We have to practice making invoices as part of the professional project, so here are the invoices I made for my different projects. I grouped all the animations projects into one invoice because the addresses would all be AUCB.
I wasn’t provided with an address by Visible Partnership, which is why I didn’t add it in the invoice.
After doing the texturing for the doll in the film Praguiem, I was then asked to texture the main character – Antoan. He took longer to do compared to the doll, because I had to also design his look at the same time. I had to figure out what pattern to use for the gold bits of his coat as well as how to do the scarf and hair as the ‘look’ for him had not really been specified.
The first image below shows what he looked like without any texturing. The rest of the images are what each of the texture files looked like, some of them also had a bump and spec version.
Trouser/sock UV snapshot and texture.
Shoe UV snapshot and texture.
Coat UV snapshot and texture. For the coat I also performed an additional process, called ‘baking’. This process saves on rendering and compositing time, because it puts the ambient occlusion version of the object into the actual texture file/image, therefore you do not need to render a separate occlusion pass. The occlusion adds depth to the objects by highlighting the curves of the objects. The hardest part of painting the coat was probably figuring out how to get rid of the seams, for a good texture file will show no seams on the model. The seams are basically the locations that the UVs meet at when they are folded into a 3D shape.
This is the bump map file for the coat, it was just used to make the painted buttons appear as if they were sticking out like real buttons.
This is the specular map for the coat. This was created to make the gold lines of the coat appear more vivid and shiny to make it seem more golden rather than dark yellow/brownish.
Hand UV snapshot and texture. I was only provided with the small UV snap shot for the hands, which meant they would only be seen small in the film (meaning no close ups of them) and because of this I didn’t add nails because they would have taken forever to figure out where they should be painted due to the way the UV layout was made.
Face and neck UV snapshot and texture. Like the coat, I baked the face to give it more contours and definition. I also used a Photoshop brushes to create skin textures.
This was the face bump map file, it was only made to add a bump to his mole, for it would have looked weird to have a big flat mole.
Iris UV snapshot and texture.
Scarf UV snapshot and texture. I felt the way I painted the scarf made it look like it had a lot more layers to it, so I was quite pleased with this one.
Wig UV snapshot and texture. I had many problems with the wig texture. This is because the wig’s UVs were stretched in a way that stretched the hair strands to different widths in different places, so even if it looked fine on Photoshop, I had to keep going back and forth to make sure it looked good on the actual model. Also, because of where the UVs ended it was horrendously time consuming to get rid of the seams on the wig. I had to keep going back and forth between Maya and Photoshop and making tiny changes and then seeing if it got rid of the seams.
Antoan rendered – long shot.
Antoan rendered – mid shot.
Antoan rendered – close up. The hair seams were still there in this render because I had finished everything else so wanted to show the director at this point. I then went through the tedious task of removing the seams.
Antoan rendered – extreme close up. As you can see, the seams in the wig have now been removed!
This is my second design for the Avenger character, I chose darker/more evil looking colours to make him appear more obviously like a villain. There’s definitely room for improvement in the painting, because I’m not sure some of the colours are quite right, but as I had many other things to do, I could only allow myself to have a small amount of time to complete this, so I had to leave it as it is.
Since I was interested in learning how to texture things properly in maya, Jakub offered me the opportunity to texture the doll that I modeled. Although, to fit the appearance of the doll with the other two characters, he slightly edited the model’s face to be more pointed. He then set up the doll so that it was using the exact render settings that he wanted as well as the exact colours. As you can see from below, the render settings made the doll way brighter than in the maya view, so I had to change the shadows and highlights of the textures quite a lot because they would look very different once rendered.
Before texturing screenshot:
Before texturing render:
So I was given a uv snapshot for each of the body parts and asked to make a coloured image for the texture, a grayscale image for the bump map and a black image with slight highlights for the specular map. This took a fair bit of time because I had to make three images for every single body part. Below are examples of each of the three different images I had to make for each one.
UV snapshot example:
Arm texture example:
Bump map example:
Spec map example:
Below shows just the texture image for each body part. Jakub wanted the texture to appear very obviously painted, which is why a lot of them are done in a sort of rough way, to emphasise the painted strokes.
Button 1 texture:
Button 2 texture:
Feet texture:
Hair texture:
Hand texture:
Head texture:
Upper arm texture:
Upper leg texture:
Lower leg texture:
Head scarf texture:
Shoulder texture:
Trousers texture:
Top/dress texture:
Top/dress obj:
The textures may look a bit weird on their own, but they look a lot better on the doll, and this is often the case with painted textures, because it is most important that the texture looks okay on the actual model, for that will be the final thing.
Most of the textures were fairly easy to create. The most difficult part was probably the top/dress, as I had to be very precise with the painting to accurately draw on each frill for the front of the top. This would have been incredibly difficult and frustrating to do if I had used the uv snapshot only, for I would have had to do an extremely large amount of trial and errors. So, I used Photoshop’s 3D ability and opened an ‘.obj’ version of the top and painted on the frills onto this three dimensional object. I then transferred the textures from the obj to a 2D file with the uv snapshot overlayed and neatened up the frills in this file. The three dimensional painting in Photoshop is really useful for marking out the locations of intricate details like the frills, but it’s not very precise, so it’s still better to use the 2D function to neaten things up.
Completely textured doll screenshot:
Completely textured doll render:
I think the final doll turned out quite like how I think Jakub wanted it, so I’m happy with the result.
Jemma contacted me as the deadline was approaching for the project she was working on for Visible Partnership Ltd, for the clients had given her way too much work for one person to complete within a week, so I decided to help out.
This project was probably the biggest test yet for organizational skills and ability to work under pressure as we were asked to do about a months worth of work in a week.
What the clients wanted was a projection with space invaders floating about that the Chelsea footballers could kick a ball at and each time the balls hit they would explode. There were separate people working on the interactive flash bit, so we were asked to make the visuals. They wanted the space invaders to have five different levels, with five different backgrounds and also an intro to start off the whole thing. The levels included: a lava level, a neon glowy level, a desolate landscape level, a shark in a tank level and a brick wall level. For the intro, they wanted it to be quite colourful and appear as if the projection was initialising with sparks and equalisers as well as 3D blocks that made the projection appear more three dimensional.
As we had to plan the schedule between us, we shared out the work in a way that allowed it to be completed the fastest, so we did whatever we could to help each other out.
I wanted to get the most difficult and challenging part out of the way first, and that was the shark in a tank level. Usually I can make quite a high quality model of something like a shark in a week, but for this project I only had about half a day to complete it. I had to be really concise about everything I did when making the model and so I managed to produce one of reasonable quality in this time limit.
What I then had left to do for that level was to rig, texture, animate and composite the shark.
I had some experience of rigging and found it fairly easy so I managed to make a very simple rig that allowed me to animate him the amount I needed. However, I had previously had virtually no experience with uving and texturing and felt that if I attempted this myself it may have taken far too long, so I asked a friend from animation for help and she was super fast at both of these things so she managed to do it for me in about half a day, which allowed me to also make the rig in this time. So, by the end of the first day, I had a fully modeled, rigged and textured shark, who was ready to be animated.
I then spent about the next half a day, doing two animations for the shark, which would later be looped and flipped to create variation in the level, as the level had to last one and a half minutes. I haven’t had too much experience with animating in maya properly with the graph editor, so it took me a bit of time and the animation could definitely be improved, but I felt it was reasonable and had to leave it at that in order to get everything done. I then did a lighting test, which I thought looked good, so I rendered out the two shark animations.
I then spent the rest of the day compositing it all and trying to make it look sort of like it was underwater and behind a glass window. They wanted him to look like he was in a boxed tank, so Jemma quickly made a tank layout in Cinema 4D for me to use (as it can be used to make quick textures for the ground). I added some light rays, some turbulent noise and colour adjustments to try and make him look sort of like he was underwater. It’s very difficult to make the underwater effect without researching it thoroughly so I felt this was the best I could do for now. I then put together the two animations in a way that would allow it to last for one and a half minutes.
The password is ‘spaceinvadershark’.
It’s not really that exciting to watch for one and a half minutes but for the final thing there will be space invaders in front of it so they will be the main focus.
To finish off what I had to do for the shark level, I made some short cracked glass animations that could be played and overlayed when the football hits the space invader, so that it looks like it’s also breaking the glass in the background.
This animation is so short that it’s actually quite hard to watch it properly on vimeo. It’s basically just the crack appearing and I did this with about four different looking cracks by using masks in After Effects.
For the intro, I made the last and 3D section of it, where the blocks would move in and out to create the impression that the projection was three dimensional. My boyfriend also helped out on the project so he made and set up the initial blocks in maya. However, he was not as familiar with animating in maya so I took over from there and finished off the animation as well as made the texture and glow for the blocks. This was reasonably easy to do but it was quite time consuming because almost every block had to be animated at some point so there were a lot of blocks to go through and animate. The biggest issue with this one was the render time. It would have taken about three days to render it in the highest quality so we had to cut the quality slightly half way through because we didn’t have three days to spare, although this change isn’t really too noticeable unless you watch it a few times.
The password is ‘spaceinvaderblocks’.
The animation of the blocks could definitely be improved but I felt it was okay for the time we were given to do it, which was less than a day.
After Jemma made and rendered out the lava, she gave me the renders to composite in Afters Effects, where I added smoke and a glow to the hardened lava bits on the ground. Also, near the end of the lava level, I played around with the settings and made it look like it was hardening. I also had to mask out some glitches where the lava was still sort of exploding but not ment to be. In the rendered images, after the initial eruption, the lava just stays completely still, and this looked really weird and flat, so I made it sort of look like it was bubbling by using the mesh tool. Below is the smoke and hardening I made:
This lava took forever to composite because some of the smoke was made using ‘particles’ and the particles made it so that it took forever to preview each change I made. I think the bubbling effect could be greatly improved, but it took so long to view every little change that I didn’t have the time to make these improvements.
For one of the levels they just wanted a projection of the wall that we were projecting on, except with neon lines where the pillars were. So I made the neon bars in maya to make them look more 3D and overlayed them on a photo of the wall that was given to us.
It was a shame that I had to work with this photo, as, if the photo had been much higher quality I think it would have looked a lot better.
Jemma had an idea of what she wanted to do for the desolate landscape level, so I just made her some trees in maya using the paint effects tool and then converting them into polygons and positioning them in the right places.
I also made a ufo quickly in maya for Jemma to use for the 188bet logo animation, for they were the main sponsors.
Hollie wanted a very flat After Effects style animation for the program that the children will be watching on the TV in her film, so she asked me to do this as I knew how to use After Effects fairly well. She also wanted a similar style for the credits, so I decided to tackle all the character designs first. I needed to make a design for: a TV zombie, a TV woman (who role is to scream as she sees the TV zombie), the zombie boy, the zombie girl, the scared mum and the communist dad.
Hollie wanted the designs to be in the style of a 50′s cartoon, so I found the designs quite hard to do at first because they were VERY different from my personal style. However, after some practice and looking at a lot of references, I began to get the hang of the style so managed to come up with a few designs.
Here are the references I used for the following designs:
I used these reference to produce some initial designs of the zombie boy and zombie girl:
I don’t usually like leaving things this rough, but Hollie wanted some really quick rough drawings that showed the various 50′s cartoon styles, so I left them like this to meet her requirements.
Then we decided that, as she had a very specific idea of what the character designs were to look like, she would draw over any of my designs that she thought needed tweaking to finalise the designs. In this case, she drew over the boy just to neaten and round him off:
I then took these images into Illustrator and drew over them with the pen tool and coloured them with different shades of grey that I thought were appropriate and left them in a block colour style that had no line art (as this is the sort of style Hollie asked for). They had to be monochromatic due to the TV being an old black and white one. The directors also had a look at the final designs to make sure the the colours were okay, so I had to make a few minor adjustments.
I then did the same process with the TV zombie and TV woman, although Hollie already had quite a few designs she wanted to use for the zombie so we just ended up using on of her zombies. So, I mainly just designed the woman, but I had a go at designing the zombie anyway and below are some of the references I used:
I did a design for the woman using both of the styles above, as they were the style of 50′s cartoon women that Hollie liked the most.
After looking at my designs, Hollie decided to go for an in between on the woman design so that the woman had the top design’s head and the bottom design’s body. She also incorporated the nose and stitch from my zombie into her zombie design.
So Hollie drew over the bottom woman design and added the top ones head to it:
This was her zombie design with the new nose:
I then drew over both of these in Illustrator to make the final designs in the same style as the boy and girl:
Once again I asked the directors to check to see if they were happy about the colours and then made all the minor changes that they wanted.
The final two designs that I have to complete now is one of the dad and one of the horrified mum. They decided that they didn’t want the dad to be a communist in the credits.
Below shows the composited versions of the characters. I just did the animating really quickly to test out which bits had to be in separate layers, so the animation is quite amusingly terrible.
To try and grasp the principles of animation, I decided to start from the basics try and make a ball bounce.
Note – The videos may need to be re-watched a few times as the internet connection can sometimes create a lag in the video.
I started off by literally just positioning the ball at the highest and lowest points of each of it’s bounces and then gradually decreased the distance between these points to zero to allow the ball to eventually come to a stop. At this point it obviously looks nothing like a bouncing ball because I have yet to adjust the timing, rotation and the squash and stretch.
For this next step, I adjusted the timing so that it stayed in the air for longer at the height of each bounce and did this after studying how a bouncing ball should be animated in Richard William’s animation book. However, it still doesn’t really look like a bouncing ball as I still have yet to add rotation and squash and stretch.
So I added rotation and tweaked the timing some more and I think it looks a lot better as a ball would definitely rotate in real life if it were bouncing forward. The timing was still not perfect in this so I had to adjust it some more to reach the final one. The main problem was that when it slowed to a stop it seemed to stop and then roll again, whereas it should just roll slowly to a stop.
After finalising the timing and playing with the squash and stretch, I decided to make two final ball bounces. One of a hard rigid ball and one of a soft, squidgy, water balloon-like ball.
Please click on ‘vimeo’ to watch these through a bigger window.
Hard ball:
Squidgy ball:
This is an observational drawing I did a while ago, I quite liked it because I felt the drawing looked quite like the boy, as sometimes it’s difficult to make a drawing actually look like the person.
Please ignore the random gradients on the following images. They were caused by the scanner.
This is a line drawing of a kitchen that I did. It’s the first time I’ve attempted a line drawing like this so I’m quite pleased with the outcome. However, I can see that there are still a few perspective issues which I need to work on.
This is a tree that I started to draw. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish it because the tree was outside someone’s house and they happened to come home as I was drawing it, so to avoid being mistaken for a stalker, I had to leave early!
These are some two/three minute life drawings that I did. I need to practice more to improve my speed.
These are some of my five/six minute life drawings.
These are some ten minute clothed life drawings that I did. I think I need to practice some techniques that will help me improve my lines.
This was a more detailed life drawing that I did, however I forgot to time it.
This is the second creature I was asked to design – the Chimera. In the script, it is described to have three heads, a lion head, a goat head and a snake head. Its body is described to have the front body of a lion, the back legs of a goat and the tail of a snake. So, as the chimera has three heads and each is of a different animal, I decided to do some possible designs of just the head first and I started by gathering the reference images below and then drawing some heads similar to the ones in some of these images.
I really liked the idea of having a white lion head as I think they look stunning so I drew one in that style. As for the goat, his personality was supposed to be quite funny in a stupid way as he constantly mishears things, and I thought both the farm goat and mountain goat heads looked sort of dopey like that so I drew them both as head possibilities. I knew the snake head had to be between either a python or a boa’s head, because they’re quite defined and recognisable. So, I finished drawing the first two (the left one is a boa and the right one is a python) and decided that the head should be a combination of those two so I didn’t finish the last head and just moved on to the whole design as I needed to produce these designs quite quickly.
For this particular design, I decided it would be interesting to make all three heads white. So, I decided to go for the head of a white lion, a farm goat (I chose that over the mountain goat because I decided a farm goats legs would work better with a lions body), and a white snake with a boa’s head shape. However, as I progressed with the painting, I felt that the design may end up looking bit boring if it were all completely white, so I decided to give it the tail of a ‘red-tailed boa’, as I think this complemented the rest of the design and it was also one of my favourite snake patterns.
This was quite a difficult image to draw as it was made up of three different animals that were quite different so I had to switch between painting the fluffiness of the lion to the short fur of the goat to the scales of the snake and sometimes this was a bit disorientating. I think my favourite part of the painting is actually the tail, so I’m not sure the completely white look will be the best design for the Chimera. I think for the next design I will do one that’s a lot more colourful.
To help with drawing the Chimera animals in my next few designs I decided to do some observational studies of them, as I felt this would help me draw them faster and more accurately:
I also did a painting of an initial concept for Pegasus, however, I don’t think he was as good as I realised later that the image I was using for reference was weirdly proportioned, which is why he turned out slightly wrong as well.
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