All's well that ends well

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.

All finally coming together

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.

Posing for Persona

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.

Some more texturing

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.