Monday 25 April 2011

Burn burn burn, a ring of fire.

So the last couple of things I did for the last trophy this term was some Dynamic fire for the camp scene, model and texture a gag for the apprentice in the end camp scene and finally put all the textures of matt painting by simon on planes into my camp scene, gun hunt scene and missile scene and finish any loose textures off such as the ground textures in the hunt scene and the missile and missile flyby scene. I would then hand them over to Olly for lighting. Though seeing as the animation didn't get done in time to render all these scenes for the deadline this has become more for mine, Emmas and Ollys portfolio to show off the modelling, texturing and lighting. Me and Emma have considered trying to get the film done over the summer but we will first have to get all the animation and loose files together plus many other jobs and fixes that would need doing might prove for this to be very difficult. We will try to get some of the scenes which we like rendered at least.

So getting down to my last few weeks work on the project here are some render tests that I did while trying to get a simple looking camp fire particle effect working using the visor tools once again.


I used a variety of settings to get the desired camp fire like flame. The settings that I had to fiddle with the most were the the basic emitter attributes rate (percent), density/voxel/sec, heat/voxel/sec, fuel/voxel/sec and fluid emission turbulence. Below shows the final 2 flame cycle render test on its own for the camp fire. The first cycle was to fast and to short but the second one actually feels like a burning fire, both were put together in premiere pro while at university.






After Id nailed the fire, simon asked me to model, texture and attach a gag to the apprentice rig for the end camp scene shot where he is tied to the pole and bound and gagged to draw bap out of the jungle. This only took an hr or so to model, uv and texture it appropriately and then attach it to the apprentice so that it follows his head correctly. Below is a breakdown of the modelling, edgeflow and texturing from the front and back.


Here is a quick video showing the constraining of the gag to the apprentice, if I had more time I would have added in some jiggle with a jiggle deformer. This and baps back hair are two examples I may use at a later date to help demonstrate my skills in using deformers. Below shows the apprentice gag animation constraint test.



In the next post I will round up the cleaning up of the jungle scenes adding in Simons plane textures and ground textures as well as finishing off any loose textures myself for the gun hunt and missile and missile flyby scenes.






Monday 18 April 2011

Ok have a nap, then fire zz missiles!

Ok so the last scene I had to do was the missile fly by scene, which luckly was only one camera shot so I was able to build the entire scene around the Camera shot. This made things much easier from previous shots.
I started by laying out all the plants and there was a bit of jockying with the camera positioning as things got layed out but this is pritty much the final layout breakdown below.


Here is 2 of the plants I started to rig, just using basic fk controls and weighting the geometry accordingly to how I needed the plants to bend.


Once all the plants had been layed out and the necessaryn plants had been rigged up to be animated when the missile flys by, I moved onto animating the missile to then create and attach the jet trail to it. For the missile trail I used the same technique as the trail pete used for one of the other scenes for continuity sake. This was basically one of the visor particle effects, which after a bit of tweeking with the various settings of the particles and the emitter we got it working. Here are the various test shots with the bottom right being the end result for what the missile trail will look right. There are no lights so the focus was on the trail. This was just to speed up the render test as the computer I was using was particulary slow.


The last element I wanted to get roughed out was some lighting so you could see the jungle plants and the missile trail more clearly than the above screenshots. This work was once again recent I just wanted to keep the post clean and keep it all together. I initially used some basic 3 point lighting to get some nice shading, but it seemed to flatten the thickness of the missile trail. Matt then recomended adding in the physical sun and sky as the scene initially seemed a bit dull with only the 3 point lighting. Then this in combination with the physical sun and sky was washing out the scene. So I scrapped the 3 point lights and turned down the gamma on the physical sky. The bottom right as usual is the shot lighting I have so far to better visualise the missile trail and some plant shadows, but it is still a little blown out. If I had more time I would have worked on this further and imrpove the lighting to improve my own basic understanding of lighting.


As this is only the setup stage I will be posting a rendered shot breakdown once emma gets round to the animation. This will be something we work on to have a finished shot between us as it wont be included in the final film now so it will get done when its done for our own protfolio sake.

In the next post Il cover finishing up cleaning up the camp scene adding in simons background matt paintings, sorting the dynamics caches out, making a quick gag for the apprentice in the end scene and crating dynamic fire for the initial camp scene.

Friday 8 April 2011

Il have Bap textured sandwich please

So before sneaking onto the missile fly by scene here are a few stills of the texturing process with bap. Which thanks to constant art direction by simon went more smoothly than anticipated concidering I had only 2 concept pieces for reference. Through talking to simon constantly and talking over possible colours in different areas of the character as we nailed it down to the follow textures. Again as always if there was more time and reference I could have worked some more detail into Bap's textures and given him some more depth.


 Below shows a final overview of Baps topology in the form of a wireframe, showing the subdivided geometry for rendering more smoothly at 40000 polys, pre subdividing 12000 polys. We were originally going to render Bap in a non subdivided state with softened normals to take off the jaggered edges, but ended up needing to subdivide his geometry for rendering as well as texturing and this is his new wireframe. I maintained border edges to keep Baps original outline.


 Below shows a few different 3 point lighting combinations Ive also recently tried in preperation for rendering a breakdown of Bap for my showreal. This is recent work but I wanted to keep all Bap related changes to one post for now. I decided to go with the bottom right lighting for Bap as it casted some nice shadows but still highlights his features. This may change for the showreal if I can get him lit better in time but for now this will do.


And for now this is goodbye from Bap till we see some pritty renders and animation from our animators Roy, Emma and Oddne, and for now heres Bap doing the mess around and chilling while waiting to be animated.



Tuesday 5 April 2011

The hunters claw kept growing and so the T5000 was born.

Well at this point I thought I would be laying out and rigging the plants for the missile fly by scene as well as the particles for the missile trail and then doing the texture for Bap, but there were some problems that simon needed me to fix on the hunter so I put the fly by scene on hold and picked up the hunter and started my fixing.

The first problem that I encountered was what me and matt l described as a T5000 like spear which seemed to be coming out of the hunters right arm. I was quite familier with this kind of problem from when I was weighting Bap. It occurs when verticies have no weights assigned to them. Below shows the first of many problems I encountered with the rig.


A few clicks here a few clicks there and the problem was solved, well I pritty much re-weighted both hands properly to be safe, making sure each joint deformed as it would on a real hand using my own hand as reference was particulary useful.

After the T5000 issue had been fixed there was a few other issues that simon asked me to fix so I got to it. The first of which being the neck weighting when the hunter rotates his neck the collar would go through the coat. To fix this I started by weighting the collar to follow the neck joint correctly. I then secondly started weighting the coat easing the strength of the weighting in but only to a value that would subtly effect the coats geometry and so that the collar would not pass through the coat. I was able to account for this up to about a 45% rotation but any further and the collar would pass through. This could not be fixed easily without re-topologizing the collar and coat top to allow for better deformations. As we didn't have time for this we just left it at a compromise of sacraficed rotation for the hunters neck which wasn't a massive problem as he wasn't really doing any 90% turns with his head like a owl so that was ok.


The next problem was his coat around his gluteus maximus, his trowser's kept coming through his coat and his groyne had very weird and dodgy deformation. With a bit of prancing around the studio raising my legs unnecessarily high, to get a feel for what muscles and clothing are influenced by the various joints of the body I managed to iron out the kinks.

Below shows the lower coat and groyne fix and well as a quick look back at the re weighting of the fingers.


The last real fix I had to do was weighting the feet which for some reason kept messing up when the animators got hold of it, but the second attempt seemed to iron out all the problems. Below shows the breakdown of the weighting for the lower leg joints.


After all the fixes had been done simon asked me if the mostache of the hunter could be rigging so to stop it going through his face during facial animation. I did this portion of rigging between starting the texturing of bap and building the missile fly by scene so its kind of a pre emptive post so to keep all the hunter rigging and fixes in one post.


For this I just made a basic fk control system attached to the main rig neck joint so when the head rotates the mostache would follow correctly and could also easily be animated by the simple fk controls see above.

In the next post Il cover Baps texturing and the start of the infamous missile fly by scene.