Evaluation

During this module I had the opportunity to work collaboratively. I chose to work with my friend Tess Bratkowski, as while we have starkly different art styles we were able to work really well together because we both have very similar work ethics. We both want to succeed and create something that can help us become professionals. We also had an overlapping interest to make an animation that made use of Hybrid animation and Maya so we chose to work with Maya as our main platform and 2D assets. This wasn’t my first attempt at 3D but it was going to be my first attempt at modelling and animating a character in 3D so I was nervous and excited as I had forgotten everything I had learned last year so this was an opportunity to develop the remnants of old skills and take them further. I was able to learn how to animate, model and be a moderately competent animator with the software. I think mine and Tess’s differences are why we were able to work really well. We had a strong desire to get the work done but had a mix of very different ideas. As the project went on I found myself struggling a lot with Maya as multiple issues with rigging, modelling and animating appeared and I relied on Tess a lot during these times. This wasn’t a good thing as it meant I wasn’t figuring out my own problems so with future projects when I reach a problem or something goes wrong I’ll calmly evaluate what I’ve done and first try to remedy the problem or if it fails redo it and take it as a learning experience that will help me to take my animation practice further. It’s all about how I have to handle sudden problems and this means I’m going to have to grow as a person. I’m glad that the module has made me aware of this and I will endeavour to improve.

While working collaboratively we found that our personalities rubbed off on each other I’m a person who over works themselves and gets stressed easily while Tess takes her time, to a fault, and is very relaxed. I caused Tess to get a lot of work done early on and Tess caused me to not over work myself. Although I’ve caused Tess to become very stressed. After talking to Tess she says she’d work with me again on either a 2D animation and on a 3D animation after I’ve gained more knowledge of it. I would like to work with Tess again to see what we can do with a different brief and I agree with her I’d like to work with her when I have become a more proficient 3D animator. I have really enjoyed the fact that I could compare ideas and see another person’s perspective on the same brief so that we can approach the most suitable and best ideas. We went back and spent a lot of time on pre-production as for both of us it is our strong point and continuously refined our character and narrative this was when mine and Tess’s best traits showed we were able to come up with designs and story even after we thought we had reached a final product. Collaborative work is something I want to push across this coming year and this was something I liked about this module, being able to start with a friend on a one to one basis allowed us to be honest with each other and I now have an understanding of how as a person I need to improve and what I need to improve on in my skills as a practitioner.

This module overall has given me multiple opportunities to grow and try new things and I’m even finally understanding after effects thanks to DUIK, a software I didn’t think I’d dare touch previously. It’s been hard and I fell behind as I had to go home on many occasions because of family reasons this took more days out of my module and for around three weeks I had fallen behind. But I was still able to get the work done in time so I was happy I didn’t need an extension it was proof that I am improving in my work flow as organization has been a big part in this module and I am going to make myself more time tables and schedules in order to keep on top of my work and allow myself to create the best work I can. After watching the final animation at our courses showing I’ve realised how much I am actually proud of our work and have learnt and improved and this was because of my mistakes. This has left me feeling quite good about myself as it is proof that I have improved and when I consider it I barely knew how to make a Maya project and now I have a full animation that with a little tweaking we can be proud enough to enter it into festival because the worst that can happen is it gets rejected. I plan on in the future to work more in Maya so that when I work with people on 3D I won’t hold the team back and the prospects of taking Hybrid animation further excites me as well. In conclusion the module has been a great way for me to get back into animating after summer and has allowed me to see things from a new perspective.

Research Blog Study Task 2 - Mayas Accessibility

Maya is the main, industry standard software used for 3D animation. it has been used for character modelling, rigging, VFX, animating and much more so it seems that there isnt really much else it can go. But animators and studios are constantly wanting to improve the quality of their 3D animations and that means the technology has to go further. This is want makes Maya so accessible, the fact that the software is highly customisable and allows for plugins. But this means that the software is in an incomplete state and is constantly being updated while this in itself isn't a bad thing its an example of how the software is lacking. Anything an animator might want the software for is to be waited for the next instalment of maya, or if your company big enough (looking at you Disney) you have to make your own plug ins. Disney was actually the ones to suggest that the software have a custom bar so that each animator can have the required tools needed in easy to reach places of their choosing, just like a real studio desk. They had specialist departments for hair and effects so they were going to need access to their commonly used tools not necessarily the modelling and rigging tools. This function is definitely one of the things that makes maya a much more accessible software. But to get to the point where you can use this you need to work on a steep learning curve as even our tutors have said they don't know everything about Maya. And here is possibly Mayas biggest limitation. The fact that no one fully understands every aspect of it, so fully comprehensive animations might not be made because an animator has missed a feature of Maya.

Research Blog Study Task 2 - The Usage of Visual Effects

VFX or visual effects are not just used in live action movies but also in animated ones to. In recent years Visual effects have become much more prominent in movies with the development of hyper realism. So live action film makers have become reliant on the effects to make there movies look bigger, flashier and better. But this means that character and plot development is sacrificed to make the pretty picture. Peter Jackson the creator of the Hobbit movies has stated in interviews that a lot of directors and producers rely heavily on VFX to make things in movies possible. Its not a case of thinking of the most suitable way to do it but they think of it as the most impressive way to do it. However this doesn't mean that Visual Effects studios are staying in business oscar winners Rhythm and Hues went bankrupt around the time they won their oscar. So there is a danger of the visual effects industry vanishing because they don't get paid any of the royalties from the movie that could keep them in business.

Also when CG and VFX were first introduced there were severe limitations that kept the technology back but this was something that was beneficial to it as it meant directors had to think outside the box and use VFX as a side element that complimented the film rather than made it. Now all limitations are off and there are multiple possibilities for further hyperrealistic animation used for CG and VFX putting story driven content on the back burner. My own personal example of this reliance on CG and VFX is the upcoming Mummy movie the original movies had VFXs for the impossible mummy (you could see through its body at certain points)and natural disasters because these things were out of their control. they used special effects made by actual explosions and the elaborate scenes actually happened with them not acting to a green screen. With the latest movie the flashiness follows the same formula of all other big super hero movies or dick flicks as a class mate calls them. So the limitations over all for VFX and CG comes down to producers and directors and how they interact and view the usage of the technology before them, do they use it sparingly and smartly or throw it into the whole thing like Spielberg and his 45 minutes of CGI in crystal skull?

https://www.rocketstock.com/blog/opinion-10-reasons-why-cgi-is-getting-worse-not-better/

http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2013/02/28/visual-special-effects-industry-in-trouble/

Research Blog Study Task 2 - TV Industry

The TV industry has had a very mixed bag of work produced in it. It is a format that allows for more out there animation styles to develop, similarly to the animated shorts created and it has been a good platform for the development of narrative. The longer a series runs for the more a story can be developed which is something the TV industry will always hold over the film industry, the fact that a film has maximum 2 hours to get us invoveld and connected while a series could have an entire year. But this in itself can also be a flaw, because the first episode has to hold you abnd have your atttention so if the build up is too slow people will lose interest.

I mentioned that TV animation has a lot of variation in its animation styles, some 2D, some 3D, after effects and stop motion as well, in comparison to the film industry where 3D has been the most prominent and dominent form of medium, bringing in the most profits, why has TV been so different? Taking a quick look at IMDBs list of animated series the top 50 are all 2D, with a large majority being Anime on top of that. This isnt the most fair and accurate list as it is mostly come from adults and if we look at childrens tv shows there are many that have a range of mediums, peppa pig, pocoyo the klangers to name a few. But again 3D is rarely used in the animations and why is this? Time and money. the time to teach people to use the software and the money to get these digital animations done. To work around these issues some series have been very selective with what they choose to model as it helps to keep a good work flow and assists in the telling of the narrative. Pocoyo is an example of this, they have Blank empty spaces and have the character, a simply designed and modelled toddler interact with a few other character. it focuses on the character animation. But 3D is still not the most beneficial way forward for a TV series, the creator of advcenture time states that 2D animation is making a comeback as there is a greater focus on story telling and less concern over what the most up[ to date medium it needs to be in. So its less of a limitation for 3D and more of a threat to it however it still holds strong in the movie industry.

Telling Tales Production Diary Week 10

Monday - I was unable on Saturday, to animate the scenes as i thought they needed continuity so i was waiting for my partner to come in with their hard drive to give me the file. (turns out i only needed it for one scene) However my partner didn't come into uni on Monday and i had no way to contact them as their phone is currently broken and they don't use social media. This is something id like to make them aware of more so because they can become very off the grid at times and this makes the working together difficult. So for the monday i worked on study tasks.

Tuesday - My partner showed up to tell me i could animate one of the scenes and the other scene needed to have continuity. So i animate the scene where the scientist is walking up to his desk and taking a drink from a flask in little under an hour so that when my partner returned i could send the scene over to her to place the facial sequence on. In the latter half of the day i added the 'special effects' to our animation. This was the explosion from the cauldron and the beam from the magic circle. However we were unsure as to what we could do because we weren't using arnold or any rendering format that renders certain lights so we couldn't render out certain effects. But i didn't really like the idea of having after effects animating on top because it really would not fit with the aesthetic. So i was just messing around with the shapes and transparency of the blocks and found that by animating the block extending with the transparency on it looks like a very stylised explosion/beam both myself and my partner thought these created effective explosive scenes and my partner will add a fade out on the beam in post production so it like a white light appears to engulf them both. After this i was able to quickly get the scene off my partner and do the continuity close up.

Wednesday - We used today to work on the sound. We booked out the sound booth which was one the most hilarious experiences in my life because I was screaming into a microphone making chicken noises for the animation. However something we realised later on was that we should of taken the animatic into the booth with us because we here just making inconsistant sounds to cut up later but this has resulted in sound that could of been refined a lot more.

Thursday - Taking the sound i assembled it into our animation. I struggled to change and mess around with the pitch of the sounds as we have noises that are a bit too loud so we need to alter the volume some how. I was shown how to use the editing tool and started to fiddle around with the duration and the pitch of the sound effects so that we didn't have any instances of warping in the sound. Once it was i had added all the sound effects in my partner added the backing music, final scene and credits to it. Here is our completed animation.

Research Blog Study Task 2 - Hybrid Animation

Hybrid animation has actually been integrated into the pretty much entirely already. Just not in a massively obvious way. Something could be animated in photoshop, animate, toon boom, maya and then taken into after effects to be altered, have effects and motion graphics put on top and finally it gets taken into premier to be assembled together. This is the low key hybrid animation happening all the time in the industry but their are even more blatant examples. Live action with Visual effects. The interaction with that which isn't there and green screen. This is where the mainstream animation industry is at with hybrid animation, but there are a few very interesting developments that are being worked on.

One of the first instances of 3D being implemented into 2D animations was in the black cauldron where a glowing orb was animated in 3D. Nowadays some key animations that have used 2D and 3D Hybrid have been The triplets of Bellville, The iron giant and the most recent example is the disney short paper man. These films all make use of 2D, 3D integration in different forms.
Triplets of belleville used 3D limbs attached to 2D bodies so that the bicycle kept a consistent shape while the body had a squash and stretch to it. The iron giant made good use of the 3D model to keep a consistent shape to the model because has a machine his body did not shift and warp like a squishy human. And the most recent example, Disneys Paperman, was all about John Kahrs desire to bring the hand drawn, illustrations, character designs and line tests back to the animation as they had been lost with 3D. Each one used 2D and 3D to its own end but Triplets of Belleville and Iron Giant had them as very separate entities while Paperman fully integrated the two mediums together. The lines were brought into the 3D and made part of it. The limitations right now is that this software is still in its production stages and it suffers from a lot of issues with colour bleed so it can't be applied to big budget movies just yet. However hybrid animation really doesn't have any limitations except time. any form of art can be created it just a matter of having the time to make, assemble and program. The encroaching deadline would have to be worked towards in the fastest fashion possible using the most suitable medium but with the combining of mediums a lot of time is lost.

Research Blog Study Task 2 - 3D animation

3D animation first truly came to the publics attention in 1995 when Toy Story hit the cinemas, created by pixar who have now become a megalith of a company. Back then there was several areas of improvement that was needed meaning there was still a lot of potential for growth, the input of realistic hair and fur as well as CG effects are just a few of the possibilities that have been explored and developed in the past 20 years since toy story. Now its about refining those areas and making them become more immersive. This isn't about making them real, so not making them hyper realistic but making them feel alive. An example of this is Pixars new short Piper, where a small piper chick ventures out of its nest for the first time. 

"And it feels realistic, but if you look at, say, Norman Rockwell’s paintings there’s a lot of exaggeration to draw your eye to the centre of attention. It’s the same principle in animation; we’re just doing it at 24 frames per second.”

This was a quote by Barillaro the director of piper, he's talking about how realistic the bird is portrayed so its like its not stylised but almost hyper realised however it features elements that change your perception and make the character appealing and that draw you in. The animators when characterising the piper wanted the feathers to be an integral part of its design and character to help portray the personality of the character. But while the software could simulate the movement of feathers it couldn't make the feathers act, this meant new technology had to be created. The director of the short Barillaro, wanted to control every single action that happened on screen not leave it to the computer to simulate the actions and this meant software engineers had to create the software to allow the animators to animate said feathers. This is where the limitations of 3D come in, the software just isn't there. It needs to be created by engineers and while animators and artists might think thats easy the engineers who know how it all works cry them selves to sleep. Another issue is time in the sense that while piper has the human touch to it where you can feel the artist behind the animation most if not, all studios just don't have the luxury to have the time to dedicate so much time to the movement of something that can just as easily be simulated. A final question to be raised is there too much on a reliance on machines with the animation? and could that lead to a loss of aura? However beside the software not being there, the ability to at some point create said software keeps the possibilities open and it wasn't until almost 100 years 2D animation was knocked off its pedestal so 3D still has a lot of room to grow.

Piper short

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/06/18/how-pixar-hatched-piper-the-cutting-edge-tech-behind-their-cutes/

Telling Tales Production Diary Week 9

Monday - Over the weekend my partner went through the timings for the animation and each scene which meant a few of the scenes that i had done were actually slightly out of time as they were following a slightly different animatic as i got the variations of our animatics mixed up. This meant that i would have to go back and rework the animations. But before i did this i was going to have to rerig a couple of our models as there were certain models that were different because my partner had altered them on their folder. However because those scenes were much shorter scenes (only a couple of seconds) I started work on the largest scene of mine so that my partner could work on the final scene after that as we needed continuity. The scene was taking some time and trying to stick to the exact timings wasn't working because the actions of the chicken body just bouncing was very unnatural so we decided that it would be okay to go beyond the time limit of 1 minute for our animation and we could keep the pauses the length they needed to be to keep the comedic timing. Im glad we decided upon this as it means were putting the flow of the animation ahead of everything else so that our animation will be smooth and entertaining.

Tuesday - Mental. Breakdown.
No matter what i did maya did not work for me. I had gotten a large chunk of a scene animated yesterday and then had to move a part of the model, which was parented to what i just animated. so that meant the head that i had animated bouncing was jumping up and down with the movement of its parent. So i tried unparenting it, didn't work. Then i tried to go back, i couldn't get back the work id done and i hadn't saved. I was being pushed to my limits at this point so i started again, what does it do? Crashes.
So after the eventful day of spending the whole day on Maya and accomplishing nothing as well as causing my stress levels to go through the roof i had to drop my plans to work on something for responsive because it was going to become detrimental to me if i didn't stop something. I should take this on and think about why it happened as im still only learning how to use maya.

Oh and we had a crit where we showed what we had gotten animated up to this point. While the animations that i had gotten done were well received in the fact that i got people actually laughing at what i had animated it was partially for the wrong reasons, my character was making some very suggestive movements unintentionally. During this small crit i felt a little disappointed as i felt that all the problems up to this point were my fault and it was stopping us from getting more of our animation done as well as producing something that was of decent quality, wether these problems were within my control or not

Wednesday - Okay. So after an evening of purposely not doing anything after the events of yesterday i calmly approached the same scene from yesterday and begun to get the animating done. I found out about the squash input tool which came in very handy when trying to give the chickens initial bounce a humorous and more natural touch although it didn't quite parent correctly but i was able to make it work and at the end of the day i was able to get the scene to my partner so that she could import the animated expressions.

Thursday - I worked on my other longer scene today which i was nervous and apprehensive to begin due to the past experiences. Also i could only work on it for around 4-5 hours due to other timetabled sessions. during the hours i was able to work on it i worked to make an entertaining walk cycle for our characters one where the body would bounce up and down rapidly according to their stature. The Short stubby scientist was to have a rapid walk where the legs would switch back and forth and up and down, initially i did the same for the occultist but my partner thought it didn't fit, he was moving too quickly. So I slowed him down and made it so that he came to the centre at a different time to the scientist to give them a less mechanical action.

Friday - I took the scene i was working on yesterday and completed it in record time. My initial plan was to seperate each camera cuts into a seperate scene but found that i could set key frames on the camera as well. And so i continued to animate the scene. It all went rather smoothly and for once i didn't have any problems, i feel like i finally cracked maya, it was just a case of getting a balance on both sides with the chaos being caused by the chicken and i had to make he chicken bounce on the heads of the brothers at the end so that it could land in the middle as they were too close for it to land inbetween them. I have been continuously saving. There was one instant where the light source was not parented to the bulb model and i wasn't even able to set key frames regularly so i found out that you can set key frames by key selecting the lights attributes so i just moved the light source with the bulb. While because of the way we are rendering, maya software 2.0, we don't get such solid shadows on objects so the light movement doesn't affect much but there is a slight glow shift. With the beam that appears from the magic circle my partner said that she would figure it out as neither of us knew how the light would work.

Saturday - Now that the larger scenes were finished i went back to my shorter scenes that i had to do. With the goblet pouring scene i made his body move backwards instead (much to my dissapointment) so it now looks like hes jumping back in shock as the 'blood' falls into the goblet and through the bottom. Using the same key select method i used for the light i made the blood fall through the funnel. it was really easy to do as they were just cuboids and we weren't using any particle effects.

Telling Tales Production Diary Week 8

Again i couldn't quite remember everything i did this week or in which order i did it besides the fact that i did animating at the end of the week. from Monday to Thursday i worked towards figuring out the rig of our character.s

The problem was our characters didn't have the same conventional build of a maya model so the rigging process would of been detrimental to us at this point. the characters didn't have enough polygons and faces to allow for any flexible movement. so we had to think of a different method. I tried to make presets for the legs as they, we thought would only have to be walking (we later realised that they have more movements than intended). These presets worked and created a nice walk cycle for our character which was jumpy and sprightly really showing their character. with their arms we made them seperate to the body and parented them to controllers which were then parented to a main controller for the body, the controllers made it a lot easier to move our characters about.

Thinking id done a good job i gave the model to my partner. Oops. While i had to go home again for family reasons on the friday my partner tried to UV the characters and a new problem arose with the UVs. The controllers on the feet were part of its history that needed to be deleted for the UVs to work which meant they freaked out and caused the UVs to go strange and the file to be too big and to cause it to crash. So while I was away our tutour fixed the problem some how. The room at least was finished with the UVs having finally worked.

For the lighting we used mutiple ambient lights, one main white light in the bulb in the center of the room a few clusters around the flames of the cancdles and a blue one in the computer. These gave it a really nice atmosphere and complimented the muted colours of the water colours. With all this in place i was able to start animating.

We split the animation into scenes to be animated and for the montage we would do the scenes as one long scene and then split them up in post production where needed.

I started with the cauldron and the goblet scenes which both had the same issue of things being detached from objects. But i didnt know how i was supposed to make the hand let go of the objects. through parenting, locators and the visibility settings i was able to make my character throw multiple objects into the cauldron. For the goblet i made a duplicate of the goblet and just switched the visibility between the two so it looked like the bottom fell of in one frame, it works with the aesthetic of our jumpy animation.

Telling Tales Production Diary Week 7

During this week for three days our course went to MAF (Manchester Animation Festival) so i wasn't able to get much work done during this week as i didn't have access to maya. While at MAF we saw the making of Ethel and Ernest and went to a lot of talks and shows that entailed 3D and 2D hybrid animation. While our animation doesn't use complete 3D crossed with 2D we do use 2D assets and UVs so this was a good chance to witness how active professionals and other students are applying the style.
But i was able to work during Monday Friday and Saturday. During these days i mainly modelled the final missing objects and pieces needed for our animation. This was mostly small bits and pieces to add to the room to make it appear more lived in.

We started to look at the assembly of the actual room which my partner took over from me. I put the large objects into the room, such as the shelving, desk and a few smaller items. As i finished these off my partner worked on the designs of our monster.

Study Task 5 - Strike a pose

By using our own reference of ourselves we had to pose the moon model and rig to look at the use of live reference. I really enjoyed this task because i could either make the poses really exaggerated and over the top, or i could make the have a really subtle feel and be rather atmospheric.

The first pose i did was anxiety for this i wanted to amplify the insecurity and stress that is felt so i worked with the idea that when a person is anxious they try to become invisible and avoid the situation so i made my moom hunched and sitting to make him a lot smaller this amplified his feelings of inferiority.

This one was fun. Cruelty. In this case cruelty to another person and finding enjoyment out of it. Unlike the previous one i really over exaggerated the expression because i imagined the moom to be sadistic and flamboyant, and finding pleasure in this cruel act.


This was a really simple one but one that i think was very effective. For happiness i can imagine  lot of people doing laughter or over the top grins. But thinking to my own experiences I thought a humble happiness would be more interesting and preferable, it meant for a pose that wasn't very extreme but gets across a feeling of genuine emotion that i can relate to.


Amusement is probably my worst, it would probably look better if it was animated as its supposed to be moom crouching on the ground, buckled over and laughing while smacking the ground. It didn't feel very real and was just a little too exaggerated.

I think with timidity it shows well in the body language, almost as if moom is putting up a front with a timid little smile but agin like with anxiety, its making its self smaller agin, bringing its limbs in and  moving them back to a defensive position. I could of taken better photos and lighting here.

Study Task 4 - DUIK

DUIK is a very similar tool to the puppet pin tool on after effects, used for character animation but unlike the puppet pin tool it has more precise movements and has a less chance for warping of the asset. It does however take much longer to set up than  the very simple puppet pin tool, so for simple actions puppet pin tool is more suitable but for longer and more complicated movements like a walk cycle.

To start DUIK you open it from the windows selecting this box.

This will open up the DUIK control panel. To make the rig for the model I only needed to use the Bones, Controllers and IK tools. I did try to use the auto rig function but this resulted in a rig that didn't appear to be attached to the actual asset for some reason. No one could understand why this happened so i restarted with the help of Oscar Baraney who went through how to make a rig manually.

First you need to import your character into After effects as a psd document so that the layers are separate and can be worked on. This is the key different between puppet pin tool and DUIK, the separate layers stop the warping of the character. 

To start the rig use the puppet pin tool to put in your wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees etc in their respective layers. (such as Knees in legs) and label them as L or R their respective part s the rig understands that you have a left or right knee. This element is mostly for the auto rig to recognize which part of the rig corresponds to which limb.

Of course it also helps with Organization.

Parent each part of the rig from the furthest part from the body geadually working its way up to the body so that when the body moves the limbs will follow and the limbs will bend when the initial parent is moved. Now select all the pins on a layer and click in the DUIK menu, bones, this will create a set of bones layers.

This is actually from the auto rig but this is the result of the bones tool when done individually as well. Then the limbs are selected in their groups and controllers is selected this creates a main controller for each group which is located at the initial parent (Wrist, Foot).

Again this is the auto rig so only the hands and feet should be selected. Finally highlight each group of layers in order from the wrist to the controller and select IK this will make it so your characters limbs will bend properly and not distort. 

The characters rig look something like this.

Now the character can be animated. But their is a lot of layers now so to keep it organised I found out about the hide tool to keep the layers that your messing around with visible.

This is my animation. The final installment of not limbo, Not Limbo III.

Oscar wanted to also make something using my character and rig so i thought id include it as a thanks for the help.

Here it is with sound.

Study Task 3 - Puppet Pin Tool

Puppet pin tool is a method of animating on After Effects that utilises still images/assets that are animated by moving different parts of the image.

This is the puppet pin tool icon and the way the tool works is that using a still asset you place 'pins' that can be key framed and moved about, similarly to rigging a character but on a much simpler scale.

The small yellow dots are my markers for where the pins are. Having connected them i can set key frames to make the character move.

My first attempt with the puppet pin tool ended like this.

Yeah so a new level of terrifying that became uncontrollable. It was done by holding down the command key which causes the timeline to run. While this happens the pins can be pulled one at a time to make the character move. This however is not suitable for something like a walk cycle as can be seen the character becomes warped and twist.

I tried it again but this time used less pins and did it through setting key frames rather than moving pins to the running timeline.

This turned out so much nicer with simple movements i was able to make a much more appealing animation and i quite like it as it didn't take me long at all to do. 

Finally there is another feature to the puppet pin tool which has to do with the way the pins decide what gets moved. Using triangles for the mesh you can control how much flexibility and manuverability is required for the animation. Increasing the count means for more fluid motion but a lot slower rendering time while decreasing does the opposite as well as is more useful for simpler characters so the count never really has to go beyond 350.

Telling Tales Production Diary - Week 6

Modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling modelling

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Yeah this week was just filled with Maya modelling and it really pushed my final nerve as well as some personal issues which meant i had to abandon work for a few days across the week so i didnt get as much work done and i cant remember which day i had done the work so this weeks post will be an overview and list of everything done this week.

While modelling the objects i had to think of what was going to be the most suitable way to design and stylise the objects to make them fit in with the scenery and world. so the objects had to be made out of cuboid shapes that were very angular and rigid. The chalk was really easy to model because of this. The inanimate objects were the easiest to model using extrusions from faces to create the shapes and changing the transparency on certain layers to create the right effects. I did run into a few problems when extruding layers because i wanted to get a clean and crisp shadow but due to duplicates in faces and edges it resulted in an unnatural gradient as well as a form of buckling on the models. I was able to fix this by deleting the excess edges and faces.

The objects that were the hardest to model were the organic models, models that were based off of living things. This was because they couldn't be produced in the same mechanical way by keeping them cuboid. But i had to find a way of keeping them to the aestheitic of the animation. With the robot/human body i brought in an image of a moveable mannequin and modelled it accordingly, cutting off corners and other elements to give it a rigid shape. I think this was one of the later models i made so compared to the others it is a lot more poor quality. If it had more of a presence in the animation i would of gone back and remodeled it if it had a stronger presence in the animation but it is on screen very briefly so i chose to leave it although i would of liked to improve it further.

The chicken was interesting to figure out as its head comes off and it has moving components as well thus it was going to require a rig at some point but i didn't know how to do this so i chose to model the head separate from the body with wings that were also like the arms of our characters, detached. The beak was awkward to model as i wanted it so that it could open and close but it made it clip and warp the mesh so i separated them from the main body and left it as is for my partner UV so i could rig it afterwards.

The plant was a unique problem as the leaf shape was the first thing i had to figure out. I went with an arrow shape reminiscent of ivy plants. once i knew how i wanted the leaves i started to duplicate them and assemble them on the same level but i couldn't curve them over the edge of the plant pot unless i put a bend tool in. I did this after combining the leaves together.

During this week myself and my partner were shown Ethel and Ernest by our tutor. Ethel and Ernest was a film that made use of a water colour like aesthetic in a 3d world, similar to what myself and my partner were thinking as we were planning on using UV mapping to add texture and depth to our animation because of how simple and basic it was. While i was away because of personal reasons my partner was focused on painting the water colour UVs as they were the more compatent painter of the two of us, which is why i worked on the models mainly.

During this week maya had a glitch which meant every time my partner tried to UV map the objects i had modelled it crashed, we never did find out why. But there was also flaws in my models with how i extruded from the object because there were times that i had tried to extrude something but made a mistake and hadnt quite deleted i, this meant we had extra faces on edges meaning the uvs got confused. We had to select the whole of the model and merge the vertexes. But my partner had to remodel a lot of my work which is frustrating because it doesnt feel like i left much of an impact on this week with all the mistakes made and being replaced by my partners work which also means im relying on my partner a lot more than intended so its not balanced.