Believe it or Not, I'm alive!

Yes, I realize that it's been a while since my last update.  Apologies as usual, once again, my infamous lack of consistency has won the day!

(It's a work in progress, promise.)


Wow, before I continue, I just have to say that Blogger is being unusually glitchy today.  I press enter to skip a line and my cursor goes flying all over the place.  Might just be me but still... odd.

Anyway, I've been busy looking at a lot of 3D animation, even as entertainment!  (How's THAT for two birds with one stone?) And recently went to see a recently released film called Rio (twice in a week) that I found  to be particularly noteworthy for its rather bizarre blend of realism and anthropomorphism.  Usually, bird characters are notorious for being very anthropomorphised - wings become arms, feathers become fingers, beaks become lips, etc.  very little of their natural movement is conserved - in fact, the best example I can think of other than Rio is the pidgeons in Bolt which were also good for it, though the difference between those and the characters in Rio is that they are more comedy relief and aren't true protagonists and so they don't have the duty of conveying all the emotions the protagonists of Rio have to.  That being said, Rio is probably the best (in terms of realism) mainstream film I've seen yet for capturing the mannerisms of birds while the emotiveness and likeability of the characters doesn't suffer at all for it.  For the most part, wings are wings, beaks are beaks, and feet are feet and hands... which is sort of right, parrots and the like have very good control of their feet.

It reminds me of Ratatouille which was also kind of unusual for retaining more animal characteristics than are usually retained in this sort of animated film.  I have to say it makes a pleasant change.  I really appreciate the love and care it must take to believably recreate the animalistic motions in these sorts of characters (particularly in birds) and I think it does help the characters from an emotion standpoint - they become more the animals they're based on than humans that sort of look like animals, though the rendition does work well in films like Kung Fu Panda (2008).  A film that also comes to mind is Valiant (2005) in which the pidgeon characters are VERY humanlike... actually, the mouse character is too.  Now there's a comparison I need to add to my research.  Rio/Ratatouille versus Valiant in terms of animation style.  Wait.  Wait.  Another one is coming to mind... Ah!  The Ugly Duckling and Me.  Very very humanised rat and bird characters to compare, though the CGI in that film was already outdated by the time it was released... ah well, animation is what's important.

The worst thing is, I don't know about The Ugly Duckling and Me, but I think Valiant would have been much more effective if it had more of the realism that Rio had; I think rather than making the characters more small flying humans (with only small references or changes to dialogue to remind you that they're little pidgeons, besides the overtly human-like visuals) if they were actually displayed closer to the small, vunerable birds they are the film could have 1) been less offencive with racial stereotypes and 2) had a greater sense of peril.  Rio did an excellent job of making the characters have conflict on their own level (via Nigel, the primary bird antagonist) but also keeping the audience aware of the bigger picture (via many perils of the city and smugglers).  Valiant should theoretically have a big focus on the bigger picture (they are delivering messages during warfare after all) as well as the bird antagonists.

I know I've never been keen on characters with too many humanized characteristics so there's obviously some bias present, but I do think Valiant could have worked very well if the characters were... how to say it... less soldier, more pidgeon.

On a completely different note, I recently purchaced a new game that was on offer - well, actually, quite an old game.  It's The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.  Now, going back to a game like this:

After being very used to games that look like this:

Is naturally going to have the player urking at the graphics for a while until they get used to them. That's normal. But the thing I noticed was... why are the characters in these older games made up of multiple pieces as opposed to characters in newer games that are usually a smooth mesh?  I'd say obviously graphical limitations but doesn't having several parts make the model just as graphically straining as having the same model joined together, with the same poly count?  I'm thinking it might be to allow the characters to perform nessessary animations without having to worry about essentially 'scoring' the joints so that they can bend without too much deformation (and therefore ending up with a lower poly count) but can I hear anyone else's ideas about why this might be?

That randomness aside, it's back to work, turning these messy notes into readable material.  I need to finish my dragon model too (I'm thinking of prioritizing the Faun for now until I make my desired tweaks to the dragon's mesh - and I still need to figure out how to do those wings.  I've been looking at a couple traditional dragons in CGI - Dragonheart, Dragonheart 2, Eragon, The Last Dragon, etc.  No one ever animates bats in detail in 3D... or maybe I just need to search harder.  Poor bats.  So cute but they never get any love!)

Anyway, I'm off for now, see everyone tomorrow!

Updates Don't Get Much Later Than This

Hello again, time for an update.  A very, very late update.

So work on my 3D character has been coming along alright.  The basic model of the body is more or less done, except for the few bits of clothing my character wears which I'm going to add separately (and hopefully add cloth physics to).  He's also going to need hair and fur, but I think as far as the hair is concerned I'm going to go for a partially clumped look, maybe with strands of hair partially visible at the tips of the hair if possible...

(And yes, as an example of what I'm thinking, I'm going to refer to an old favourite of mine.  Yay for predictability!)

Like this perhaps.  Bless you for your simple CGI, Final Fantasy IX.  Bless you.  *salute*



It's the best example I could get for what I want.  Blocky, but floppy.  Surprisingly not that common nowadays! (Usually, it's either floppy and realistic or blocky and stiff, which isn't what I'm after).

On top of that, I might make minor changes to his mesh but it's not decided yet.  Originally, the intention was to try for a style part way between Hiccup from Dreamworks's recently released CG film 'How to Train Your Dragon':



and Disney's older, traditionally animated film, 'Tarzan':

Sorry if that's a tad big.  Anyhoo, Tarzan uses this nice, clean, angular sort of style I wanted to use.  A similar style is found in Disney's 2001 film 'Atlantis: The Lost Empire'.  But my character sort of evolved away from the angular style, probably out of personal habit more than anything else.  I'm considering adding in extra loops in order to just sharpen the edges I already have.

I would take some full body screenshots of my model to put here, but Cinema 4D is locked down right now (it always is before noon on Mondays, what a pain) so this will have to do.

'What'chu lookin' at?'

Yeah... it's got a way to go, though I'm happy so far.  I'm currently working to get him all rigged up, and also to come up with a name for him.  Everyone keeps calling him Mr. Tumnus, but I think I'll have to pass on that one.  Don't really have the money to just go around getting myself sued... sorry guys.

Since Fauns are supposedly from Roman mythology (as opposed to Greek, which I think was the case with Satyrs who often get confused with Fauns) I took a look at some old Roman names and thought Felix suited him.  But since he lives in a completely seperate fantasy world, I might just scrap it later... I'll see how I feel about it after some thought.  Felix is a cute name.

I have a long list of animations I've been looking at but I'm going to pop them all in my next post.  For now, I have much Cinema 4D experimentation and possible computer-killing to do.  Next time!

Rendering Problems and Character Design

So I spent my entire day yesterday wrestling with Adobe Premiere.  Heck, I even spent the time I was supposed to be here typing an update about how I was wrestling with Adobe Premiere wrestling with Adobe Premiere.  What a pain.

The problem I've encountered is that it wants to be very snooty with how I set up the project.  I've tried several identical projects with different settings and different render settings, but it will not render in widescreen and still allow Quicktime to play the file.  I can get it to do one or the other only - either it's widescreen and Quicktime can't read it, or Quicktime CAN read it and it's smooshed.  Obviously there's something I'm doing wrong but I can't figure out what.

We'll get there.  Also, don't mind my idiocy in my last post... rendering it then recording in Fraps, eh, was definitely a Monday...  But the Chroma key's quality is rubbish, so though I'll take a peek again to see if there's a way to improve it, I'm mostly going to move away from that idea and see if Adobe Premiere understands empty space on layers.  Since Photoshop does I'm guessing Premiere does too, but we'll see.

This morning I've been trawling Conceptart.org for faun designs and I've found a few that interest me:

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=207015&highlight=faun

The Faun character viewable in this thread is of particular interest because it actually has the same shape that the brief said my character had to have: skinny.  Character just has to be skinny.  Though I do like this work and the way they've taken a reasonably well-used concept and made it interesting by embellishing the character, it's a bit too flowery and nature-oriented, that would suggest they're going down the usual fantasy-elves-live-in-peaceful-forests-with-magical-trees type route, which isn't really what I'm aiming for.  I'm wanting something a touch tribal with some modern trappings for familiarity.  So though I do really like it, don't think I'll be doing something all too similar.

One faun I found that I really like is this one from 'Pan's Labyrinth':

http://www.americanneopaganism.com/2006_pans_labyrinth_wallpaper_002.jpg

 ...because it really has an interesting way of embellishing the whole inhuman side of the creature; this faun is not just a human with goat legs, it's something else entirely.  That's something I'd like to nail with my design - hopefully the mannerisms involved in the actual animation will make up for what more human characteristics I'd remove physically - as well as the whole tribal thing.  Let's be honest, though, that faun is incredibly interesting looking but also very creepy.  Let's try to steer clear of creepy.

On the other side of the spectrum completely is Mr. Tumnus from 'The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'.  Now this character is, honestly, just a bloke with goat legs.  But he's so cute and endearing I just had to give him a mention.

http://jamesmcavoy.fansiter.com/pictures/james-as-mr-tumnus-narnia.jpg

I also found some pretty nice 3D models of a faun character, among other things, here:

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=faun+character&view=detail&id=0F89312BF43D43E95C4A7C32B798EAE17F883149&first=1&FORM=IDFRIR

Now to be fair, these are obviously for video games, not animated film/shorts like the kind of stuff we're shooting for, but still, they're fantastic.  Same problems though, too familiar...

I'll figure something out.  Hopefully.  But it's gonna have to be soon, because I don't have forever to finish this model, and it's best to make changes while it's still in progress.

Here're some other pieces I enjoyed:

http://www.conceptart.org/index.php?artist=Exeivier&cat=updated

I just adore the simple and warm style here.  It's quirky and easy to get into.  I wonder how it would come across in 3D?

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=194252&highlight=faun

This man is so creative with his creature designs it actually gobsmacked me.  Fantastic, make sure to look at every page of that thread, or your life is incomplete!

Next thing to do is to brush up on my tribal research and finish touching up this character so I can make appropriate changes to his 3D model before I get too far along into it.  Rigging starts soon and I don't want to fall behind and miss the rigging!

'Til next time.

3D Character Animation Start

Well, back after a good week break (that, I have to admit, I desperately needed) and I've got my new brief.

It's the best brief in the world.

AD108 covers 3D character animation, which has long been a subject of interest for me.  A while back I began to learn basic modelling, rigging and animating in Blender.  Since I started college I haven't had much time for it, but I've been trying to brush back up on that as well as practice in Cinema 4D.  It's crazy how different the two programmes are, considering they both do pretty much the same thing.  Though admittedly I haven't read about any Blender equivalent to Cinema 4D's NURBS (and also, what does that even mean?  A nurb? )

But I'm feeling motivated and quite excited to get back into the meat of it, though I might tweak my character design a bit (I never actually liked it... but it ticked the boxes for the module).

Another good thing is that I passed my two previous modules!  Actually came as a BIG surprise because I was almost entirely certain I'd failed, and miserably at that.  But hey, I must have done something right!
What's even more surprising is not only did I pass, I passed better than any pass I've achieved previously.  So what I thought were my two weakest modules actually turned out to be my two strongest... it's a strange world.

Oh, speaking of which, I think I might have come up with a much easier and more time efficient method of combining the two halves of my ident.  Before the problem was that I was animating in Adobe Photoshop on a decent sized canvas.  (Bare in mind I'm not the best when it comes to animating in Photoshop).  I'd have this big canvas, then, and one run of the Granny's arm animation is almost 60 frames/layers.  The cat, if I remember right, was between 40 and 50 frames/layers.  As you can see on my last post, the Granny does her motion about 6 times.  So 6x60 is 360.  360 frames for the Granny plus the approximate of 40 for the cat's single run, 400 layers.  Then consider whatever final touches, like extra E4s or leaves falling (these could be keyframed for position change but rotation would have to be done manually, so let's say an extra 30 layers for all of them)... we're looking at 430 layers on a whatsit-by-3000 pixel canvas.

Wouldn't be a problem if I was using something like Final Cut (if I were any good at using Final Cut...) but in Adobe Photoshop it just becomes much more difficult.  Now, two options.

1) Continue in Adobe Photoshop, weathering the struggles of my poor tiny computer, and chip away at it
2) Struggle with Final Cut Pro (Hey, it can be tricky you know!) which would get the job done but I'm not awfully experienced with...

But first, I'm actually going to try something that, if it works, will let me combine the two halves with minimum effort and super quick.  Basically I've been trying to learn how to use Adobe Premiere and its chroma key effect.  I'm going to remove the background from the Granny and the Cat, replace it with a strong green or so, render, record at max quality with Fraps, go into Adobe Premiere and chroma key them back onto the original background and together.

It might not work.  It might be a trainwreck.  But if it does work it'll save a lot of time and effort and lag. I'll just have to give it a go and see what I can come up with.  And also, I can't forget to put the sound in.

Either way, I'll probably repost the final once I've puzzled out the best way to go about doing it.

Related AGAIN is that I got to see everyone elses' idents too, and my, they're fantastic.  You guys better upload them soon so I can oogle at their animated brilliance again, okay?

What else... oh yes, we watched a lovely little film called 'Cat Shit One', where two rabbit soldiers take on a base filled with enemy camels to rescue hostages.  It was actually really, really good, if bizarre, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  War films usually aren't for me, but thanks to quirky writing and cute character design I got really invested in the two protagonists really quickly, and the animation was brilliant.
          Oddly, though, I could tell by looking at it that it was Japanese in origin.  I think there's a particular style in Japanese animations that involves character expressions, lip movements (like the shapes that the mouth makes, even if the English speech is synched well) and the camera angles.  I felt like I was having flashbacks to the idealized style of Final Fantasy Advent Children all the way through.
Japanese animations seem to keep mouth movement to a minimum; characters often seem as though they should be opening their mouths wider and making more distorted expressions but don't.  The same is true for the facial expressions in general; any distortion is very minimal.  A lot of the expressions of the characters seem to be created using the movements of the eyes instead.

Unfortunately, Youtube doesn't seem to have an good quality clip from Final Fantasy Advent Children, but here's a decent example of what I mean.  In the first 20 seconds of this clip, watch Cloud, the blonde man with spiky hair who's being addressed.  Watch his eyes.  Though his face hardly ever changes, his eyes are used to express his emotions instead.  He goes from quiet anger to uncertainty to fear to annoyance in 20 seconds.  And most of his face barely moves.



This was the sort of thing that happened in Cat Shit One.  The faces of the characters were quite still, but the eyes told you what they were feeling.

Camera angles is a bit harder to go into, and in Cat Shit One the oddly recognizably Japanese use of camera angles was mixed together with more standardized war camera angles (yep, over the shoulder shots and the like frequent war films), but they were there.  I think the general difference is American or English films tend to make dialogue between two characters easy to keep track of, often simply having the camera flick back and forth between the characters (and the characters do not invade and move around each others' shots) while Japanese animations are a little more dynamic with how the characters actually speak to each other and don't follow the speaking character quite as obviously.  Like I said though, it's hard to explain, and there's no set-in-stone formula or overriding rule of 'American cameras are like this, Japanese cameras are like that'... it just felt Japanese.

Overall, though, it really worked for me.  The lip synching left a bit to be desired but it wasn't hugely distracting, and the story was told well with good pacing.  Thumbs up!  If you get the chance to watch it, I'd recommend giving it a look in.

Well, I think that's all the blabbering I have to do today.

E4 Ident - Two Halves

Okay, I promised myself I'd post sometime yesterday but I ended up sleeping for most of yesterday (I didn't sleep at all through Thursday night, I was trying to push to finish the thing but... gah, the speed at which I work is nothing short of pathetic).  So, today, I'm finally updating.  Go me!

Though I didn't -quite- manage to outright finish my Ident, I did complete most of the animation for it, which, as usual, I didn't make an easy task for myself (yes, my Granny DID have to move in 1s and have almost 60 frames for one movement of her arm.  It was completely necessary!) - but, in the end, I'm reasonably pleased with what I have.  I just wish I could have combined everything into one truly final piece before the deadline.  And when I've recuperated from the terrible effects of deadline week, I will finish it.  For myself mostly... I'm one of those 'start a billion projects all at the same time and never finish them' type people and believe me, I'm going to change that.  It already drives me crazy when I can't bring a close to my personal projects, it becomes extra frustrating when the habit spills over onto my college projects as well.

But enough of that, here's the first part of my animation.  Please bare in mind how this is intended to work; the Granny version of the animation is the required length of 10 seconds.  The Cat version would be intergrated into this, not added on, so the final thing would be exactly 10 seconds long, as the brief specified.  The Cat is part of the Granny animation, the Granny isn't a part of the Cat animation.  If that makes any sense.

The Granny Version:



Okay, here we go.  The Granny was intended to be the main focus of the animation, though she is the most boring aspect of it.  My original intention was for her to be hand-drawn in each and every frame but I decided not to - both for time constraints and so that she would feel extra static; the less interesting movement to be observed from her body, the more attention you pay to the part that IS moving - her arm.  If you're watching her arm, you naturally follow the arm to the walking stick.  And from there, the bright colours of the E4 logo itself should catch your eyes, making you aware of it.  But it's not in your face, which is a complaint I had with a few idents I looked at.  I preferred, largely, idents that made you aware of the E4 logo but didn't feel the need to shove it so close to your face you felt like it was going to bang you on the nose.  So that's what I tried to do.

Problem with this is that it is, at the end of the day, boring.  So when I was drawing the storyboards I added in a little bit of randomness to try and inject a little offhanded humour into it, and hopefully something a tad unexpected.  And that's below:



So down falls the cat and the lawnmower.  The cat itself was generally taken from the old  'old lady trying to get Tiddles the cat out of the tree' sort of idea, the lawnmower was added for an element of the randomness and unexpected entrance I was after.  Besides this, I wanted there to be this sense that there's this woman, and she's prodding at this E4 'apple', and there's odd stuff going on around her but she's so absorbed in the E4 that she doesn't notice anything at all.  The final animation would have had quite a loud crashing sound effect when it fell down and a loud engine roar as it moved, just to drill in the point.

Well, I hope anyone reading liked this anyway.  It was fun, but tiring, and I think this project (and the module running along with it) have been my weakest yet.  Still so much room for improvement.  But, looking at the bright side, each module I've done the final animation gets closer and closer to being finished.  My first animation was barely there at all, my second was halfway done, this one very close to completion.  The next one will be finished by the deadline!  ...Geez, my time management is awful. 

Deadline Woes

Well, it's that time again.  Or at least, it's almost that time again.  We have our work due for this Friday, and, truth be told, I have more than I can manage.

At this point it's quite obvious that there's no way I can pass both modules, so I've been thinking that my best bet is to pick one -the biggest one- and just focus on that.  It improves my chance of passing that one but pretty much assures that I'll fail the other, but at least I'll have one clean and clear out of the way.  I can, I believe, resit the second module, and since it's the smaller one it should be more managable running alongside my next modules.  It's not in concrete yet but I really see no other way - it's a choice of do I want to tackle four modules at once, or three?

I do wholeheartedly blame myself, though.  It was me who put myself into this situation.  Though events that have transpired recently have had me stressing for a week and then mourning for another, I should have just bitten the bullet and got on with things rather than just sit around in self pity.  Everyone else seemed to just manage to get on, but no...

Well, that's the state of play.

Taking all things into consideration, I'll be focusing entirely on AD109 and pretty much ignoring AD102, so my week is as follows:

Monday - Worked partially on AD102 and AD109, have since decided to give priority to AD109 (unless, of course, Dave comes along and clips me about the head for making such a stupid decision)
Tuesday - Focus on finalisation and neat presentation of all research - Ident research, Ident style/visual references
Wednesday - The Ident itself should be finished by the end of Wednesday, early Thurday at the latest, giving me time to evaluate.  Storyboard and concept visuals should take a backseat, but I would like them to be coloured and presented today, if not
Thurday - Storyboards and concept visuals should be fully presented by the end of Thursday at latest; evaluation of animation complete
Friday - Tidying up, any final presentation and file sorting done, then hand in.

It's gonna be a busy, busy week.

No True Update

Because of personal reasons I haven't been able to achieve much today.

My jobs for the rest of the week are as follows:

Tuesday: - Catch up on missed modelling
Wednesday: - have a line test for my ident readied
Thursday: -So on
Friday: - And so forth