animation tests

Here's this week's animation.
Some of the videos have come out really small for some weird reason, but everything should still be visible.
I hope.

I spent a bit of extra time trying to get the stumble to look right, so this was purely to test that out. I'm thinking of redoing the animation from scratch, though, so I'll probably leave this file alone after this point.

I merged scene 9 into scene 8, so it flows a lot better now.

Animation tests

here are some animation tests for this week.
I'm starting with the harder scenes so I can get them out of the way first

Light test

Took a quick screenshot of the scene with some really basic lights to get an idea of how it would work. I tried to give it a really orange-y colour to emulate that kind of street-light effect that you get in cities and towns. I'm not sure how to get the decay to look right though, so I'll mess around with it a bit more before I'm 100% pleased with it.

Finalized Storyboard

And here's the second part of the storyboard. After the previous version of this file got corrupted I just decided to redo it from scratch. It turned out really well though, better than it would have done in the old iteration.

Storyboard Progress Update

Apparently one of my files for the second half of the updated storyboard didn't save correctly, so I need to redo it this weekend. However, the first half has been reworked  so it flows much better than the previous board did. I also changed a bunch of the shots so that we see more of the characters doing more expressive poses than before.

Small Texture Progress Update

I applied the rest of the textures to the rest of the objects -not handheld props- that will be used in the scene. There's some windows that still need to be duplicated on house 4 and some flat roof colours I need to decide on, but those are ten minute jobs at best, so it's nothing to worry about.

Texturing progress

All the textures are pretty much done aside from a few handheld props, so here are some photos showing off what they look like when they've actually been applied to the scene.

All I have to do is apply one or two more textures to the scene and duplicate the windows, then it should be pretty much complete aside from a few minor details, but those can all be done without too much difficulty.

Storyboard Redux

I've been meaning to get this done for a while now, but I just haven't got around to actually working on it.
That's bad workmanship on my part.
Here's a progress update on it.

The biggest change aside from the time I spent trying to fix my camera angles is probably the fact that I've almost doubled the amount of panels I have, which should -in theory- help me plan out my animation a hell of a lot better than I had done before.

Mapping progress

Yet more bulk updates. I need to do this on a more daily schedule. There's a few small jobs left before I can really put down the UV mapping towel and move on to texturing everything. Considering I chose to map literally every single object in the scene down to the bloody cigarette, I'm surprised I feel so confident that I can get it done and dusted. I may be a bit behind everyone who's already finished texturing, but I don't feel like that's too big a setback given how much I /fucking love painting/. 

Onwards to glory!

(All street areas mapped aside from 1 or 2 archways)

(That archway took too long.)

(In the end I only had to map 2 windows. Hunh.)

(Top-down view of the scene in all its glory~)

Props and Street Lamps

I think the only modelling I have left is one or two bits of piping, and then it's just UV mapping. Anyway, the kinfe handle needs to be remodelled so that it's less complicated, but I included it it this progress update anyway because, well, it's still /technically/ progress

(Base Knife Model - smoothed)

 (Showing off the movable blade)

 (Upscaling the Alley so that the knife and the cigarette are the right size)

 (Adding Street lamps to the Scene)

More progress on Layout

I plugged all of the empty holes with archways and doors so that if the camera catches any of them in shot accidentally then there won't be any problems with people being able to see outside of the layout model, and it will give me a lot more leniency when I start reworking the storyboard.

I still need to add street lamps and a few other minor props, but aside from that the only thing left to do is mapping and texturing, so it's coming along really nicely.

(Remodelled Archway to match the reference picture I had.)

 (Modelled the base for a wooden shop front from the main reference.

The shot wasn't perfect though, so I had to wing some of it.)

 (Shot taken from the back of the scene to show all the -now plugged up- doorways)

Progress on Layout

I forgot to post in progress updates on my layout, so here's a bunch of screencaps I took to give you an idea of where I'm at currently and how I got there.

Stage 1: Base idea for floor plan

Stage 2: Fixing floor and adding bases for the house fronts

Stage 3: Adding windows, an archway and roofs

Stage 4: Finishing main archway and door,

starting on additional archways.

Problems with the new storyline idea

I mean to make a post about this earlier, but I got caught up in modelling and forgot to do it. Truly my dedication is professional.


So anyway, I abandoned the idea of using Lupin in the plot for 3 main reasons.

> Firstly: In order to include him in the plot, I needed to have something valuable that he could steal from Norman/ Morpheus/ the other rig in the scene. There's no way to explain how the rig got this item between the 2 shorts.

> Secondly: There are a number of issues I was having with where he starts in the scene and how he moves about. Given the time we have, it would be difficult to make this work well.

> Thirdly: It would have made the entire scene needlessly complex, especially considering how small the scene actually ended up being.



Even if I decided that the original idea was a lot better, I still need to rework my storyboard to fix some schizophrenic camera direction and needless inclusion of arrows.
Back to the drawing board, I guess.

Changing the story

I suddenly remembered a series of stories about a French Thief called Arsene Lupin, 'the Gentleman Thief'; an incredibly notorious character in the world of literature.
Seeing as I set my story in France, and involved a thief character in the plot, I thought that re-tweaking the story to include this aspect would be a very good idea.

Here's a link to the Ebook library so I don't forget about it;
http://www.goodreads.com/series/41315-ars-ne-lupin

Animatic

1st draft of the animatic is done.
I already have a bunch of ideas on how I could improve it floating around, but I wanted to get this out before I started doing anything extra.

The animatic seems to jump a few frames towards the end in this video.
I guess that's to do with an export error.




03/01/2014 EDIT:

Here is the animatic that I stuck to for the actual animation, and sorry it took me so long to upload it. After speaking to Hilary, I realized that my storyboard was filled with schizophrenic camera angles, so I fixed it over the course of a day and came up with this.

Note that I cut the following things out of the final animation that are still in this animatic due to time constraints and a better idea about how the piece would flow;

• There is no smoke in Scene 4. 
• Morpheus doesn't get startled by the sound of the door slamming shut.
• After the second rig gets kicked, the camera doesn't jump back to a 1st person view, and instead stays locked in the same spot for the last 2 scenes. As a result we see the second rig react to the kick from an outside perspective in the final animation.

Pocket Watch Model

This has been overdue by about 3 days.
Time to fix that problem.

Modeled in Maya
About 4hrs, give or take.

Storyboard

I just finished the 1st draft for the storyboard. At this rate, I should have the animatic done by tomorrow afternoon.

The red arrows indicate fast movement, and the blue arrows indicate slow movement.

The Plot

The research on the setting has been completed, and I know for sure I want it to happen in a Dark Alley somewhere in Annecy. As for what will actually happen, here's a very basic script;

A Cold Night Out (2)
- Rig 1 walks into an alley at night. He enters from an archway that's too dark to see into. 

- Rig 1 shivers, then starts walking slowly down the alleyway.

- Rig 2 is leaning on a nearby pillar, having a smoke.
- Rig 2 starts slowly following Rig 1, pulls out a knife and attempts to mug Rig 1
- Rig 2 pushes Rig 1 up against a wall and starts threatening him.
- Rig 1 says something like 'Look over there'
- Rig 2 blinks and turns his head away for a few seconds, laughing at how he thinks Rig 1's ploy will actually work.
- Rig 1 has replaced himself with a cutout of himself looking shocked
- The cutout falls over
- Rig 1 is seen slinking away, then realises he's been spotted and sprints off into the distance.
- Rig 2 gets really mad, throws his knife on the floor, hits himself in the foot, starts screaming unintelligibly, bounces around for a bit then storms off in the other direction, muttering stuff under his breath.

Setting

After looking at Hopper's paintings and taking into account the amount I love C.D.F's work, I decided that I wanted to use a street setting for my piece, so I immediately got to work looking at photos and paintings. It wasn't long after this that I remembered the Annecy trip and I started to give my research a much more solid direction.

Edward Hopper

From this point the research started to get a tad convoluted as I didn't really know what angle I was going to take. I looked at a number of paintings that had a lot to do with colour and light in an attempt to understand how I wanted my scene to work, but they all felt slightly off, then I looked at Edward Hopper after Hana decided to talk about his representations of indoor light.

Thinking about it now, it wasn't his lighting that I found so striking, but rather the way in which he was able to simply render the areas outside of the light in a way that made them believable without getting too caught up in the little details.

Starting point

The first thing I wanted to do was look for inspiration, and given that our tutors had told us to try and take it from paintings, I decided to take a look at a handful of painters whom I find to be particularly striking, in particular Rembrandt -for his skill with representing dynamic light- and a personal favourite of mine, Caspar David Friedrich, for his stunning representations of Outdoor scenes.

Attached are a few images that I gathered while doing this research. I feel that they inspired me the most out of everything that I looked at.