An Article in Lithuania's Largest Newspaper

A Young  Lithuanian Emigrant  Creates Portraits of Baltic Gods 

A very cheerful start of the day,  reading a newspaper with an article about my own animations! (:]

Few days in 2013 I was contacted by the largest newspaper in Lithuania, 'Lietuvos Rytas' . Editor Dovile Lebrikaite has interviewed me about my character designs and animations, focusing mainly on  The Baltic Pixie. 

 If you can read Lithuanian, find the article here

The Baltic Pixie Animation

Pixies are charming fairytale character, different in Celtic, Germanic and Baltic folk stories. 'The Baltic Pixie' is an animated short presenting an intricate and ambiguous Pixie character from Baltic culture. The queen of all the pixies , Laumu Laume Vaiva, introduces her kind as inviting, yet dangerous creatures and it is revealed what gifts they’d bring and how dangerous they might become to an everyday man.

Last Touches before the Submission of Major Project

Some final design works on publishing before the hand in , which is tomorrow.

I am expecting a book to arrive, however it seems it will miss the official time of the  hand in just by couple of hours, acording to the package tracking information. It is slightly unfortunate, for I have planed to present the cd in the book instead of DVD case. Well, it only seems we can't control every aspect of project work. Still, this one seems to be a promissing submission and I am well happy to be finishing my bachelors degree with the kind of hand in of  tomorrow. :]

High-Rez Stills of the Baltic Pixie Animation

 These stills are already in the Art of book, but I think it was worth to uplod them as self-standing images on blog too.

  

 

 

 

I believe this should be the last publication on The Baltic Pixie project for a while, as I won't be embedding the finished animation for a while. I have submitted it to a student animation festival organized by Cartoon Brew and in their rules have specified, that the animated short can’t have an online presence for a while.

Major’s submission deadline is only couple of days away and there are still bits to be resolved.

Character Demoreel 2012

This demoreel focuses only on design, modeling and texturing sides of character pipeline. Animation specific reel will come later.

The Art of The Baltic Pixie

The Art of the Baltic Pixie by JJ Jolanta Jasiulionyte

The Baltic Pixie Render Tests

I am slowly moving into rendering, with animation waiting to be polished and secondary animation to be set up. These are some examples I consider as final looks of the shot. Im am happy with the evident range of emotions and moods. Put the right two images next to each other, and she looks like two different characters. I see the intense facial rigging was worth while.

I have also revisited her texture maps and shaders.

Again, Having analised Jenny Dunbar's, my voiceover actresses recording, I can say there is not a single syllable with out amazing depth to it ! Wow, she is amazing!

This is at least.... FOR NOW !

Untill ! Your Nails!

Alone ! Remain...

    

  

We Gather By the Riverside

  

 

BP Animating Progress and Process

It is the end of second week of animating the Queen of Baltic Pixies. I have roughly 53 seconds animated. This week was generous giving me 6 seconds a day.

 In the process of animating Vaiva, I start with blocking key poses which tell the story within the shot. After that I make sure to create some equally strongly posed in-betweens. Third phase is adding some delayed animation poses for separate parts of the body. All of this done in stepped mode of animation (non-smooth flow of action) . Having done that I hope I have mapped out something decent and with my fingers crossed spline the animation curves.

 Still not good. Splined animation gives dirty anchors and brings out mistakes naked to the surface. At this point I work on ‘cushioning’, as Richad Williams terms it. It is essentially making sure that there are not a single hard stop within animation curves, meaning every action would start or end incrementally and organically, unless otherwise intended. Lastly, refining and tweaking anything to hit the right timing is what I end up with.

Also, when thinking about the quality of animation I almost never consider film, for, as I mentioned a while ago, one animator has the whole year for 2 min of animation. Instead I always have in mind a commercial quality type of animation, for a typical commercial project has roughly the time I have to animate the character, which is – from 3 to 5 weeks ( 3 for me).

 I am reaching the ending scenes at the moment and am hoping to move to some secondary animation ( rainbow, riverside, ‘Laumikas’ and so on. )

Vaiva's Animating Progress

First week of animating has finished, so far I have 18 seconds of animation. Here I add a short glimpse to Vaivas introduction animation. To see clean shape deformation it is rendered out as AO pass (ambient Occlussion)

The rest of planned animating time ( 2 weeks) have the rest of 70 seconds…. However it is far from bad news. Usually getting into animating and solving those last rigging problems, which appear only when controls are used intensively, do eat some time.

Also, I thought this is an interesting fact: A standard length of completed animation per animator, in studios such as Pixar, is 1,5 min maybe 2 min …per year (!) … I suppose therefore everyone in CG Arts who’s in this task of bringing their characters to life during the relatively short time we have left , should take this fact into consideration and in a way have realistic expectations.

Lastly, I feel fully in the mindset for animating and thinking with the character ( Vaiva now appears in my dreams too ) And it seems that couple of scenes are asking for slight modification to work out audience’s distancing to and from the character better.

Acting Reference

It was clear very soon, that acting reference was key for creating Vaiva’s performance. So many expression nuances were hard to capture solely in storyboards or pre-vizes. The images represent stills of the reference footage.

 

With the help of time code and the grid over the footage, I’m comfortable to attempt constructing accurately timed and well spaced performance.

Vaiva's Controls Test Animation

This is an exercise of Vaiva’s body animation controls. The animated sequence has only some indication of her character, however I was more concerned with learning the workings of her rig and warming up.

 

 After this test I see that some controls work very closely together, so it means when using a particular handle it would only work correctly if couple of others go with it, for example: her feet controls work together with the middle ring of the spine, which is responsible for the skirt and the avoiding of leg/skirt geometry clashes.
  Also, great consideration should be taken to create organic and feminine animation instead of something closer to Ivan the Bird – clunky robotic animation :D However I have great belief in acting reference I am filming at the moment (with some struggle taken to borrow a camera from Universities resources for photography students). Lets see how it will work :]

Vaiva's First Expressions

These are Vaiva’s first expressions , having just finished rigging. :]

 

To create suitable rig for Vaiva it was essential to think about her performance a lot. This guided me through rigging process. It was very clear what type of expressions she’d need most for example, snarly lips, squinty eyes. On the other hand, a very gentle and motherly smile too.

 

 It has been nearly 3 weeks of rigging Vaiva. Most of the time spent preparing the character for lip-synch and facial animation. 

I am in currently researching animation techniques (Animator’s survival Kit of course) , and references for animation . Also, filming action for animation reference. Soon to come will be a test walk cycle animation.

Laume's Character Rig

For a good week I was busy with creating rig for Laume. She has a fairly standart character body rig. The only exception being her chicken-like legs: her toes have more functionality than a real human's leg:  behaving more like fingers.

Her face is the complicated part. It has now over 60 controls for tongue, eyebrows, cheeks, lips, squinting ande else. She now can  blink, her mouth is also in place and working but the daunting task of rigging  hasn't finished yet, for I have still to make blend shapes for lipsynch and general expressiveness.

Unfortunately while rigging, something must've broken links of my textures and because I have combined my body parts it will ask for me to do a carefull face by face selection to reaply textures again , so I wasn't able to upload nice renders of her posed and texture. 




 

Vaivas Body Colour Map

A little nuance.. I ran out of space for photos on blogger, so from now on I'm joinin photo bucket.
Vaiva's body colour is almost done. I'm thinking to revisit the top and match it to skirt's colour because it doesn't seem to blend that well now.



In couple of next days I'll be developing surface shaders .

Vaiva's Texturing Progress: The Head

Friday I have started texturing Vaiva. The head was challenging in that every storke was either working or not. Head's texturing so far is purely a colour map, meaning surface shaders are not yet created. It is a common aproach I take, after work placement in picassopictures, where purely colour map had to look as if it had many layering to it. So  I move  to creating surface shaders only after thecolour pass looks as good as possible.

Original Concept:

What I found extremely helpful was James Gorney's face colour zone scheme:

 I've looked at some eye shading tutorials. It went through a detailed process in photoshop and maya. 

The rest of the body as well as surface shaders ,  I suppose,  will come along over next week :]

Details and Finessing of Vaiva's Model

Monday onwards, I was defining the character to its details. I have added amber chest, interior of the mouth, chicken feather part of the dress.

I have resolved body parts which needed great detail: chicken like feets, hair and face. 

In Mudbox I've created high rez meshes and imported those back to maya to extract normal maps.

Not without a reason many sculptors noted that essential mesh doesn't take too Long to build up, but the fine detail takes 10 times longer.But modelling, I believe is now finished and I'll  work now on texturing (!)

Vaivas Body Modeling Progress

It is nearly done and ready to be UVd and taken to Mudbox for fine details.

These stills are little bit dated, as I have talked to Alan and done some tweaks to her crown, face and general topology.

Sketching out Vaiva's Body Model

Progress in modelling Vaiva's body. So far it is only a sketchy map out, with only hands being modelled to the fine detail.
This is helping me now to see how 2d designs translate in 3d. I see which areas need to be more punchy.

Detailed modelling is on its way.

Vaiva's Head Model Turnaround

Vaiva’s head model  consists of head mesh, hair and the crown.

There are hints of chicken-like anatomy in her facial features: elongated sharp nose, round big eyes. Also royal grace is another intention: long thin neck, small chin in an overall thin face, but at the same time her face doesn’t lack volume in cheekbones or the hair for contrast. With some of the asymmetry in her model it is aiming to break from the “tidy’ harmony, for the character is of a twisted kind.

'Laumikas' Model

Time's come for production. This is the model of 'Laumikas' a bag of straw out of which a dwarf-child grows.

Original Concept was :