The Final Animation

The final animation,
http://vimeo.com/32562056

Extra Shots

On thinking we were finishing (and having one of the first relaxing weekends for a LONG time), we had some criticism for a few of the shots, some got sent back to comp, some sent back to the render farm.
We even cut the last shot out, due to bad animation/poor lighting and inserted the following shots.

More Animating

These two posts are just what i consider my best animation for the project...and they're still not that great. I really want more time to polish what i do..and would've been able to had i had just TWO roles. *sigh*

Animating

As one of our animators skipped town, and didn't turn up to classes, it was left to Sean and I to animate 19 shots. It was a daunting task, but we were able to animate some block outs and start finessing them. Unfortunately we didn't have the time we wanted to really get the animation looking realistic...which is a real shame. But there was just so much to do.

Layout

The only reason I'm posting this is for some of the half decent animation (a few of the cameras).

I thought it would really add to the shot if i animated the cameras fairly closely to what we'll be looking for in a final animation. Some aren't though, and others are edited in post.

Passes

We learned about multiple passes today, which was ace.
So I can now render multiple passes, within separate render layers and get a huge amount of frames to composite and play with. I think i'll mainly do the Ambient Occlusion and the depth passes. The depth one was really lovely, being able to pull focus in post was just a dream, and without having to up the render settings within maya to avoid getting a grainy effect.
Very chuffed.

Quick Eve Render

Quick rubbish renders of Eve with a single texture pass.

So this is why we might end up using a different map pack for close ups, using the displacements. It looks good from a distance, but the light tricks break down when you get closer.

Designing my own Tartan

So I couldn't find the right texture for Eve's tartan pyjamas. I had a long look on google images, and various texturing sites. I went through my personal texture bank of $%£$£% WAY too many textures, and still couldn't find anything that I thought would fit.

Starting to think I had to make my own in photoshop, I tried one last time to find something drastic. Google> "design own tartan". I found this site > http://www.scotweb.co.uk/tartandesign/


Great way of generating multiple tartan patterns, and it was free! So I made about 4 and compared each within Zbrush, using the new spotlight feature.

This was a wonderful way of making sure the pattern was consistent and the lines conformed. It was hard though, making small rotational adjustments to spotlight and tracing the lines before committing to painting.

Something I'm going to look into next is 'Bodypaint'. It'l be easier to create dynamic textures with hard surface models, without having to subdivide them in Zbrush.

Eve Textures

Character textures are always much harder than static ones, I find.
The character was given a more comic-style for a few reasons. One is so we can get a polished result, rather than going for hyper-realism and failing, possibly making something that looks 'odd' or 'scary' rather than sweet and innocent. The other is that we have a good few members that really enjoy comics and comic animation/characters. It's something that was easier to do with the reference too, as it was largely comic based.

At the moment the texture hasn't gone through any post processes in photoshop. It's the base paint I did in Zbrush. I DO plan to clean this up. I think I'm going to do a range of passes, to see which is best.

I've also done a displacement map, but I'm keeping it on reserve if the Normal map fails/isn't the right quality. The only issue with this is if the model is resized in any way. It's also an issue for rendering times too. for long-shots there's absolutely no reason to be using a displacement, and there's not many close ups. 

Designing my own Tartan

So I couldn't find the right texture for Eve's tartan pyjamas. I had a long look on google images, and various texturing sites. I went through my personal texture bank of $%£$£% WAY too many textures, and still couldn't find anything that I thought would fit.

Starting to think I had to make my own in photoshop, I tried one last time to find something drastic. Google> "design own tartan". I found this site > http://www.scotweb.co.uk/tartandesign/


Great way of generating multiple tartan patterns, and it was free! So I made about 4 and compared each within Zbrush, using the new spotlight feature.

This was a wonderful way of making sure the pattern was consistent and the lines conformed. It was hard though, making small rotational adjustments to spotlight and tracing the lines before committing to painting.

Something I'm going to look into next is 'Bodypaint'. It'l be easier to create dynamic textures with hard surface models, without having to subdivide them in Zbrush.

Modelling Eve

Just a few screen grabs of modelling the main character.
She started life as a badly topologized ZSpheres ZBrush project, went through Topogun, back into ZBrush (for more detailing and texturing) and finally into maya for rigging and animating.

Texturing 1

So i finished texturing the bunker, as a first pass. Everything has a colour channel, and most objects have a form of bump mapping. I varied using new maps and existing maps for the bumps, trying to use as little 'new' maps as possible. Most are 2k maps, so as not to use huge textures that slow my realtime viewing, and to practice getting the most out of smaller texture sizes. (Though 2k is pretty large for me :) ).

These are just some screenies of the UVs and mapped textures.

This is how i made the textures. Just a series of layers in photoshop, with some outsourced photo reference. Some mine, some not. 

Bunker Textures.

I worked on modelling the bunker.

I wanted to keep things very low poly, as we can always sculpt up if we decide to later. There are only two assets in this scene with normal maps, everything else either has a bump (usually it's own colour texture feeding in) or nothing at all. 

I loved modelling the wires. I used a new process of extruding from a nurbs circle and using the pen tool to simply draw my wires in the Side view. The fun thing is, they're al still attached to my original curve, meaning i could edit them in the Z axis later, so none of them collide with each other. While creating them i was also able to control the poly count, which is going to really help when we come to rendering the scene. 

Industry Exercises

Hello.

For this Industry unit I'll be focussing on Texturing. This will include all aspects of modelling normal maps/displacement maps, colour maps and paintings.
I want to really look further into creating shading networks that can further my work, and add realism/style/rendering efficiency.

I'll be modelling all my own work shown, though will note only if it's been nabbed from someone else.
I'll also be looking at animating. I may not be animating anything for the Digital Environment project, but i would like to improve and research much more in this field.

I know I've picked two, but I'm greedy :)