Transcription Crit: Project's Work; Entry 1

As it was said on the crit, The animation isn't finisedas a product. However, arguably, what has been achieved in ten weeks frame is pretty satisfying.
Like the bird himself, the 'mish-mash' of the story is presented in the following video:

The Making Of:

Here I present the first part of Making of, a visual document of the pipeline of Transcription Porject.
When The animation is finished, the document will include all the character design behind and the rest of project's development after the deadline.


The Making of Ivan the Bird Part 1

Mental Ray: Caustics, Physical Sun, Portal Lights, HDR Image Based Lighting,

Caustics:

Mental Ray Shaders:

Physical Sun and Sky

Shadow Sampling and Softening in Physical Sun and Sky:

Portal Lights:

HDR image based lighting:

Technical Paper on Mechanical Bird's Rig

I wrote on the most challenging technical part of transcription project, Mechanical Bird's rig.
The paper covers methods and solutions for rigging. it is also very illustrated as , no secret, rigging with its terminology quit easily and quickly seems to be over too complicated.


Technical paper Mechanical Brds rig

Demoreel element

Finally the video is gathered. It was also a good practice of animating using motion path as in the following weeks I'll be dealing mostly with that kind of animation. It takes longer to animate, as now all body parts are fluid in the air and free to move. But it is much more experimental as it doesn't have to follow sometimes mathematical preciseness a walk cycles ask in order to be tidy and symmetrical.

But back to the demoreel element. The music used was played in Tivan's Sky lantern festival.

Hope you'll enjoy it:

Some Wrap Up Stuff

Its now getting to the  wraping up stage in transcription project so I decided to work on the brief's aspects before the deadline is too close. This post is most dedicated to self and project  promotion.


Demoreel element:

One of the brief's task was to create a showreel element using   the elements of the project. I chose to take the main character  and present it as an animated turnaround.  These are some stills from the soon to be resolved showreel element:

Environment definition:

Also, as I said last week, I saw it neccesary to spend some time on details of the outside scene as before it looked dull even if all the major elements were brought in.
So I thought of bringing in these elements:

 

And so far it seems they really gave that much more to the scene. It is lot livelier to my mind. And, as I did in the first act, the scene will be pushed even further but this time only to specific scene requirements so to compliment the composition of the shot.  

Personal Branding:

Next in line,  is personal branding. I was working on logo designs  from time to time. there were quite some cheesy ideas...  here are some  attempts of past few weeks.

this is one of the cheesy ones I've mentioned... 

Then I came up with an idea to make an elephant from my initials. Well, if you asked me why elephant, I would say only, that they are my favourite animal from , as long as I remember myself and they are said to bring luck as well  :]

However, for some reason the logo didn't feel as personal.. I think it  fails to serve as my initial. 

I gave it another go. Basically the following  example has both of the previous initial design ideas as well as some flavour from the past ones I had. So it actually is a graphical development of my signatures yet still fresh. I felt this is perhaps the strongest ( or closest to me) personal logo.

 

And the business cards, brief asks to produce, would look like that:

Front side:

 

Back side:

 

After 'excercising' with brand logos, and catching the right rithm for  designing, I've also worked on title design which will be used for animation opening sequence also throughout other promotional materials. It did take quite some time in the day as the entire design is one big work on details ( what as some would agree, takes the longest in any work). But as I said it is a rewarding work, as it will be used extenisvely.

So the good rithm stayed and I went on designing the dvd cover and disc templates. I used the idea of demoreel presentation, as it really apealed to me.I like the 'clean' creamy/dreamy aesthetics  in this one, as well as title fits in perfectly. Hopefully it feels a bit like a story-book cover as my entire project's idea was to make a story-bookish world , characters ect.

 

However the templates still need few  renders from act 2 and 3. Also an 'epic' descriptive text.

After finishing work on these designs the feel was perfectly summary and the mood great :]
Hope that's goint to help in the last week ( lets be honest, 3 days actually) before deadline. 

In the mean time soundtrack designs for act ,  demoreel video, maya tutorials,  some animation refining  is still waiting to be finished for Thursday. this week best be the lucky one :D

Dynamics, Displacement and Mental Ray Rendering, week 8

Displacement:

Mental Ray Rendering: Final gather and Global Illumination:

Dynamics : Sequential instancing and Goal

'Painting up' the Scenes

 Last couple of days the time went on 'painting up' and retouching the scenes. Whether it meant building and bringing in last details, or 'painting' the set using  lighting set up for the better final image result.

So to start with, The opening scenes only briefly suggest that Ivan perhaps isn't the only character in the story. As camera pushes through the workshop we notice one another model in the set, also on the notice board next to Ivan there is a worn-of sketch of other mish-mash models.

So I've designed and created the Shiball (she has ship parts and ball) character.

the texturing for this character:

Further I went back to the second environment again . First,  trying to figure out ocean shader . With the help of Simon Holland, I think now it looks far better.

Other  largest elements in the scene was the front modeled trees.

And the scene, after bringing the major elements together now looks like that:

 However if this was a painting I'd say it lack of that last layer of details. And to be specific:  Nests, waist disposals, wind vane on the house, foam for shore line, grass here and there, little statues , something to also cover the contact point of trees and the ground. Just lots of things nobody notices yet it somehow brings  life to the scene.

Few more scenes are ready to be baked after spending that time for lighting, render setting.

Much like with animation, lighting is also getting easier and easier . Through trial, experimenting, reading on tips,  it reaches the point when you are actually getting creative with it in maya , even if it is not as simple as making few brush strokes in photoshop. Light linking is used extensively to emphasize  some of the set's and particularly character's aspects.

Lastly, I think this picture summarizes the work of past few days: the needed other elements are built and  brought in ( outer environment) the lighting is set up, rendering (render settings,  passes and effects) are adjusted.
 

Now I started working on show reel's element, and personal branding. Hopefully these will take no more than few days.

Mental Ray Rendering

Rendering Analysis:

render 1

0:39
custom settings

***

render 2
rendering time 0:38
bsp size 10
bsp depth 60
sampling 2

***
render 3
rendering time 0:41
bsp size 10
bsp depth 50
sampling 2

***

render 4
rendering time 0:34
bsp size 10
bsp depth 60
sampling 1

rendering time 0:34,bsp size 10,bsp depth 60,sampling 1

Motion Blur:



Maya Software 3D motion blur (Shutter angle 90)





Mental ray 3D motion blur (No deformation)

Depth of Field:
 Foocal lenghts is set to 20,  F-stop to 15



No Lens-bokeh

the setting for Lens-Bokeh in this image were :
Plane 4.1
Radius: 0.6
Bias: 1
Sampling: 12
Anti-aliasing: 0.04

The lens effect gives a very interesting effect and appears to be worth-while to experiment with . Especially interesting to me is the posibility to plug in custom bokeh shapes, which give such interesting effect

Realy really impressive...

Ivan the Bird: Progress, Week 8

It's been a while since the last update on the project. But here it is.


Recently I worked on second environment, the outside of the house. It's taking reasinably longer to build as the space is many times larger than the workshop set's as well as include a variety of elements to consider.

Such as, to start with, the rendering of water and shoreline. I'm working on ocean shader and for the shore line, using dynamics to create foam.
These (VERY) developmental  images show what I have so far.

Other than that, the house has pretty much reached its final looks. It serves as a background detail for the most of the time.

Also, the field is now textured as intended in the concept. Also, Instrad of using bump maps, I used Normal maps, as the camera angle never reaches the point to reveal 'fake' bumps.

What still is not yet resolved is tree texturing.

Other than that this environment is in the stage of refining, but  to stay honest.. it doesn't yet have the right feeling even if all the elements are brought together (apart from lighting)  in the place. The idea   somehow hasn't translated yet  into 3D as I imagined  it.

So that was the set building of the project.

The other part is the acting. 

This is right after when Ivan encounters the Island and after a thorough look notices the house in the tree. Immediatly he is overwhelmed by desire to reach it. The ending of the clip suggests he realizes his ship-qualits.

But to keep on pushing the second act forward, I had to get back to rigging stage, where , quickly enough, system was created to help control Ivan's flight sequences. Motion path with additional groups for translation and rotation control is aded.
Here is the initial test of the motion path system ( no inentions of properly animating it there). I also aded aditional controls to the rig.



I used it to acquaint with the changed way of animating and see how the fall of from motion path would work.

To continue on, one another field of this project was lighting and rendering set up. ( this is where I failed to guess how long it would take to finish, where originaly I gave 3-5 hours it took me a week) .

Here is an example of lighting set up in one of the scenes from act 1

The lights have separate linking and affect only specific parts of either the scene or character. They are also animated to follow or change intensity according to storyline. Every scene has approximately 6-11 lights.

Here is an example of lighting adjustment int he scene:

At the beginning the general set lighting never seems to suit the specific scene. I first solve volumes of lightness then go and adjust how it falls, and causes shadows ( particularly concerning character).

And so, after quite some of adjusting and problem solving I have a scene which (supposedly) is fully resolved and should go to final sequence.

The Bird is waking up:



At the moment I'm dealing other scenes of act one in the same way, to get them rendered and ready for postproduction. Also I work on second act's flight sequences and set building. Oh and show reel element, I have an idea for that.

Project progress: Lighting and Animating

Today the time was spent to get the lighting working when character was finally set in to the scene.

Each bit of  scene ( in total 7 for act 1) is lighten separately.

For example in this scene  four more lights support the character to create a volumetric lighting. Key light,  few section boost lights and rim light shape the bird in this image. I think more work is needed still. For example light wings. Also it is clear now, the background is to empty .

This scene I'm pretty happy with. Though it looks like it still needs some tweaking on shadows.

In this scene I used rim  and Rembrandt short lights (light which is 45 degree to the character) to separate  the character from the background .

All the images have render layers combined. So this perhaps would be the end result of animation looks.

And here is the portion of animation. The Bird after encountering the enchanting Island rushes towards it and gazes at it in chill amazement.

As usually after seeing a sequence of animation I go back and do some curve cleaning, but essentially it is the same what's in the video.