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!
So my friend/former-fellow-Dreamworks-Intern, Theo Aretos, agreed a while back to do concept paintings for my thesis film! Which is GREAT because I fucking SUCK at designing things. (and yet I took on the challenge of designing my own characters, but whatever, what’s done is done)
Anyway, he has so far gotten 2 paintings done: The exterior of the Monster Mansion, and the initial Hallway inside the Monster Mansion that the Hero enters before stumbling upon the party room:
And to be quite honest, I am absolutely swept away by these paintings. They’re exactly what I asked for, too — Not super-finished, sketchy paintings that get the shapes and colors down, but don’t bother too much with the detail. So before you get all concerned, I purposefully asked him to keep the paintings sketchy. Because that way, it gives me more freedom when I model these structures into real life! And really, the important thing that these paintings give me is style and color composition, which are the two things that I am the absolute WORST at when it comes to film-making. So thank you so much Theo!! And I can’t wait to see the rest of the paintings! (That’s right y’all, he’s designing the School Yard, Kid’s Room, Kid’s House, and Party Room as well! And he described his idea for the Party Room recently and I pretty much died with how awesome it sounds, so YEAH BABY shit is getting DONE.
Anyway, and just in case you’re concerned about whether or not I’ll be able to model these paintings into real-life 3D models, worry no further!
These are 2 production shots of the exterior of the Monster Mansion. It’s not finished, as you can obviously tell, but already it’s looking pretty fancy, in my opinion! I really only need to append another handful of structures and fix some of the sizes before it’s time to start texturing and lighting it! Wooooo.
BUT IN OTHER NEWS~
I have officially gotten my entire cast-list for voice actors for my film! YESSIREEE! And without further adieu, I give you the list (In order of appearance):
Hero: Jesse Pilchen
Hero’s Mom: Celia Rivera-Baron
Mean Girl: Christina Cook
Mean Girl’s Friends (Archer, Bil, and Edgar): Michael Malconian
The Party Monsters: Whichever of my Fraternity Brothers feel like going into a recording booth (none of the party ghosts have any real lines, so it’s not a big deal)
Main Party Ghost: Me!
Yes, I’m doing one of the voices. After watching my Animatic through all its stages, I’ve realized that, while I can’t really pull off a middle-shool-boy voice, and CERTAINLY not a middle-school-girl voice, I definitely CAN pull off a goofy Ghost voice. The rest of the actors, however, are other USC students, and I’m SUPER excited to record them! I’ve been struggling to lock down a date with the ADR people, though, but with luck, it’ll happen this coming Wednesday (yes, on Halloween. I’m aware of how perfect that is.).
ANYWAY, ONE LAST BIT OF NEWS~
I’ve officially decided on which 2D animation software I’m going to use for my film! This was a point of concern because I really don’t like Flash or Toon Boom, because they both function in Vector-Based lines, which quite frankly look like shit in my opinion. They just don’t look like the lines that I draw on paper, whereas animation software that works in Bitmap Lines end up producing work that looks WAY better. It requires more work, but I know that it will pay off in the end. Also, I’m considering having the party monsters be colorless (just filled in with white) both for simplicity’s sake and for style. After all, juxtaposing a full-color world with 2D black-and-white monsters will be… quite jarring, won’t it? 😉
Anyway, after shopping around for free (or very cheap) animation software, I found that the best match for me was PAP, or “Plastic Animation Paper,” which is a really fucking fantastic free program that can import footage, animate bitmap-cels on top of it, and it exports that animation really beautifully.
I only got this program a couple days ago (and I’ve been partying this past weekend due to Halloween) so I only have a very rough sketch-up of the first bit of 2D Animation I’m doing for the film:
…and even that rough sketch of the animation isn’t done. I did all of that today though (including figuring out how the goddamned program works, which took time in of itself) so as you can see it’s a fast, lightweight program that, if I put the effort into it, will produce good product. So yay!
Oh, and P.S. to those non-animation peeps reading this, the difference between Bitmap Lines and Vector Lines is such: Bitmap Lines are based on pixels, and when you scale them up in size they lose quality. Vector Lines are based on mathematical points in space, and when you scale them up, the points get scaled up, and the computer just fills in based on the new numerical location of those points. So as a result, they lose no quality when they’re resized. However, Vector Lines (because they’re so geometric in nature) don’t look nearly as natural as Bitmap Lines… it’s sort of like the difference between buying a cake from the store and making it yourself. Although the quality isn’t necessarily as perfect as the store-bought cake, there’s more heart in the home-made one.
Anyway, that’s all for now! Hopefully this is enough progress to show to my class tomorrow (it’s my group’s turn to present and I’m kind of nervous because I spent 2 of the last 3 weekends either partying or going to NorCal, soooooooooo yea I didn’t actually make that much progress in the last 21 days, gulp) but yea.
So I’m on the verge of getting many things done. Let me list the ways!
– I’m finally getting on the ball and will (*fingers crossed*) hopefully have completed some voice-actor auditions by the end of this coming week. I still need to lock down the room though so that’s in the air.
– In order to avoid becoming super fucking lazy, I went ahead and started up the Scene-Files for 14 of the 30 Scene-Files that will comprise my film. (Before today I had only started up 4). Now, I haven’t actually animated in any of the new ones, but just the fact that they’re set up now means I don’t have to get over the mental-block/procrastination-fodder of “I don’t wanna have to set up the shoooottttt” anymore, because it’s already all set up. Time to animate!
– Speaking of animation, I’ve gotten 2 shots ready to show to people who I trust to give me good advice on how to improve it. And so that process shall begin like, 30 minutes from now!
– I got a message from my OTIS student friend, Theo Aretos (who I also interned with at Dreamworks) recently saying that he’s almost done with the concept designs for the environments for my film. So soon I won’t have ridiculously-crappy-looking standin-environments for my film! Wooooohooo!!
– I heavily revamped the 4 friends of the Mean Girl of my film (and by this I mean I changed their bodies) and all that leaves is fixing their faces some, and then I’ll have a second pass on them to show around to people! Woohoo.
So basically, there’s a lot of potential in the air. Will I persevere and continue to make progress? Or will I just open up a bag of Doritos and never finish my film?
Just kidding, of course I’ll persevere. PERSEVEERREE!!! (I really need to stop making these posts after 2AM)
But in the mean time, here’s at little something I did for homework for another class:
You’re probably wondering what the fuck this is. This is my homework for my Lighting And Rendering class, and we had to demonstrate Caustics (aka when light is refracted through transparent objects like water or crystals) and Subsurface Scattering (which is used to make skin look real). So I figured, what the hell, I’ll put the Mean Girl from my film into a sassy pose and turn her into an ice sculpture and a skin… sculpture… thing. She kind of looks more like water in the ice sculpture one though, and she looks a little waxy in the skin one. But whatever. I’m not trying to be a surfacer…
…Because I feel like it’s been like a week or something since I’ve last animated anything. I’ve become very lazy these past few days/past week. And yesterday was officially the first day where I legitimately didn’t do ANYTHING in the way of working on my film. WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME. AAHHH. I NEED INCENTIVE.
Anyway, despite my horrible issue with perception of my own productivity, here’s the official first-ever lit-and-rendered frame from my film!!!
AKA this is me trying to give myself incentive. But wow, check that shit out!! Yes, I know the lighting is all wrong, but just goes to show one really important thing (that I already kinda knew):
Lighting makes everything look a thousand times better than it looks while I’m animating it.
Don’t believe me? This is what the exact same frame looks like in Maya with no lighting:
…yea. Even his facial expression somehow looks better in the lit version! Sometimes man, I don’t even know. But it’s working for me, thank god.
Also, this makes me really happy because like………. I DID ALL OF THIS FROM SCRATCH! And this also the first scene I’m animating that involves more than one Character Rig at a time, and I haven’t run into any issues with that yet! (I don’t know why I would find issues with that, but you never know. You neeevvverrrr knowwwwww with Mayaaaaa….)
But yea. I dunno, seeing this first lighting test really gives me hope that my film could turn into something great. It’s just sort of hard to visualize when all you see are these lifeless-looking poorly-lit dolls whenever I’m animating… So yea. There’s hope. Anyway, back to work I guess.
– More to come
EDIT: Oh shit P.S.! I did some math, and figured that since this render took 30 seconds to do, and the film will be ~4.5 minutes at 24 fps, that comes out to just over 100 hours of render time… and that’s not counting adding the 2D elements to the film! FFFfuUUUuuuUCcCccCCKKKKkkkkkkk
Oh and P.P.S., this is the 50th post I’ve made on this blog! GO MEEEE
So I haven’t made the environments that my characters will be working in. And I actually asked my friend who goes to Otis to help design the environments because I have no interest in being a visual designer, AND I’m not good at it at all, especially when it comes to environment design. Like I just have no skill. Ask me to design a room, and I’m gonna make an oblong square with a door and a window and a desk with a chair. And it will be a very simple and rectangular desk and chair.
Like, I have no style.
But unfortunately, I need some sort of environment in order for me to know how far the characters need to walk from one location to the other, and what kinds of important objects they need to work around, and bla bla bla.
So long story short (except I’ve already talked too much), I made a stand-in environment for the first scene I’m gonna animate:
Can you tell which location it is? Can ya? Can ya?
It’s the yard in front of the Monster Mansion. And the black cube in front of the mansion is meant to be a stand-in for the main Hero character, so I can get a sense of how big all the other objects need to be in relation to him.
See, aren’t I so smaaaart?!?! Doin’ all this preparation n’ shit…
Uh, but yea. Also, in other news…
… The main character is soon gonna have someone to really be scared of! Woo wooooo!
(also omg the lighting in that image is horrible. Thank god I’m taking a class on digital lighting and rendering this semester! Woop wooop)
So as I think I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I plan on having the characters in my film be a mix between 2D and 3D Animation. Which is to say, I want the human characters (The hero, the mean girl, mean girl’s friends, and the mother) to be 3D characters with classical rigs and everything… but I want the MONSTERS in the Monster Mansion to be 2D animated characters.
My reasoning for this is three-fold: First of all, this method allows me to showcase my animation skills in both the 2D and the 3D realms, and since I’ll be showing this film to potential hirers, that is important.
Second of all, having the different kinds of characters be two different animation media will really help illustrate the fact that the Monsters are truly from a different sort of universe than the main Human characters in my story.
And Third of all, doing the monsters in 2D will be MUCH more fun and EASY to do, rather than modelling and rigging each monster individually — especially considering I want each monster to be a different type of creature, and not all of them will be bipedal creatures — some may be snakes, or have wings, or who knows what. And I don’t know how to rig, so in the end it’ll be much easier and freer for me to just fuckin’ draw it all.
However, this of course poses the issue of integrating a 2D image with a 3D image without it looking too jarring looking. However, I’m making progress on that, and this is what I’ve done so far:
First, I did a quick animation of a 3D character in a room with some party lights going. (The rig I used is a free rig you can get online called the “Eleven Rig,” but I changed the colors and ear proportions (and added a big ball of hair onto its head) in order to make it closer to what the character for my film will look like:
I then exported that out into a movie file and then imported it into a 2D aniamtion program, and animated a dancing monster on top of the movie file as a separate layer
And the 2D Assets by themselves look like this:
I then exported the 2D Animation as a PNG sequence (I tried all different image formats that have Alpha Channels, and PNG turned out to be the smallest) and then went back into Maya, placed a flat vertical plane next to the dancing boy, and assigned the PNG sequence to the texture of the plane. And this is what it looked like:
And when I rendered it out, it came out like so:
Once again, I’m sorry that it’s like Zero seconds long, but hopefully you can get a gist of the look of it. Obviously the final 2D animated assets will not be scratchy and flickery like the ones that are in this tester, but I mainly just wanted to do an animation test to find out how I would get these 2D characters in the 3D world in a way such that I don’t have to paint on lights and shadows…
As for issues that I will have to figure out how to fix, I know that this method will produce trouble with perspective issues (notice in the final version of the clip, the Monster got kind of skewed into perspective) and I may play around with with that by de-perspectivizing the PNG sequence before doing the final render — that is to say, somehow applying the opposite-direction perspective to the 3D plane such that the two opposing perspectives going on balance each other out, and the resulting rendered image matches perfectly with the image I draw in the 2D animation software (instead of getting a skewed version of it). Haha I hope that all made sense. Also, I will figure out how to make the 2D assets cast shadows (but that will just involve alpha-channels on the 3D plane itself), and of course there will also be the issue of having the 2D assets physically interact WITH the 3D assets (including the few shots when the 2D tentacle grabs onto the Hero’s 3D arm!) But all of that will be figure out in short time.
So for now, good bye, and I leave you with my usual closing statement: There is much more to come! 🙂
MmmaaaxxxRubinThesis 