Here is the link to my final submission for the Covergence/Divergence unit (and final submission for the second year of my Illustration degree):
Click HERE for the full 1080p version uploaded to YouTube.
I am extremely happy with the end result. I did my best, and could literally not have spent anymore time on this final piece without sacrificing massive chunks of sleep time. I believe I achieved everything I set out to do in this project and much more. This has been the most important project of this year in terms of learning new skills and finding where I would like to see my work once I leave the AUCB.
My only wish is that I could have had enough time to do more characters. I could not, however, have done more without sacrificing the level of quality that I have achieved in my final piece, and I am comfortable with that decision. As I have mentioned in a previous post, when it comes to showreels, less is more when there is a battle between quality and quantity. I am happy that the amount of designs are diverse enough and embody what I set out to achieve in my learning agreement, while still allowing me time to experiment a little and expand my technical and theoretical knowledge.
This has been a very enjoyable, while challenging, project and I look forward to building on what I have learnt during the holidays and into my third year.
Everything is finally coming together. I have finalised the poses and textures and niggled and niggled with the render settings in Maya until I felt I was happy. I started putting the 2D elements together in After effects so that I had a better idea of how much time I would have for each part, and the timing of those parts to the related music track. This in turn will allow me to animate the the right time in Maya. After Effects is largely unknown to me, but after just a little while in the program I feel I have fallen in love. I was able to apply much of my Photoshop knowledge (thanks Adobe) and it has been too much fun. It is a pity I only have such a short amount of time during this project to fiddle around with After Effects, as it was always my intention to use it purely for compiling work I had done in other programs. This project has reminded me why I moved away from 3D in the first place, as it is very very technical and you only really start seeing 'cool looking' results well toward the end of a project. I am too visually driven to be starved of beautiful visuals until the end of such a long project. After Effects has in turn opened my mind to very new and interesting possibilities and I might look into some motion graphics during the summer holiday. It is definately something I would consider developing in my third year. Animating in this program is a lot of fun and has renewed my interest in the subject.
Here are some screen grabs of frames from my current progress in After Effects. I am working at 1080p at 25f/ps (PAL):
My little intro sequence containing my name, profession and top contact details (including a link to a professional website where more of my work can be viewed). Minimal but efficient I would say. Making use of this logo/design throughout my reel has helped pull it all together and has introduced a nice element of design I am very happy with.
Fading this frame to the colour concept art helps add some more information to the viewer about the design, as well as giving me an opportunity to highlight the strength of the character's silhouette (a key element in character design and something I feel is important to establish in a showreel).
My first little 3D render. I tried bringing in an infinity curve into the render, but eventually abandoned the idea as it was giving me unfavourable results and it didn't really seem necessary in the end. This way I can keep the background consistent throughout most of the reel and it also allows me more freedom in regard to colour correction as I can now colour correct the 3D render without worrying about affecting the background layer.
The music track I am using is a remix of a song called Exile by Enya, and can by found HERE
I had no intention of mixing my own music for the project as I knew I would have very little time and I would rather explore other skills more related to my field of study. It is something I would like to dabble with in the future when time permits. The music choice was very important to me though, because there are so many pitfalls when choosing music for a showreel. The top tips I got from researching the topic of music choice was that it should preferably be lyric-less (or non-destinctive lyrics), the song should have a strong beat (not necessarily a fast one) and that the song shouldn't be distinctive (i.e a well known song associated with a movie) as this can make the reel look amateurish. I really like the song I chose. Even though Enya isn't exactly unknown it is still a remix I hadn't heard before and it 'spices' up the tempo of the song to make it more upbeat than the original. Sudden tempo changes in the song have also given me some nice cues to cut my reel to.
Overall things are coming together better than I had planned due to some new knowledge and happy accidents. The final hurdle in this project is to make sure I get the renders out of Maya before the deadline arrives. Sadly there is nothing I can do to speed up the process and hopefully my planning regarding keeping the render time as low as possible pays off. I am rendering to HD after all. It has been a crazy three weeks with an average of 12hours a day in front of a computer and the last couple of days WELL above that, but seeing the final results are always somehow worth it.
Here are the three poses I want to use in the final showreel. These are screenshots straight out of Maya. These are important to me because they add a little more depth to the character and show him experiencing different emotions.
This first one was fun because I was trying to mimic the original concept art. It's great how close the two are to each other. It all took a while to get right because the rig I made for the character was insanely rushed and my skills as a rigger are severely limited. It is safe to say the rig is broken in almost every way possible. After I had gotten the three basic poses I duplicated the geometry of each and put them in a new scene so they were no longer effected by the rig. I could then go in an tweak the poses by hand, fixing any bad deformations and adding in some facial expressions (as I did not make any blendshapes for the character either).
After all the posing I proceeded to add in little blades of grass and a little flower her and there. This is to break up some of the bigger shapes and stronger lines, as well as to add some more 'believability' to the environment props. The 'rock' he's sitting on is in fact the top part of one of the Golem's feet
Now that most of the texturing and posing is in place I can start to lay out the scenes for the final animation of the turntables and camera movement.
The texturing for the Golem is finally done. I am super happy with the result:
The compression for web isn't doing it any justice, but here it is. Even though I've been working really hard not to run out of time, this part of the project has been quite enjoyable. I am really happy with the overall result. The legs and hands were really interesting because in the original concept I have a gradient sweeping over the hands from the fingers up and on the feet from the ground up. I wasn't sure how to tackle this as the nature of how I had laid out the UVs for painting wouldn't allow for seamless gradients from bottom to top. That's when I poked around online and found out that you can have multiple UV maps of one object and then tell the shaders which UVs to use. I created second UVs for the feet and hands, projected straight from the front. I used those UVs to make a gradient shader that shades them from the bottom up. I then took both the normal colour shader and the gradient shader and plugged them into a Layered Shader. This shader turns other shaders into layers like in Photoshop, taking in consideration opacity. And voila, there you have it.
The crater in the middle, to me, is an improvement over what I have in the concept art. After the texturing came the lightning effect. This was tricky as I haven't much experience with special effects within Maya. I couldn't find the tutorials I needed and just had to play and experiment in an empty scene in Maya until I got what I wanted. Maya luckily has a preset lighting effect that I could customise to suite my own needs. Once I figured out what all the settings did it just took some time to place all the control object in my scene
The two images above are identical apart from the amount of glow the electricity is emitting. Still not sure how much glow I would like because I am wary of the glow washing out my other textures. Possibly something in between the two, leaning toward the bottom one. I am also tempted to try and see if I can maybe do the glow in After Effects after the fact. I might have more control that way.
Here are some of the painted textures applied to the model:
It took me ages to paint these, but I guess the result is well worth it. Now that the Golem is mostly done I can move on to posing my Sheldon character, as I am using parts of this model as environment props in his poses.
After some late hours I have finally completed most of the Golem character's model. It isn't as precise to the reference as I would have liked but a very near likeness. This model's process is very different because I have no exact front and side orthographic views to work from. Just the one semi full frontal concept design. Also, obviously, sometimes there arise 3-dimensional impossibilities within a 2D design, if one does not strictly adhere to the rules of perspective. Here are some screen grabs of the current model:
One of the pros about this model is that all the pieces are rigid bodies and a therefore do not need to deform in any way (like the face of the Sheldon character). This allows me much more leeway in the modeling department and has thus been considerably more speedy.
Because I am being more free with the 3D interpretation of the design I have also decided to divert from the normal process of modeling, unwrapping and then texturing. I am planning to rather tweak, UV unwrap and texture pieces as I go along. This allows me to identify problem areas (such as the areas not visible in the original design that I have to freestyle), and adjust as needed as I go along.
I have also been watching some more tutorials related to rendering in Maya. Tonight I did some of the unwrapping and texturing of the three main 'henges' of the design and then had a go at some quick renders. I was extremely happy to see that some of my research has payed off. I believe I have found the perfect settings for rendering the model so it very nearly resembles the concept art. Here is a quick test render I managed to push out tonight:
Also, it seems that this setup is also relatively light on the render side, even at full HD. I still haven't cranked up all the settings for best quality and I am only rendering three textured models in the particular scene so it remains to be seen if the render times will stay low.
Here we have some videos I have been watching to help me decide how I want to interpret the 2D concept art in 3D regarding the use of lighting and skin shaders. While I like the 2D concept art very much I think the 3D application allows for some further exploration and pushing of the boundaries of what this character could end up looking like. Thus I will also be able to push the boundaries of my 2D illustration practice with the incorporation of 3D elements and skills within my process. There are many 3D illustrators out there that never venture into any kind of animation work, just using their skills for 2D illustration.
This 'Final Gather Lighting' tutorial has been most 'illuminating' regarding lighting my scene without the use of any lights whatsoever. This is great because it makes achieving the soft lighting from the original concept art much easier. There are other pros in regards to hard, crisp specular details in areas like the eyes, where that 'studio lighting' effect comes into play.
I was aware of ambient occlusion before watching this video but not aware that you could build it straight into your shader. This might be a way to go for me, we shall see. I would like the ability to change the colour of the ambient occlusion so might still have render it out as a separate pass and make adjustments as I see fit in Photoshop or after effects.
Sub surface scattering has always been something that I have wanted to master in my 3D work. It is great for creating more convincing skin. I think my character could greatly benefit from this effect. One of the biggest parts of the 'Pixar look' is their amazing skill in creating their iconic warm, beautiful looking skin in their movies. The biggest drawback for me here is that it will require splitting up my completed colour map into multiple parts so I am able to create the desired effect. This is a lot of extra work. Time allowing though, I think I might take a stab at it.
Showreel inspiration:
The first 50 seconds of this clip are the best for me. I like how the character has been to posed show off the character and hint at the context of the character and what kind of personality and genre you could expect to couple with him. The little addition of the rock he's standing on is GREAT as it suggests terrain and environment while not drawing attention from the character. This ties in with a conversation I had with Matt Johnson (my level 4 tutor). I mentioned to him my concerns regarding adding in some environmental elements. He brought up the example of an artist I love, Jamie Hewlett, creator of the art for Gorillaz. He mentioned how he solidifies much of his characters' context and personality by the use of interesting poses and suggesting little actions and quirks the characters might have. I was reminded that I touch on this very aspect of contextualising the character within my essay (attached to this blog).
Not sure I'm a fan of the choice of music in the clip above though.
This showreel has some better music. Upbeat while not overly so or distracting. He displays an array of skills including knowledge of key industry software, and with the Gambit character, he shows that he has knowledge of industry requirements in the form of a low polygon model for gaming, with high levels of detail through the use of texturing effects and Normal mapping.
This showreel is my favourite. I like the choice of music. He has achieved exactly the effect I had in mind when I started this project. His renders are crisps and clear, with very nice lighting. The background is part of the scene by making it an infinity curve as opposed to just sticking a textured wallpaper in the background. I love the smooth camera movements he has achieved. He shows the right details at the right times, e.g. the mesh. I don't like, however, that there is no suggestion off environment and the turntable spinning becomes repetitive as the reel goes on. This, to me, is not helped by a song that sounds really nice at the beginning but also starts to feel a little repetitive.
The book prop for my character is modelled and textured. As I am not doing any real animation at present I did not rig the book but rather just created open and closed versions for use in the showreel. Rigging would simply be a waste of time at this stage and isn't a skill high on my 'to do list' so to speak. Here are some screen grabs from maya of the basic, untextured geometry:
Here are some screen grabs of the open version of the book, all textured and pretty. Really loved doing the textures for the book. Adding in all the little scratches and ageing was a lot of fun.
I also added in the middle pages as extra geometry to add to the realism of the book a little and break up the solid shapes. The grey visible in the image at the edges of the middle pages won't render in the final images. This is due to a 'transparency map' that I created that will mask off those grey areas. This saves me from modelling all the edge tears in with geometry. This way it will render quicker but still have all those great little ageing effects. This in line with my understanding of requirements within a professional production pipeline.
Here are the textures I painted that are applied to the model in the images above:
Getting the cover design to work took me a little more time a finesse than expected but I believe the end result is up to the standard I have been working at up until now.
Here we have the texture for the inside pages of the book. This one texture map will be shared between 2 pieces of geometry.
This is the transparency map for the middle pages. A transparency map works exactly like a mask in Photoshop or After Effects. 100% white is 100% visible and 100% black is 100% transparent. This has been another case of how previously acquired knowledge has worked to my advantage, as understanding how to make this map work was relatively simple (it took some finesse getting it to render properly within Maya).
Now that the texturing is done it is time the rig the Sheldon character. This will allow me to pose the character for the final renders. This is a step I cannot skip and yet it feels like a waste of time as I would prefer to move on to the Golem model so I can move things along to final renders and compositing. Another example of the work that happens behind the scenes that few people appreciate. Here is a clip I watched a day or two ago that might be an alternative to full Maya rigging:
The advantage is that it's a MUCH quicker process (Maya rig will take at least a day for a basic rig), but it has some major drawbacks regarding the accuracy of the rig and the ease of use when it comes time to pose the character. Time is running out and this might be something better explored within the summer holidays. Either way way at least I am now aware of this method of rigging.
In the spare moments I have between working on the main assets for the showreel I have been making very loose little storyboards so I can start to plan the flow of the reel and what kind of music and mood I would like to shoot for. In a following post I'll post up some of the tutorials I have been watching to fill in some of the gaps in my training and also some of the other showreels I have been watching to be more aware of industry standards and which parts of the creation process would be most important to highlight within the final showreel.
