Remember that animation I was making and I said I wouldn't get distracted from it? I got distracted from it. I had a job interview, made that gif for my website, and then was inspired to make an animatic which I can't show now, but I'm quite proud of. Anyway, I'm back working on this. I have a little more than half the scenes animated (though I've saved the most complicated for last).
I took a break from my personal project to make a new header for my main website, and wanted to share my process work with you.
First I thought of an idea. Then I realized the idea was WAY too long and complicated, so I came up with a different idea, and I made a series of thumbnails to visualize and plan the actions I wanted:
And then I made a rough layout of how big everything would be with the final 1050x350 size that the website allows.
Then using the layout, I modeled the letters in Maya, and imported my Lou the Janitor Character. I also almost went with a black letter on white background, but it didn't look the way I wanted it to when I lit it. The background was constantly getting over-exposed, while the character looked dull. I like the way the character pops against the black background.
And finally, I animated it, lit it, rendered it, added a subtitle in After Effects, and made it into a gif.
Well... sometimes things don't go as planned. Lots of complications since last update. A power outage left me unable to do a lot, and then the usual shaking off the dust of not having animated for a few months means I overestimated my abilities. I did not get the full layout pass that I wanted. Instead I ended up animating a few minor scenes, trying to get back into the groove of animating.
Here's one of the scenes I did. Again, I'm shaking off the dust. It's been a month or two since I've animated, and a few more months since I animated human characters.
Anyway, by next update I hope to have gotten a few more scenes blocked out. I'm hoping for like, at least one scene a day, maybe two. Really solid blocking, and maybe some full-on, first-pass animation if it's a short scene like this.
Today's update is a little different. It was basically a lot of setup without anything to really show off, so I'm including an "audience reaction" GIF to predict your reaction. So without further ado, here's what I got done:
I re-recorded the dialogue, and mixed it with a new copyright-free, royalty-free, free song. Then I adjusted the timing of the animatic to be funnier, added the important sound effects, and exported each scene's audio.
How does the audience feel about that?
Then I imported the audio and referenced the characters and background into maya files for each scene, and in each of those file I set the camera into roughly the area it needed to be (like a really really rough layout). Then I recorded reference videos of myself performing the short, so I could get a feel for the acting.
How's the audience doing?
And finally, I organized everything into folders. Each scene has its place for the maya files, audio files, and render files. All the reference files are organized.
Audience?
Yeah, so today was a kind of boring update. Just a lot of organization, adjusting minor things, and setting things up. Not sure what future updates will be like, because I don't want to spoil anything, but from here on, it's just going to be animation. I'll probably just show screenshots, and maybe GIFs of scenes I'm proud of.
By the next update I plan to get an actual layout pass done, with significant poses, and final camera angles.
A silly character I sketched a while ago. I'd like to model him in 3D some day, and then I also have an idea for an animation with him. But for now it's just the sketch, and that drawing in my portfolio.
Got Frankie all rigged. I think for the final animation I'm going to have his hands in IK instead of FK so they don't move around as much, but this was just a rig test.
By the next update I plan to have organized all my folders, broken down the animatic into shots, gotten the audio ready for the lipsync, and fixed the minor rig issues I noticed.
Since the last update, I changed Johnny's proportions to look more appealing (His head was HUGE. and his arms were lanky), and I got him all rigged up and ready to animate. He mostly stands in shadows and lends intimidation to the scene, so his face rig isn't super detailed like the two main characters.
I also got texturing done for the Boss and for Johnny (although I usually change the textures during the lighting process so these textures are almost final, but not really).
By the next update I plan to have modeled the last character, Frankie.
I've been working on rigging the past few days. Got Lou's rig done... except for some reason it seems to crash Maya a lot, so I have to figure out what's wrong with it. I think it has something to do with the referenced files because the face rig was acting weird.
And I'm pretty much done with the boss. Just some minor weight painting issues I noticed while making the gif.
By the next update I'm going to try to fix the crashing issues, and start working on the next character. I'm aiming to get these updates out every Monday and Thursday.
In order to hold off boredom while I look for a job, I'm making a quick animated short based on an animatic I made two or three years ago.
I'm not going to post the animatic (because that would ruin the fun), but over the past few weeks I've gotten progress done on the modelling and rigging, and I'll show those.
First we have Lou, the main character. His body and face are all rigged. All that's left is to finalize his textures:
Then we have the Mafia Boss. As you can see, his textures haven't even been started:
The background was the first thing I did. Again, the textures haven't been started, but the basic color ideas are there, and all the models are done.
And last but not least, The Props (which I did during my vacation in Florida).
I'm hoping to have weekly or biweekly updates on this project. For the next update I plan to have finished rigging the Mafia Boss, and started modelling one of the two remaining characters.
Making a Short CG Film isn't easy. A lot of people (including myself when I began) think because it's "computer" animation that means the computer does most of the work. That's not true. It takes a lot of time and effort.
So for those of you interested in behind-the-scenes stuff, I've compiled a ton of my process work from when I created my college short film "The Test of Time."
First of all, here is the final product:
The audience sees the two minutes of completed work, but what they don't see are the hours of planning, designing, testing, and redoing.
When I first pitched the idea to my teachers, it was the story of two neighbors. Space was a grouchy shut-in, and Time was an energetic peppy guy. The idea was Time would try to hang out with Space, or he'd pull a prank on him, and it would escalate to a fight until they came to some sort of understanding at the end.
Eventually it evolved into a story about Time and Space working in a textile factory, as they worked together to weave the Fabric of Reality. Time was a mechanic, in charge of making the machines go with his magic time-powers, and Space was the one doing the weaving. Time (being the energetic person he was) tried to help weave, but scared Space, causing him to tear the Fabric of Reality. Time tries to help fix it, but Space doesn't want him ruining it again, and it escalates into a fight, until Time is finally able to out maneuver him, and use rewind to repair the fabric.
The story was too much to do in two minutes though. I had to establish their job, establish them, get them to fight, and an ending where they come to an understanding. My teachers said either make it a story about seamstresses trying to fix torn fabric, or make it Time and Space fighting. I picked Time and Space fighting.
I chose to make them boxers because you literally just have to see the boxing gloves to understand why they're fighting. No complicated explanations about what the fabric of reality is, or who does what at their job. Just two fighters fighting. Boxing is also the only fighting sport I even remotely understand the rules to (thank you Punch-Out for NES).
Next came the script writing and storyboarding. Above is the animatic, where you take the storyboard, and set it to sound effects and dialogue to get a sense of timing.
One of the weirdest things in my animatic was Time originally controlled his powers by blinking and winking. I have no clue why I thought that was a good idea. It was not very clear to the audience what was happening. Having him hit his wrist makes way more sense. (I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to do a 50% grey background either).
You can also see when Space stretches out the ring, there's hardly any indication he's done so. In the final shot I exaggerated how long the stage had gotten, thanks to the advice of a mentor.
Time was also going to use pause to warp, with the idea being he paused everything, including us, and then he moved, but I found it way too weird. Warping seemed like something Space would do, like creating a wormhole. And since the story is from Time's perspective, it was weird to suddenly not know what Time knew. So I cut that, and made him use fast forward on himself, which cut a joke I was going to add "Looks like he did the time warp again."
Next comes design. You need to draw everything in 2D before you can model it in 3D:
Space originally had hair??? And he stood up straight? And he was ugly? Yes, but I redesigned him even after I was already graded on the other design because I just hated it so much.
Good reference is important. I knew I wanted Space to be this massive guy with high shoulders and no neck. So I looked at examples of characters similar to what I wanted, to make sure my character looked good too.
Time went through the least changes.
Props are easy to forget about. I based the stage lights off of a diagram of light in space-time I found. I'm not even going to pretend I understand it though. Then the belt is a four-dimensional hypercube, to symbolize the 4th dimension (and Space wears the belt for 3rd dimension to indicate he's the champion of the previous dimension).
The one good environment drawing I did.
After the idea was approved I got to work modelling, texturing, and rigging all the characters, backgrounds and assets. This one's pretty self explanatory.
A small detail you may not have noticed is that the audience members are the three states of matter, solid, liquid and gas. In the original model they were orbs that contained an ice cube, water, and clouds, but in the end they were changed to ice cubes, a water drop, and clouds to add variety to the shapes in the crowd. There are also photons taking photos. I gave them a wavy mustache because photons can behave like a wave.
A lot of things can go wrong
That's not right
That's just what the proxy mesh looked like. It was scary.
Having fun with blendshapes.
Then there's layout, where you get the camera and characters into the right places so you can start animating. There's still the weird blinking to control the powers. And there's still that terrible shot that doesn't explain that the ring was stretched. But this is basically just a 3D version of the animatic.
And the rest is just months of animating, lighting, compositing, color correcting, and trying to get the darn thing to export until finally you have the finished product. I don't have any interesting things to show from that part. It's just a slow progression of refining things.
So as you can see 3D animation is hard, but it is a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed the behind-the-scenes process work for The Test of Time!
