Winter Break Work (So Far)

I haven’t posted in a while mainly because it’s Winter Break, and I have admittedly been working at a slower pace this past week what with driving up to NorCal and then Family and then Christmas and then seeing all my friends and now New Year’s coming up… But luckily break is gonna be pretty long.

 

In the mean time though, I’ve been making some progress on 2D animation, including the one shot where all the monsters are sorta ganged up together (when they appear behind the mean girl). So I was composing a group-shot earlier today. See what you think!

 

Haha, keep in mind that all of these characters were the monsters that I drew when I had had about 6 shots of Jager in me over a semester ago, and it shows. But drunken nonsense is what these characters are all about! And a fair number of these dudes are pretty cute looking, so I’ll keep most of them… and who knows, maybe I’ll have another jager-night and draw some more!

 

But yea. Just makin’ a quick post to insure to y’all that I’m not dead. In fact, quite the opposite. I’m just working in my hole as furiously as I can (while also handling all sorts of other events going on).

 

More to come!

While I Finish Finals — Credits!

So my last Final is on the 19th, which is only 3 days from now, but still — this is a perfect excuse for me to not work on my Thesis for a couple days and to take a goddamned break for once!

However, fun-fact: It’s impossible for me to not think about my film whenever I have free time. And lately I’ve been thinking about one aspect of my film that is ultimately the least important, but it can also make the film a whole lot better:

CREDITS!!

And I know that it makes me a totally typical film student, but I absolutely adore the opening titles for the film “Enter The Void” because I find them to be super inspirational.

These credits are amazing in so many ways. Artistically, they are an impressive feat of editing and graphic design skill. But in relation to Enter The Void as a movie, they do a perfect job of preparing the viewer for a film that no one can ever really be prepared for.

Now, I don’t want to copy Enter The Void’s credits, because other people have done that and it’s not cute.

(Except I love the lyric video for Die Young, so– haha oops whatever)

And besides, having incomprehensible flashing colors and lights for my film wouldn’t really fit with — actually wait no, come to think of it, it kind of would fit (thematically speaking) with Phantoms In The Dark! I mean, Phantoms is a film that deals with topics such as partying and fear and supernatural beings. Scary flashing changing fonts and colors isn’t too far off from that!

But still, I don’t want to copy. However, I am taking inspiration. And I figure a good way of starting with the creative process for this would be to get some cool strong fonts for the title of the film. So I went through all the fonts I have on my computer, and I ended up selecting a mere 45 that had some semblance of something good to them… and then I slowly rounded them down to 12 that all worked pretty well:

My main thought process in rounding down fonts was choosing a look that is, Fun, Scary, and/or  Victorian-Era Vintage, since those are the elements that my film mixes.

And in case you’re curious, here are the names of those fonts:

But wait! The fun hasn’t stopped yet. Because by some random twist of fate, I just learned TODAY that apparently Maya can very easily generate 3D text in whatever font and style you want!!! And it can generate it in multiple ways! Behold:

(These are just the voice actors obviously. Also I chose fonts that fit the personality types of the characters that each voice actor plays. Hence why mine is all weird-y and ghosty, haha) (Also I’m a weird person to begin with so hey it fits)

As you can see, Maya does a pretty decent job! And yet it also fucks up at a few places too (Notice the missing R in “Dark,” the painful irregularity in Michael Malconian’s credit (then again I knew that font would cause difficulty), and the filled-in holes in the S’s in Jesse Pilchen’s name)

So yea! This is clearly just the beginning. And while I don’t know how the closing titles of my film will eventually turn out, I do know one thing — they’re gonna be awesome. AND I have lots of truly amazing fonts to play around with! When I finish studying for my Lighting and Rendering final today, I may just play around in photoshop making concept-art for the credits, haha!

That’s all for now, though. More to come!

Mid-Year Review

Well, it’s official — I’m half-way done with my Thesis Film. I’ve gotten a rough-pass on pretty much all of the animation, and for the nest 2.5 months, I’m gonna be doing nothing but Final Animation, Final Animation, Final Animation!

Anyway, here’s the updated animatic that I’m going to show to the Faculty tomorrow at 3:30PM.

Yeap! Presenting it should be pretty easy. I’m just gonna come with this animatic + Some supplementary images (like a picture of the final version of the Monster Mansion, for example) to give as good of a sense of what the final film will be like as I can. Woohoo!

More to come. Oh and happy holidays!

Finally, some 2D Animation!

That’s right! I’m officially kicking into gear the 2D-animated half of the film, and so far it’s looking pretty good! Then again this first shot was really easy since I did it directly from reference.

Basically, I’m doing the only 2D spoken line of the film, (there used to be two but one of them got eliminated recently, you’ll see soon enough) when the Main Monster Ghost guy floats up to the Hero and says “Hey there, new guy! Why aren’t you partying?? Not having a good time?”

So what I did basically was film reference, cut down that reference into one take I liked, and then exported that take into a .jpg sequence so that I could then feed it as frames into Plastic Animation Paper, the 2D animation software I’m using, and then animate directly on top of it.

Check out the passes here:

(Yes, I do do most of my reference shirtless. But sometimes I put a shirt on because I’m aware that I may want to put it online, but I guess I forgot this time…)

And here are the 2 full takes (the side-view and the front-view) in their latest form (it’s still all rough obviously) because it’s higher-quality in this video:

As you can see, I used Rotoscoping to get body/poses/proportions/everything, but then drew over that to sort of “Cartoonize” it, if you will. After all, the final version of the main monster isn’t going to look like me at all, and if you looked closely, you may have noticed that its proportions are thinner than mine (you can see that I drew the monster’s shoulders much closer together/I made the chest less wide/I made the neck much thinner than my own), so it’s not ~complete~ rotoscoping. Also, that tail had to be figured out completely independently, so that’ll be a challenge, haha.

Anyway, here’s an up-cl0se image of what the Main Monster will look more like:

However that design is a little bland, so I played around with accessories I could give him to make him more interesting/give him more character:

(click to enlarge) (also, spot the Lady Gaga one)

Anyway, his design isn’t done yet, but I really like this base that I have. It’s cute like Casper The Ghost, but it’s more grown-up looking, and honestly I’m not trying to be super-original with my designs at this point, I just need to get it out so I can make viewable product as soon as possible. ‘Cause NOW’S THE TIME WHEN IT ALL HAPPENS! Wooo and it’s really happening, heyyy.

More to come, yo.

– Max

MOM DAY!

That’s right! I have finished rigging the Mom character in my film! And therefore finished rigging ALL OF THE 3D CHARACTERS OF MY FILM!! WAHOOOOO!!!! I’M DONE WITH CHARACTER RIGGING YAAAAYYYYYY

(I hate rigging, in case you couldn’t tell. Although I have improved at it quite a bit since I started working on this film, so hey, every cloud has a silver lining.)

However, making the mother was an interesting challenge. After all, just like how I made the head-models of the Mean Girl’s Friends, I also made the Mom’s head by taking the Hero’s Head and morphing it around until it looked like a different person. And I figured that it should really work this time, since at least the mom is related to the hero, right?

However, the challenge here was taking a male head mesh and transforming it into a female one. And not just that — a female one that’s much older. So while I was doing this, I had to figure out a lot of things — what makes a person look older vs. younger? What makes a person look female vs. male?

Anyway, below is photographic documentation of the 15 deformations I put on the Hero Head mesh to turn it from young-male to adult-female. Also, with each transformation, I included a nicely-rendered version of the head, as well as an in-program screencap of the head showing the lattice deformations I implemented:

FIRST THREE TRANSFORMATIONS (the first head is the original base head):

As you can see, my first prerogative was to make the face longer, the nose longer, and the chin more pointed. All ofthose things make the human face look older.

NEXT FOUR DEFORMATIONS:

What I then did was work in more elderly-looking cheekbones (aka more defined ones), I worked with elongating the face more, and I also did a hair-test to see how it looked…….. and it looked like the Main Character in drag. Bad drag. So I knew I still had a ways to go.

NEXT FOUR DEFORMATIONS:

At this point, I saw that it was starting to look more female, so I created a new Skin Texture, and I also think this was the point when I manually moved some of the vertices around the Eyelids to make them more “feline,” if you will. Really all that means is I pulled them up the face, and towards the sides. After all, this is just basic Drag Science — you always brush makeup up and outwards from the center of the face, never down. It makes you look more feminine — true fact!

LAST FOUR DEFORMATIONS:

And here I think I was just doing final touches, getting everything shaped nicely. Aaand that was that!

So yea. And as for making the body, that was simple, because making body meshes is kind of easy.  Haha, I admittedly am not giving nearly as much attention to the body meshes as I am the face meshes…

Now, before I finish this post, let me say that as for the design of the mom character, I admittedly didn’t put much thought into it. After all, this was mainly because I already had the perfect reference to base my character design off of!

Yep — that’s my mom! I even gave the Mom 3D model a shirt that my own real mother actually owns/wears (in the picture on the right). My mom is the best mom I know, so why not base my mom-character off of her? 🙂

Also, I think it’s awesome that my mother character has a nice big dark mane of hair like this. After all, most moms in popular culture NEVER look like that!

That is, unless they’re evil mothers…

…I’m not gonna lie, when I watched Tangled with my family last summer, all of us (and especially my mom) couldn’t help but feel slightly offended at the portrayal of Mother Gothel as a very obviously Jewish/Middle-Eastern-looking woman. Which, I mean, Jews/Arabs have always been the face of evil in pop culture, let’s face it. (Go back to some Original Series Star Trek episodes, look at the way the Klingons used to look, and try to deny that they totally looked like stereotypical portrayals of Arabs.) So with all of this, I guess I’m trying to do some community service with my thesis film as well. After all, Jew girls can be nice, too! Dark curly hair and all. 🙂

Alright, sorry to get superficially pseudo-political there. Have a good week y’all!

More to come.

Hey Max What Did YOU Do Today?

What did I do today?  I RIGGED A MOTHERFUCKING CHANDELIER THAT’S WHAT I DID.

I based the chandelier’s mesh off of these three photos:

And this is a video of me demonstrating how the Chandelier Rig works (because oh yes I will have to animate it.. and that will be a bitch.)

That’s all. Hope you had a good weekend! I know I didn’t.

~More To Come

 

EDIT: Since the video is so low quality, here’s a nicer quality image of what the chandelier looks like in full

Animated Films: They’re All Full Of Lies And Bullshit

So one of the first shots of my film is a close-up shot of the main character standing in front of the doorway to his house, nervous about going to his first day of school. And in that shot, his mom’s hand appears in frame, and lays itself on the hero’s shoulder. The shot looks something like this:

 

(It’ll have color and an environment, but whatever that’ll come later)

 

Anyway, this all looks ok and stuff, right? Well here’s what I had to do to the Mom Rig in order to get that composition:

 

Yeap. Because you see, for a normal human to stand next to her son and put her hand on his shoulder like that, she’d have to pretty much be standing RIGHT next to him, thus her torso would have to be in the shot as well. But I don’t like that as much, compositionally speaking. So instead, for that one shot, I’m faking it hardcore.

 

~Hande It~

 

More To Come!

 

P.S. Oh and as you can see, I’ve FINALLY finished the Mom Rig!!! I’ll make a post about how I made her in a bit because there’s a somewhat interesting story related to that…

 

Peace out!