose Potato Boy over the other children, because the others seemed too childish/girlish (playing with little toys and dolls) to play on the see saw.

I also wanted to visually show his thought processes, but was not sure how to go about it. Texture it differently, or animate it in a dream like quality? In the end I removed it, as his facial features were enough.

Using the cat rig for this project has helped me learn a great deal about it. Such as how each limb moves, which way to rotate it and how far? Which bones to rotate locally or by view? The use of the cat rig has also shown me where the envelopes are, and what range the envelopes affect. This will greatly help me in the designing of characters, due to me knowing which parts will bend better than others. Also I’ll know where each bend/distortion will occur, and how it will affect any exterior/additional clothing, Such as a tie or shirt lapels.

Overall, I’m disappointed, by what I removed from the short, and how much better it would have been. If I had paid attention to physical size and measurements, some of the pushing scenes could have stayed as well. However, the animation is okay, even though sometimes the arms were trying the float free and Billy has a terrible haircut. I did enjoy making it, however I just wish I could have done more.

Realisation

I have come to the realisation, that i have made this project overly hard for myself. Not only have i chosen a story to tell, with my limited abilities, but i didn't truly think the story through. I keep changing the story to help myself, which in the end doesn't help at all, because the story board i'm working from looks really different now.
I really do wish that i had just chosen to create something funny, instead of something funny with a plot that holds the viewers captive and all that jazz. There's enough for me to do, without me making it so hard on myself.
I've changed the positioning and timing so much, that now i'm completely reviewing the end (which i'm in the process of making). Now i'm not sure how it's going to end.

I think i have a solution!

Okay, so the link constraint on my laptop doesn't want to work between two cat rigs. So what i have to do, is create the illusion of a link. I need to animate the connection between my character's hands.
This isn't hard to do, just vaguely annoying due to how much it is going to slow me down. However, i thought of the walk cycle lessons (on the spot) and thought of how much easier it would be to control where their hands are, and connect, if i keep my character as still as possible. I then realised, with the hips constantly moving i would have to keep the hands steady. I can do this just keeping and eye on their co-ordinates.
So, all is not lost. I should probably start doing this then.
The shame is that i don't know how well I'll be able to do this with the 'pick up/weight' scene. We'll have to see.
edit
okay, that was excrutiating. I've done the best i can do at the moment. It will have to be enough, because i need to move on to the next scene.

Started animating

With both characters rigged, and the envelopes adapted to by best abilities, i started to animate. Using the rig is something that i really need to get used to, although it is happening slowly during this project.
Everything was going smoothly until i tried to link the two characters together. For some reason, i can only assume being my fault, The link constraint will not link the two, I did manage it once, however Potato Boys arm strecthed off into the Billy's hand and wouldn't render properly. When i tried to undo this the Cat rig got upset with me, as it always does when you undo, and both of their arms stretched off into the horizon.
I'm afraid that i won't be able to do the 'unexpected weight' scene due to this not being able animate it efficiently. I might get away with the 'dragging scene' if i animate the hands constantly in the same place. I really hope that works, otherwise the story won't make much sense with out both of the scenes.
This set back has put me a bit down. I tried so many times, with all different bones/skin combinations. I even tried to select and link it.

Potato Boy

So after all that cafuffle with Billy, i made Potato Boy.
I admit that he does not look like the original design. I didn't model his scarf and ended up just drawing it on. His arms are not as long as i originally intended, however this fault was in my T position drawing, in which his arms were short. Alas, i made them that way. But, they are better proportioned that way.
I really love his drawn face, it's simplicity makes it great. Really looks like a kid drew it on themselves.
Potato Boy is by far my favourite character I've made so far. He's the friend i should have played at the park with.

Just wanted to say how creepy these eyes look

reall creepy.
Also it'#s tstrange how big the eyeball is too the eye socket. It's huge in comparison. You can only see a quarter of the eyeball. It's crazy!

working on the morphers

I had quite a few morphers. To be honest i didn't really need all of them, however combining them together does make great facial features. They almost seem natural.Making all these morphers took a while due to the compensations i had to make. Moving needed vertices, then having to 'fill out' the face because there's weird chunks missing. I found that challenging, and never recovered the 'ooooh' morph target. I just got around that by not using it's extremes.

A problem i had

a strange problem i had after unwrapping, was this white 'glare' on the character. I had this problem in Roma's project, which thoroughly discouraged me.

However i did find the solution in Billy's map section, in the material editor. I simply had to choose the option of not showing Alpha on the map. Not that i knew i had alpha, as i am sure that's the same as transparency. But oh well, it solved my problem. I am really glad that i came across that solution, as i would have had to texture with the multi sub object material. That would have taken a long time, and would not have looked as good for Potato Boy.

unwrapping

so after modelling, i moved on to unwrapping Billy. All my previous attempts using the unwrap tool had left me really annoyed, but i know now, that is because i wasn't using it the right way.
Following Andy's instructions to the letter this time, i unwrapped Billy in one afternoon. There were no complications, nor problems.
I suppose that i have learnt that things aren't always as hard as other's find it. It is only as hard as you make it.

I could have made it a bit tidier but i wanted to make sure all the seams were covered. I must say that i was very satisfied with the outcome.

Billy

wow, I've just realised i haven't posted anything for this project yet. So i will have to post them now in the collected bundle i have prepared! Overall modelling went fine, although I was actually quite terrified of completely messing it up. This fear created a few set backs and i ended up a bit behind schedule.
Hmmmm... changing Billy
As i was modelling Billy, i came to the conclusion, that his depth is way out of proportion to his width. But i only realised this after seeing the 3D model. It was extremely visible on his head, which i had to change.


looks like a xenomorph

 As you can see from the image, what i changed it to was only partially better. But i could not change it too much in fear of creating a strangely shaped head. It was already quite square.
His tie, was an unfortunate subtraction from Billy's design. I had hoped to animate it with a tail bone, however, i wasn't sure how to model it onto Billy. Would it be and extrusion from his neck, or a seperate model. I wasn't sure on this, so i removed it from the design.
I would have also liked to have changed his shorts, as they look quite ridiculous, however i did not, as it is the character i designed. I should design it better next time.

Pirate Camp

Evaluation for procedural animation project

My main ideas and intentions that I was trying to express in the project was a temporary camp for pirates. The scene was originally was going to be in the dark , however it  was changed due the necessity to see the animation in the scene. I wanted the viewer to know what it was straight away due to the designs that i made. Some of the ideas had changed from the original design, such as the washing line with clothes, the rain and the boat sail.

I worked mainly from my imagination on this project, as I have watched a variety of pirate TV programmes and films, and read a fair few books on them. I like to think that my interpretation of their pirate camp would be fairly worthwhile.

I took a risk by trying something new by using Maya. This programme was hard to learn how to use, due to my previous use of Max. Having to change the way I use the programme confused me at times, and made it hard to relearn. It was the Interface that slowed me down so much during the project. Always having to remember to right click for choices and making sure I was on the correct tab, so I could select the choices I wanted. Originally I decided to model the whole project in Max, due to my comfortably with modelling with the programme. However I did eventually model the boat and leaves in Maya, which I thought was successful. Over the last two weeks of this project I have become much more comfortable with Maya.
One of the unexpected problems I had to solve was the leaves. The leaves were created by a particle emitter . I made the particles fall as leaves, with the instance tool. However, it was the animation of the original leaf that created the problem. I wrote an expression for the leaf to rotate on an axis throughout te animation, so all the leaves would appear to be turning constantly. However the leaves kept turning when they were on the floor. I’m afraid that the friction levels had no effect on the expression.

When batch rendering, I found a problem of the particle fire turning brown in roughly a quarter of the frames. I did not know why it did this, but on closer inspection, it would seem that the glow wasn’t activating and dimming randomly. I am not sure why it did this, as I had created no expression or ramp to acquire this. To be honest I thought it ruined my animation. Thinking that it was doing this on random frames I rendered the animation three more times. The fire turns brown in exactly the same frames every time. I have no solution to this, and after looking for solutions on the internet, I came to the conclusion that rendering in Mental ray was possibly the problem. However when I tried to batch render in Maya hardware, Maya informed me that they couldn’t batch render in this renderer. Which I am sure was a lie. I found no solution to this problem.

The boat sail was hard to control due  the spring constraint I had on it. The spring had to be high so the cloth was bunched up at the top. However when the animation played, the sail would spring up into place and get bunched up above the beam and stay there. Unfortunately it would not be blown by the wind.

The layout of my camp had to be changed a little due to my involvement with leaves. To have leaves, you need trees. Also, you needed them near the camp so it’s actually visible in the video. So I had to do a bit of squishing.

Honestly, I do like Maya, it is a useful programme that I know I will learn in the future. I just have to get used to all this scripting business.

How my camp is looking



My camp is looking very nice at the moment. It's a shame that i won't be doing the washing line idea. But i was not sure how the model the clothes. Also the boat and poles were modelled differently to their original design. I think that it looks lovely without them anyway.

I was super surprised that there is an ocean shader! Instant ocean. Although I'm sad that i didn't know hope to adapt the programming of it. I did try, it's just that i didn't know what i was trying for, or how to get there.

Lighting up the camp

I don't consider myself very knowledgable about lighting yet, so i found my self a bit lost in Maya. I started with an Area light for the campsite. I'm still not sure what that one does. Or why it was so dark?

Then i moved on to an ambient light, as it sounded like it covered a wide area with light. I changed it a bit yellow, as sunlight is usually shown as this.

I chose the Ambient light, as it lit up the sceen well, and created lovely contuours in the sand dunes.

Texturing

As usual i have collected my textures from cgtextures, as the website has a wide variety, which makes them awesome.
Using the textures in Maya were a bit different to Max. As most of the words/descriptions of tools are different. However i did finally learn how to tile the ground image. Thankfully Maya wraps textures automatically the 'right' way, so i didn't have to change it too much. Except for 90 degree turn for the boat.

Fiddling with the flag got a bit annoying though. How was i suppoed to know to change the coverage? Well i know now, after changing everything.

Bringing everything together

I created the Pirate Camp file in Maya, and started importing everything into it. All the Max files turned into Mesh, which was a little annoying, but didn't affect me any. My boat was teeny tiny, when i imported it over. I suppose this is a lesson for me to pay attention to the sizing of my creations.

teeny weeny fire

The fire emitter, which i created in a seperate file, was absolutely tiny compaered to everything else. It looked a little funny. But i had to remedy this by changing some of the dynamics, so it doesn't look as good.

leaves

I decided, that as everyone will be doing rain as one of the three dynamics, i want to be different. Using the Instancer (replacement) tool, i can replace the particles with objects. I happily decided that i want leaves.
First i needed to model a leaf. I did this in Maya and it doesn't look that good. But this was a rough/practice run.

So the first particle emitter i made, i didn't change the speed of the particles. I'm pretty sure that leaves would knock people out, at the speed i had them going. After using the Instancer tool on the emitter, i couldn't change the speed after. To remedy this, i made another volume emitter for the leaves that fell at a less hazardous rate.

I really like my idea of the leaves gently falling on the scene, as it will make it look kinda peaceful. I suppose my pirate camp is becoming less 'piratey' by the minute.

Modelling things for the pirate camp

Just putting it on record that i am modelling the pirate camp in 3Ds Max, due to my limited abilities to model in Maya at the moment. I am starting to get the hang of modelling in Maya, however it is not yet up to par.
So, I'm modelling the rocks at the moment. Who knew how long rocks took to model?

Now just my little rowboat to make now. Made some little sketches, for the little rowboat. Will start making that soon. Due to the fact that i will eventually have to use Maya anyway, I'm modelling the boat in Maya instead. A test of my abilities so far.

layout for pirate camp

I've created a bird's eye view of my Pirate Camp. I made it for positioning my props, contributing to the spacing of them and the 'land' around them.
The lines in the top right corner signify a sand hill. I designed it this way for it's easily accessed high ground, natural wind break and a defensible position.

I've also put on my desired wind direction. I choose this direction, due to the better aesthetics in the nCloth properties.

Creating the Character

So in the creation of my charcaters, i would need a drawn reference to work from. So i created these:

Attempting my fire

Okay so I've been trying to make my particle fire recently, and i find that they look stupid in tube. They are strangely hard to manipulate in points or streaks.

I thought that i would make it better this time round with cloud, so i decided to record this attempt.


Cloud particles, with glow

So here is my first good looking attempt. I made the glow intensity and incadescence a bit too high in this one, though. I turned it down, to get this:

Now you can see the particles a bit better, and the fire isn't so crazily bright in the middle. But at this point, Maya crashed, and i had to start again from scratch.

This one I changed the directional speed, to make it a bit wider. The added a radius pp ramp to get a bit of difference in the particles, as they ascend.

Thinking that fires move in towards the top, i played with the Away from center tool. Even though it does what i want , i find that it does it to much to the extreme. So i removed this from my fire.

So this is my fire for now. It doesn't look to shabby at the moment. I will add more on to it at a later date.