Intensive Animation Diaries: Tentacle!

So I’m still in the midst of Animation Purgatory, aka the last 30-or-20-something days I have left to animate the rest of my film.

 

If you were wondering why I haven’t been posting on this blog as much lately, then that’s why.

 

However, I am currently animating the Tentacle portion of my film, and surprise surprise — It’s no longer a 2D shot. Well it kind of is. You can see what I’m doing here:

 

 

So basically what I have done is I have rigged a very long, flat plane as if it were a tentacle. It took about 20 minutes to do and it was super easy, woohoo! It’s a bit of a bitch to animate though, especially since I’m not used to very long pieces of Spline IK, but this is the easiest way to do it, so hey whatever. And it’s coming along nicely anyway so I shouldn’t bitch.

Also in case you were wondering  just how LONG the tentacle was that I made….

… it’s about that long.

Anyway, yea! Luckily, all the hardest parts of the animation of my film have already been done, because they were part of my reel. Which, if you wanna see my reel, you can check it out here:

Woohoo! Hopefully I’ll get something schweet with that. But we’ll see.

And other than the shots that you see in there, it’s really just a bunch of characters standing around… and talking… and stuff. And thankfully it’s all been going relatively quickly, so I think I may just be able to make it before Picture Lock! 23 days left, ahh!

Peace out! 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!

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. 🙂

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

As I Animate And Stuff

Like I said, all there is to do right now is finish my location models and do the damned animation for my film.

 

So first off, here’s the latest animatic with a couple more scenes animated (but everything’s at the utmost-roughest state of animation, so–)

 

 

And here are some images of the models I’ve been working on!

 

 

I’ve actually made texturing the Exterior of the Monster House my final project for my Lighting and Rendering class, which is great because A) it’ll force me to get that done, B) texturing this model is sure to be difficult due to how complex it is, and C) getting the texturing on this done correctly will be a HUGE help for my film, since making the Monster House look right and scary/the way the Monster House looks is a very important pivotal element of the film.

 

Also, here’s a close-up on some grunge I attempted with the golden grown above the central window:

 

…Yea, it all still needs work. But it definitely looks better than the colors I’d put on it before!

 

Also, my fabulous and super-talented visual designer friend, Theo Aretos, got some designs to me for the Monster Party Room! Here are the 2 paintings he did for it. One is more of a color-study and the other is a diagram-version of the central party area.

 

 

We met up this past Saturday at CTNX, though, and we both discussed/agreed that it needed an entrance-way appended to it so that there would be a better opportunity for camera angles showing the grandiose-ness of the party area.

 

Anyway, here is the progress I have so far on the Party Room:

 

Just the central cylindrical area (cut-out version):

 

Interior shot (with poor lighting) of the central area, including the appended entrance area:

 

So yea! Imagine that area full of crazy lights and shit. Also, it seems like the Disco Ball is working better than I anticipated as well! Hey heyyyy.

 

So yea. Just chuggin’ along.

 

More to come!

Animatic, Version 7!!

I now have the final audio put into the animatic!!! And this only means one thing:

I have no stumbling blocks ahead of me (aside from, you know, ANIMATING THE WHOLE THING)!!!!!!!!!!!! Literally all that’s left for me to do for now is:

1) Finish rigging the Mom

2) Finish modelling/texturing the environments (which will slowly happen over time as I animate, haha)

Aaaand

3) FUCKING. ANIMATE. LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER.

 

And after that, of course, comes lighting/rendering/compositing but that’s not something I’ll have to think much about for a while. For now though, really all I need to focus on is hunkering down with Maya (and occasionally Plastic Animation Paper) and GET CRACKING. ‘Cause I got no other excuse now haha.

 

More to come!!

Quickie Whatever Post

Here’s just an update on where I’m at on things.

 

1) I modeled the Hero’s Mom FINALLY!!! I won’t show it for a couple more days though because I feel like that deserves its own post. But I’ve gotten a really great first pass on the head/hair/body of the Mom character, and it’s actually looking really good… right now I’m just trying to come up with last changes to do to it but to be honest I’m not totally sure if I want to do much with it at all.

 

 

 

…Oh, OK fine here’s a render of what she looks like:

 

Notice how her hairline lifts from her forehead a bit there. Yea, I still need to fix a few things…

 

2)  I have FINISHED editing together the dialogue audio!!! What that means is that all the lines in my film that involve characters saying actual sentences, I now have final versions of those lines. Aaand I’m really happy with them! The audio for things like Gasps or Pantings or Screaming, though, I haven’t gotten final versions edited together of. But whatever. The dialogue is the more important stuff, I would say, haha.

 

3) I’m currently putting together the 7th version of my Animatic, which will include this finalized audio, and once it’s done, I’ll throw it up on this blog. So stay tuned, Phantoms! It gets brighter and brighter all the time. 😉

 

More to come.

Tedium

This is me right now:

 

Because I’m wavering between constantly wanting to just pass out (and by that I mean watch endless youtube videos), and getting myself to keep working, which is hard when the work I need to do right now can be summed up in this image:

 

 

Those are audio files! Each with unique and descriptive filenames! See, one really great thing about my Sound Technician (whose name was Kim Patrick, and she is AWESOME) was that the audio files she gave me came ALREADY CUT UP more or less into their individual takes! Which will make putting them into after effects/selecting the best takes REALLY EASY.

 

But that doesn’t change the fact that I still have to name them all according to what lines/sounds are in each of them before I can work on them. Because… yea. That’s how I work. I can’t stare at a folder full of files called “Mean Girl_1.wav, Mean Girl_2.wav, Mean_girl_3.wav” and not end up sobbing quietly to myself 5 minutes later.

 

So that’s been fun (not really)

 

In other news, I’m rigging the Mean Girls’ friends! Evidence of that is the first image of this post. Ehh? ehhhh? See what I did there?

 

Also, check it out, the monster house has color! Or at least its’ starting to:

 

 

The colors fucking suck, I know. I just kinda applied them based on what seemed right at the time, and NOT based on the painting that Theo gave me, so I’ll take a closer look at that soon and get it crackin’. Luckily, I’m learning about surfacing techniques in my Lighting And Rendering class, so in a few weeks I’ll certainly have a much better idea of how to make this house look old and creepy with just the click of a button! Woohoo!

 

But yea. I’m just chuggin’ along as usual. Once I get my sound organized/put into the animatic, I’ll be doing some serious RLO animatin’ though, so stay tuned for that. Yeaaahhh buddy!

 

More to come!

Concept Art and Modelling and Stuff!

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.

 

More to come!