RENDERING!!!

Hey! Sorry for the lack of posting lately.

 

I’ve been busier than ever finishing up my film, though. And rightly so — it’s due next Wednesday! aaah!!

 

But even awesomer than that — I’m probably going to finish all my work on the film TOMORROW! AAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!

 

But right now, it’s 2:30 AM and I’m backing up my work, and so I figured I’d make a post showing you guys some of the final renders I’ve been doing! Weee!

 

 

Exciting, huh? And more is on the way. But I’m almost done with it all, too! In fact, I’ve documented all the shots getting rendered as I’ve gone along with

this shot-composite image I made! Check it out:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also, since you’re probably curious:

 

Blue line means I’ve prepped the shot for render.

Pink line means I’ve submitted the shot to the renderfarm.

Green X means the shot has been rendered.

Red X means the shot got deleted from the film entirely.

 

Wee!

 

And once I’m done rendering, all I gotta do left is just do some color correction on certain shots, and then put the frames into the animatic, and render it all out!

 

AAAAHHH I’M SO CLOSEEEEEEEEEEE

 

But even at this late stage… there is still… more to come. 🙂

Finishing Things Up: SCHOOLYARD

So, in the next 4 weeks, I need to do the following:

– Finish up all of my animation

– Light all of my scenes

-Render all of my scenes

and then of course composite those renders into my animatic, which will then no longer be my animatic but rather my final, polished Thesis Film.

And it’s interesting because while that list is numerically small, each of those 3 things are very very long tasks.

But luckily I took a huge chunk out of the first one today! (and a bit of yesterday too)

And by that, I mean — I’ve been animating new material like a motherfucker!

“But Max, I thought you’d already roughed in all your animation!”

Ah yes, imaginary voice in my head, that IS kind of true. But not really. Because by that, I originally meant that I had roughed in all of my IMPORTANT animation. But what I’d neglected to animate until today was the characters that are going to fill out the Schoolyard location of my thesis film. And I’d been putting that off for two reasons:

1) It’s not important and it doesn’t support the story

2) I knew it was going to be really difficult.

But it had to be done, and last night + today, I did it all! Well, I roughed it all out. Tomorrow I’m going to finalize it all. But that will be much MUCH easier than finalizing the animation of the more important shots of my film, because these Playground shots are all going to be in the background of my shots — they’re all gonna be far away, unimportant, and nondescript. So really, the animation can be relatively shitty, and no one will notice! As long as there’s movement.

But unfortunately, creating a schoolyard full of kids posed several challenges at once. Not only did I have to create 25 (yes, 25 — and I may do more) new mini-animations, but I also had to make sure that those kids were all not overlapping each other in space, AND that the entire composition as a whole looked good.

But having a scene with 25 character rigs PLUS location rigs all referenced into each other = a surefire way to crash my computer. But luckily, I understand the power of COMPOSITING, so that I can render each mini-animation separately, and then mix them all together later.

But getting the initial comp right was in of itself a challenge. Here’s what I originally was working with:

This was me animating the characters and putting them together into the Schoolyard Composition that I already had made long, long ago. And as you can see, this schoolyard looks mighty barren. Also? The school BUILDING itself was way too big! And at first I thought “should I just put in more kids?”

Luckily, however, I realized the perfect solution — move all the Schoolyard objects CLOSER TOGETHER!

But unfortunately I had already animated all these kids…. And moving the schoolyard elements (the playground, the monkey bars, the slide, etc.) would shift them AWAY from the animations… uh oh…

But luckily, I have MATH on my side! So, what I did to avoid fucking everything up, essentially, was I took note of the ORIGINAL X, Y, and Z location coordinates of ALL of the schoolyard elements (I didn’t move the ground or wall however), and I then moved those elements to their new, closer positions. I THEN took note of the NEW positions of all the elements.

THEN, I went into Excel, and computed the DIFFERENCE of the values of the new and old X, Y, and Z coordinates, so that I then had the exact amounts I needed to move each character in the schoolyard whose animation depended on the physical structure of a schoolyard element.

And let me tell you…

It worked out OK.  Now, that re-locating and re-calculating process alone took ~3.5 hours. But it would have taken over a day if I didn’t do those calculations. So I’ll be praising the lord tonight that I know Math! Thank you, Gunn High School! Looks like some math/science skills come in handy for art majors after all. 😉

Anyway, as you can see in the new composite, it’s much better looking, but I’m going to sleep on it now and look at it tomorrow and decide if it’s still too barren-looking or not. And if I wanna add some more characters, then hell, I’ll add some more characters. Ironically enough, ANIMATING this stuff was the QUICKEST part of it all!

But for now, I’m going to sleep, because once again I’m making these posts at 2AM. Later, y’all!

More to come. 🙂

Animatic v15

Some kids go to Cabo for Spring Break. Some kids go to New York City, or Catalina Island.

 

I go to North Hollywood to spend the week with my boyfriend, and while he’s off at work ~12 hours a day, I sit in my underwear and fix up a new animatic for my thesis film. And I also do some 2D Animation. I’m working on it, I promise.

 

But what I’ve basically been working on for the last week is render out playblast after playblast after playblast, getting every moment from my film at every conceivable angle (but without breaking the 180 rule, though, don’t worry), and then once all of that was done, I mash them all together into something that… hopefully…. works much better than the last animatic.

 

Check it out here:

 

 

There’s a lot of different stuff in this one, so I strongly suggest you check it out. Also, since I like putting images in these posts, here’s one I captured when I was setting up the “DARK” animation for the opening title:

 

 

Not pictured there is the tiny camera that’s inside the hole of the letter A, haha.

 

Anyway, hope you enjoy it! Right now the two things I’m working feverishly towards are 1) getting the 2D animation up to speed so that it’s acceptable for picture lock (luckily the amount of 2D animation that my film needs has gone down pseudo-drastically since the last animatic), and 2) getting the edit of my film absolutely perfect. Because THAT’S what picture lock requires. Yikes! I’ll see y’all at the end of the tunnel.

 

But until then, I hope y’all have had good Spring Breaks, and if you aren’t a student/this week wasn’t your spring break, then I hope you had a good week anyway. And until next time — there’s more to come!

Character Replacement

This is sort of a continuation post from the one about Picture Lock (posted like 5 minutes ago).

So in the midst of my panic over getting all the animation done for my Thesis Film before April 3rd, I wangled together an interesting way of streamlining one of my scenes.

The scene in question is when the entire Mean Girl Gang starts by staring at the Monster Gang, then they all scream, and then they all turn on their heels and run away.

Now, the difficult thing with this shot is that I originally had to animate all 4 of these runs for the length of the entire shot, which meant a lot of work. But an easier way to do it, I realized, would be to use a LOOP of each of them running, instead of animating every step.

But that comes with a slight issue — you see, with an animated character rig in Maya, you can’t just loop a certain PORTION of a character’s motion. If you make an animated motion loop, it loops the entire timeline of that character’s motion in a certain scene. This is all kind of complicated speak I’m giving right now, and there isn’t really a simpler way of explaining it (without using images that is) but what this all basiscally means is that I have to do a bit of Replacement Technique for this shot to work.

And by that I mean — when each character is about to enter their run cycle, I turn off that character mesh’s visibility, and I turn ON the visibility of a pre-prepared looped animation of that same character running. So basically it’s like having two characters doing two separate actions, and at the exact right moment, I switch them, and the viewer isn’t any the wiser. Don’t quite understand what I mean? Watch this video and hopefully it’ll explain:

In that video, the animation of the characters up until they start running is stepped. But the animation of them running is completely smooth. That’s because each character is actually two separate animations, and at the point when they change from stepped to smooth animation is when I switched the different rigs out.

Anyway, this saves me a TON of time, because it means that I hardly have to do any work to get the runs perfect — because I already got them perfect a couple days ago! And also if I wanna change the way one of them runs, it’s no big deal, because each of those 4 characters’ runs is in a separate, editable file that I can update whenever I want. Weeeee!

Now, the funny thing about doing this was that, at the point when the switch-off happens for each character, I had to PERFECTLY match up the two rigs’ poses. Here are some images I got of me doing that for Edgar:

This is the two Edgar Rigs super imposed on one another. As you can see, at first the only thing I matched up was the heel of their left feet.

And here’s the same frame, but with the Edgar Run Cycle turned into a hollow mesh. What I basically had to do, then, was match the other Edgar’s pose to the See-Through Mesh pose in order for the motion to seamlessly flow from one animated segment to the other.

And here’s the final result. I know it’s kind of hard to see, but the two Edgar Meshes are now in (more or less) the exact same pose and position as each other, and one of them is a see-through mesh, so right now it looks like one Edgar Mesh that’s covered in a Spider’s web, haha.

Anyway, once I matched up the poses, all I had to do was make the motion smooth and then go over it a couple times to make sure that the whole thing is seamless. And if you look at this video below, you’ll see the (more or less) final product:

(Also the aspect ratio isn’t messed up in this one. Sorry about that (in the first one))

 

Soo, yeah! Hopefully this was cool/interesting/understandable. I try to make this blog understandable to people who are not Animation-Affiliated, but sometimes stuff gets really complicated, I know. Anyway, that’s all for now. Happy Wednesday!

And of course, there’s ALWAYS more to come. 🙂

Almost There

Hey!

 

So really I’ve made not that much progress on my thesis film this past week, mainly because I’ve only been focusing on the 6 shots from my film that are going to be put in my animator’s reel:

 

– Mean Girl saying “Sure! Roll me the ball”

– Mean Girl kicking the ball

– Mean Girl saying “Oh I’m SO sorry! I didn’t mean to do that!”

– Mean Girl and Bil having their dialogue while sitting on the play structure in the schoolyard

– Hero climbing the wall

– Hero getting sucked into the mansion

 

Oh and if you wanna count EVERYTHING from the film that’s going into the reel, then I’m also putting the Hero’s Run Cycle and the Mean Girl’s Run Cycle into the reel as well, but those are both done/don’t require nearly as much work as the other shots.

 

Anyway, I’m about 90% done with all of those things, which is exciting because I have a lot of free time today to work on them, AND I have all of Friday to work on them as well, and possibly some of Saturday, so HOPEFULLY I’ll get them all done in the next few days. Or if not, I’ll certainly get them all done by some time next week. Which is exciting, because that means that I can finally embark on finishing the animation for the rest of my film! And it’s about time, since I only have a little over a month left to work, yikes.

 

However, just so that you can have something to look at, here’s the Hero’s House Exterior that I started modelling a couple days ago. Check it out!

(During the day)

(And at night)

Obviously it’s got a ways to go before looking finished, but the overall shape/composition of it is there, and I’m really happy with how it turned out! It’s very cute and normal looking. 🙂

OK, sorry for the lack of interesting stuff. There’ll be more to come I promise!

Animatic v14

That’s right, new animatic! But before I get to it, lemme tell a quick story.

 

So I had office hours yesterday with Michael Patterson, with the hopes of getting advice on camera direction/cinematography/editing of my piece to have the storytelling flow better. And what I got was that + even more!

 

For you see, one thing that Patterson noticed right off the bat was that my animatic was kind of unreadable, what with how none of the final locations had been imported into any of the scenes, and how a lot of the establishing shots were still just flat pink photoshop drawings that I made literally a year ago.

 

So after getting a fire lit under my ass to heavily revamp my animatic, that is exactly what I did — I spent all of yesterday importing the new locations into almost all of the scenes, and I even started up the Party Room scene of my film! And you get to see it AAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLL together now, which is great because the resulting animatic was something that is one huge step closer to looking like what my final film will end up looking like come showtime in May.

 

But before giving the link to the animatic, here are two funny images:

 

This is a still from a scene with the OLD school-yard model (the stand-in version)

 

….And this is the exact same still, but with the old school model deleted, and the more finalized school model imported.

LOL. So yea, that’s the main logistical difference between the two models of the Schoolyard — the ground isn’t level in the new model. Which ultimately looks better, but it’s just funny because it meant that for a couple of scenes I had to re-position the God-Nodes of the characters so that they were standing correctly on the ground. Uneven terrain! Fun stuff! (not really, but it’s not really a big deal at the same time)

So yea, enough talky talky I guess. Here’s the 14th Animatic of my film. Look at how far it’s come!

And of course, as I always say…

…there is certainly more to come. 🙂

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!

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. 🙂

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!