Other things and stuff

Things have finally settled down enough for me to go back to working on Polarity, still not entirely comfortable with my original plans for creating the hair but rather than waste an afternoon mulling things over I decided to get on with the accessories instead.

The belt needs some pouches but I wasn't sure if one needs to be accessible/animatable later on, the goggles need detailing but the final design is still being worked out. Other than that I thinks its just small changes here and there, I want the scarf to look wrapped around and layered as well as getting some seams and crinkles in the suit itself. And looking at it now the palms of the hands could do with some work too.

Things and Stuff

First piece of cool news is that I just found out today that my grad film Discovery is going to be screened across the UK as part of the BBC Big Screens project/thing.


Next up is that Kinect Sports 2 was released this week, I had the chance to work on this for a couple of months over the summer after graduating. Was strange but cool seeing something I'd worked on being played in a store. 


And finally, Polarity is almost modelled, there's been a few tweaks and the mouth needs to be reconstructed as I've finally settled on a rigging solution and I want to make sure the mesh flow is a neat as possible and take out any hint of a smile/expression so the base mesh is as plain as possible. Which is  a stupidly long sentence, but there's loads of work to be done so it can stay that way for now. 

Polarity Begins

Finally starting to model Polarity, got the chance to run through the idea for showreel pieces/portfolio ideas with a couple of artists and animators at the Eurogamer Careers Fair. Concept went down well so after a couple of days thinking through exactly what we want out of it I've had the designs through and am in the process of working up a base mesh, most the way there now just got the hair and hands to go.

We've also got another person on the project now to help with voice acting and the creation of Polarity's nemesis... It's all sounding really cool but I'm saying nothing until things are confirmed. Even though we're splitting time between working day jobs/this project the plan is to have a short scripted and a 30 second thing done for the new year, depending on how busy people get.

As well as the short we're figuring how how to show off the model and set up in-game type animations in Unity (which will test how well the python learning is going). So while the scripts and storyboards are organised/written/whatever there's other cool stuff to be working on. Main priority is getting this modelled and rigged well enough and in a way that's flexible enough to allow us to do all of this.

Polarity

Finally started work on a side project with a friend, she's had an original superhero character idea for a while and I happened to mention a few showreel piece ideas that I'd had involving superheroes but I'm not so great with designs so I'd not pursued them any further...

Anyways I'm working on making her designs into a 3d character in maya and building a better rig than last time out, researched and found better  modelling and rigging solutions than used in the grad film so loads to learn but working with someone on a cool looking character makes it fun and easier to go through the process from scratch.

Aside from that I've also started to learn some python programming as every job spec I've looked at seems to want some know how so hopefully that'll start to sink in and become useful as the polarity project comes along - especially when it comes to making the GUI.

Short tests 2

So after the previous short test thing I found that I really liked getting back into the facial stuff compared to the more game-y body mechanics stuff i've been working on pretty much exclusively for the last year or so, I've decided to have another go at a longer piece, its getting there slowly and ive got a few ideas of how this is going to end up as a full body performance. I think im gonna start blocking these bits in then re animate the eye line/head movement to fit

Short tests 1

While i'm waiting for shots to come through at work i'm doing my own thing and either taking part in the mini challenges on the 11second club or playing around with various ideas of my own, today i decided to tackle some lip sync and start doing some more performance focused things.

This is still a WIP but i've really enjoyed spending a  couple of hours working things out and playing with a different facial setup to things ive used in the past. Want to get some of the mouth shapes better defined and figure out how to get some movement into the upper body without over doing it.Been a nice change from the sort of things ive been doing with mocap and my grad film.

Will post polished version shortly

Face wise it feels a lot closer, keep scratching my head when im thinking about the line, not so sure it works with the character, single frames look nice but over the whole anim it doesnt feel quite right - at the same time its better than him stood there arms side by side. will ask around and think about what to do next... 

Discovery

Discovery from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.


My grad film, completed in 7 months. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way

[insert witty title]

So its been a while since I last updated this properly, loads has happened in that time. I'm writing this sat in a hotel bar drinking an ice cold pint celebrating getting a 2.1 for my degree and starting my new job as an animator at Rare.

To say I've been lucky is an understatement, admittedly I've worked hard this year but it's all coming together at last. The month or so before hand in was unbelievably stressful and I still cant watch the film without cringing at glaring mistakes and animations that are a little too rough around the edges.

The grad show came and went and I'll post photo's from that once I've been reunited with my camera, which is in one of many boxes 116 miles away in Cardiff. The show itself was a success, was a good chance to see people from my original year before I disappeared to do the animation internship at Lionhead Studios as well as getting to see my film on the big screen, the biggest surprise came the next day when I got a mention on the ffresh review of the screening and show.

Whilst all of this was going on I'd been applying for various jobs and snuck off for an interview at Rare in Birmingham, within the space of 7 days I'd been offered the job, moved to Cardiff, and then frantically raced upto Birmingham to start work as an animator/motion editor.

I'm still not entirely sure as to the purpose of this blog post gradutation, in some respect it will always be my production journal for the grad film and a place to ramble about the various projects I'm working on. So far there's been talk of working on a game with Chris Caesar, vague discussions of a windows phone game with Megan and Jacko once Tea and Techno have finished competing at Dare to be Digital, as well as wanting to get my reel vastly improved to send out after my time here at Rare. It seems the work really never ends but there's so many cool things going on I really cant complain. While I try figure out the best way to keep working on my reel (separated from pc whilst on the short contract at rare) and juggling the other projects I'm shortly going to be posting various things over at #AltDevBlogADay but it may be a few weeks before that gets off the ground as internet access and time have been in fairly short supply...

Degree Complete... Level Up!

So I've handed in the grad film and have completed my degree, it's been a long testing year but it's also been awesome. There's a few bits and pieces I want to tweak and the edit needs a tiny bit of work now the final audio is sorted but other than that i'm real happy with how it's all turned out. I'm dying to post it but in even better news I've made the shortlist of the top 12 Ba/Ma films and festival submissions appear to be liking exclusivity for a while... However if you want to see the final thing e-mail me/comment and i'll sort something out :)

Moving onto re cutting my showreel and generally job hunting in an attempt to distract me from thinking about getting the final assessment feedback...

Blockout to Final Render

This clip shows some of the processes involved from animation to final film, the first section shows the blocked out animation of the proxy models, the second shows the animation converted to spline curves and a first pass on clean up, the model has also had a smooth preview applied to ensure that there are no strange intersections and base textures have also been applied. The third and final section consists of the final render from the film, the scene has been lit and as a result the SubSurfaceScatter texture on the skin appears along with a light inside the helmet, the background has also been added in post. 

Light at the end of a ridiculously long tunnel

So I've nearly finished the film for monday's hand in, the last few scenes are rendering and the edit is pretty much there. The only decision left to make is whether the bed jumping animation stays

 
I can see the argument for cutting and leaving.... at the moment i want to drop it but that knocks the music out and im still waiting for the final draft of that to arrive so i guess i'll probably make that call late on sunday... that or remove it for the grad show (click link for trailers/previews and profiles etc)

Eitherways while this has been rendering I've been working on Megan's film and doing various things, the biggest job was working on one of the puddle worlds and making a CG city so she could animate a tricky camera shot which iI then inked....

All that's left to do now is a huge write up and publicity pack, hand in on monday then work back into the film a little more for the grad show, I want to get string behaving like string but still don't fully understand how to make this work on time for monday which is a shame but I wanted time to make sure the edit was right and refine a few other animations that I felt were more important. Will have a trailer/link to finished film soon.

Rendering

I'm almost finished with maya, nearly every scene has been rendered with one or two animations left to complete and refine. I've spent the weekend shifting settings and generally solving technical issues which took a little longer than expected but for the most part it's all falling into place.
The biggest relief is sorting out the tomato face in the cave, it turns out I'd changed the settings of the SSS shader without realising and made the layers of skin super thin, so once they were corrected the render started behaving and looking less red. Here is a picture;

Once the animations are out of maya im putting everything through after effects to add in the skies and do any colour correction as required. There have been a couple of cases where I've had strange artifacting on the walls or props, in these situations I've gone back to the source file and rendered the character and environment out on separate layers and composited the two in after effects, these are then exported as uncompressed .mov files for the final edit which is happening in Premiere Pro.

Renders

Been lighting, rendering and stressing pretty much all week but finally have a configuration im pretty happy with, also the renderfarm is alive again so once the last few bits and pieces are textured i'm gonna work up the animation a little and the finally hit render.

 

Argh

What happens when I open a 2011file in an older version of maya.... Not cool

Testing of things so far....

Another hectic week in which a lot has been learnt, took a day or two but ive got a skin texture im happy with so spending time researching and looking into subsurface scatter has proved worth while, the bedroom is complete except for the posters and medal, the earthboy is also done except for some tweaks to the hair. The next couple of days im going to be focusing on getting the moon up to the same level so by monday I can focus all my attention on lighting and rendering and try and get a decent first cut out for the 10th of may deadline.

Texturing:

Problems:


Turns out the render farm is down and unavailable, which sucks however I had a feeling that if anything were to go wrong it would be this. So I decided to see what the Uni pc's are capable of and rendered a relatively simple sequence full HD with a poor lighting set up (have since found tutorials) these 4 seconds took 3 hours to render so getting 3 mins out on time is going to be tight seeing as theres still a couple of weeks work to go into all of this. Another added problem is that they auto power off after 20mins of inactivity and that cancels the render so leaving work over night also seems impossible.

Quick Render Test from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.

Deadline:

Now ive got a gauge for how long the rendering will take and the work that needs to be done in post the 6th of may has become my absolute deadline for work to be completed and ready to render/tweak lights etc. Unexpected shift in dates but hopefully something thats realistic providing there's large quantities of caffiene available.

Subsurface Scatter Tests

Today I learnt about Sucsurface Scatter (SSS), the top photo is how the boy looked this morning with a flat horrible lambert, so I tried to figure out how to get some texture and life into the skin, the 2nd image is pretty much the default maya/mental ray SSS shader - all waxy and horrible. 3rd is the latest incarnation, getting there still got to play with the specular highlights etc... but the bump and colour maps add a lot of detail, shall continue with this experiment

Bedroom Textures and Lights

Finishing up the bedroom textures and starting to play around with lights.....

Update on everything and yet nothing in particular...

... been a long and busy week but theres been a huge leap in progress and a massive drop in stress levels which is awesome.

Animation:
The majority of the animation work is completed and Ive been able to get some help from Scott MacDonald on some of the shots I was struggling to get ready on time.
Texturing:
The bedroom is very close to being completed just got a few things to finish up like the posters and stars and tweak a few things here and there. Matt Sutcliffe has helped an insanely huge amount with this and has got things looking awesome, needless to say I would be really upagainst it with out his help the last few weeks.
The Moon is very much WIP but ive finally got a good indication of what i want it to be like which has been a real block the last few weeks.
Lighting:
Is my new nemesis.
Audio:
FINALLY found a composer who sounds genuinely excited and interested in the project and had some amazing tracks that are being used as a start point, played a few over the film and it added so so much, really looking forward to getting the 1st edit which i think is gonna arrive on time for the first cut review.
Edit:
I also managed to playblast and arrange all of the sequences into the first edit of the latest version of the film and its improved hugely, the pacing is loads better and from the feedback i've had its working as a film at last! Another bonus is that in the way ive structured the projects through Maya, After Effects and Premiere providing I stick to correct file naming conventions and folder structure the edit should remain untouched for the most part and just update with higher quality visuals as the project comes to completion. Render times are becoming concerning along with my total lack of lighting knowledge but if i can have another couple of weeks like this one then i should get something out that im happy with.

All in all collaboration is good and I wish i'd asked for help sooner.

Texture Preview

not lit, just ipr default stuff to check things applied properly... they sort of have

Test Edit with 1st pass animation and blockout

Moonboy Test Comp for review from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.

Everything so far in one sequence to check pacing, see how the new shots work and whats left to do, Clean up is taking longer than expected but having a HUGE helping hand with textures means I can afford a day or two longer to get this looking really good. 

Shotlist Update

Midway through animation clean up, the bedroom should be completed by the end of the weekend and the moon will hopefully follow soon after, also getting a few textures going here and there so will get some render tests and better quality WIP shots posted asap

Studio closed for holidays... make front room studio...

The studios are closing for easter so the lounge is now the new studio so Moonboy and Puddles can carry on being made

Tests

montage seq v2

Shuffled things round a bit, feels a lot better to me, gonna block this version in asap and playblast everything so far to check it out... will post updated animatic/work in progress edit soon

montage test, wanna have the camera move around a little and put in some shots further away. showing the development of the rocket slowly coming together etc

Somewhere in here is a montage I just havent found it yet... there in no particular order yet but some of the drawings i like. a lot.

Tests

Been fiddling round with getting a working duvet reacting to the boy breathing/sleeping, nice little anim starting to appear (and im aware the UV unwrapping is not done yet hence the warped look on a lot of things but not everything is going to require it and for the time being im more focussed on the animation and getting the story working)

jump on bed

In an attempt to stop me doing over and over the same anim file ive set a time limit on blocking... then uploading whats ready so far. so here is the last hours work. i can see whats wrong but there simple weight shifts/adjustments/arms theres 2 looping keys on there making him look like a chicken :( (i think) and also have to rig the bed so he can actually bounce rather than go through it.

trying to get a contrast between the two jumps, found a video of astronauts jumping/playing on the moon that i used as reference but needs lots of work and figuring out the cut between the two is tricky - almost, well probably does need pose matching...

Revised Schedule

Im not going to lie... its tight. there is a lot to be done but after talking to various people and managing to recruit a couple of people this film WILL be made ON TIME and looking AWESOME.
The dissetation took a little longer than expected to wrap up but after 8437words i feel ive said my bit and am ready to get that bound and out of the way.
Getting advice/help means i can afford another couple of days on animation and the latest revision to the story has increased the amount of shots required/few technical unknowns with regards to lighting/rendering etc...
Thanks to Matt S being able to understand my rambling the texturing has started, and all files have been referenced allowing me to update the master environment/character files with the new textures as we create them (mainly Matt for the time being). This ate a few days with teething problems in the set up but ultimately saves a lot of time towards the end. During this process all of the animation completed so far had to be stripped out and reapplied to the correctly referenced rig, again this will hopefully pay off later on.   

story edit

Changes

So there was a tutorial in which many changes were suggested essentially turning the film inside out and whilst making it work better there are a lot of red crosses and changes on this and a lot of new shots to workout. very daunting. but i have pretty much completed my dissertation hence a lack of posting and general animation updates.

 

Moon stuff

Finished the massive to do list of fixes to the rig, the shoulders still dont deform as nice as id like but Ive started blocking in a sequence this morning, landing and looking around - cut to shiny thing in distance - back at him staring it out... got sucked into it so ended up doing it all in one sequence for now.
This is properly rough and will be updated as there is progress worthy of playblasting...
first up is going back and doing the arms and defining the path of the shuffle, somehow managed to overlook that entirely and the camera will not move like this it just does for now as it was a test not intending to be posted... but has been anyway

Playing with the camera, way happier with something along these lines (this is with spline tangents and a few more inbetweens, loads of anim to layer in and tweak yet):

Moon blocking and bug fixing

Ive pretty much blocked all of the stuff that happens in his bedroom and some shots have had a really quick 1st pass on the animation - props moving and playing with overlaps so with that going well i decided to start blocking in the moon sequences. However in switching to the other rig/character mesh its back to bug fixing controllers that werent properly assigned and other things that had gotten messy with me trying to retrofit the rig i'd made for the other character mesh. this probably means a day of tweaking settings and weights. yay. so for now the to do list is as follows:

- establish why wrists dont work in fK
- wrist fK manipulator doesnt follow as expected
- Finger curl controls work for middle and end knuckles but not top one
- shoulder collapses in on itself
- correct influence on hands and suit details to prevent clipping

blocking continued

more blocking, horrible floaty arm, been staring at this all day and generally disliking.

Starting to get the shoulders deforming okay tho

*small update -- thursdays progress*

more blockout

Having spent the last few days blocking things out and cutting video reference/refilming and generally doing anything but animating ive blocked in a few more things, just the main keys for now so i can settle on the timing then i'll go back and play with overlapping/offsets and look at the f-curves...

its the section where he's starting to build his rocket and hang stars on the ceiling etc, im still testing various things with the string set up for now (i.e dynamics) so the prop doesnt move, was more focussed on getting the body animation timing correct - there is no facial animation yet either. decided to work in layers body/face/props/cameras rather than try and get everything done at once so i guess all of this is subject to change and testing.

Timing

Having started animating its become apparent im more than a little rusty with regards to hand keying and even weirder is swapping from animating at 30fps to 25... wasnt expecting that to feel odd. So in the hope it helps ive decided to film lots of video reference which is something i got used to doing last year, and to try help things i made a box helmet because inside i am still the 8 year old with a cardboard box rocket.
Also worth mentioning was the talk we had with Tim Allen on monday and him speaking about over animating and trying to put too much in and over doing it, which i think ive been doing in my head and complicating what should be a simple motion. Eitherways sections have been re storyboarded and thumbnailed so i've got a good idea what im after and something always crops up in the live action reference too. So here goes...

Problems...

Started animating with props today and found a bug in the process, for some reason when i attached the pencil to the hand joint he got super stretchy arms, trying to figure out the problem as fast as I can in the hope that i can attempt to save some of the animation done before I found the break....

Stuff

Finally been caught out with the whole working between home and uni across various hard drives and usbs. A corrupt file has made me drastically reassess how im working. Ive claimed a pc at uni and have a dedicated place for my project and will work here on all important stuff from now on which means taking advantage of late nights/early mornings/weekend access which will hopefully save any more lost files. Im in the process of working up the sniff shot from the previous post as this was the file that was lost... 

Blockout continued and the sort of development of a shot

Slowly starting to block more stuff out. Progress is slow but the distractions of recent weeks are gone and early starts/weekends in the studio have returned. Planning to start with the easier shots and work my way up to some of the more complex ones

Adding more inbetweens and correcting stuff, the blendshapes need a fair bit of remodelling/scuplting to get a decent sniff going.

Small update in the blockout, ive accidently moved the camera but kind of like it, so for now it stays and i'll see how it feels in comparision to the surrounding shots in the animatic. added the dropping hand, feels too quick so i'll sort out the timing and add an updated version shortly. Also the head looks like its hitting an invisible wall. not intended.

Gotta fix the left wrist so its not robotic, then another pass all over to avoid anything feeling robotic etc. Also get some of the motions overlapping as there a bit clunky currently 

Unsure if the left arm really needs to move and whether its actually the pose of the hand thats not right, eitherways theres definately something wrong 

Star Test pt2

Been re thinking about how the stars on string will move and after talking to a couple of people ive given dynamics a go (with the help of charlie)
The meshes have been combined and turned into n-cloths, then the top vertices were selected > nConstrain > transform, which gives me the ability to move the string.
Next up is attaching this to the boy's hand...

ShotView

Found a useful script/tool/thing online that lets me designate a specific camera for "shooting" and have that view in a seperate window so i can see what the shot will look like whilst working on it in a different view and not risk accidently moving the camera (which ive done a lot and its annoying) and also hiding all of the controls etc leaving me with just the mesh. Probably not the best description in the world but it saves jumping between views and means i get to work and preview stuff full screen.

Shotlist

This is the shotlist so far, the tutors seem happy with the story and im itching to start animating so i think today it begins. texturing still needs to be done but i want to spend sometime animating and try get ahead rather than being to texture and get lost in putting in unnecessary detail. That and ive still gotta learn how some of this stuff works.
Also started looking into changing the eyes for smaller versions and tweaking the body shape but due to the way i'd made the model and rig changing things now will set me back 2/3weeks in an already tight schedule, so i'd rather have a finished film with imperfections than no film at all.
Ultimately im looking forward to it being covered in ticks 

model tweaks

wanted to update the model and stuff but ive got a fair way down the pipeline so when you change stuff it gets weird...

Epic monday!

For a monday today was epic, really good feedback from the tutors about the film so far and what i can do to make it better
James also showed me how to get the fk/ik controls to show/hide according to the ikBlend setting so i ended up learning about if statements and the expression editor. All in all a good day.

if (rightArmManip.ikFkBlend > 0.5)
{
    master.ikManip = 1;
    master.fkManip = 0;
} else {
    master.ikManip = 0;
    master.fkManip = 1;
}

^^ that is the code making the pictures above work, basically saying that if ik mode is on show the ik controls and if its turned off the fk controls show.

the only flaw in it is that when ikBlend is set to 0 the handle disappears (as was the desired effect) so getting it to reappear is tricky.... so im gonna try assign this to the master controller so i can always access it (or just stick with the previous setup) either ways i learnt lots and have more i wanna try out (when i have time)

Stars and Strings

The last bit of stuff that needed rigging was the string so I could add in a slight sway as they're hung.... wasnt sure how i was going to achieve this at first and lots of joints and rotating each one seemed long winded but as I was setting up the character I found out about the "IK Spline Handle Tool" which pretty much worked like the Ik handles but meant joints in the chain would have a serpentine movement which was exactly what i wanted with the string. So i tried working out how i'd impliment that:

More research and testing occured:

Then i crudely keyed a quick sway just to confirm things were starting to work:

The bottom half is getting there and the top is close but needs adjusting as well as animating the star rotating/spinning on top of the side to side motion (which is blockout not animated).... Eitherways its getting there but still needs something

Final Controls

I realised at somepoints i'd be switching between fk and ik in the arms depending on what the kids doing but when i turned off the ik i had no controls for the fk stuff and showing/selecting each joint seemed a messy way of working. So i decided to create some manipulators to attach to the elbows and wrists to help me when im animating using the fk rig. but then there were LOADS of controllers everywhere. this was messy and looked horrendous. so i sat in the corner and geeked out and decided i would find a way to hide the new fk controls when using the ik ones and vise versa....
The master control (big yellow arrow-y type thing) now has two additional attributes they are as follows:

ikManip
and
fkManip

both of these were added as Enum attributes which let me create a show/hide option in the channel box. I then connected the appropriate controllers visibility to the new attribute so they now appear or vanish as required....

I also locked and hid the translate/scale attributes for all the new fk manipulators to avoid confusion - they are also a different shape so i can instantly tell which mode the arms are in. And all the manipulators are now coloured too - red for the left, blue for the right and yellow for anything in the middle...

 trying to work out how this would all work and connect up...

Re Rigging pt3

Was happy with the rig I made fri/saturday but it didnt have any manipulators for the fingers and having to select individual joints to keyframe seemed messy so after a shed load of experimenting I figured out what to do to make my own controls for each finger and it worked!

Re Rigging pt2

Re Rigging

After the crit on monday I realised how important the character performance was going to be, I thought keeping it limited was the way forward but it turns out its gonna be harder to do it like that which i dont mind but the setup machine rig I was planning on using doesnt fit what im after. Yes its a good rig and was useful for the tests but it needed a lot of persuading to do the things I wanted often with poor results so I figured rather than force it to work i'd go back and rig from scratch, therefore creating a custom rig for the character so it'll have what it needs and in setting it all up myself i'll have a better idea of whats going wrong later on. Probably not the smartest move seeing as ive not rigged a character before but here is the final (ish) rig, just need to add in some manipulators for the fingers to save going thro each joint individually and its there in full ik/fk glory... just hope the skinning goes as relatively painfree

stuff

ive been thinking a lot about how i want this film to look and i keep coming back to paper plane... but i dont think ive got the experience or time to pull this off so im kinda lost with where to go next. Having a lot of issues with the setup machine rig and seriously concidering rigging it myself, the problem is in it adding an insance amount of joints which is making weighing a total mission, the space suit turned out ok but the hands and arms are really messy.
general feedback from the crit is that this all rests on subtle character animation which means getting a really solid rig sorted asap and some focus.

CG Animatic

CG animatic from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.

rig fail

:(

Blockout

Continued starting to blockout the film, rig needs more work and adjust the timing too

And so it begins...

Today Im starting to blockout the animation in maya and convert the current 2d animatic into a CG version, once this is done i'll go back and add the textures and the details once im sure that the space is right and theres no unecessary bg stuff etc.... The first key has been set :D

Moon Stuff

Rough Layout of moon to match storyboards, sky in photoshop

mock up of stars, first half is starry ish shapes and the second more like the drawing in ps, both are a bit much but maybe workable somehow

cave

a cave, that took all day :|

Cave

The cave that really needs modelling and i keep putting it off... it will be done today....