Maya Evaluation

3D animation. I may have finally come round. I started this brief having no interest in creating animation in 3D, and a fairly strong dislike of watching 3D animation in general. Initially I completely hated Maya, it just seemed like a total nightmare, a thousand hidden menus, loads of concepts I hadn't come across before, and a pretty steep learning curve. I really thought I would never make it anywhere with this project. After struggling to come up with an idea for the animation, I finally just knocked out an idea in a couple of minutes, and amazingly it ended up working out pretty well for me. My character, a snowman, turned out to be really easy to manipulate and animate. I initially chose a snowman as I had no confidence in my modeling skills, and it would be easy to assemble from a few spheres and cylinders. Once it was parented together and had deformers in, the range of motion I could get from it was surprising. My first idea was the snowman meeting a hot waterbottle, falling asleep with it and waking up as just a pair of eyes and a top hat in a melted pool of water. The idea I actually ran with involved the snowman starting without a nose, then discovering a carrot and sticking it on his face as a nose. Following a thoughtful pause, he was going to remove it from his face and place it in a phallic position, and end with a sly wink and a Fonze-esque 'eeyyyy!'. Timewise, with the 30 second maximum length, I found I couldn't achieve this without it all feeling too rushed, so I cut it at just placing the carrot on the face and smiling. The snowman has quite an emotional rollercoaster in his 26 seconds of existence, beginning looking forlornly around, before being startled by the sight of an unfamiliar object on the ground. After bounding over to it and picking it up, he scrutinizes it before before reeling back in surprise at the realisation of what he has in his hand. Finally he cracks a happy little smile at being complete with his new nose.

The graph editor was one of the hardest parts to get to grips with. Making the snowman look like he had weight when he impacted on the bounce was quite tricky. There are some parts where the movement could definately do with smoothing out more, particularly after he's picked the carrot up and is waving it around in front of his face.

Lighting wise I tried seting up 3 point lighting, but it didn't really look that great, it wasn't producing enough shadow. In the end I settled on using a single spotlight, which created a nice sun rising, early morning sort of look.

Rendering ended up presenting a few unexpected problems. I foolishly decided to render out in 720HD as it looked so good, but it took an absolute eternity. After spending an age rendering out a section, I found the texture on the tree trunks was moving around as the snowman did. They'd somehow been parented to the snowman at some point, so after correcting that I had to render it out again. As it was all taking so long, I left a long section rendering overnight. Coming in the next day I'd made the schoolboy error of rendering through the wrong camera, so all you could see was trees. So I sacked off the HD nonsense, and quickly rendered it out in 640x480.

I had wanted to add sound to the animation, but I didn't want to use audio from the internet. I was planning on recording the effects for it, but ran out of time in the end, so I decided to leave it silent instead of just cobbling any old bits of audio onto it.

To sum up, suprisingly, this has actually been the project I've been most pleased with. I've pretty much hated everything I've produced so far, but I'm almost kinda happy with this one simply because at the start of the project I felt like I'd never get anywhere with it. There's a lot of refinement that could be done to improve it, but it stands up as a fairly complete piece as it is. So, the good thing is I think I'll continue using Maya, and considering I'd have sworn blind I'd never touch it again at the start, that's a pretty big deal. Im less interested in using it for character animation, but creating assets to composite into video or flatten into flash is pretty appealing, I can see a lot of potential there.

Maya brief. Done.

Good and Bad Animations

The first animation I'm going to look at is Bernard the polar bear. Now, I've been unfortunate to come across this 'character' on TV a couple of times before, and couldn't have been much less impressed. This is the exact kind of aesthetic that in general puts me off 3d animations, the overly smooth look to the characters. Combined with this that there is something about the characters that is totally unappealing, the way they move, their facial features and expressions. It's not even saved by interesting or amusing storylines. Poor show Bernard.



An animation I like is Robert Crumb is in the Woods. I like the aesthetic of this piece a lot, nice combination of hand drawn elements and bitmap looking graphics, and the flat 2d depth look, which I'm really into at the moment. Short and pretty random story this, but it's enjoyable to watch.


Robert Crumb is in the Woods from joseph Pelling on Vimeo.

Fleischer Animation Studios

Max Fleischer was an early pioneer of animated cartoons. He invented and patented the rotoscope, a technique for creating realistic movement in animations by tracing over images of live film projected onto a frosted glass panel, frame by frame. This method is carried out by using computers nowadays, but the basic principle remains the same. Fleischer was also the first to synchronise sound with animation. Fleischer Studios (formally Out of the Inkwell Films), set up with his brother Dave Fleischer, produced many well known classics, such as Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor, and the Superman cartoon series.

Maya Nose Picking

Having gotten to the point of the snow man picking his nose up, I had to try to find a way of making it move up from the floor with his hand, then detach from the hand and stay on the face. I tried out the idea of having a carrot already in the hand, and one already on the face with the visibilities switched off, then toggling the visibilities between them during different parts of the movement to create the illusion of one carrot being picked up and placed on the face. As the carrots hadn't been parented to the snowman at the point of his creation, they didn't move properly with the bend and squash deformers. The first attempt to solve the problem involved creating a new locator in the hand, and using a parent constraint on the carrot to attach it to the new locator for the duration of the movement. The carrot came up with the arm, but drifted out of the hand sideways as it did so. The next solution was using a piece of script called Rivet. The Rivet locator was placed in the hand, and the locator for the carrot was aim constrained to it. This succeeded in keeping the carrot in place as the arm came up to the face. The next problem occurred when trying to detach the carrot and leave it in place on the face. When the parent constraint was turned off, to allow the carrot to leave the hand, it snapped back to its original position on the ground. The solution to this was duplicating the carrot when the arm had it in place on the face, deleting the constraint in the duplicate, and switching the visibility off in the carrot in the hand. There you go. Putting a nose on a snowman. Easy as.

More Maya

After messing around timing the squash/stretch of my character to his points of impact and peaks during his bounces, I had a go at using Set Driven Key to set the high factor of the squash to the peak of the y translation, and the low factor of the squash to the low point on the y translation, instead of just keying it on the timeline as I had been. This produced a better looking result, and is in fact much easier. It would also means that if I changed the timing of his bounces, the squash would automatically change with it. Bonus. However, as I already had some squash and stretch keyed in on the timeline prior to using the set driven key, I found I was having a few problems when I was trying to set the squash back to zero when he'd finished bouncing. He was moving upwards on the y axis as he became less squashed. So it's back to the timeline keyed version I had been using. On the plus I managed to use the graph editor to move the keys for the bounces closer together to speed up the movement, as it had been rather slow and floaty before. I'd planned on just speeding it up in after effects after I'd rendered it out, but there'll be no need for that anymore.

Full Moon Safari

Came across this on the first onedotzero dvd Anna very helpfully put me onto, it's a short flash animation directed by Ben Hibon, the creative director of unit9. This won the best flash animation award at the OFFF festival in 2002. It's really stylised, all made in red, black and white. The story is pretty inconsequntial, but the execution is extremely slick, I didn't realise you could animate things so smoothly in flash, and I don't know how the 3d perspective effect was created on the road and street lights at the beginning. It doesn't really seem to say anything, seems more like a vehicle to show off how well and stylishly Hibon can animate. But to be fair, he can. And I like it.

http://www.unit9.com/videos/fullmoonsafari/view_movie_flash.htm

Second Life Uses

Although I have a general lack of interest in Second Life as a virtual world/community, I can see uses for it that would be beneficial to areas I have greater interest in, particularly video. The ability to create characters and objects, then photograph them from any possible angle and distance makes it a very usefull tool for storyboarding. Add in using screen capture software and you can create a pretty good feeling for how a scene is going to run through time wise. This also gives you a lot of freedom to experient with different shot framings and camera angles. You can also test build sets fairly quickly and easily, enabling you to get a better impression of what's going to work and what might need changing, without having to invest money and time into buying mateials and creating a set only to find its not going to work out quite how you'd imagined. I can also see it would be useful for creating an animatic for 3D animations. Having used flash to create an animatic for my maya animation I know it isn't the greatest way to do it. Whereas with second life I could've made a model of my character really easily, then taken different shots of it, which would reult in something much more similar looking to how the final animation is going to be.

Mr Scruffs visuals

Went to see Mr Scruff a few days ago, proper amazing night. One of the coolest things about it were the two massive screens either side of the decks, playing animations of his dodgy little characters. With him being high up and hidden away behind his decks it gave a good visual focus, kind of like what I mentioned in my post about his honeydew video. It was all pretty simple stuff, there was a sketchy looking speaker that pulsed in time with the bass through some parts, and all the rest of the stuff was mainly images being scaled, rotated and moved around the screen, but it was all effective nonetheless.

Squirrel Nut Zippers - The Ghost Of Stephen Foster

Brilliant animation for the Squirrel Nut Zippers song The Ghost Of Stephen Foster. This won Best Animated Music Video at the 1999 Vancouver Animation Festival. Really nicely done, in the style of old Fleischer animations like Betty Boop, and imaginatively set to the lyrics and music of the song.

Saves The Day - At Your Funeral

This video was made in 2001 by Maureen Egan and Matthew Barry for the Saves The Day song At Your Funeral. They made this video using motion control. To summarise it in brief, motion control involves having a camera set to run through an exact motion over a set period of time. This motion can then be repeated over and over, meaning different things can be fimed with the same shot then composited together. That's how the effect of having one continuous rotational shot, inspite of having the elements of the room change, is created. Very similar to the effect in The All-Seeing Eye installation, but created in a completely different way. The singer who stays constantly in the centre of the shot would have been filmed against a green screen and then composited into the footage. It all produces a pretty interesting end result, showing the life of a man from birth to death within the walls of his home, then the start of the cycle anew at the end. Lovely.

More Maya

I've added snow texture to the body and a wood texture to the arms, looks a bit rough at the moment, I'll probably go back and refine it when I'm finished animating. Also added a mouth and eyebrows with bend and squash deformers in to the basic model I'd made, so he'll be able to convey his emotions better, y'know, really get in touch with his feelings. I rendered out a section to have a look at, and it looks completely wack. The arms are black for some reason, so they get lost in with the background, and the mouth and eyebrows disappear and then come back as the head turns. I've got no idea why, but it needs sorting out.

Second Life Action

We've been learning a few basic principles of second life, how to model objects and attach animations, scripts and sounds to them. So far I've made a staff (which I hear is this seasons must have accessory for second life avatars) and attached an animation to it so it sits properly in Reg's hand instead of skewering him, and a sound file that makes it emit an irritating droning sound for everybody in close proximity of my character to enjoy. I've also created an object with animations atttached to it, namely a chair that when clicked on allows you to sit in a thoughtful/vacant pose. Splendid. I missed the sessions on applying textures to objects and adding effects like wind, so I've got a bit of playing around to do before I'm up to speed.

The All-Seeing Eye

The All-Seeing Eye (The Hardcore Techno Version) was an installation by Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry at the BFI Southbank Gallery that I saw late last year. Basically, a projector hanging from the ceiling continually rotated through 360 degrees in a rectangular room with white walls. The projection was of four walls of a room, each projected onto a wall of the space, giving the impression that you're in the room, so i guess they set the space up so the wall sizes were in proportion to those in the footage. There were cushions in the middle to sit on, and you had to keep spinning round to follow the film around the room. As it progresses you gradually start to notice things going missing from the room, a chair, some books and so on until eventually whole kitchen units are going missing. It's almost imperceptible to start with, leaving you feeling unsure if something really was there in the first place. The whole set up is pretty hard to explain in a few lines of text. The 'special effects' are actually being done in real time, the room is actually a scale model, and as the camera they're filming with is rotating they lift out various parts of the furniture until its just a blank room. There's a TV in the room with a section from Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (directed by Gondry) where Jim Carrey is finding out about having memories removed playing throughout the whole film, tying in with the pieces dissapearing out of the room. All in all it was an extremely interesting and enjoyable experience, you have a level of involvement as you have to keep following the film around the room instead of sitting passively watching a screen. I love the fact that the objects dissapearing from the room isn't a post production effect. Well worth seeing if it's ever on somewhere again.

Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free

http://www.chaletpointu.com/clips/zombie.html

Awesome stop motion remake of John Carpenter's 'The Thing' using GI Joe figures, made by Simon Gesrel and Xavier Ehretsmann as a music vid for french band Zombie Zombie. The Thing is a great film, and this is such a good remake. I really like the sets, using glue sticks for the ice samples was a particular favourite.

AE Rotoscoping

The tutorial turned out to be really useful, I just followed it through step by step without too much hassle. I used some old footage of my buddy Jake skating one of the grimy spots in my hometown, as it's one of the only shots I've got filmed from a tripod that hasn't got too much going on in the background. The hammers in the funfair in the top left are swinging in the footage, so I tried to get them at a point where it looked natural for them to be still for the background shot. The effect's not as good as it could be, due to the fact that my mask isn't very tight and the movement slows down in the middle of the screen, meaning I only managed to get 3 Jakes on at any one time. From doing this I've realised you'd really have to plan the shots you were taking if you were intending on using this effect. Although it doesn't look too hot, I've definately learnt a fair bit about AE through messing around with this.


AE Rotoscoping Trial from Tom Thiel on Vimeo.

Rotoscoping in AE Tutorial

I've been getting interested in learning how to use After Effects lately, and I've found a tutorial on rotoscoping in AE that seems pretty straightforward and easy to follow, so I going to have a crack at reproducing the echo effect from the DVS advert I previously wrote about.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/oconnell_pete/roto/video.php

Rabbit

This animation was written/directed/produced by Run Wrake in 2005, and has won quite a selection of awards. Apparently Run came across some 1950's educational stickers in a junk shop, and scanned them to use as the basis for this animation. Having a limited source to create the movement of the characters from was one of the biggest challenges in its creation. I hadn't really considered using found materials to animate with before, the result that's been achieved here is really impressive. From what I've learnt lately I imagine this was created in After Effects, it has all of the nice layering and depth. It took a little over a year to complete, and for the first 8 months Run was working solo on it, before enlisting the help of another animator for 4 months, then another for the last month, so it was an incredibly small team. It's a great tale, with the subversion of innocence, a moral message and the continuity of the cycle of nature. Composing such a story from pre-existing still images is testament to the great imagination Run Wrake must have.

Maya Character

I've got my basic snowman character assembled, everything's parented together nicely with the bend and squash deformers in place, and it all seems to move as it should. Things are starting to make sense in Maya now, after initially being totally lost. The amount of different menus makes it seem pretty overwhelming to start with, but now I've got the snowman assembled properly getting it to move with some character seems a lot more achievable.

Invisible Boards

Just remembered about this little beauty after putting the rotoscoping up. It was directed by Spike Jonze, and its from Yeah Right which came out in 2003. Great idea this, basically green screening in reverse. All the boards were painted entirely green, so that after they were removed in post production everybody looks like they're hovering above the ground. Good work from Spike, as always.

Rotoscoping

I decided to have a go at rotoscoping in flash, drawing over some old footage I had. I knocked it out fairly quickly, and was using the touch pad on my laptop to draw with, so the graphics are a little on the sketchy side, but it still produces quite a nice effect. It's running at 24fps, and I've only drawn over every other frame, which is still 30 frames of drawing for this 2.5 second animation, so it would be pretty time consuming to create anything detailed of any great length.

Stranger Than Fiction

I'm really into the intro to Stranger Than Fiction, I love the overlaid animations, very clean and precise looking and they help show the analytical, structured way in which Will Ferrell's characters mind works. The global zoom shot at the start is nicely done, and the camera in the mouth shot is genius.

Puzzle - Song About Someone

I'm a bit unsure about this video, there are some parts I really like, and others I can't decide if I like the look of or not. I'm really into all of the hand drawn looking parts, but I'm less sure about the way they're combined with the 3D parts. The way the camera moves around the room is quite nice, as is the sense of depth, but there are a couple of moments when the combination of styles doesn't seem to fit.

Emperor's New Sound

For the Interactive Media Fairy Tales brief, I decided to base my interactive storybook on The Emperor's New Clothes. The story is about being sold something that was never there, and it made me think of adverts for a mobile phone ring tone you could get sent to your phone for a few pounds I saw a few years ago. They were aimed at school children, with the selling point being that the pitch the tone rang at was at a higher frequency than older people could hear, so teachers wouldn't hear your phone going off in class etc. I was pretty sceptical about these ads, imagining that they probably sent nothing at all, and wondering how many kids would still insist they could hear it. I decided I wanted to adapt this to the Emperor's New Clothes, but using a band who get sold some hollow amplifiers that supposedly play at a special frequency in the Emperors role, the dodgy Music Agent who sells the amps as the tailors and the crowd at a gig as the crowd at the emperors procession. It was then a pretty obvious choice to call the band 'Emperor'. The problem with this was, that with the whole thing being based around sound, I didn't think it would work so well with the band being silent because of the rip-off amps. I't would seem like something had gone wrong with the sound. So I adapted the idea so the band was actually sold what was supposed to be the most cutting edge sound of the moment, and making it a really horrendous sound.

The story runs through in a linear fashion, there aren't any different routes or choices you can make to navigate through it. I'm really into Hotel on hoogerbrugge.com, it's utter genius, and the episodes usually run through in a linear fashion, but with lots of things to interact with, and this is what I was aiming for. I really haven't managed to include as many different interactive things as I'd have liked to.

Style wise, I was trying to combine a few different looks. I'm really keen on Jim Houser's art work, simple shapes and solid block colours, and I wanted to use this style for my characters. I also really liked the menu screens on Son of Rambow, the handrawn by a kid with felt tips on lined paper look, so I decided to use that style for my backgrounds. The simplicity of my characters meant they'd work well on this kind of background. I originally intended to hand draw all the backgrounds on lined paper and then scan them in, but after several goes with fine liners and felt tips I found it wasn't coming out quite right. When your trying to draw things badly it's actually prety hard to acheive the right kind of badness. So I gave it a go with having plain lined paper in the background and drawing the actual details in flash. This wasn't exactly the look I wanted, but having it looking like it was drawn by a kid in Paint is close enough to the drawn by a kid with felt tips look I was after. The benefit of having the lined paper background is being able to place text on the lines like in an actual book. I used a handwriting style font for my text to keep in with the look of a scrappy sketchbook. I'd also wanted to include some Monty Python/Phonejacker style elements, and I created the agent, Don, with that look. I didn't want to steal a random photo off the internet for this, so I dressed my housemate up in some dodgy agent looking attire, photoshopped a phone into his hand used an airbrush filter on the picture to make it look less sharp so it wouldn't contrast quite as strongly with all the other visuals.

This was my moodboard for this project. Probably a bit too varied.



As for the actual scripting, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than I'd anticipated. I thought it would be straightforward creating my characters with up, over and down button states, but it wasn't nearly that simple. It actually took a lot of work to get the characters animations to play when you clicked them without you having to hold the mouse button down over them to play the full animation. And then when sound starts being involved, there's yet more scripting. A big thanks to Szymon for taking the time to help me sort out those problems. I also used some scripting for animation, namely on the wheels of the cassette tape. Trying to get them to rotate with tweens was leading to them stuttering and not running smoothly all the way round, but scripting the rotation lead to a nice smooth looking result.

The sound in this story is all important, so creating good sound clips was pretty crucial. All the sound clips recorded are either a human voice or a keyboard. I think it adds a nice quality to the story having a voice making the phone/bass/drum etc sounds rather than recording the real sounds. Thanks to Rob for helping me out on that one.

Overall, I'm not too pleased with the end result, for several reasons. There could have been a lot more interactivity in each scene. I'd also wanted to combine several different visual styles, and as much as I wanted the whole thing to look a bit rough and sketchy, it could've done with more visual polish. Positives are I really like my band members, I think they all have a lot of character inspite of their simplistic styling. Also, recording the sounds was an enjoyable process. Scripting is a tricky one, when it goes right it's satisfying (or is it just relief?), but when somethings not working it can take an hour to find you didn't give something a capital letter or something equally small and infuriating. I'd like to get better at scripting, as it's definately a useful skill to have, but I don't think this area is where my strongest interest lies.