Finished

Next Version

New Opening

After Matt animated the first scene I've comped it into a whole new opening sequence. Funnily enough I wanted to use an actual television on the opening sequence I think it works a lot better.

SK Pushes 1

Mr Fidler has done this opening piece of animaton on the piece.

Where We Are With 2 Days to Go

Adding a TV Effect to the Opening Sequence

Just to bring home the fact that the opening sequence is an old film now relegated to late night TV I've added a TV effect to this sequence. Again not a plug in as I find it better to work from scratch.

What Happens When Maya Goes Wrong

I Love Maya

Test 1

After resolving the issue with the tif sequence being out of line I have now imported them again and this time not at 30 frames per second when the comp is 25 frames per second. The frames are nestled in the comp ready to be replaced with the completed frames at a later date when all the animation is finished.

Game Show Scene

Here is a render of the Gmae Show scene.

Mountain Scene

Just aquick Play Blast of the mountain scene. I've had some real issues importing these tifs into After Effects as it was importing it in at 30 frames per second when the comp is 25 frames per second. Thankfully it was worked out in the end.

Render Times

The great thing about working in 2D and comping it all in After Effects is that the render time in Maya works out 12 seconds per 1920 x 1080 frame and I have very large textures to boot.

Starting the Sound

Because this piece is slave to the sound I am trying to link the mouth shapes to the sound first. Obviously I am putting the lip syncing quite roughly at first.

Imagery

In an aim to keep this blog contained I have placed most of the imagery on another site. Click below to see all the imagery.

http://www.tonytrimmer.com/kotw

Bob's Hands

Although Bob's hands could have been added in Maya then changed by a drop menu I have added them in After Effects and masked off the end of Bob's arms. This means that I can determine how long his arm needs to be in the scene. However if this sequence were a complete animated short I would certainly have added this function.

Rendered Version Compared to the Design

As can be seen from the shots below the Renders do seem to be mirroring the designs quite nicely.

Mountain hat and Mountains

The hat is added on in after effects but the mountains either side of Bob are PNGs with a lattice deformer on each.

Setting the Rigs Up

Obviously Bob wears 3 different outfits for this piece: Game Show Host, Rapper and Naked. SK is Naked. for the purpose of the piece I have set up the rigs ready to animate.

Dressing the Rig

An Idea for the Game Show

One idea I've had is to have these devices coming down onto the conveyor belt on top of the figures as they retract they leave behind a little flags saying 'mine'.

The End Shot Layers

Test the Rigs

Here is a quick test thanks to Mr Fidler

Lighting the Characters

I forgot to show a before and after on how the rigs were lit so I've included this shot which shows how the rig looks before and after. The way these 2D rigs work is to light the textures not the scene. This is done by using the default lighting but uping the Ambience and putting the diffuse to zero.

Titles With the Mountain Background Dropped In

Whoops, forgot to place the mountains in.

Where We Are With A Week to Go

Time is ticking away and all the shots are in place ready to drop in the Maya files.

New Blockout

Elements to Make the End Shot

After a little magic in photoshop here are the main elements for last shot.

Blocking Out the Animation

In an aim to find out just where the animation needs to fit and how long it needs to be I am putting together all the backgrounds in After Effects ready for the animated characters to be comped in. I could have done this as an animatic but it was just as easy to use the actual backgrounds and tie them to the music. This means that some of the work is now done for me as half my project is an After Effects project. Now all my backgrounds are in place and tied to the correct timing.

Change of Clothes

Now the rigs are complete it is worth noting some of the functions that belong to the rigs. The beauty of working in 2D is that you can add certain functionality which can't realistically be achieved in 3D. You can easily set up several different sets of clothes and mouth shapes and replace them at ease. The shots below illustrates how this can be done. If you look at the drop down menu at the side you can see that any number of mouth shapes can be chosen. The same applies to his clothing. This can be achieved by making sure that the planes which define both his arms and body correspond roughly with the planes of the clothes. Therefore the vertices are in approximately the same place.

End Sequence

The end sequence is a cross between these two images. I like the idea of a large metalic Bob hoovering over the earth with his voice booming over humanity.

White Line

I've just added a white line to the end of my ident which appears on the end of this piece.


Version 1

Conveyor Belt

As you can see from the test, here is the conveyor belt ready for Bob to be dropped in behind. The sign behind changes it's hue throughout this piece.

Hologram End Frame

Although this might seem strange I want to sort out my end frame with my logo. I'm using a hologram effect that I'm constructing from scratch in After Effects. (no third party plugins here)

Rigging The Characters

As you can see from the rigs below Bob and SK are finally rigged. They're very simple rigs constraining certain meshes to the bones. The weight painting consists of clicking the plane and clicking a bone and hitting flood, (very easy). Where these rigs can get complicated is because in the case of Bob he has 2 sets of arms. One set trailing behind and the other set consists of 2 tentacles. This means that the shoulders have to be linked and placed in the same place.

SK's rig is very straight forward, in fact it couldn't be easier. His hands are the hardest part as there are 8 separate parts on each hand and that's no real problem.

Bob's rig is the complicated one. Not in any real technical way but there are several different parts which are rigged then attached to the main body. This means that one must be aware of all the parts when rigging and how they will effect or hide the planes I have used for the individual mouth shapes. This is no real issue as there is no real need for paint weighting (hit flood) and the different parts can be rigged and then attracted to the main body.

Obviously there are no blend shapes although there could have been as I have experimented with them. However blend shapes n 2D are just as hard as 3D but with added problems and in fact they seemed to take longer. Using 2D planes meant that the shapes had more of natural feel to them as they were based upon my drawings.






Rigs by Sam Berry.

The Schedule

The Schedule for the piece is listed below.

1. Design Characters
2. Storyboard the idea
3. Design Sets
4. Design Props
5. Design Mouth shapes, Eye shapes and Outfits
6. Build Character's assets in Photoshop in including mouth shapes etc with feathers around, Textures and image planes
7. Build Rigs
8. Output UV from UV Texture Editor
9. Texture Characters
10. Rig Characters
11. Load backgrounds into After Effects (layered ready for Bob to be added later
12. Animate After Effects assets
13. Animate characters in Maya
14. Render
15. Comp and add sound effects
16. Hand in

Countdown

As part of this piece I have a five second countdown. This was made in both Photoshop and After Effects.

Testing previous riggs

Here are some examples of previous riggs I have used. They obviously don't have the smoothness of a 3D rigg but can be made in a fraction of the time.

Animating the Opening

The opening is meant to be a trailer for an old film. The ship and 3 planets are modeled and animated in Maya and the dropped on a still background with a transparent blue layer (15%) on top to give it a blue tone and therefore blend the images together. When lighting the objects in Maya I've kept to a three point system (Key Light, Fill Light and a Rim Light ) and used lights with a hint of blue. I kept this setup throughout however added a spot light to the UFO in an aim to bleach out the top surface. I did this because I knew that this area would pick up more from the blue layer in After Effects whilst standing out from the planets.

As for the animation it's meant to feel sightly slow as if we are watching an old trailer that could have been made using paper mache and string.

Creating the Planets and Ship in 3D

Maya. I modeled textured and lit 3 planets and one UFO. The texture for the earth is made out of a peach skin, a mango skin and a texture gained from a concrete wall.

Props

Sets

Obviously as pre-production is the feild I wish to get into I am trying to make as many sets and props as desirable as possible.

Texruring and Lighting the Characters

These are just some of the textures used. In the case of Bob there are many more. The textures I'm using are firstly PNGs, which have a transparency therefore making it possible to keep feathered edges to the body parts. This means that I can move the planes and you won't be able to see the joins. Secondly I am using Targas which are placed upon a snapshot from the UV Texture editor.

As for lighting it couldn't be simpler. When I upload the textures I set the ambient colour to maximum and the diffuse to minimum. This means that Maya will render the colour of the texture pretty much spot on. Nice little technique which keeps the pipeline simple.

Building the Chararcters

SK's body in Photoshop

SK's textures and body bits are a lot simpler.

Bob's body in photoshop

As you can see from these screenshots there over 100 different layers which have to become plains in Maya.

An idea for the test piece

One idea for a scene on these titles was to zoom into Bob's so closely that we ended up seeing the hairs on his head and they in turn sang the song. Below are the designs with mouth shapes ready to animate. However the idea wasn't great in such a small amount of time.

My submission

For my submission I will be aiming to produce an animated test piece of the 2 main characters. I'm aiming for a 30secs piece.

For this I will be building a 2d rig of both the characters. This will involve locking the camera to front view and then placing each plan over the next. I will have to do a lot of the planning in photoshop to be able to set up the rigs and textures. Then I'll have to build the plans into a rough shape and the rig it all to work with a 2d skeleton.

This sounds easy however Character 1 Bob will need over 100 planes and character 2 SK will need nearly 40. This will enable me to be able to switch between not only mouth-shapes and different eyes but also whole outfits. I will be able to change Bob's clothing with just a series of simple commands.

I'm not looking to come up with a wonderful story line but am in fact looking at working to the title sequence I worked on with some friends. For this I'll mainly be using Photoshop, Maya, and after Effects.

My Second Idea





My first Idea