Compositing and Music

A while back, I came across this song and loved it immediately. The odd array of instruments create an unusual but wonderful sound. I like the gradual increase of more instruments being used, where it starts of with a simple but up-beat piece giving it quite a playful aspect and then the string instruments add a sense of mystery and dream-like feel. I think it's a flawless match and I knew I wanted to use it before we even begun the 3D work. I feel it resembles what we were trying to achieve of an imaginary, playful and abstract city. We ignored the rules of physics and let the plane fly freely and using any pieces of paper textures with patterns and doodles and used packaging reminds me of a child going wild playing with old scraps.

The final job I had was to composite all the rendered scenes out into one movie file. I tried to time each shot as close to the music as I could, however some scenes were very difficult to do so as I needed to extended the shot duration. But I discovered that it was difficult to do this without affecting the rest of the shot's animation aswel, so the only solution was to go back into Maya and change it from there. However, if the shot needed to be shortened down then it was very simple to do this. So a lesson learned; it's better to render out scenes for longer than needed incase of compositing issues.

A useful and very effective tool I found was the opacity transform tool, which I used to fade out a scene into another scene. This worked well when the previous shot directly relates to the next. An improvement I would make whilst looking back at this stage is to perfect the music and timing of the shots. So the scenes would transition exactly when the tempo or note changes. Unfortunately to do that now would require either re-animating or re-timing the scenes in Maya again, which would be extremely time consuming and unwise at this stage.

Animating

One of my main roles within the group was to animate. A recurring theme in our scenes was to have a paper plane fly through most of the shots, almost like narrating the movie clip where we follow it's journey around the city as it introduces the audience to new environments. Below are screenshots of some examples of scenes I animated.

scene 1

A problem in scene 1 was that although the first shot is quite nice and frames the pyramid and city well, when the camera zooms in to follow the paper plane, the edge of the city is revealed which spoils the whole idea of tricking the audience into thinking our small city was large. And although I could have rotated the camera angle down, that then spoiled the whole composition of the shot.

scene 3

Although I do like this shot with the paper plane exploring the city from a birds eye view, the animation of the plane itself is quite static and unrealistic. If we had time I would have liked to rig the plane allowing me to animate it's wings. Gently letting them flap and sway would've been a nice effect.

scene 4

scene 5

scene 6

scene 7

Scene 7 is one of my favourite shots as I like the angle of the camera and the way the paper plane flies towards it. We get to see different angles on the plane in one shot. The scene is simple, focusing on just the plane. But here is also another example of where a rig would be useful, so I could add little flaps as it flies.

scene 11

scene 13

This scene of an intersection was quite complicated, as there were a lot of vehicles to animate as well as the plane. An idea was to let the paper plane have an effect on the environment as it flies through the city. For example in this scene, when the plane flies pass the cars come to a halt at the traffic lights and won't move until the plane is out of shot. This lets the audience focus on the plane for a little while and so that the scene isn't too busy at one time.

At first, this shot was too long as I wanted a couple of seconds before and after the plane arrives to animate traffic in a standard city. But I had to shorten it down enough to show a little traffic and for the plane to soar past. I was satisfied with the end result but I would have still liked it to be a little longer.

Pocahontas!

After a long an stressful term of knowing nothing about character modelling I've finally finished and actually produced something that you could call a character!

And here she is in an odd gorilla-style mid walk. I discovered that because of her weird body shape and possibly incorrect rigging, it was difficult to leave her arms in a natural pose. Especially as the arm controls would only allow me to rotate the joints as the translate tools were locked. And because her shoulders are small and her belly is large, the armpits would starting deforming when the arm rotated too much.

But overall I am quite satisfied with my final product. I like her hair and the way the belly is textured, however if I were to re-do my character I would work more on the rig and skin weights for better posing flexibility. I would also work more on the overall texturing on the model. 

Textured!

I'm quite pleased with the final outcome, especially the way the patterned belly turned out. However, I would have liked to work on the texture of the rest of the model more, and have time to research more into ways to make her closer resemble plasticine. I did look into any techniques previous modellers might have used, but nothing solid came up and majority of people used other packages such as 3ds Max.

UV Mapping

UV mapping was definitely a difficult one. After several attempts of cutting seams, sewing them back, mapping, relaxing and unfolding UVs I eventually got there.

And below is a somewhat decent effort of my first attempt at ever UV mapping. The checkered pattern allowed me to determine any distortion and I discovered that UV mapping was basically trying to get as many squares straight, levelled and evenly distributed as possible.

Rigging and Skinning

Using the Rapid Rig : Basic script downloaded from Creative Crash I was able to quickly generate a simple rig for my character. After placing the joints in the correct place the more difficult part came of painting the skin weights.

I was able to find several tutorials to guide me through how to paint the skin weights, and after a while it was quite simple. The only annoying part was when I thought I removed all the unwanted weights but it'll still move to the wrong joint as sometimes a faint unnoticeable skin weight is still left, so it became a lengthy process of going back and forth fixing each part.

3D Printed Model

My 3D printed model! One of her hands fell off but it's still pretty cool.

Modelling in Maya

Being very new to modelling and even Maya, I had to do a lot of research before getting started. So I rented a couple of Maya books from the library and mainly Googled or YouTubed some more tutorials.

One of the most difficult part of modelling my character was the hair and face, as the hair wasn't symmetrical so I had to model it as a whole. And I had trouble with the random spikes in her hair, as I didn't want to model every individual piece of hair on her head, but rather have her hair as one mesh as this would resemble clay more.

And because she has such large eyes which are wide apart it was quite difficult to try and model a smooth face with good edge loops.

In my original design my character had a large zip at the back of her suit, however I decided to not include this as I'm now trying to model a claymation style character and the zip has far to much detail and might not look right. 

And here are the renders of my completed model. I tried keeping as much of the model as smooth as possible to stick with the claymation style.

Building Designs

Here are sketches of buildings we could use in the city. I kept them very simple so they'll look more like they're made out of paper. Again I stuck with the idea from the movie Science of Sleep of using the cylindrical shapes of toilet rolls. And I sketched up some skyscraper style buildings as they tend to use basic shapes and are common in crowded cities. They'll also give the city more depth.

Tighe, Los Angeles 

I found these contemporary buildings and liked the way they're made up of cubes meshed together. To me, they look like abstract cardboard boxes similar to the style we're looking for.

And below, I've started modelling. They're quite boring and dull without any textures but I was focusing on simple but abstract buildings. They might not be used in the main shots but they will definitely prove useful in the wider shots of the city, as buildings in the background.

Paper Bus

Here I found front and side references of a typical London bus to start modelling.

And here is my final out of the bus. Again, I kept it similar to the paper car in using flat planes with no extra details and curves. The texturing was done in the same style as the paper car but with red paper instead. The bus was much harder to texture unlike the car, as it has cut-out windows revealing the interior and because the bus is modelled from flat planes the textures would appear on both sides. So after a little research online I found a handy way using shaders, to texture both sides of the same plane with different images.

Here's a quick animation test. By using expressions, I was able to animate the wheels so when the bus moves the wheels rotate. I gave the wheels that texture so the rotation of the wheels could be seen more clearly as I noticed that before, with just a plain texture I couldn't tell. The animation is a little slow but I like the effect of the textured wheels.