Happy_Endings_28/11/13

Today is the last day of our week and I have finally caught up on EVERYTHING!

Now i am trying to give our group an extra hand by completing anything that is left to do.

We have started rednering and are in the process of tidying up our shots and animating the last few shots we have left.

I animated shot 20 today which was one of the few shots left. It was a simple scene that involved katie lying on the ground with the tyre swing swinging very lightly.

The hardest part of this shot was trying to position katie into a believable pose where she looks like she has fallen over unconscious.

Every time we tried to position her, the mesh would glitch and would muck up to the point where I had to edit the mesh a little so that it didn't look out of place.

 This is the exact same shot from the animatic that we had. I couldn't quite get Katie to pose like this as her rig wouldn't allow her body to twist as much and her arms are much shorter which won't allow for the reach she has in the animatic. We compromised by slightly changing her pose to one where she is lying face down instead of on her side and we fully hid the bottom leg because the mesh screwed up when it was visible.

I am really happy with the way the shot turned out.

Happy_Endings_27/11/13

We are nearing the end of our animation and have started rendering certain scenes.

We have tested the lighting and we are trying to match the contrast in each shot so that nothing looks out of place.

I have also managed to finish the last two shots that I needed to do.

I had shot 4 and 5 left to complete and they take place right after each other so that made it a little easier to figure out how I was going to animate these shots.

Here is how those shots turned out.

 

 

The first is of Katie drawing a tree which will be textured in the final shot. This is a shot from her point of view but is essentially the same scene in the next shot.

 

 

She draws the tree and then lowers her pad to find a tree has appeared in front of her out of nowhere. For this shot I grouped the pad to her thumb which allowed me to move her arm and the pad together to make her move her arm down and out of the way.

This next screen shot is of the next shot, shot 5. In this shot, it basically replays what just happened in the last one but from a different viewpoint. This shot is of katie, capturing her expression as she lowers her pad and sees the tree.

She sees the tree and is surprised that it appeared and is feeling very pleasant about it. She smiles her unique little smile as she realises her drawing came to life.

Theses screenshots don't really portray exactly what the scene is trying to convey but when you see the whole shot as an animation, it makes a lot of sense and gels together really well.

Happy_Endings_26/11/13

The next shot I had to animate was shot 14.

This was my favourite shot as it was a shot of katie when she starts getting sick and is coughing, and she drops her pen and her book which I had to animate falling to the floor.

I had to animate the book not only falling, but reacting as it hit the ground. I made it so that the book kind of bounced up a little and the pad opens up as it naturally hits the ground. I also done the crayon hitting the ground and rolling away. The camera stays static the whole time the animation happens.

I also animated katies legs so she takes a small step as the book and crayon drops.

I think this scene was the one that turned out best for me in terms of the animation for the book dropping.

Happy_Endings_25/11/13

I managed to finish my first shot last thursday and have started working on my next one, shot 18.

Shot 18 is similar to the first shot i animated, shot 16.

You only see her hand and the tyre swing again but in this shot, she is struggling a lot more to stay upright and is losing all her strength very fast, becoming very weak. you can see this in the shot because her hand shakes and trembles as she reaches out for the tyre swing, still not quite close enough to grab it.

It took me a while to figure out how exactly I was going to get the hand to shake/tremble.

What I ended up having to do was set a key on every single frame I wanted the hand to shake in, then slightly move the hand just a fraction, left and right in every frame and set it. It worked fairly well and looked believable as a slight tremor in her hand.

As well as completing this scene I have also managed to complete nearly all of my remaining work that I personally had to complete. I have also realised all of the shots I have animated have had static camera shots which is just the way we have shot our animation and found that for the scenes I shot, this was most effective in contrast to the whole animation. I did however set up the camera for shot 6 which was set up to zoom during that scene and the shot turned out really well. Jitesh managed to do an amazing job timing the zoom which I helped him achieve to capture a great shot.

Happy_Endings_21/11/13

Today I have finally started animating! I have been given a total of 5 scenes to animate myself. All of my scenes take place in the dream world which will be a lot of fun to animate since I had nothing to do with the construction of this scene itself.

The first scene I decided to animate was shot 16. This shot consisted of Katie reaching out for her tyre swing, not quite able to reach it. it is a very short scene with only the movement of her hand to animate.

In this shot, katie is reaching for the tyre swing as she almost reaches her destination.

As you can see she attempts to grab at it but is still too far away and by this point is getting quite sick.

I found tricky to get the right shot and the right length because her shoulder kept wanting to pop into the scene but I managed to figure out a way where that didn't continue to happen.

Happy_Endings_20/11/13

I have been discussing with Zac and Marc about how we will approach lighting the real world scene.

We had to play around a bit but we had much help from the fact that there are already lights built into our scene. The hospital lights mounted on the walls give off a bit of light and one of them happens to be situated directly above katies head.

We had to adjust the brightness and put a tint on it to give katie a bit of colour. We added spotlights into where the hospital lights are modelled to which produced a great overhead light and changed the colour to a yellow tint that just adds to the shine. We adjusted the cone angle and enlarged it to capture her whole face.

This is before we added the lighting

The light that is mounted on the wall sits just above the drawings in the picture, shining down on katies face. We also had to make sure that the light wasn't going to be too bright.

 

It looks like the light is too bright in this scene but it actually lights up perfectly when you see the proper scene.

Happy_Endings_18/11/13

For our real world scene we finally came together and agreed on a suitable floor and walls for the scene.

The checkered floor i originally created was too dark for a hospital setting so we have kept it nice and simple with a white tiled floor which has been bump mapped to give it that extra effect.

Marc Is in charge of animating this scene so he has added cameras and has started creating the pan shots that are going to be in the scene. We have also been trying to get the lighting right so that it looks authentic and will come up nice and clear when we render.

Here is a screenshot of what the walls and floor look like now.

As you can see, the floor and the walls better contrast the rest of the scene now to give it an authentic hospital feel.

All that is left is to complete all the picture frames and adjust the lighting.

Happy_Endings_12/11/13

With our real world scene almost complete, I have started putting in the minor details and pictures of katies drawings all over the walls.

We designed and drew up many different pictures for katies drawings and we had to make them look as kiddy as possible, as if katie herself was the one that drew them.

In most of her drawings, we tried to reference many of the things that appear in her dream world so that it came across that she conjured them up, not out of nothing, but from real world things she had encountered herself. Some of the objects were referenced from her drawings, others were referenced from wall decorations, toys, photographs, etc.

Some of the other drawings we used, we referenced from the other groups animations as a nice gesture towards the class.

The starfish drawing is a nod to group 1's starfish animation that they are working on, the second drawing of the airplane is a nod to group 3's animation. We even managed to do a rough kiddy drawing of our tutor Raj who has been our motivation and drive behind the animation to complete it with great quality.

Happy_Endings_14/11/13

Today I spent most of the day attempting to tidy and fix all of the small things wrong with our scene such as renaming files, adjusting textures and retexturing certain things like the walls and the floor.

This took alot of time as all our textures in our source images folder were really jumbled up.

Because I renamed all the textures into an organised file, I had to also reapply all of the textures again into a copied scene which would be our final working file.

I rearranged everything into a numerical order, easy to follow and easy to locate all of our textures.

We have also almost finished the Dream world and are almost ready to start animating.

 As you can see in the above picture, we have found a unique design for our dreamworld.

Happy_Endings_07/11/13

I am making a lot of progress on the texturing and have now started texturing all of the hospital machinery that will be appearing in our scene. They proved a little tricky as they have multiple textures for different parts. For example, i had to texture all of the creens but also add different textures for the casing of the machines, Metal textures and textures for buttons etc.

 

 

The ventilator was very interesting to texture as I had never seen a ventilator before. So i did some digging and found some references as to what they look like. However, I found that the screen didn't quite look like this and had another one that stuck out a little. So what I did was create the ventilator screen texture with a black outlining which actually gave the machine a nice look. I kept the heart monitor pretty basic.

The IV machine I found really fun to do because at has many different aspects to it. I had to make the IV bag and the tube transparent with a slight bluish tinge that makes it look like it is holding liquid. To do this I changed the transparency of the IV bag and the tube and liquid so that you can see through it. The IV was modelled with a screen even though they don't usually have them so I had to improvise and used another heartrate monitor screen that looks completely different from the ones i have already used to give it an authentic look.

Happy_Endings_06/11/13

Today i have started texturing all of the furniture in the scene. There is quite a lot of objects that need a wooden texture so I had to create a wooden look to the textures.

I ended up getting tricky in photoshop, using a basic woody orangey brown colour as the base, then i applied streaks with the brush to create a grainy look that wood has.

I also used the burn tool which helped give the wood an authentic look making it look like wood which is what i need.

 

For the side table with wheels, I only applied texture to the actual table. The steel frame and the wheels I just used simple blinn and lambert colours to get the desired effect. The cutlery and the tray I also used ordinary colours because there is no point in texturing plastic as the look will remain the same in this setting.

 

 

 

The chair and the side drawers were just as easy as they wheeley side table to texture. They all differentiate a little from each other as Icreated different textures for each object.

Happy_Endings_05/11/13

Most of this week is going to comprise of me finishing all of the UV maps and textures in the real world. I have already successfully managed to UV Map all of the necessary objects in our scene and now I am spending time creating a lot of textures.

Some of the objects proved very tricky to texture and some were going to be really complicated so I automatic mapped some for a quick map which i rearranged and tidied into an understandable and readable format.

For the bookshelf, I had to seperate all of the UV's that belonged to the pages, the covers and the shelf itself so that I could colour it all in one go without having to colour each individual face of the UV's. There was alot on this map that I had to fit in. I kept the colours basic and added thin streak marks on the pages to give it a realistic look as if they were actual pages.

This is what they looked like when they were finished.

Happy_Endings_04/11/13

I've started working on UV mapping and texturing some of Katies clothes. I created the UV map then did a rough texture of what her clothes are going to look like so that we could see if the UV map worked.

It turned out pretty well and Jika ended up finishing it off with his own textures that he had drawn up. They really made katie stand out.

Here is the rough version I came up with:

This is a screenshot of what I was designing as a mock up texture in photoshop for katies shirt.

As you can see i just did a rough drawing of the patterns to see if they would look even and proportioned on her clothes.

 

 

 

 As you can see below, the mock up texture was looking good in the sense that it isn't stretched and there are no edges that cut into the patterns.

Happy_Endings_31/10/13

With the progression of the texturing in the real world scene, we have started to think about necessary textures and the different ways to apply them. It took us some time to find the right texture for the scenery outside the window as we wanted something believable that katie might see.

We tried a city view but it seemed quite bland and wasn't exactly a very pleasant view.

This was just a funny look at what her room would look like if she had zombies attempting to break into her room as if the whole entire city was overrun by zombies and she awakes in a post apocalyptic world where she survived by being in a coma and awakes to fend for herself and set out on an EPIC quest where she must find out what happened to her parents. Armed with only a machete she found in an abandoned hospital corridor, she locks herself in for 10 years, building her strength and aquiring a set of skills necessary for tracking down the ruthlessly undead and becoming the hunter and the key to ensuring the survival of the entire human race. Obviously we did not go with this story...
It was too awesome to comprehend.

 

 

 

This is the final texture we are going to use:

 

 

Not the best screenshot but you can see that we have gone with a very modern look outdoors with a modern building, possibly another part of the hospital, that really sticks out and adds to the realism of our scene.

 

Happy_Endings_29/10/13

So we have been throwing around new ideas for the trees as we want something that will suit katie and will reflect her imagination.


Here are a couple of concepts we have come up with that are more in line of the look we are aiming for.


This tree is more along the lines of what we want but not quite there yet.

 This tree is my favourite but would prove really tricky to model and animate as it is in parts.

We also finished texturing the flowers and animating them which turned out really cool. they have a unique look which is very ideal in the dream world we have created.

Happy_Endings_23/10/13

I finished my model sheet of the flowers and have produced some models which turned out really well.

I have also started testing colours for the trees which will probably change completely. Instead of using green trees, we were going to attempt to use a colour scheme of blue, pink and yellow, mayybe purple, to style our scenes.

Not really happy with these trees so we are going to come up with some more concepts. These trees look too ordinary and won't stand out.

Happy_Endings_22/10/13

Today I started drawing up concepts, model sheets for the flowers in our scene. I did 5 different flowers with completely different styles to see what would fit best with our animation.

Here is one of the flowers that i chose to do a model sheet based on. It has a front view, side view, and a three quarter view. This is my drawing scanned into photoshop.

 

 

 

Here I am going over the flower in photoshop to give it a more clean finish.

 

 

Happy_Endings_15/10/13

We have started our group projects and have been assigned 3 different groups.
 In my group is Jitesh, Jika, Hope, Zack, Marc and myself. We have a really well rounded group and i think we will all have different strengths to bring to our project. Hope has been selected as Team leader.

We are working on different ideas and storyboards to use for our story. We have been given a certain amount of weeks to complete different parts of our animation which is broken down in three different stages.

Pre-Production

Where we will brainstorm our ideas, come up with a story and storyboard it so that we have a great understanding of exactly what shots we will need and what the scenes are going to portray.
We also will decide on who is doing what jobs and try to split the work evenly, but at the same time, try to utilise each others strengths to ensure we have a very high quality animation that has been well thought out.

Production.

This is the stage where we start, modelling, rigging and animating our story. Adjusting it and bringing our storyboard to life. this will be our busiest stage where we will all need to really buckle down and ensure we have everything thouroughly thought out.

Post_Production.

This will be the most tedious part of our project as we will have to edit and render our final animation. Depending on how we make our animation and what paths we choose to follow to create it, will determine how long our animation will take to render.

Happy_Endings_19/11/13

I am one day away from animating!

My group has already started animating but I have been doing my best to finish all the textures in our real world scene. The reason my texturing is taking a little longer is because I have been going all out to provide really detailed textures where need be. Such as all the photos in our scene. I have made them look as realistic to the scene as possible. What I had to do was model katie into different poses, changing the textures of her clothes and taking "semi-professional" photos of her in different settings.

To get the realistic photo with her parents, I had to do a quick model of both the bottom half of her parents. I chose to do it like the old style cartoons where they would only draw half the character. This proved to be pretty cool and made a great photo.

The picture frames turned out great, we have sorted the lighting for the scene. Now I will start animating tomorrow and hopefully things will go smoothly.

Happy_Endings_13/11/13

This week I have almost finished texturing our entire real world scene. Because I have UV mapped and textured a majority of the scene, I have been left to do all the UV Maps and textures in our real world.

I encountered a few problems when texturing and trying to make our scene as smooth and as bug free as possible. I had to remodel a wall because the geometry wouldn't allow it to be smooth which I managed to fix by replacing the cube model of the wall with a window in it with a plane that I extruded to get the window sil. I added edge loops and now it's working perfectly in the file.

I also replaced the floor with a checkered green and white marble design. The green and white checkers references her jigsaw puzzle floor in her imaginary world. I'm not happy with that look though so I will probably edit the texture and make the green a lot lighter so that it feels more like a hospital. I found that hospitals usually use really soft colours that are easy on the eyes so that might be something for me to consider when texturing the rest of the scene.

Happy_Endings_11/11/13

We have come along way with our project already and look to be on track with everything.

Mark has finished modelling our main character Katie and now Jitesh is figuring out the rigging.

The rest of us are working on finishing all the textures, hopefully this week, so that we can get a start on animating our story.

My texturing and UV mapping skills are getting more confident as I have done many more UV maps and textures over the last week.

As you can see in the following picture, we have already textured quite a few things in our real world side of the story.

We are trying to get a reasonably high level of detail in our "real world" scene. I have been trying to think of simple yet effective ideas to incorporate into our scene. I came up with a great idea for the book on her side table by her bed. I decided to texture "Alice in wonderland" onto the book by her table to make it look like that could be her favourite book. It also works really well with the story as we originally used concept ideas from Wonderland in the book Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll to use for her dreamworld as it is heavily based in fantasy.

To cut down on time texturing and UV mapping, we have tried to think of simple things that could be coloured using simple blinn/lambert colours in Maya to colour certain objects that won't need a whole lot of texturing, such as metal objects, plastic, picture frames and paint pots.
An example of this is the paint pots in the following picture. They only have simple colours however I still UV mapped the paintbrushes and the cup they are in to make the bristles on the brush and the brushes themselves stand out a little bit more. I also used the burn tool in photoshop to add slight discolouration on the cup making it look a little dirty with paint marks.

We are trying to get the real world scene completely finished by the end of this week so that we can focus on her dreamworld where a lot of the animation takes place. I will mention to Hope that we need to have another group meeting to figure out who is animating what and to make sure the work for the animating is evenly distributed.