3D Animation Project – The Finished Product

The quality of this isn’t as good after uploading it to the web. I might try and upload it on youtube, but it’s 400ish mb so don’t know if it’ll work.

This is the finished version of my animation. It has traveled quite far from my original starting point, which was to use attractive texture and abstract 3D shapes as a form of motion graphics. However, I didn’t know enough about texturing to be able to make the kind of textures that I wanted (very glossy/shiny colours), so I moved on to the idea of using fractal graphics as I knew how to make them. I then discarded the idea of only using abstract shapes because I don’t think the animation would have been as long or as interesting. The abstract shapes I was thinking of making would have been good to go in the background of something like credits.

So I then decided, after Mauricio taught us to model the Jetfire robot, I that I would model a robot similar to that and then apply fractal textures to it. I felt this was a good choice because it created a character, which gives the animation more of a purpose. I was then going make the character dance to a music track that I would make because that would make the fractals move in a similar way to the abstract shapes that I was going to use. However, I realised that that would be too similar to my night out project, where I made the tachikoma dance to the song. So, I decided to add another character, as this would mean that my model can interact with the other character instead of dancing, creating a small bit of narrative.

After looking at other peoples models, I felt like I should’ve made a more complex model because I wasn’t pushing myself as hard, but then I realised that a complex model usually makes texturing the animating harder (as there are so many more things that can go wrong) and so the texturing and animating won’t be as good, so I decided that my model was adequate as it allowed me to texture and animate effectively. I think if I use maya again though, I will definitely be more ambitious with the modelling and make the models more like characters rather than abstract shapes.

3D Animation Project – Animating the Characters and Making the Music/Sounds

Originally, I was going to make a music track and then make the characters move to the music. However, I realised that that was too similar to my Night Out project, so I decided I would try something different. I ended up doing something that I don’t usually do – making the visuals first then adding the sound after.

So I wasn’t really too sure what I would make my characters do, but when I looked the Birdman (who looks similar to Jetfire from ABC Maya), I decided I would make him run/walk, as that was something Mauricio would be teaching us to do in the ABC Maya sessions. However, as he hasn’t actually taught us this yet, my Birdman’s walking/running looked a bit odd. Luckily though, I managed to hide this oddness by altering the camera angle. Before animating his walk, I decided I would make the camera circle around his body once, mainly because I wanted to highlight the different fractal textures of his body.

Here is my first render of Birdman animated, I used the H.264 codec to compress it. I noticed that the lighting in this render was not very good, so later I added two ambient lights to the start and finish of his walk/run. I also changed the camera position for my final render as I felt the Birdman was too far from the camera in this one.

This is a still from an uncompressed version of the animation and as you can see, the colours in it are much more vivid (which is how it’s supposed to look), therefore I think I will try to keep the final animation uncompressed.

I then did a similar animation with my Ghostboy. Although instead of making him walk, I made him bob up and down whilst flapping his arms and rotating his head.

To bring the two characters together, I decided to have a comical sequence where the Ghostboy bobbed up and down around the Birdman and then as the Birdman reached out to touch him, something unexpected happens.

As for the music/sound, I use a few GarageBand melodies and then recorded some of my own sound effects. I found it very hard to make appropriate sound for my visuals because I usually do it the other way round. Also, I haven’t previously had any experience with making and recording my own sound, but I would like to learn a lot more about it.

3D Animation Project – Development 6

It has come to my attention that I need to make some changes to the characters I made. This is because I was told that if my models had too many vertices then it would be very difficult to animate and as I smoothed my ghostboy’s body many times, it ended up having too many vertices:

As you can see, if you click on the image, there are 442,244 vertices. Luckily I saved a spare ghostboy body that had not been smoothed and so I decided to use that. I was also told that it may be easier to animate by smoothing the objects after they’re animated, so I decided to try this out.

This is what ghostboy looks like without smoothing:

So I began to animate him by adding joints:

However, I discovered after trying to animate him with his joints like this, that some joints had to be disconnected like below:

This is because the body and the arms are made using the same polygon, so I had to make the body a child of the middle joint, then select both shoulders and bind them to the skin of the body polygon. This allowed the arms to move up and down whilst the body didn’t move much and when the middle joint was moved the whole of ghostboy would move, which is want I wanted.

Then I created a short animation to test out these movements I wanted to use:

I felt the movements worked quite well, so all that was left to do was to smooth the body and this is what he looked like after one smoothing:

This is what he looked like after two smoothings:

As you can see, there’s not much difference between the two, so I decided to just have one smoothing as means the final thing will take less time to render.

I then rendered the animation after one smoothing and this is how it looked:

As this worked, it proved to me that you can smooth objects after animating, so this is what I will do, as it makes things much easier to animate.

ABC Maya – Jetfire Texturing and Rigging

I finally managed to finish texturing my Jetfire Robot. It was very time consuming to do because some areas of the textures did not match the model exactly, so I had to manipulate it on Photoshop to make them work together.

We also learnt about rigging the robot, which was very useful because I need to be able to do that when working with the Birdman in my 3D Animation Project.

3D Animation Project – Development 5

I finally managed to figure out how make the curved shape on the Birdman’s head. So I made and textured it and this is what it looks like now:

I then used UV projections to move the textures around so that they were in better places:

Then I finalised the textures on Ghostboy:

So now that I have finished texturing both of them, I need to figure out how to successfully rig them. But first, I will create a few different music tracks and then select one, as this will help me figure out how they should move.

3D Animation Project – Development 4

I’ve almost finished modelling the Birdman figure, though I don’t know the best way to model the thing on his head, so I just stuck a polygon there for the time being. I will find out how to do this soon, but meanwhile, I will produce as many fractals with the same colour scheme as possible for I will need these for texturing. I have decided to use blues and purples for the colour scheme of my Birdman as they are probably my favourite colours.

The fractals I made to use as texturing for the Birdman are shown below. I need to make at least 10 different fractals because I will be applying a different one to each of his body parts, which are: head, head thing, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, body, hips, thighs, calves and feet.

Some of these aren’t as good as the others, but making them takes a long long time as they take ages to render etc so I decided not to be too much of a perfectionist. Also, they will look very different when applied as texture to the Birdman’s body parts. I deliberately created them all with a ‘spherical trend’ because I felt this would let them work better when placed next to each other.

As I was modelling the Birdman, I realised that I haven’t tried modelling many smooth/curved things, as I have currently only modelled robots, so I think I will add another character to my animation, but unlike the Birdman, he will have most smooth/curved features, such as a spherical head. He will resemble Casper the friendly ghost so I will just call him Ghostboy. Below is a 2D outline of him:

He will also be textured with fractals, which is why he has a swirl for a face in the image. I will use the an orangey/yellow colour scheme for his texturing because they are the complementary colours of the Birdmans colour scheme. I felt this choice of colour scheme was appropriate as he is supposed to be pretty much the opposite of the Birdman, appearance-wise.

Here are some fractals I made to texture Ghostboy’s body with:

So then I went on to model the Ghostboy and due to his abnormal shape, he was a lot harder to model than the Birdman. However, after creating him, I feel like I have a much better idea of how to model irregular/rounded shapes.

After rendering him like this, I decided that his body was too big so I scaled it down. I then applied some of the fractals to him to see how they looked and which ones I should use. These are the two combinations I ended up with:

I’m not sure which one to pick yet, I think I might put him next to the Birdman and decide which one looks better with his bluey/purple colour scheme.

Here is what the Birdman looks like after I applied the different textures to him:

I just applied the different textures without moving them at all, but it seems that some of the textures which definitely need to be moved to better positions (mainly the ones from his waist downwards).

Here is the Birdman and the Ghostboy together:

I’m still not too sure which Ghostboy looks better. I think I will try to ask many people what they think and go with the one that the majority chooses.

3D Animation Project – Development 3

So I began to start modelling my Birdman figure and in order to do this, I had to take pictures of it from different angles, as that was necessary for creating the construction planes similar to the ones that Mauricio created for us in the Jetfire one. I also had to edit them in Photoshop to make sure they were about the same size.

Top

Side

Front

Back

Then, I textured the planes with these photos so that I could begin modelling.

I also noticed that certain parts of the model were ‘empty’, like the back of the knees and the front of the elbows. There were two ways in which we created these parts on the Jetfire model – one was to create a cuboid and then delete certain faces and the other was to create a thin cuboid and extrude a face on each side. So to decide which method I would use, I decided to see how each method looked with the texturing:

Original Cuboid

Method One

Method Two

So as you can see, method one appears to work a lot better, as method two seems to make the fractal texture overlap itself and look messy, which is why I will be using method one to create those parts when I actually do the modelling.

ABC Maya – UV Texturing

We learnt how to properly texture items like the one below using a UV projection. I think this will be very useful for making realistic-looking objects such as the one below, but it’s also helpful because it lets us move textures around, which I think I will probably need to do when I create my animation.

3D Animation Project – Development 2

I had much trouble today trying to get the fractal textures to show up in an animation. For some reason it just wouldn’t render as a quicktime animation, it would just come up with black nothingness when I tried. Even Liam and Mauricio could not work out what the problem was, but we found that at least we could render them as an image sequence. However, even with the image sequence it was difficult to make a mov file, because when I tried importing it into premier and then exporting it, the exported video was weird, with lots of lines and looked completely wrong. That is when I stumbled upon this video, which has currently made matters much easier:

So I finally managed to animate the objects with fractal texturing. Although I also found that rendering an image sequence using tiffs gave a much better quality than when rendering jpegs, so I will definitely render as tiffs in future. I also found that for some reason, the mov file only works on youtube when the ‘Alpha Channel (Mask)’ box is unticked during the initial rendering.

Jpeg

Tif

It might be quite hard to see as the sequences are very short, but the jpeg one has actually lost part of the texturing, which is why the tiff one is better. Also, I think I will try and make my animations a bit longer than one second in future…originally I made them short so that they were smaller in size and took up less space on my hard drive, but after watching them again I realised how ridiculously difficult it is to see what’s actually going on…they make me laugh though.

I then tried making a similar animation using a polygon sphere and found that the nurbs ones work a lot better, for, as you can see in the video below, the polygon sphere with fractal texturing has jagged edges.

Also, I thought I should mention here that after fiddling around with different shapes and trying to move and morph in an abstract way, I found that it’s actually very difficult to do this well and not make everything look really random. So, I have decided, which I briefly mentioned in the Birdman post, I will try and model the Birdman figure and apply different fractal textures to his body. I haven’t decided exactly how he will move yet, but I think this will be easier to decide once I’ve applied the textures to his body. I may also make him interact with some of the original abstract shapes.

ABC Maya – Birdman Paper Figure

We were asked to choose and make a paper figure out of the templates we were given and here are some photos of the one I chose:

Once I’ve completed modelling and rigging the Jetfire robot I will have a go at modelling this one, and because of the way it looks, it might actually work well if I texture it with fractal graphics and then make it interact with the 3D shapes in my 3D animation project. So I’m starting to think that it may be better to have character/main subject in my animation, rather than just random shapes moving and morphing because the use of a main subject will make it easier to plan and structure the animation.