A short text post

Hey! I haven’t posted in a week so I’m just gonna put out some words.

As usual, I’m just chugging along to the best of my ability. Right now I’m working solely on the shots that I plan on putting in my reel that I’ll use to apply to animation jobs after I graduate, so that’s… stressful. To say the least. haha. Those shots in question, by the way, are:

– Pretty much the entire scene when the hero is at school for the first time. It has a lot of great acting, dialogue, as well as a great shot of the Mean Girl kicking the ball which demonstrates good physicality

– The shot where the hero climbs over the wall, because as far as physicality goes, that’s pretty damned difficult to animate

– The shot where the hero gets thrown into the monster mansion, which I revamped actually, and made it better for a reel; instead of getting thrown into the house and then getting up, he instead does a double-take, gets up, runs back towards the door he flew through, bangs on it a couple times, pushes against it with his whole body weight, and then gives up and turns around. Bam! Animation.

Aaaand that’s actually pretty much it. The funny thing with an animation reel, is that really all you need to show is that you can animate body mechanics well, and that you can animate acting/dialogue scenes well. And as an added bonus, if you can animate both of those things in more than one animation style, then that’s even better. Right now, the animation style I’m going for is a more realistic, less-cartoony motion, so I may go and do some extra stuff to kick it up a notch, but we’ll see.

I also updated my animatic with a new version of Scene 23 (aka the scene when the hero is in bed contemplating after he runs away from the monster mansion) and I think it’s finally working this time around. Woohoo!

So yea. It’s weird to think that school has only been in session for 2 weeks, because it feels like it’s already been at least a month. I feel like I’m going to die of old age before this semester ends, haha. And I don’t wanna get too emotional, but the fact that my performance on these specific shots of my film will eventually determine what kinds of jobs I get once I’m out of college…. it’s something that haunts my mind every day, and I sort of wish I could fast-forward through all of this stress. But alas, this is life, and this too shall pass.

Sorry there aren’t any images in this post! I try to keep it visual but this time around I’m just sort of slowly losing my mind and don’t wanna have to spend the time racking up screencaps and stuff.

Well, OK fine, here’s ONE screencap I made:

This is a shot of the re-done roughing-out of the shot of the Hero climbing over the wall, and I noticed that this one particular pose he made was very… pin-up. So yea. Clearly I am losing it.

Anyway, that’s all for now! More to come. Especially very soon, since I have a new animatic that I’m not showing you right now for some reason, haha.

 

OH, AND SIDE-NOTE! I noticed that my computer was filling up to dangerous levels of information, so I decided to clear some shit out, and I deleted all the playblasts from Maya that I had made. And you know how much data that ended up getting rid of? Over 14 Gigabytes. I had created over 14 gigabytes of playblasts in the last few weeks. If that’s not proof that that I’ve been working hard, then I don’t know what is!

 

OK, that’s really all for now. More to come!

Ugh

Wanna know what happens when you rig 6 characters before really knowing how to rig a character correctly?

What happens is you find out about more advanced rigging deformers waaay after the fact, and then you feel like beating yourself up for not using them earlier on because they’re way more convenient/better than using blendshapes for every goddamn facial deformation. Ugh.

 

(This is an image of a wire deformer I applied to the hero’s eyelid.)

Luckily, if I need extra deformation options later down the road, I can actually add them after the fact, so it’s not a big deal after all. But still. Damn.

In other news, though, I was testing out Jiggle Deformers today and I realized that I’m totally using them for the characters’ hair because that’s way more easy than animating it by hand. Woohoo! I love computers.

More to come!

The Last Few Days: Schoolyard!

The Schoolyard is where a lot of stuff happens in my film, and it’s also the most object-heavy of any of my locations. Also, it’s an exterior, which posed a whole other set of problems, such as making sure that you can’t see the edge of the ground-plane in any horizon shots while also making it not look like there’s absolutely nothing in the world around the Schoolyard area. Anyway, all I can say, really, is thank god for Trees!

So let me start from concept all the way to the so-far finalized status!

My work was cut out for me when my amazing and talented concept artist, Theo Aretos, did concept paintings for the Schoolyard environment:

This painting was done just to get the color scheme down, and at first I found it interesting considering how dry it felt, but then I realized that that’s actually a smart choice, since I want the schoolyard to feel like a sort of unwelcoming place. Also, this entire time I imagined the ground being covered in grass (because at the end of the day, I am a very very uncreative person when it comes to visual design…), so the idea of having it be a DIRT ground was simultaneously new to me, interesting, better than my original idea, AND it’ll make rendering easier (because fuck if I know how I was gonna render an entire field of grass!)

I then asked him to change up the design of the school-building and to also do a few more playstructure designs, as well as a topographical layout of the ground, and I then got these beauties:

And so my work began. First off, I started by modelling all the things I knew I needed: a picket fence, a stone wall, the school building, and whatever else I could think of in the way of playstructures to fill the area. Check them all out!

Picket Fence! (this was real easy to do, just a lotta copy and paste)

Brick Wall!

(To make the bricks seem authentic, I made a brick-randomizer thingimajigger that basically had clusters attached to 42 different points on a lattice surrounding a base brick shape, and over time those clusters all were programmed to jiggle around in 3D space. As a result, it made… a bit of a difference.)

Monkey Bars!

You can’t really see it from this angle, but this structure was meant to look extra terrifying because the bars go up and down very sharply over the length of the structure.

Sandbox!

Complete with sandcastle, shovel, and bucket. 🙂

Basketball Thingy!

I legitimately forget what it’s called.

You like the hoop, though? Yea, that was fun to make. 🙂

Play Structure Thingy!

This is actually the only play structure that will actually be USED in the story in an at-all important way (it’s what the Mean Girl Gang sits on as they watch the hero enter the monster mansion) and I ended up using the same model as what I’ve been using before since it looked good enough to begin with. I just wonked it up a bit to make it less perfectly straight and symmetrical, I got rid of the swing-set next to it, and later I plan on texturing it so that it looks like it’s actually made of wood and not perfect 3D cubes. (I also plan on texturing everything else in the play yard, but that goes without saying I guess)

Terrifying Slide!!

True story: my dad walked into my room at one point over break and saw me modelling this, and he said “You know, slides aren’t supposed to go up …” Anyway, my point in bringing that up is that the physical nature of these objects are not meant to serve their function, but rather serve the overall stylistic purpose of the play-yard, which is to be a sort of intimidating, terrifying place… but not in a super overt way. Really, though, this is the most overtly creepy thing in the entire schoolyard, I think.

Aaand of course, THE SCHOOL

With a little flag on top~


So yea! Once I modelled all these things, I then had to choose one more thing: TREES.

Luckily, Maya comes with a collection of built-in tree types that you can just paint into your scene, so I went through all of them and went with these Birches:

Cute, non? Also I looked up Birches and apparently they’re wide-spread all over the Northern Hemisphere in temperate climates, and it’s the national tree of like 3 different countries I think…. so I guess I did a good job of making my film be location-ambiguous!

Anyway, once that was all decided upon, it was time to painstakingly put all this shit together. Why painstakingly? Because this is a lot of memory for my computer to handle. But thank god for Layers in Maya, so I can turn on and off objects to make the program’s running speed faster! Woo.

And there ya go. Oh, and if you need further explanation of what will happen where in my film, here you go too:

Bam~

Oh and one last thing about the schoolyard — if you’re concerned that some of the play structure objects seem a bit low-res, then let me defend myself with two rationales behind the relatively short amount of time I spent on modelling everything (this entire thing was put together over the course of like 3 or 4 days):

1) A lot of this shit is going to be waaay in the background, with the exception of the play structure that the mean girl gang sits on

2) I don’t have much time left so I gotta cut corners somewhere…

So yea. Hope this was interesting to read! And as always, there is certainly more to come. 🙂

Final-Animation Update

Is “Final Animation” the correct term for what I’m doing? I feel like it is but there’s also a chance that I’m using the wrong terminology for all of this.

Anyway, this is just an update post to quickly say that the Final-Animation Train is still chugging along. Still got a ways to go, but I’m right now working on Scene 7, which is the largest scene both in length and in number of 3D characters, so yea that shot’s gonna take a while. But I did the first-pass on the finalization of the movement of the Mean Girl and the Hero in that shot, and those two are the main players in that shot (the third real actor in that shot I guess is Edgar, who says a line at one point, but the other two mean-girl-friends don’t say or really do anything, they just stand there), so yea! I guess it’s mostly done. And by “mostly done” I mean it’s still got a long ways to go, because a shot needs a lot more than just a first-pass on the final animation. But it’s much farther along! Check out some of the motion of the Hero here:

Yea! It’s turning out better than I thought it would, considering this is a first-pass with no review/editing done after. AND it’s coming along pretty fast! I can get at LEAST one character’s worth of acting in a shot done in a day. And today I got TWO done, which is awesome, and I owe myself a drink I guess. I dunno. But this is all exhilarating! WEeeoooweeeooweeeoooweee!!!

Anyway yea. It’s 3AM now, which seems to always be when my brain decides it’s time to make a post on this blog. But I’ve said all I wanna say.

G’night, world! There is more to come in the future. 🙂

Oh and also: First pass on final title cards

No matter WHAT my credits will be like in the end, one thing’s for sure: I’m gonna need a fancy-lookin’ main title card. One that can be used on all the posters and stuff that I’m going to make for my film! Lol ‘cuz clearly this shit is gonna win the Cannes grand prix award haha.

So here it is, check it out! Feel free to comment all you like.

Oh and don’t worry about me not having a high-res version — this is version is like 10% the size as the full-size version.

This is just a first pass though, so we’ll see what it turns out like in the very end.

More to come!

Final Winter Break Update: FINAL ANIMATION

When I decided I had finished my first character design and it was time to start modelling the characters in Sculptris, I couldn’t get myself to do it at first and I moped around the house for a couple days before finally getting myself to sit down and start doing it. The reason for this was because, to be frank, I was terrified! I was terrified that by continuing onto the next phase of production, I would make some rookie mistake and fuck the whole thing up, and my whole film would fall apart.

The same happened when I had finished my first character model and it was time for me to rig it.

And I probably moped around fearfully for a whole WEEK once I had finished that first character rig, before I finally started animating with it.

Well, I’ve gotten the Rough Layout animation pass done and done well on almost all my 3D assets shots (all but one, to be exact) and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks avoiding the next step out of pure fear. But the time has finally come — I have officially commenced the FINAL ANIMATION PHASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (as of yesterday).

And let me tell you — I’m still sort of terrified. After all, I’m taking what right now is good-looking rough animation, and then COMPLETELY CHANGING IT. And it’s terrifying! What I’m scared of, really, is that I’ll accidentally fuck it up and then not know what to do. But I’ve only got 80-something days left until Picture Lock, so it’s high-time I do this.

Last night I did a pretty simple shot though, and once I input the new curves, looked at a playblast, and then tweaked them around a bit, this is what I got:

As you can see, it’s not really that good-looking. BUT it’s on its way. The real struggle here, of course, will be to get the curves of the motion of all my characters to be as smooth and on-point as possible.

Now, to all my non-animator readers out there (I know each of my posts get liked by a bunch of random bloggers for some reason, so I know non-animators are reading this) let me explain how this is done:

Hopefully the image reads well. But basically, since all motion of every object and living creature in the WORLD starts with an anticipation, then does the action, and then has an overshoot period (also known as follow-through), I need to basically add frames in the timeline that serve as the beginning- and end-points of those 3 different stages, and then smooth the whole thing out. Thank god for Bezier curves! And really, from just working on 2 shots like this, it seems that the real work-intensive part of this comes not from inputting those points, but rather from getting them in the RIGHT PLACE and getting the TIMING down as well. And lemme tell you — the timing is very rarely going to be perfect on the first try. But luckily, us animators can quickly playblast our animation, watch it, take notes, and fix it. 🙂 Woohoo!

Also, to all those math/science people out there, another name for this Anticipation/Action/Followthrough animation terminology is “Hysteresis,” which describes systems (in this case, motion systems) that depend “not only on its current environment but also on its past environment.” (taken from Wikipedia)

So yea. Art meets science! That’s animation for you.

One scene down, (actually, 1.5 since I’m working on the second one right now) and 13 more to go!

And of course, more to come. 🙂

Reference Mishap

So the last time I showed a reference mishap, it was one of my fraternity brothers slapping my face when my eyes were closed.

But this time, it’s completely my fault.

This time, I was shooting reference for this one shot where a monster is holding onto a chandelier and swinging it around as he laughs at the main character.

Here are the storyboard panels that explain what I’m talking about:

Yea. Top-notch drawing skills there. (Also, this is the same shot that I modelled/rigged the chandelier for, btw)

Anyway, luckily there’s a bench-swing outside of my house that was perfect for getting reference for this shot on.

However, when I tried to hold onto the chain with only one hand… well, shit happened. And it was entertaining as fuck.

More to come!

Still working. But slowly.

I’ve been mainly focusing on 2D animation because I dunno why. It’s kind of easier in a way. But it requires better drawing skills, which I don’t really have so oops whatever. Here’s some of a witch stirring brew animation I’m working on. Luckily I only have to worry about silhouette with this one since you’ll only see it in shadow-form (das right, it’ll be projected as a shadow along a 3D wall. Woop woop!)

More to come.