Category Archives: Stuff

So i’m back to doing this again and everything was running quite smoothly, which means something confusing will happen soon.

The arms (and other blend shapes) are really tricky. Due to them being completely flat they can only move in certain motions without becoming invisible. Distorting and twisting the drawings to use them as blend shapes is an interesting technique though, it allows the looped texture of an object to be animated with and controlled in 3d software. It also gives you the option to mix up 2d and 3d animation quite nicely.

I am finding the right arm to be especially difficult as it will need to move more than the rest and has the most complicated paths. Linking body parts together in the hierarchy is proving to be annoying too because moving a limb via blend shapes does not change it’s position in the world space, just it’s appearance – so a hand or foot won’t follow the bent arm or leg.

One of the most important guys behind Renaissance Disney (late 80′s, 90′s – you know the ones) mentions some stuff about his plans and ambitions for his life after leaving Disney.

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/glen-keane-talks-about-his-post-disney-plans.html

“I want to animate something where my original drawing stays on the screen.” – Sketched pencil lines, being able to see the thought of the animator behind each movement, that same scribbled nature that I want. Cleaned up Cel stuff lacks it just as 3d does, although it is considerably more difficult to achieve the same effect with 3d software.

Speaking of 3d – I feel as though I am getting close to what I want. I just need to plan out the movement of each body part and have sequences of lines unique for that part only, rather than repeating the same looping scribbles on different limbs/parts of limbs.

Not so long until Paperman…

Just a quick post showing what he’s looking like at the moment. Pretty cool. Although it has taken much longer than I hoped to get to this stage.

I might add a little bit more colour back to his eye ring things and mouth, make the legs sharper. Also the jumper needs a new normal map, one to match the much bigger knit. And lastly (probably not last) he needs his pencil outlines!

I feel like adding that this is a Maya render; I don’t really understand much about rendering in Maya…

Time to give him some eyelids.

Little Cars

A short film by Lilian Hardouineau, who is French or Romanian or whatever (a sort of ‘in joke’).

SO… here we go.

It’s ultimately a good piece in terms of cinematography. It’s a good car chase, it’s fine. Now obviously I like it when 3d has hand drawn bits in it but i’m really not a fan of this, It just seems lazy to me. they must have seen that when the lines are completely still and motionless that there is something wrong. It just appears dead. This must be why they put that weird layer over the top, just to add some extra movement so you aren’t how lifeless    But it’s the wrong type of filter, it’s for making things look grainy and old, for 1930′s black and white film – Not for a slick, clean and crisp 3d car chase. What it could do with is a filter that picks up on the drawn edges and lines to make them flicker and wobble. I’ve had a quick go at this, using Photoshop to edit every frame of a sequence. It’s ok. It can be used as the final outcome or layered up with the original (and more) in After Effects.

The city and all of the buildings are fine, they don’t need to move around, they aren’t whizzing about in a car chase, they look fantastic, so does the sky! Also the depth of field helps to blur them out of focus a bit so you don’t get too distracted by them.

Bus with Filter

The bus scene is the made up only of the altered Photoshop images. The super low resolution does not suit this and the grains are much too long. I should re-render this sequence in high definition really.

Squid with Filter

The squid has the Photo-shopped layer blended in with the others. It’s quite subtle but it has added some contrast and made the whole thing less grey. Again, for some reason the resolution is not high enough, not sure why on this one though.

tl;dr You can’t expect that a still image of scribbles will keep it’s energy and ‘feel’ when it’s used in video, unaltered and for long periods of time.

The first image uses textures straight from Mudbox.

The second uses a mixture of Mudbox layers and actual drawings from printing out the UVW templates.

The third is just composite of the 3ds Max render with a Photoshop filter applied.

I think I want to put a slight ‘skin’ texture onto the model, just a simple normal map, but it should break up the smoothness of the objects.

All three of these have layers drawn over the top (so they couldn’t come straight out of the 3d software). I’m just seeing what looks cool. The last one seems get much darker with each layer and has completely obscured any detail of the knitted jumper.

Got to remember that none of these are in motion yet, so I can’t fully judge each way. Also they are all just layers put over the render – I HAVE TO FIND A WAY TO GET THESE LINES ON BEFORE!

Updated Album with UV’s and stuff: http://imgur.com/a/HjdpQ#17

It appears as though there are some similar techniques used in this to the ones I am using in my ‘Jaffa Cakes’ project. Layers of hand drawn/painted textures, some of which are looping a sequence. Appears to have similar issues with the speed of their looping too.

The characters are 2d animated though and applied over the top, it’s really nice that they still have a papery texture to them rather than drawn directly over digitally. Mine will be animated in 3d but each limb will be made as a separate object with a looping texture.

It looks so simple, it’s great!

Website: http://elizakinkz.com/ChocoMilk

Here are some lovely quotes from an article by Rebecca Keegan for the ‘Los Angeles Times’.

“The sense of wonder has gone out of movies. We appreciate the beauty of what’s done, the ingenuity of the director to put these images on the screen, but the sense of magic is gone, because a 14-year-old knows that when they see something amazing on the screen, the default answer is, ‘Yeah, they did it all on computer, and there’s nothing you can’t do.’ This slightly old-fashioned idea of stop-frame somehow brings the wonder back.”

- Peter Lord, co-founder of Aardman

“We want to tell creatively richer, more emotionally resonant stories in this medium. You could have a western, a romance, a musical, a sci fi epic. Stop-motion is probably the worst, most painful way to make a film. It’s a completely awful process to engage in, an anachronism. But the stories have a warmth and a charm. You’re not looking at ones and zeros. You’re looking at the hands of the artists who made it.”

- Laika chief executive, Travis Knight

Great! The ‘handmade’ element to animation is something that I am very fond of. Because it is such a slow and painful process to create anything animated it’ s nice to be reminded of the process and people behind it. It doesn’t have to be too much, I don’t want to shove it down peoples’ throats, but just a little bit, enough to perhaps incite a more emotional/personal response.

So often 3d animation can be too clean and sterile, and mistaken for being almost completely generated by some fancy software. I want to make it look like I’ve just cobbled it together out of drawings and stuff. If people ask me how I made my work I don’t want to say “Maya/Max, Mudbox, rendered in blah blah blah”, I want to say “It’s some drawings and other shit I put into a computer”. Or something along those lines…

(Link to article: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-0426-aardman-stop-motion-20120426,0,7022621.story)

So it turns out that I was wrong about Mudbox! It’s really cool! It has a ‘stencil’ system that should allow me to get the look I want and without changing the process too much. I can even use a lot of the concept artwork with this method to get specific lines and textures.

You can use ANY image as a stencil and just paint it over the model once you have it lined up where you want it. This is great for transferring pencil drawings straight into 3d, any already line can be ‘projected’ onto any part of the model and scaled to the size you want it. It removes so much hassle and work with unwrapping, I still need to do it though, just don’t need to make it ‘draw-able’ on.

Being able to create ‘Normal’ maps is interesting too, I’ve never done anything like this but i’d like to know how to. A normal map is some weird way of making a low poly model look like it has much more detail. I’m still not quite sure how to utilize it in 3ds Max yet, it goes in the bump channel right?

I tried a fancier one with a bit of sculpting involved and the same scanned piece of knitting as the old Alvy before I realised I could just project the drawing onto it. I don’t like how I couldn’t match up the two textures, instead it just looks like a lumpy 3d model painted with  flat knitting. I’m sure there is some way to make it look real, but i’ve only had the software for the weekend.

Here is a pretty awful render of it so far. The eyes and lip textures only temporary (because it looked so dumb without them) until I make stencils for the skin. I need to fix smoothing groups as his feet look a little weird… and put his teeth in! they are made, just need to be aligned up to the lips in each of the morph targets – yay.

At the moment it looks eerily too similar to the one from last year, but it won’t do when it’s finished!

As per tradition here is the imgur folder of stuff for this project: http://imgur.com/a/HjdpQ#0