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.

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. 

Paper Car

Some sketches of paper cars. I wanted them to look very simple and basic to resemble a toy car rather than a real one.

Here I modelled the paper car. It was quite simple to model as I've used flat planes with no detail to represent just the basic shape of a car.

I textured my car with one of my cardboard textures, then putting it in Photoshop to add a little aspects such as the windows and wheels. I kept the details sketchy and messy to add to that paper feel. I originally used a paper texture but I changed it to cardboard as it gives the impression of a solid box where as paper is quite flimsy. 

Concept Art

An ideas of what the paper city might look like. We want to for a more abstract look, with odd shaped buildings at different angles similar to the Science of Sleep toilet roll city Amelie discovered. 

Paper Airplane

Above are examples of the style I'm going for of a standard and basic airplane. 

After folding several airplanes I began mapping out the process to give me an idea on how to model it.

Modelling

And here's my airplane model I made, with the help of this tutorial. I simply started out with a flat polygon plane, then added several edges for the folded creases and began moving the vertices to fold the airplane into place.

Texturing

I finished with texturing the model with a white crumpled paper texture. I quite like the end result, however I've noticed that it can be quite difficult to see the folded areas of the airplane unless there is a definite contrast between the light and shadow.

Animation Tests

In my first test I focused on the speed and acceleration. I thought the plane should increase it's speed as it's swooping down but then slow down slightly as it dips back up a little. I was testing for a more natural look with the plane flying down in a simple direction.

Where as in this test, I started playing around with the movement of the plane. It flies in an unrealistic way as if it's got a mind of it's own. I also tried rotating the plane's body according to it's movements, which I think works well giving it a more organic feel, rather than just staying still and folloing the motion path.

Paper Tree

An idea for the design of the trees is to have 2 or more 2D cut outs of the tree's shape, and then slotting them together to create one 3D tree, like the above models. This simple style goes well with our group environment of a paper city.

Here I've started to sketch out ideas of what the trees might look like, again keeping with a simple design.