Little & Large

Finally!
This is the final piece of my first 3D animation:  "Little & Large"
I'm really glad that I manage to get it done on time, since I had some technical issues on the way.
Loads of room for improvement, but I'm really happy with the outcome considering the amount of time I had to make it and the little knowledge I have of the software.
Also, I'm really thankful that my friend Adam Fergler, once again, accepted to work with me and made and awesome melody for it.

I'd love to have some feedback about it!!!   ... if I manage to get a better computer soon, I might come back to it and fix some of the little details that keep annoying me every time I see it.

oh! and just for the record...it is inspired on my actual working space (I just couldn't get to get aaaall the details)

E.T.A.

This is nice short animation called "E.T.A." made by Junkworks.
It has a really simple plot, but it is driven in a way that makes it outstanding in some way. No surprise it won the   Best animation award Break Point 2008 in Germany and the Best New talent award on the Aarhus Filmfestival 2008 in Denmark.
This shows you the power of only one Director (Henrik Bjerregaard), two modellers and animators (Soren Andersen and Michael la-Cour) and one music composer and editor (Rasmus Kudahl).
Space topics are definitely not part of my main interest, but when something is well done as this, I not only appreciate it, but I also enjoy it.

 

Tahyon - 3D fractal

One of the artists that I recently started following is Joldos Dan Emanuel, a CG artist (and furniture Designer), who has an amazing collection of works, most of which are representations of 3D-like fractals. When I first saw his pictures I thought they where produce on a fractal software (I've try some before) but I haven't seen any that produces ones of such a good quality.

Then, while looking at his website I saw a video and it was just surreal. It is a nice composition of constant flow and morphing shapes that hypnotise you. The concept of space and physics as know completely disappear and the boundaries of creation seem endless. 

I really wish to have to make a concept like this, probably adding a narrative, but the idea of breaking those boundaries is something that excites me and will definitely will look in the future for ideas like this one. 

Growing up

Growing Up from Lucas Ridley on Vimeo.

One of the things I like to look at is rather than following only mainstream work is following track of some other students from different universities around the world.
This time it was Lucas Ridley who caught my attention with his impressive animations that he made while  being in his student years at Vancouver Film School under the program of 3D animation and visual effects.

The one above, 'Growing up', seems to have a similar topic as ours for this project (Little and Large) which made it even better.
The animation it self, regardless of the amazing illumination and well done textures, is really fluent and vivid. There might be some tiny little mistakes on some parts, but being a student and achieving this quality is something really impressive.

Taking from this not only to put effort on my future animations it also encourages me to do more work with the post production of my projects.

Matryoshka light

I just added some lights to the scene (quite quickly since it's quite late and I'm working tomorrow morning) and started testing some renders. 

This is a quick one with the Maya software. Cant see much but I wanted to see how the books texture look since I changed them a little bit. 

And at the end I just wanted to see how it looked with Mental Ray and it does make a difference. The only down side is that this one below took 1 min 22 seconds and multiplying that by the 1200 frames that I have it's going to take a while (although that was on my computer, it might be faster on the uni ones).

Still got to work a lot with these lights and their shadows; modify some textures and test the look of some shadows in some of the scenes, specially with the fighting ones. 

Any ideas or suggestions?  ... 

Matryoshka texture

After finishing the main parts of the scene for the animation I wanted to start getting some textures just to start testing the looks of it. 

This is just a scene of the scene before importing the dolls into it, but after a bit I added more stuff and change the whole arrangement of it:

I know the scene is simple, specially because my original plan was to recreate my own desk, but then doing too many details might cause the scene to be too distracting of the actual subject and also really time consuming (which is something we all lack ). This picture below is more or less the final arrangement of the scene. Even scanned the posters and post-its from my walls. 

This picture below is trying some other textures, like some for the dolls that are done and also trying the bump on the book and desk. I hope that putting a scan of an actual manga I have in my room doesn't get me into trouble lol.  

Even now I'm struggling with defining the style for my animation. I think is one of my biggest mistakes from the begging because I didn't established a style to follow and now I hope it doesn't turn out too mixed since some of the textures are too cartoonish and the rest aiming more to realistic. 

I'll try my best to blend this with the illumination. 

What do you think so far? any suggestions? 

How to of how to train your dragon

How to train your dragon of Dream Works has recently entered my list of favourite animated films and recently I found in youtube this video that shows the behind the scenes:

Being in the process of animating my russian dolls made me think again of the amount of steps and hard work that need to be put on an animation, specially if it's one that's going to appear on the cinema.
Team work is what I got more from this video. It is obvious that doing everything on your own makes things easy since you have control of every aspect, but the level of skills is different for every process and that can affect the ending product of your final piece.
On studios such as DreamWorks it must be really important to get a really good team, experts on their own fields, but more important, a team that's on tune with what the project is all about. Style, graphics, movement, sound; everything has to be completely synchronised and that is something that I admire from studios like this one.

Mastering UVs!

At the beginning I thought that my scene and the whole animation was going to be really simple because middling the Russian dolls wasn't much of a hassle. My initial idea was to animate their faces to enhance the expression of the movements and give them a nice personality but in order to do that I needed a proper UV mapping for the models. Now I've done UV mapping before (on 3d Max) but never came across with something as problematic as this.
It might be my lack of experience with this software or that I just cant retain any information but it took me three sessions to finally get the hang of it (that plus my file getting damage and causing me to do all over again).

 


Because of their round parts at the top both the inside and the outside, it require to cut the edges on the UV editor, then cut the edges on the back spine of the main model just to manage to properly unfold the figure into something that I could easily work on photoshop and after effects to get image sequence for the faces.
After finishing this I completely feel like the master of UVs... I just hope that I don't screw up with animating them since they all have different emotions during the whole animation.

I really hope the rest of the process works with easement since I'm tuning out of time for the final critic.

Design in Animation

Here are the 20 tips for the design of character for an animation:

• Research & evaluate
• Design & plan
• Target the audience (who is it aimed at?)
• Visual impact (what gets people's attention?)
• Line qualities & styles
• Exaggerated characteristics
• Colour to communicate character's personality
• Adding accessories
• Thinking in three dimensions (all angles) 
• Conveying personality
• Expressions (character's range of emotions
• Reasons (goals & dreams to achieve)
• Building back stories
• Quick on the draw
• Hone, plan & polish
• A character that works on any media or material
• Real world drawing (drawing outside computers) 
• Release the beast (show and ask for feedback)
• Beyond the character (environment) 
• Tuning the figure (question each element) 

3D Matryoshka

For my project of 'Fundamentals of 3D modelling and animation' module I decided to keep it simple and go for a Russian Doll (Matryoshka).
I've always like this dolls and it perfectly fits the idea for the project 'Large and small'.
The concept of its movement seems limited by not having any arms or legs, but that's where I plan to practice and apply the principles of animation. Also I plan to animate their faces to enhance the movement and give more narrative to my animation.
This are some of the pictures I used as reference for my modelling:

 

And obviously the modelling didn't took long:

Also...I know this isn't 3d (more like stop motion)...but I will use it as a reference for some movements. (Although, this dolls have arms )

BC Dairy Foundation "Russian Dolls" from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.

CG Reality

Knowing that my interests go more towards cartoonish-animation and videogames, I've always found very impressive the quality achieved in some films that incorporate in a realistic way parts of CG.

On my years doing architecture and trying to achieved a realistic-looking renders was really complicated (specially when you have short deadlines). There are so many aspects that you have to match with reality that you normally dont notice. Lights and shadows reactions are the hardest ones. Textures and camera angles.

The short film underneath are just some shots from Paris, but the impressive work that has been done to make it look like floated is amazing. The water looks really realistic and the reflections on it gives the complete feeling of it. I assume the illumination was made with images from the same place. (Worth watching in HD) 

5:46 AM // Paris Under Water

Mimicking fluids, specially water, has always been complicated for me since my computer dyes every time I try.
Also not only in the field of fluid, but the integration animating surroundings to make something surreal yet realistic looking. The adverb below is a good example of it, because of the synchronization with the music and the dance with the animation makes it really good looking.

While trying to work in the past with 3D max I remember being a huge fan of Josep Kosinski, because of his architectural background I was years ago, so probably the graphics now are not that impressive, but the point in the composition is there.
Here's the adv called Race from Mezzo. The first one is the complete advert and the second one is the steps for the composition on the visual effects.
It gives you a good idea of how professionals work and the most important steps to considering when making a composition with something that has already been filmed with real actors. 

Can't wait to be able to play with light in maya. I always struggled a little bit in 3D max and if it wasnt for render engines like Vray I wouldn't have been able to do anything in decent quality. Hope maya is slightly easier  (屮ﾟДﾟ)屮

Stop Action

Stop motion is one of the topics that has always been attractive to me, although I've always been really scared to try it because of the amount of dedication it requires to make decent pieces of animation.
Films like Nightmare before Christmas and the Corpse Bride from Tim Burton or Coraline by Henry Selick are some of the proves that animations out of the range of 2D and 3D animation are just as strong and beautiful.

A quick gif showing the process in animating Coraline.

The kind of skills the artist have to have for this animations is what makes it more appealing, since computers is in most cases are only used for editing, but the rest of the works has to be handmade. 

The videos below show some adverbs directed by Jamie Caliri and the artist behind it made every single part in paper: 

Heart 

United Airlines, Dragon 

It is a beautiful way to appreciate the traditional art that teams like this ones produce, because it's impressive how  they don't seem limited by the lack of infinite canvas and the idea of not being able to correct mistakes as easy as a digital artist can.

I'd like to try this sort of animation one day, but I assume that finding an appropriate team to work with most be the most difficult part since there doesn't seem to be many groups that focus on this way of animation.