More After Effects.

Now it was time to edit the green screen footage of jeff getting abducted. This involved using a process called keying. I blogged about this earlier in the project when we were taught it but I still wanted to document the progress of my own keying. Im getting the hang of keying and quite enjoying the process and generally using after effects.

The less grey the better.

Actor separated from background.

Dissolved.

Using the scatter effect I gave the impression of the actor being disolved by the alien spaceship and abducted into it. I keyed the action in the timeline then added the effect. I then made another key which changed the opacity to 0, so from the first to the second key it looks like she's been vaporised. I also changed the scatter to vertical so it looked like she was being beamed up.

I really enjoyed doing this in AE and im finding it easier to pick up than I did initially with Maya. The program is also a lot less complex than Maya in the sense that working with 2d images is easier and less can go wrong.

Spaceship animation and AE.

After finishing with the model I moved on to animating the spaceship. I Imported an image file into the maya and animated the spaceship flying in front of it to reference where it would fly in the video file.

I also added a motion blur to simulate the flying effect in a better way and help blend the spaceship and background. This is not a finished product but this is the current state.

Rigging & Binding.

The next job after the texturing was the rigging of the character. This was done by building a skeleton using the joint tool, which would then be attached to the character so it can be animated. This was relatively easy and I managed to complete it withe few problems. Besides the hands, because of the way I had modelled it the joints to the hands were not easy to position because in the top view the fingers obscured each other. However I managed to get around this with little problem just using the side and perspective view to positon the fingers. Having learnt from last time the importance of naming, I made sure to correctly name all the joints as I went along. This was infinitely helpful when it came to moving joints and parts of the body.





The next stage was to create the controls for the rig. This meant using NURBS primitives to draw out appropriately shaped handles which would then serve to operate the joints inside the mesh. Circles were used for first two spine joints, neck, head, elbows and feet. Where as the jaw, hands, shoulders, third spine joint, and clavicle controls were drawn out to mimic the rough shape of the body part in question. Except for the third spine joint and the clavicles they were controlled by arrows which showed their direction of movement.

After creating the controls I had to then constrain them to each relevant part so the controls move the skeleton with it. This was all very complicated but I struggled through and then it was time for parenting. This involved parenting each joint to the appropriate one next in the hierarchy this involved thinking of how the human body was constructed.

Weight painting was the next task which was found to be increasingly difficult this resulted in me not weight painting the model extensively just the key parts this resulted in less animation than i had intended. This was necessary as I was tight on time. I simplified the movements to just a wave and a turn of the head. However throughtout this module i do believe my skills in all these areas have improved as most of the things I've talked about i couldn't do before. Besides weight painting which I really need to work on. 

Interior.

Now considering that this is the back of a camper van the interior should be as such so I pulled some images off the internet to give me an idea of what to include.

 The pictures I got really helped the design of the interior as I used different aspects of each one to make my own. Such as on the left the chair speakers.

I liked the patterns on the blue one because they are really vibrant and complicated. This I thought was ideal and the design of the chair was also what I was looking for.

After using the pictures I had acquired I started to build and shade the environment based on the images shown above.

the colours could be considered a little ostentatious but thats
the idea. Normal hippies are a bit funky so what are space ones
going to be like. 

the speakers were a key part of the design. the space hippies have to mirror
real hippies as much as they can to make them believable 

using a toon shader for the environment was a really good idea because when the
light hits the surfaces the change colour depending on your perspective. Another
example of ultra-hipping. 

Toon Shading the Van.

Just a quick post to show that I've toon shaded the van into some funky colours

I had a bit of an issue with the rings around the middle of the van. When it was smoothed it the rings would warp and change and make it look rubbish. This was because i should have extruded all sides at the same time so the vertices were merged. Even though the van isnt smoothed I still think the blocky retro feel works quite well.

Modelling Jesse.

First thing I did was too import the image files into Maya so I would have two reference points in which to start modelling the character. these were the images I used:

After attempting to model in Maya last time, it turned into a total disaster and destroyed my confidence. Knowing pretty much nothing extra when I went into Maya this time the experience was much much better and I enjoyed modelling Jesse.. even if it took 7 hours.

I started by creating a plane and splitting it in two. One of the eye section of the face and one for the mouth. After last time I made sure all the outer vertices had been snapped to the centre to avoid problems when mirroring later. I was particularly apprehensive after making the T-shirt sleeves as I thought this was going to be impossible at first look. 

This was just before I mirrored the character. I made sure to use edge flow effectively this time by deleting edge/vertexes and unneeded edges to try and reduce the overal poly count.  The Hardest part of this was the shorts. I wanted a baggy effect on the shorts and this was very difficult as I wasn't modelling with cloth but i think the shorts still look pretty good despite my struggles.

After failing at Uv texturing last time, this time i decided on a different approach. I found this tool called the 'toon shader' which essentially gives the effect of your model being a cartoon. This was very beneficial to me because it reduced a lot of time texturing. It also made sense to do it this way for my scene anyway, because they're space hippies lots of vibrant, changing, flashing colours can only support the hippie premise. I also thought that actual textures on a very much cartoony alien would not have worked as well. Plus this way the environment and character can blend seamlessly as I have also used the toon shader on the vehicle and the interior.

Designing of the Aliens.

After creating the head of the alien I then drew the rest of the body and proceded to then take it into illustrator. After doing this I was able to create a symmetrical character by tracing one half of the drawing then going over it in illustrator.

My original drawing wasn't symmetrical so
took into photoshop and mirrored it so
both sides would be same which makes Maya modelling
much easier

After tracing the design in illustrator i then used the Live Paint tool to fill in the gaps in the illustration and make it come to life a bit more. Note. the colours are not the final colours just for display.

I was very pleased with how (now named) Jesse turned out. I used to really struggle to make anything look good on illustrator and completing the design was a real confidence boost, which enabled me to model him successfully as well

My spaceship design included two characters and the second one (chester) was made in a slightly different way. After talking to my tutor I decided that modelling an entire other character would be very time consuming and would put stress on the deadline. So instead I modelled his head and then stitched the body of Jesse onto the head of Chester. This saved a massive amount of time. 

Jesse's body, Chester's Head.

I didn't need to model the rest of Chester so I sketched out
A quick design and touched it up a lot more in illustrator.

The final product. Colours are still not final but once modelled they will look (hopefully) very similar to the designs above. I really enjoyed working in illustrator for this because after having not used it for ages I thought I would have forgotten how to operate it. But as it turns out I came back and was better than before.