Texturing!

We all chipped in to texture the museum scene, as there was plenty to do. The first thing I did was the light switch, which was modelled by Maik. It's hardly the most important object in the scene, but everything has to be textured sooner or later, and I am a complete beginner to texturing. Since the object has no curves whatsoever I went about it by automatic mapping. When it was unfolded, there were a few UVs dotted around that need to be sowed together, particularly the sides of the squares. I selected vertex and clicked on  a vertex on the edge of the square so that it would highlight all the vertices it was attached to so that I knew which UVs i need to sow. The final result is shown below:

I'm not going to pretend that I already new how to do this, as I couldn't pick much up from the elctures as I kept getting so lost. So Maik and Dave ran me through the basic techniques of unwrapping which allowed me to get involved with texturing more comfortably. So credit where credit is definitely due, thank you Maik and Dave!

I looked on the internet for a plastic texture for the light. Although they are always flat white in real life, there didn't seem to be a point texturing it if I was just going to paint over the UVs white in photoshop. I found the texture below from deviantart.com. It gave it a bit more of a realistic feel than would a flat white lambert of blinn.

So now that the UVs were unfolded and the texture was decided all I needed to do next was apply it. I created a PSD network and saved it to the sourceimages file. The I opened it in photoshop and dragged the texture over onto layer 1 of the UV snapshot. Resized it, saved it, then applied it as a lambert and the lightswitch was textured!

And here's the final result from mentalray:

Scene 1 Animation Done!

So I've been working on the animation relentlessly to get the shots finished and they're now all finished. I playblasted all the scenes from the angle they will be rendered from and cut the together in after effects to make the video above. Originally the shots didn't read that well, and some things happened twice from different angles. But I trimmed them down and I think they're working quite nicely now! Things are moving along quite nicely now. We're going to start texturing very soon, and a lot of work is happening on the second scene. As soon as we all texture the first scene it's getting lit and rendered. Lovely!

As much as this shot has been a complete pain, it's now done! I had to spend a lot of time looking at the weight of the character and how it shifts as he moves over the rope. It took a lot of observation, and some painful attempts, to understand how it should look. I realised that the leg he's stepping forward with raises first, and the weight is pushed forward by the torso so the body is very briefly in free fall. Then the toes of the back foot push upwards giving the height needed to clear the obstacle, and the front foot absorbs the weight of the fall. The idea is that the character is then so pleased to have stepped over in one piece that he forgets the obstacle when moving his other leg, clips the rope and goes down.

I made the recovery quite snappy to give the character a bit of personality. He knows he shouldn't have stepped over in the first place, so tries to regain his composure quickly before anyone realises what he's done. Though the scene is set when the gallery is shut, there would be other guards on patrol so he doesn't want to get in trouble.

In the next few shots the character becomes intrigued by the painting in front him and attempts to touch it. The painting reacts which frightens the guard, but his curiosity gets the better of him and he touches it again. But as soon as he does the painting sucks him inside and the first scene ends. It sounds fairly straight forward when it's put down in words, but it's gonna take a solid amount of hours to finish. While this is happening, Dave and Maik are setting up the second scene inside the painting. James is doing some lighting tests for the gallery also. The plan is that once myself and Joe finish animating the first scene, we'll all texture and light the gallery together and send the scene to render. Once that's done, animation for the second scene begins while the scene itself gets textured. Then we bring all the files together, light them and render them. Then we'll finish the animation for the scene back in the museum and send that to render, then editing begins and we should be done!

In the mean time, here's the finished shot. I'm not going to post each individual shot up on the blog because it doesn't seem like it has any benefits against finishing all the shots and putting a finished scene one playblast of the animation up once I'm done.

Step-over Playblast

This is a shot that I was stressing out about trying for a while. It took me about three million tries to do the legs, and another four million to do the arms. I just couldn't get them to look right! But the playblast below is the best one I've done:

I think the left knee is popping up a bit too fast, and there are another couple of areas that need some more attention, but I'm much happier with this one and I'm hopefully gonna start polishing soon!

Shot 1

Shot 1: done. It really upsets me that all the effort I put into cushioning the animation and really subtle moving holds don't show up in the youtube clip above. But at least I know they're there and that they will show up in the final render, so I can sleep at night. The next shot I'm going to work on is the step/trip over the rope. Pretty nervous about this one because it's gonna be tricky. Below are a coupe of videos of me attempting to make something to work from, and looking like a complete idiot at the same time. It has been useful, but I think I'm going to need to sketch this out to understand it more.




This first one was a little extreme, and I was going at it too 'straight on' if that makes any sense. Tried to fix these problems in the second one.



No idea why that's playing so fast but this one actually helped me a lot more. But I didn't know what to do with my hands. I was conscious of not knowing what to do with the hands before I made the video, so I think I forced it a bit when I filmed it. But this is something I can work out when I start sketching poses out, and the video helped me out a lot with the legs. It was really helpful to see that the leg rises first in anticipation of the height of the object, and then the toes push the weight over rope.

Goon Walk Cycle Test

This is just a quick test to see how the rig works. Took me about 2/3 hours to get this much done but it's obviously not polished or anything. The walk itself is pretty vague and doesn't really convey a lot of personality, but was only really meant to test out the technical points of the rig. And to get me back on walk cycles, because after producing about 6 or 7 in year one i was happy to leave them for a while, but ended up forgetting about them completely. Took me a bit of stressing out and thorough read of the animators handbook to get my head around them again, but I got there eventually!

Malakai has worked really quickly and has produced not only a story board but an animatic as well, both of which are really good quality! I've got a much better idea of what I'm going to be animating and how the film is going to flow now.

And here's the animatic:



After talking about it for a while we decided that Joe will be doing the animation up to where the Character walks to the painting, and I will be animating from there until he gets sucked into it. There's a fair amount of tricky stuff in there, especially the shots where he steps of the rope barrier and falls which is going to take a fair amount of research to be able to convey the weight well. But the first shot to be done it the close up of the face reacting surprised to the litter on the floor. It's only a second or so long, but there needs to be a lot of polish on the animation so that it doesn't look boring, so I'm starting that straight away.

Aside from that the museum interior has been finished! Dave and Maik have worked really quickly and we're all really happy with the result:

And here is an early lighting test done by James which I think works really nicely to set the atmosphere of the room. It's also got a roof mock up by James which looks really cool as well:

There's also a much higher poly version of the ropes that Dave has done which looks a bit more realistic:

We've also made quite an important change to the character, in making him a security guard instead of a janitor. We thought that it would fit the piece better if he was a security guard on patrol, because not only would we avoid having to have him cleaning or push a mop around, but we liked the idea of a security guard being bored on a night shift so often day dreams to pass the time. As the whole sequence of being sucked inside the painting gets revealed to be an elaborate day dream, we thought it would fit a lot better. Maik and Dave have added some additions to the character and changed some of his colours to make him a much more authentic character, as seen below: