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!
