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.