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. 🙂

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!

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

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!!

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!

Mean Girl Day!

I titled this post “Mean Girl Day” because today was ALL about the Mean Girl in my film! And by that, I mean, SHE IS RIGGED! And I now officially have 2 rigged characters in my film. Which is also super great because when you combine the Hero and the Mean Girl in my film, they do about 90 percent of all the 3D-Animated acting of the film. Because after all, the Mean Girls’ friends (of which I plan to have 4 or 5) collectively have 1 line of dialogue (one of them asks the mean girl a question and that’s about it), and the Mother appears in like 2 shots. So, yea.

But in my process of making the Mean Girl the wonderfully beautiful bitch that she is, I took a lot of screencaps, and I wanted to share with you, dear reader, my journey in creating her. And to be honest, my reason for devoting a post like this to her is because her character design really is the greatest I’ve ever done for any character I’ve ever designed — I’m extremely proud of her, and she continues to support my theory that VILLIANS ARE ALWAYS THE BEST CHARACTERS, design or personality-wise. I’ve always fucking loved villains, whether it be the Borg from Star Trek, or Madame Medusa from The Rescuers, or Madame Dubois from Madagascar 3 — Villains are just always amazing.

So here you go:

As all character designs must, the Mean Girl started off as a drawing.

Once I had decided that I liked her having big cat-like eyes, large eye-lashes, a small nose, pouty lips, and a heart-shaped face, I went and sculpted her out in Sculptris, a free 3D sculpting program. And as you can see, this image is NOTHING like what she ended up looking like, and she certainly had some weird fucking beginnings.

But as I worked into her more, things improved, and as I’ve already shown in older posts, I used this hi-res mesh as direct reference to make a Quadrilateral Polygonal model that would become her final face.

Thankfully, I had the sense to soften her brow ridge though, because it was way too fucking intense.

(New head on the right)

And then I had to decide what kind of hair she’d have! I knew I couldn’t have that long voluptuous hair, because it would be impossible to animate. I went with a short ‘do with a large swooping bang, but I knew it needed an accessory to make her more unique looking.

At first I wanted to give her a cute, youthful, girly hairband with fake plastic flowers in it. But then my friend said “No, give her a bow like Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl!” and I was all “Who’s Blair Waldorf?”

But I then looked her up, saw how awesome the bow was, and went with that instead.

I mean duh. The bow is way better.

It became clear at this point, though, that I was NEVER going to escape the Jimmy Neutron comparisons with this film, because not only do people see my main character and think he looks like Jimmy, but now people will look at my villain and think she looks like Cindy!

But really, I like to think of my Mean Girl as a mix between Cindy and Blair Waldorf….

So it’s sort of like a more bitchy, more mature, more stylish version of Cindy. So ha, take that!

But then I had to give her clothing. At first I was going to give her a long-sleeved shirt with a deep v-neck and some blue skinny-jeans. But then I realized that that wasn’t bitchy enough. (And I also consulted some actual females about what middle-school girls wear, and they all seemed to agree on one look:)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand yea! And then I rigged her, and now here you have it! A mean girl.

And before anyone goes ape-shit about the colors, let me say that THESE ARE NOT THE FINAL COLORS. Of anything, really. I mean the final version will probably be like this, but nothing is certain. Her clothing colors will most certainly change, and her lip-stick will become a lighter pink, and her rouge will be toned down a lot (because she still looks a little too mature with that makeup) (I won’t tone down the mascara though, because according to my lady-friends, Middle School is when women go Hard As a Motherfucker with the eyeliner and mascara, so there), but this is what her body is gonna be like.

Also, just as an extra fun image, this is a screencap I took while I was weight-painting her head:

Looks like a shitty iPod commercial, right? Hahaaaa.

OK. Anyway, yea. I figured it would be cool to compile the entire history of this character from step Zero to Finished Product, and it’s really exciting to me that I can create an awesome fucking animated character literally just from my imagination. This is definitely an extremely satisfying accomplishment for me, artistically speaking, and it also gives me confidence that in the future if I want to keep making independent animated films, I still can, with zero budget! 🙂

But yea. As usual, though, it’s 3:30AM right now as I post this, and I’m treating this blog like it’s my fucking diary, so I think it’s time for me to turn on my night music and go to sleep. G’night y’all! I can’t wait to animate this girl!

Peace. (and there’s more to come, of course!)

– Max

An Important List Compiled From Past Mistakes

So this post is gonna be short. (EDIT: Lol never mind it ended up being kind of long. Go me!) Today I made some good animation progress. I also finalized the Mean Girl’s hair and she will be rigged tomorrow.

But that’s what brings me to this post. I wanted to put out a list of things to make sure to double-check before binding the joints to one’s character model and weight-painting it. And by “things one must double-check,” I actually  mean “Things I have at least once totally forgotten to do and wanted to hit myself for realizing something was wrong too late and then I had to start the rigging process over again ugh.”

So here’s what I just compiled:

Things to double-check before you bind joints to skin and start weight-painting:

– Finger joints are in correct position for BOTH HANDS (each finger has 3 joints each so it gets tricky)
– Back of hair and Neck don’t intersect weirdly (I can’t believe I actually fucked this one up once)
– Proportion of head-to-body is correct (an easy one to mess up especially when you’re rushing it)
– Everything is freeze-transformed and center-pivoted and history-deleted correctly (once again, easy to fuck up)
– Meshes are correct resolution
– Eye joints are in the center of the eyeballs (Or else your character will be hardcore lazy-eyed)
– Every element is named correctly (no “Polysurface47)
– Imported head is correct/still has blendshapes (You don’t wanna finish the rig and then realize it can’t move its face)
– Knee-to-foot joints are in correct place (Once again, stupid fucking mistake that I have definitely made.)

Aaaaand that’s pretty much why it took me 3 weeks to get the first character rig ready! Maybe 4. I kid though, actually, because the real reason it took so long was because I had NEVER RIGGED A DAMNED THING IN MY LIFE so of course it took me so long to get it right. Whatever. The only person being hard on me is myself so whatever I’m going to sleep now.

Oh and so that you don’t have to be totally bored, here are 2 fun images to keep you satiated, dear reader:

This is the latest Location Standin I made (It’s the part when the main character first enters the mansion and is walking down the long creepy hallway and hasn’t gotten to the party room yet). I’m really actually proud of how good this looks, though. I feel so scared for the main character when I see this — and this is just a basic production shot! Fuckyeahhhh

This is the Mean Girl’s final head, but with all the different polygons separated out. I’ll let you guess what her final hair/head accessory will look like just judging from this image, haha!!

Peace out y’all. There’s certainly more to come!

More third-done animation!

Why do I feel the need to embarrass myself like this.

I honestly don’t know why I feel the need to post these playblasts as soon as I get some semblance of animation out because really it’s just making me look like a bad animator (for now at least) because at this stage, all my animation is just in the first-pass stage.

Except I’m kidding, I totally know why I’m posting these — Because they’re exciting!! To me at least. I dunno. It’s like watching a really pretty flower just starting to grow. Also, if any of you were worried about my animation skills from the last post, you can see here that not all of my animations with this character are going to be poppy as hell. Really it was just that first one because climbing a wall is fucking difficult to animate/I’m working on it/DONT JUDGE ME!!!

Also don’t judge my disposition while I post this because it’s almost 2:30 AM and I really need to learn how to work during the day… (instead of watching Youtube videos all day and then going “oh shit” at around 10PM and getting to work… fuck) (I’m having too much fun with this blog…)

Anyway, one last thing about this — There was one main difficulty with getting this shot set up right, and it was getting the goddamned parenting on the ball to work. Gah! One thing is for sure, I am NOT a rigger, haha! I may fix/re-do the parenting on the Left Hand though (the way it works now is that the Ball is parented to the Right Hand, and Left Hand is parented to the ball (since sadly one object cannot be a child to 2 different parents)). So to all those non-animation people reading this, what that means is when I move the Right hand up, the Ball goes up with it.. and since the Left Hand is parented to the ball, the Left Hand goes up with the ball too! But if I move the Left Hand up on its own, the Ball doesn’t go up with it, because the Ball isn’t a child to the Left Hand. Get it? I hope you do. It’s basically hierarchical movement.

OK, that’s all! Bye! And like I always say: There’s more to come~

EDIT: Oh and one last note — you may be wondering why the main character is all one color. Don’t worry. That’s not how the final animation is gonna be. But I’m animating him like this because I figure it might save computer brain-space? I dunno? And I can change it at the very end so whatever. Trust me when I say that he is much cuter in color. 🙂

Peace y’all!

The Mean Girl (+ General Progress Update)

Hey! Sorry I haven’t been posting lately.

To give you an overview of what’s been going on — I got some critiques on the look of the main character, which resulted in me changing his head, which meant I had to re-rig his character, which kind of all set me back a whole weekends-worth of work-time, but it’s OK because I’d rather have these kinds of setbacks happen now rather than later, haha! I’m pretty positive that the main character’s design and rig are DONE, though, and I can resume animation tomorrow. Woo!

But you know which character’s design I WON’T be having any setbacks with?

That’s right! The mean girl character in my film (no, she doesn’t have a name yet. And neither do any of the characters in my film, for that matter!) is well on her wait to being turned in a real-life animated character! And my god, can you just look at her? She looks so beautiful, so childlike, so evil…

Really though, it’s those arched-and-pointed eyebrows that make her look so bitchy. I still have to make her lipstick a different shade (because she’s still looking a bit hookery) but for the most part this is how it’ll be. I’m currently in progress on designing her hair, but you can get a pretty good gist for what she’ll be like.

Also, check this one out:

Mean-girl Blendshapes!!! I love these kinds of  shots though, because the “Mouth_Open” blendshape always sticks out from the rest.

Also, I haven’t bothered yet to count how many blendshapes there are, but my best guess is somewhere from 80 to 100?

Whatever. All I can say is that I’m very happy that these are the last blendshapes I’ll have to do for this film — that’s right! Because I figured out a way to use the same head-model as my Hero Character for all the other characters of the film (including his own mother, haha!)

But I’ll have a post about that later. Anyway, I predict that by the end of next weekend I’ll have rigged the Mean Girl character. But for this week, I plan on dedicating myself to getting the first shot done and ready to show to people for critiques, because goddammit September’s not even over and I’m already slightly behind on schedule! Shiiiiiiiiiiit.

OK, that’s all for now, though. I really just wanted to post these to prove to you guys that I’m still alive, haha.

More to come!

September 18th, 2012

…Is the day that I did the first real bit animating for my film.

AAAHH!!!!

I’m making a post about this, however, to document and be able to remember for future reference what accomplishing this felt like, (and yes, it really does feel like a huge accomplishment) because it wasn’t like any other animating I’ve ever done. After all, with other animations, I can almost always throw away the character and choose a different one if the rig happens to suck.

But with this animation? Not only am I stuck with the rig(s) that will be used for this film, but the rigs in my film are rigs that I CREATED MYSELF. FROM SCRATCH. And when I first started moving the body joints around, every single click-and-drag caused my heart to skip a beat because I was so nervous that something would be wrong with the rig and I’d have to go back and fix it (or even worse, re-do the whole rig… AGAIN). I’ve never animated a character that I also designed, modelled, and rigged, so it’s incredibly scary moving this thing around, because anything that goes wrong at this point… will be entirely my fault.

But enough doom and gloom — the model is cute (in my opinion), the rig works well (I had to figure out a few things here and there about the IK/FK switching controls, but that goes for any new rig I guess), and I’ve already gotten about 180 frames of rough, blocked out poses! Yes, it’s not much, but the fact that I could not only get the rig to move in the way I wanted it, but it also LOOKED RIGHT when I moved it, is just… it’s exhilarating. I had admittedly been scared to start animation for the last few days because of how daunting the anticipated work all is, but now that I’m over that hump, it sort of feels like I’ve discovered a brand new pasture to run around in. I’m free!

With that said, though, I fully plan on documenting the start-dates and end-dates of when I finish each shot, so that i soon can have an idea of how fast I work, and then be able to calculate how soon I can potentially be done with this film, hehe. But that doesn’t change the fact that this first shot will probably present a lot of difficulties and snags, (and therefore take longer than average to complete) what with it being the first shot and all, so I won’t be too hard on myself for this first one.

So yea. The animation gears are finally turning! And it’s beyond exciting because this is the moment I’ve been feverishly working towards ever since this semester began. But hey, it only took me 4 weeks! That’s not too bad I guess.

Anyways, to reward myself, I’m going to have a full night of sleep tonight. Good night!

– Max