Post Production Project – Final Thing

The finished product:

The quality isn’t as good on this one because it had to be compressed but it was the only way to upload it.

Visuals – me.

Music and sound effects – Doug Brown.

I’m really pleased with this outcome overall. It feel’s like I have learned a lot about Maya (through the teachings of Jemma and Ash), seeing as I only really knew how to model objects made of straight lines before this project and I can now model smoothed objects like the cat, and really complex objects like the gun. The gun was probably the hardest to model and it’s a shame you can’t really see the detail in the final thing, but I think modeling the gun helped me a lot with learning how to model complex shapes. It also took me an excessively long time to figure out how I wanted Pixel Cat to look, I guess that’s because it’s my first time making a 3D character design for a project. I think I should be able to come up with a character’s appearance a lot quicker in future.

The next problem was texturing. I love shiny textures but in this case, shiny textures were extremely hard to make because there wasn’t much in the surroundings to reflect off the shiny texture, which sometimes made the texture seem dull. I managed to sort of get round this by making a massive white sphere around the cat, which made him look more reflective. One thing that I wanted to try and do but didn’t manage to was to create and import a HDRI image of my kitchen lighting, but because no one really had time to teach me how to do it and I couldn’t figure it out myself in the time we had, I ended up just using the white sphere.

Rigging was okay but if I didn’t learn how to paint the weights of each joint, the animation would have looked really weird, like his whole body would’ve moved if his arm moved or something. There were just so many little problems that I kept encountering in Maya, which if weren’t solved, would have made the whole thing look terrible. However, I think I know now how to reduce the possibility of these problems occurring so I should hopefully have less problems like these in future.

I then encountered the problem of filming the background. I tried filming it with a high quality SD camera, but the footage turned out extremely blurry and grainy (this was caused by the fact that nothing was moving in the static shots). I decided that I couldn’t use that and so I borrowed Alex’s SLR and just took stills which looked a lot better and crisper.

Then came the animating step. The actual animating wasn’t that difficult to do/work out, but I had to work with 26 difference maya scenes so it took a long time to apply the same settings to each scene and make sure all the shot matched up without any obvious continuity errors. Then I had to wait until Mauricio taught us how to make and render shadow layers and composite the everything so that they looked really like they were really in my kitchen. This part was quite tricky to do because there were about 5 settings that you had to make sure were exactly right or else the shadow layer didn’t work. So there was a lot of frustration caused by the shadow layer not working. Luckily I managed to sort it out, so I then composited everything in After Effects, at which point I noticed that I really needed to add a reflection because the kitchen surface had reflected all the real objects. The reflection for each shot had to be done in different ways because some bits were more reflective than others. For a lot of them I just duplicated the character and flipped him upside down and lowered the opacity. However, that didn’t work for some of them as you could see the reflection of the of the object behind him through his reflection, which wasn’t really right so I had to figure out other ways of doing it. As for the reflection in scenes with a lot of objects, I had to re-render some of the objects separately to use them for the reflective layer because if you have loads of objects in one scene and you flip them all upside down, they’re often at a weird angle to the original because the perspective is not from straight on.

I then let Doug handle the music and sound because he was clearly very good at doing it and I didn’t have access to a sound effects library and didn’t really know how to use programs like l
Logic, which I would have used to make the music and record the sounds. I did help a bit with a few of the sound effects in the end though, because I wanted a few minor adjustments to the original soundtrack he made. I think in future though I would like to have a go myself at making the sounds for my visuals because he showed me briefly the basics of how to use logic and hopefully I can work with that.

Post Production Project – Compositing

Here is a still of how everything will look in the end:

I had to make the reflection in After Effects because I’m not sure about how it can be done in the correct way in Maya.

Post Production Project – Animating

So I used the photos I took to help me position my characters/objects in the right place and then began animating.

Here are some playblasts I saved while I was animating:

For some reason once uploaded onto youtube the quality goes really quite bad.

Post Production Project – Final Choice of Footage

After filming all the scenes with a high quality SD video camera, I captured them into Premiere and realised that the quality of the shots turned out terrible. I later found that this is because I was filming a static shot with nothing moving in it. Here is how it looked:

So it was clear that I couldn’t use a video camera to shoot my scenes as the same problem would be occuring as nothing in the scene moves. So, I decided to use an SLR instead and the photos were much better quality:

Post Production Project – Camera or Video Camera

I have positioned my Pixel Cat in front of two different backgrounds. One is from a camera and the other is from a video camera. This is to decide what type of footage I will use:

This is the background from a camera.

This is the background from a low quality video camera.

I believe the character looks a lot more like he’s actually in the scene with the video camera one so I decided that I would use footage from a high quality video camera.

Post Production Project – 2D Animation Scene

I’ve finished creating the 2D animation scenes that appear at the start and end of my film, here are screenshots of them:

I will not show the actual animation because I want it to be a surprise when they are shown together at the end.

I originally started with the image above but I decided that the inverted one worked better:

Post Production Project – The Birth of Spade Face and His Home

I’ve now modelled Spade Face and the components of his home:

This is Spade Face.

These are the plates that form a wall/fence around his house.

This bottle is the flower pot that takes up most of his garden.

The stem of this flower went a bit weird, I will probably remake it once I figure out how to make it work.

This bowl is his house.

Here is what his home looks like with all the elements put together:

I also rendered an image of what Pixel Cat will probably look like when he turns ‘evil’.

Post Production Project – Storyboard

I have now planned the scenes I will shoot by making a storyboard:

Now I just need to:

• Make the opening and ending scene using Illustrator and After Effects
• Finish modelling everything
• Make a HDRI image for the lighting
• Film the shots with an average video camera to practice compositing/using maya live
• Film the shots with a HD camera
• Rig and animate everything whilst using maya live
• Make sound effects/music to go with it

ABC Maya – Occlusion and Beauty

We learnt how to separate the images into an occlusion and beauty layer today by practicing with a sphere and plane.

We used the above hypershade settings to made the surface shader appear sort of ‘flat-like’.

Then we created an occlusion layer by changing the presets on the ‘render’ layer to ‘occlusion’.

The is the jetfire ‘beauty’ layer.

And here is the jetfire ‘occlusion’ layer.

Post Production Project – Further Character Development

I decided to develop my character further by placing him in an environment similar to the one he will be presented in. I did this by importing him into the screwdriver scene that we created in ABC Maya because this scene contained a HDRI image similar to the one I will use for my video. The HDRI image is what creates the lighting of an environment such as a real kitchen, so it allowed me to see how the different textures will look in this environment.

Here are three different combinations of textures that I tried:

This was the silver metallic/airbrushed-looking texture shown in the ‘character development’ post. As you can see, when placed under HDRI lighting the texture goes a bit crazy and looks a bit too reflective, so I decided that I would probably go with the other texture.

As you can see, this texture works quite well with the HDRI lighting. However, for some reason the character’s eyes have lost it’s sparkle when placed in this environment so I’m going to have to look into why this is and how to rectify this.

Here I made the radiation sign glow to see how it would look in this environment because a lot of people seemed to like it when the character radiated a glow from his forehead. I felt this looked okay so I think I will try adding the glow when I make my video.

This is how the glow looks when the character is surrounded by a completely white space:

I also made a video with the camera circling my character because I wanted to see how the textures reacted to camera movement:

I had to compress the video file with the H.264 codec for it to upload on youtube, so the quality is much worse than the original file.