Organic Effects: Different Colours

This time i used a combination of red food colouring, white paint, glitter and glitter glue. The glitter when mixed with the paint water made some awesome effects as the glitter and liquid were shot into the tank. As the solution entered the tank the light reflected off the glitter making it sparkle which looked awesome.

Organic Effects: More experiments

This time I used these things called jelly marbles I got off my brother. The jelly marbles sit in water for a few days and then slowly absorb the surrounding water to create a jelly like.. marble.

I edited the colours again and flipped some of the clips to see if it looked more alien in a different way.

First Attempt: Organic Visual Effects.

Above is the end result of my first attempt at re creating some of these organic effects. There are more details in the description on YouTube. but essentially:


1. Boil 200 ml of salt in water for 20 minutes. Repeat for stronger concentrations.

2. Clean tank, blemishes can show up in the film

3. Collect items, food colouring, cornflower, paint, pipets (for shooting into the tank)

4. Fill the tank with as much salt water as you want

5. Push in a bin bag and then slowly add fresh water
6. Remove the bin bag VEEEEEEERY carefully and if done right you can see the different layers of fresh and salt water.

The results were really good for a first attempt and I edited the colours in places they weren't as vibrant.
Next time im going to change the salt water concentration to see if this changes the outcome. 

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. 

First Hippie Alien.

An illustration of one of the hippie aliens that will inhabit the campervan spaceship. I found it really difficult to transform the image of my friend into an alien without it looking too cheesy. But think the final result is pretty good. The original picture had rectangle shaped glasses but i thought John Lennon esque glassess would be more suitable.

Resident of the Space Van.

This is my first design for the resident of the spaceship. Just by altering the lengths of fingers you can very easily start to make a normal looking hippie into a funky looking alien.

This was a really simple job but looks good despite how long it took. Im going to keep playing around with illustrator and make some more hippie aliens for my spaceship.

Volkswagon Spacevan.

After sketching out many ideas for a spaceship using coke bottles and vinly players as inspiration i still had nothing i could really work with in all aspects of the module. Then I had a revelation in shape of turning a VW Camper van into a spaceship with a few funky modifications. So I drew out what i thought it would look like:

VWS Van

How i came up with this is i simply imagined what a camper van would look like had it been 'Spaceshipified' and this was the result. Extend the lines flowing from the font into rear wings and remove the wheels and add bumpers with wings attached. Added a dorsal on the roof and changed the eyes to 3 on each side rather than one, to represent the Alien.

Next i wanted to bring the van to life so I took it into illustrator and used the pen tool to sketch it out. Afterwards I used live paint to come up with a variety of colour schemes.

This one is my favourite and im very sure that i will be using the wings in the final model.

red and green (obviously) Looked good at first but looks to christmassy now.

I like the red and green stripes but the red clashes to much with the blue

Another finallist for the colours i think the mix of vibrancy really embodies the van and the hippies who once
used it. 

Keying Green Screen Footage.

Learning about pulling off a clean key is a really important skill needed in the VFX module because if it is done even slightly wrong it ruins the whole illusion of the green screen.

First we imported some footage into AE first we need to so separate the actor from the background then use the screen colour ink dropper to remove the green screen.

Use a screen blur for a smoother edge (use a value of 3)

Change the black and white values to 58 for the black and 75 for the white, this will equalise the black and white for a cleaner key.

Make sure the white background is a pure white, any grey
will lessen the quality of the key.

Creating a Simple choker will also tighten up the edges of the key. Finally we need to separate the actor from the background completely. 

Actor Separated from background.

Make a Junk Matte and this will remove all unnecessary background colour. Draw a wide ring around the actor to make account for any extreme movement they might make. 

After Effects.

recently we have been doing some Adobe After Effects tutorials to introduce us to the program so we are competent when we come to put together our own VFX pieces. We started at the very basics by learning how do create and make motion paths. I had some familiarity with motion paths because you can make them in powerpoint. However they are far more complicated in AE, in AE they act more like the pen tool in illustrator where you have to click, click then drag to adjust the curvature of the line.

The motion paths we did though were far more simple to begin with:

First we made some boxes accelerate and decelerate at different times depending on the path drawn.

We noticed that the dots on the lines indicated the speed the object was doing. Close dots meant fast and further apart dots meant slow.

What we did next was to import some assets from illustrator (ball and hill) and create a motion path to make the ball roll up and down the hill. We had to draw the path and then using the handles make sure the line was equidistant at all times from the hill so the movement was smooth and concise. Using the graph editor as well allows us to create a smoother acceleration and deceleration.

Next we created a car with a chimney and using the opacity and motion paths we are able to make the chimney move up and down in a comical way and puff out smoke.  We also make the cloud increase in size as it disappears out of the work space. Now because when we made this car we nested it in the other hill project we can import this car into the hill with all of its animation.

Using the curvature of the hill we can match a motion path to it and then add the car we watch as the car travels up and down the hill puffing smoke away. Because we nested this project in the first one any changes we make in the car workspace are added to the car/hill workspace which reduces time consumption massively.

Blend Shapes.

Today we learnt about blend shapes and how they are used in Maya. Blend shapes all you to deform multiple shapes so that you have a smooth blend between movements. Such as when someone opens their mouth their cheeks recede inwards because the skin stretches.

Blend shapes are very useful for making the movements of characters more realistic. The above image is a demonstration to how they work. I made 4 cubes, then i deformed each one in a certain way, front, top and right. I then selected them all, making sure the first (master) was the last selected. Then i went into the animation menu and selected blend shapes. Now when I select the the blend shape value on the right tool bar the master cube deforms to the other cubes on the right.

The VFX Module.

V F X

Recently we've been briefed for a Visual Effects (I think) which involves the cohesion of maya and film. Ive got to say i would have been happier had it all been about film but its going to be interesting seeing how the two combine to create some of the visually fantastic films we see today. Its not going to be the same standard as Inception or anything but the basic principals are still the same.

Our task is to create a pre-set visual effects short film which is based on a pre determined storyboard. The storyboard dictates that theres an alien invasion and 4 specific shots that are needed by it.

1         A shot of the space craft flying over/between tall buildings

2        One of people running and screaming away from it

3        A close up of a photographer before she gets abducted/beamed up by the craft

4        Finally is the shot we are to design ourselves, i liked the inclusion of this as it allows some                                

          creativity on my part. From the videos of the previous years videos they show the interior of the

          craft which would allow me to design it in Maya.



Ive thought about the design of the space craft first as it is in the opening sketch but i also think designing the space ships interior at the same time would also be a good idea because getting all the maya modelling done first would allow a lot of time for post production on after effects. I also can't use after effects yet as i don't know how and i can get a lot of designing and modelling done over christmas.

Standard spaceship. Not a fan looks to
flat and not enough detail on the hull
or with the colours used

An Interesting shape, pulling away from what they should look like
 but aside from that it just looks like a blob. 

I found designs such as these from a google image search and just shows how we've come a long way from imagining all alien space ships to be saucer shaped.

Awesome design for a pirate space ship. Looks rustic yet futuristic.

After looking at these spaceships I decided that it doesn't have to be a big scary malicious death machine but could be a normal house hold or everyday item that i've converted into a spaceship. I thought this would give me more room to be creative rather than be narrowed to the classic spaceship characteristics.

.E V A L U A T I O N.

Overall I feel that i learnt a lot from this project and did things I had no idea to do before september. Building a biped model, drawing it out then taking it into Maya as reference and then bringing him to life with controls and textures etc.

The good thing is I know how to do all of this, the bad thing is that the model went disastrously disastrously wrong near the end. This was because some of the vertices were trying to return to the origin which turned out to be caused by faces within faces which caused this bug. This really irritated me for no other reason than I thought i had accomplished so much and it was all a waste. However i did learn about all the things i still did and i have learned from my mistakes which i can improve on in the next module.

Despite the disaster at the end i really enjoyed this module as it was interesting to learn about all the different techniques of animation and modelling. I learnt the value of the extrusion and combine tool and also learnt how to Cylindrical map my robot character. I liked being able to be creative in a group and I really liked our idea for the cinematic. This being said time management needs to be improved and I know i've said that before but theres no more leaving things to the last minute. Mostly because I want to know that theres some overlap time to alter errors and touch it up in post production.

Even though I did pretty well in the modelling side there are still areas I need to improve on, such as, edge flow. I need to make sure the faces and edges of the model flow in a sensible way so it makes it much easier to constrain and weight paint. The other areas are the constraining, this irritated me massively as nothing i seemed to do was right no matter how closely i followed the video guides. The most important thing iv'e learnt (besides the skills involved) is to take a lot of care when modelling as the tiniest slip up could cause massive problems down the line. This is heavily linked to edge flow as the edges of my initial alien weren't very good which was why I had to restart it multiple times. Even though I had to restart the alien many times which was incredibly annoying i learnt something new I'd done wrong every time which made making my model a lot easier having learnt from these mistakes.

However this isn't really over, as next week we have an offsite exhibition in which we are displaying our work to the public. Now as a piece at the moment it could not be shown there but over the next week or so I plan on re designing the robot from scratch, drawing to animating, to make our piece a lot more professional with clean clear animation.

Anatomy of the Human Body.

The best way to think about rigging and animating is to compare your rig directly to the movements, actions and capabilities of the actual human body. The character you make may not be human or even alive but the bi-ped/humanoid shape of it, like my robot and the alien, means that the rig still has to move in certain ways.

For example you can't bend your elbow past 90 degrees otherwise it'll break. This goes the same for the alien and the robot. This wouldn't necessarily apply to all robots but if there was no structure to their skeleton their arms and legs would move all over the shop.

This isn't exactly medical journal standard of explaining but the point is that in animation you have to learn the rules to the way bodies move and how physics affects them, before you can break them and start exaggerating and changing them.

Its also worth noting that despite its humanoid shape my robot is very different in terms of how it works. The muscles in the human body expand or contract to do different jobs, the robot doesn't do this as it has no muscles so relies on its mechanical grip. The robot also stands perfectly upright and is perfectly balanced unlike humans who rely on fluid in their ears to maintain a sense of balance. You can also see about that the human knee if, if you followed it directly down, reaches the start of the toes where as my robot its knee is perfectly in line with its ankle. This explains that people are more nimble due to their ability to move quickly in different directions. The robot would be more sluggish in this way and i hope to capture this in the animation.