Its bin a while but we finished!

So basically I havn't posted for a while because of Rave-on-Air and essay submissions, and after that time was so tight. Basically the group decision was that there was no way I was going to finish animating the dump in a week, so we changed the dump scene to be more of an extension of the intro. (Unfortunately it's also the only scene where the whole dialogue is important and couldn't simply be cut down like the other scenes.) This meant a series of stills framed on a storybook looking page with text instead. While I am very dissapointed I didn't get to finish the animation this was definately for the best under the time constraints.

Here's a quick example of the final still. where I used a volume light and incandecense to make a glow come from the open wardrobe.

Still all finished now and I think we did very good on this project. Editing took no time at all, though After Effects took a bit longer for me as I had to get the storybook looking good with fading text etc. We are getting it onto a DVD today and taking it up to Paul, and I think we can all be pretty proud of this.

quick animation update

Added a few more poses, a little kick of the floor, a bit more sulking. you know how it is.

Fail free day! hurrah!!

Today was pretty much a good day. I had to spend a fair bit of time fixing Dans issues with the rig, as he needed to be able to pivot the whole body from the head so Bare Bear could fall over properly from his upside down pose. I also needed to find a way around the facial expressions, as we discovered today blendshapes weren't working. Probably because we tried doing them now after we started animation, but as a solution (possibly temporary as Yaniv thinks he knows a way to do it) I fixed up the brows to all the characters with cluster deformers so we can animate the mesh directly. This works even if nothing else does.

So as for my own animation I made a fairly decent start today I'd say. I decided to scrap the idea of him starting in a sitting pose as it's going to take far too long to work a way around it. Instead I just started him off standing and scuffing his feet a bit. I have a long way to go, but I at least have some rough opening poses. I have been working mainly in stepped animation as it is more like industry practice, and I find it useful for blocking out poses. You can see above how it translates from stepped to spline, and you can also see what I mean when I say it needs more work. A lot more inbetweens.

While I've been finding this difficult because the actions of the bear in the dump are so vague, (dragging out roughly 700 frames of him "looking embarrassed and shy"), I have managed to get over my fear of animating today. Using a character set has definately helped as all I have to think about is poses for the time being, and keyframing is less complex than I remember.

Just as a laugh, Alec showed me a cool trick with the rig, and that is the "paper Bare Bear" look, made by scaling it on the Z axis. It looks awesome, and the animation still works, but it does go a bit crazy in places, so it's not really worth persuing as a genuine idea. Here it is anyway.

Sitting down fail.

It pains me to report more failure, but now that I've decided to scrap the camera movement and just get on with animating the bear more issues have come up. The shorts are causing some serious grief, as they are just not flexible enough for him to be able to sit down or even bend. The way I had weighted it before they did not deform with the leg movments. I weighted it this way because the deform badly with the leg movments. You can see what happens with both here. the first image is without hip weights, and the second is with. Im sure you'll agree they both look aweful. I don't exactly know what to do about it.

Pan fail

Ok so I got the scaling sorted out, I grouped the environment and scaled that up rather than scaling the rig down. I also turned the ambient colour up on all the bears textures to get him to actually show up. Now I am faced with a new problem having just tried to animate the opening camera pan. Basically because I have modelled only to fit one frame when I move the camera everything falls out of place, and the lighting and textures look terrible. Observe:

How rubbish is that. Keyframing the objects that fall out of place is one option but it doesn't sort out the ugliness of the textures and lighting. After a discussion we came up with two possible solutions.

1. cut the pan out altogether and just have the title fade to the opening shot.

2. do the camera work on After Effects/Premiere.

The latter would involve rendering out the correct timing of still frames before any animation is involved. Its probably worth doing that anyway, because I can always cut out that section later if it looks terrible.

Rigs and skinning done!

Basically today I sorted out every problem with the rigs that was remaining. The zip was grouped into itself and parented to the upper back bone, which sorted that out, and I gave it blink attributes and the squash and stretch handles. I also fixed it up with a master controller enabling everyone to scale and rotate the whole thing problem-free. I then skinned the naked bear and did the same things for that one. It didn't take too much time to be honest, so I decided to sort out the shorts with a quick cylindrical map of a heart pattern I made in Photoshop. It took me a couple of attempts to get this right, because with the way I was doing it origonally the texture wasnt following the uv's they were assigned to. Never mind a bit of fiddling and it seems to work now, so it's all good.

I am now left with an issue though, as I have been working in centimeters whereas everyone else has been working in metres. This hasn't been an issue up until now, in fact I'd probably go as far as to say I've had less issues with my scene as a result. Now, however, it has come back to bite me. Despite the fact that the rig is capable of scaling, on such a large scale the model does end up slightly deformed and just wrong. You can probably make out what I mean in this render where I attempted to import the bear into the environment. You can also see my next issue, which is to do with the lighting of the scene. Bare Bear is totally sillhouted in the area where he's meant to be standing.

Yup, some serious sorting out all round is definately in order here. At least everyone else can animate now though, so I'd still consider this to be a good days work. Im nearly ready to animate, but I'm going to have to deal with this tomorrow as my brains switching off now.

panda, weights, done!

Sultans rigging lecture proved very useful yesterday, as he showed me how to do a spine in a more professional way, encorporating both FK and Ik by using extra joint chains and grouping/parenting/orient constraints. Its all a bit technical to post I think, but I have a good understanding of it now. The method of grouping an object to itself in order to keep it independant from itself has also helped immensely as it seems to solve many problems that I find commonly occur. He also showed a method of parenting the object group to a joint and then uparenting it to keep the rotational axis of the joint. This helps with orient constraints, as normally I would have to change the local rotaional axis manually to make it fit. I used this technique to create some ear controllers. Basically the rig is now fully updated to encorporate all of this, and skinning was no problem at all. I have included a switch to turn the model from low to high rez, and a similar switch to turn the spine controls off if necissary, as Dan said it looked a bit complex. I also put on pole vector attributes for the elbows and knees in case of preference to use that.

Also, the problem with the knees caving in I solved without Sultan, basically because I'm THAT awesome. It was doing that because they were too bent at the point of skinning, so naturally when they straighten out that has an effect on the geometerey. Straightened the legs out a bit, and its fixed!

This is almost ready to animate now, I just need to sort out blink attributes and the zip control (it doesnt follow the skin). We are currently testing to see if we can apply new textures to the skinned model without it messing things up. If it doesn't then that should save a whole load of time.

imported wardrobe

quick update, imported the finished wardrobe textured by Phil. I also wacked in two more random objects; one of the truck pistons that were offshot in the foreground, and a quickly modelled ironing board behind the bin. It's so dark you can hardly see it but it doesnt matter too much as it still adds to the cluttered feel of it.

image adjustments

1. Before adjustments

2. with occlusion

3. occlusion, brightness/contrast, saturation

4. Just brightness/contrast, saturation

Had a quick play around on Photoshop to see how I could potentially enhance the scene on After Effects. basically every adjustment increases the image quality and adds depth and colour to it, though with these images in mind I'm no longer sure if occlusion is really going to be necissary for my scene. Everything suddenly becomes a bit too bright for my liking.

Look at my dump

Heres a quick update. I applied a rusty metal texture to the dumpster, and a normal metal texture to the bin and the hubs. Due to the dim lighting I honestly dont think it needs to be mapped perfectly as you can barely make it out, so it would kind of be a waste of time. I also threw some straight coloured materials onto other objects such as the washing machine, and threw in a wire and plug. I also replaced the wardrobe with the better model made by Phil, and did some soft modifications to the ground around it. While I was using the soft mod tool I thought I'd get rid of the shape coming out of the bin and use the soft mod to get the 'gunk pouring out' effect. I think it looks a lot better. Finally I used an automatic mapping for the ground to sort out the stretched bits of texture on the tire tracks and it worked perfectly. I think it's really coming along now, and could perhaps only benefit from some more objects scattered around, though I'm still not sure if that would overcrowd the scene.

Today I also made some adjustments to the rig. I set up a booleans attribute to control the visibilty of the pole vector controls, as Dan and Phil say they rarely use them. They are still there if needed, but now there is the option to switch them off so they don't get in the way too much. I also did some work on the driven keys for the hand curls, as they weren't quite tight enough after some skinning tests.

Rig- pretty much done

As promised, I spent the day rigging, and pretty much got it done. It's a relatively standard setup and doesn't vary that much from previous rigs. Except for the fact that it went smoothly as I now know what kind of problems to expect with the particular techniques in question and how to prevent them/solve them. This is a vast improvement on timescale compared to last projects as well, so I'm pretty happy. The main difference is in the hand setup; rather than making the animators keyframe specific attributes in the channel box, I set up some sliders: one for the thumb curl, the finger curl, the thumb spread and the finger spread. You can see what I mean here..

The main thing I would like to find out how to resolve is the inward knee-pop when the leg is stretched out. You can see what I mean here..

I will seek the assistance of Efe Sultan (rigging specialist) when he's in on tuesday.

Other than that though I'm pleased with the rapid progress I've made with it today, and now can only wait for the model to be finalised and textured properly so I can get on with the skinning. I can then also do the zip control and squash and stretch deformer just to ice the cake! In the mean time, back to the dump!

Lighting sorted

I spent most of my maya time today sorting the lights out. A fair amount of subtle differences have happened here and it looks a lot better. The ramp shader on the sky has been switched so the lighter colour is at the bottom and the darkness at the top is a lot more defined. The spotlight on the wardrobe has been changed to a subtle blue colour, and I put a rough colour on it instead. I also got rid of the ambient light as it was lighting the whole scene, when really I needed the background to be completely dark. This did cause the foreground to also go completely dark and all that could be seen was the spotlit areas. An area light for the foreground helped sort this out, as did softening the spotlights and increasing the incandescence on the moon to take the edge off.

I modelled out the cardboard box and placed a soft spotlight on it as well, so now we have a nice area of foreground lighting that should in theory attract the focus to the 3 key objects; Bare Bear, the wardrobe, and the carboard box that he came from.

I also rearranged some of the other objects to make the scene look more cluttered, and added a couple more randoms, placing some a plain colour on the dumpster. It's really starting to take shape, but according to the schedule I need to rig the character by the end of this week. Especially seeing as we have a rigging guest lecturer in next tuesday, and I want to have any questions that might occur come up before then. I can carry on with this afterwards. I'm not actually behind though, as I've already done some texturing and I'm pretty much happy to call this scene lit.

few extra bits

Just a quick update, I now have a washing machine and a bin spewing gunk into the scene. Nice

Temporary lighting solution

For the sake of being able to see the rendered scene better I decided to get Alec to help me light it now. This is probably only temporary though, and is liable to change as the scene progresses as we are not really content with it. I do however like the higlights and the blue tint. I am also happy with the colour of the sky, and the way the wardrobe is lit by a brown light rather than a blue light, as it makes it stand out more. As Dan and Phil pointed out though, the background needs to be almost sillhouetted.

As far as the models concerned, I have some tire tracks in the foreground now. I need a lot more basic random objects for the background, and some well modelled ones for the foreground. Everyone thinks a wachine machine is very necissary, so I will begin with that.

Modelling the dump

According to schedule we all need to be modelling already, and for a change we are actually hitting targets for this project. Today we had contextual studies in the morning so we missed half a day of modelling, but stormed a load of work out in the afternoon. This is pretty much where it's at.



I used the rough ground layout we all modelled yesterday and built it up from there. The lights were already in place as well thanks to the hand of Alec. I imported the dump truck and got rid of the parts that were not going to be in shot. Basically this time We are all working to specific shots as we have decided the camera will remain stationary for every scene. This means we can work only to what we need to see rather than fully building an environment that needs to look good from every angle. It still needs more work, i.e. more random objects, but we are all making very quick progress and should be ready in time.

Dump truck!

Started modelling for the dump today. Im using the caterpillar dump truck as a reference for the model. I couldn't find any decent shots of the front and back, though apparently the front isn't even going to be on-screen so I needn't worry about that. I do however need to find some kind of reference for the details on the back as I don't really know what it needs to look like.

Starting out

Having decided initially we would try and demonstrate as many potential styles as possible for Bare Bear, I started out by making a rough model to practice some toon shader. Above are a few examples. Im not so sure about this style though, and I don't think anyone else is either. While it creates a nice looking 2D effect that is clearly childish and colourful, I'm just not sure if it's really what we are looking for. This would perhaps be useful if we were making it look like a childrens book, but as of yet we are still not fully decided on a style. One other style we have to compare this to already is the fur tests made by Dan:

It's a very different approach to the toon shading. The benefits are primarily texture; something toon shading can never have.