Teaching Block 2 (Production Diary) - UP748484

Pre-Production

Ideas and Research:My initial idea was to have a character move through-out a basic obstacle course with tyres and hurdles, and was considering an army themed character. As I developed my idea, I decided to adjust my plan, having tyres and hurdle seemed like jumping would be the characters only motion and I wanted some variations in the types of movement, so I decided to remove the tyres from my plans and add a box that the character could jump onto and backflip off of. This meant that my character would walk, run, jump and flip. I decided to change the army idea and go with a pair of athletic looking legs (slightly more feminine).

Sketches:After coming up with my initial idea, I created sketches of what I planned my character, set and props to look like. Keeping it simple enough so that I would be able to easily model them. Sketches made modelling easier because I could use the drawings as reference for proportion and design. I designs my character to be wearing rolled up trousers (work-out/yoga pants style), and running trainers to fit my the athletic style of the characters movements.

Animation Plans:

Next I drew out plans for the animation in my scene. I used these plans for work out key poses of the animation and work out the timing of my scene.

Storyboards:Next I created storyboards for my scene, to give me reference for camera angles and actions to refer back to when animating. Planning the storyboard helped me develop how I want my character to progress through the obstacle course.

Research:Through-out the pre-production of my scene I did a lot of research into different aspects of pre-production as well as research into production aspects to prepare to move into production. I did research for my storyboard by looking at books like ‘Cinematic Storytelling’ by Jennifer Van Sijll, to have better upstanding of the uses of camera angels how it can add to the scene. I used ‘The Human Figure in Motion’ by Edward Muybridge and ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ by Richard Williams to study the movement of running and jumping to plan how my character will move through-out the scene. Before beginning production on my modelling and rigging my character, I watched many tutorials on ‘Digital Tutors’ to gain a better understanding of the correct ways to model and rig. The research I did has helped me develop my character and scene.

Production

Modelling: I began the production of my scene by modelling my character, based off the character design sketches I did during the pre-production of my project, I modelled my character using the tools and techniques I have learnt through-out term 1, such as extrudes and manipulating vertices. I am happy with how my model turned out, it is very similar to my initial plans. I also created models for my hurdle and box in a separate file.

Texturing:As my character’s design is quite simple and I liked the idea of having the character’s clothing solid colours, I decided that UV texture mapping wouldn’t be necessary. Instead I textured the character using coloured ‘lamberts’ assigned to certain faces of the model. I used the same colouring technique to texture my props.

Rigging: I did a lot of research into rigging before starting the rigging process, I watched a lot of online tutorials and guides to better understand the rigging tools within maya. I am pleased with the rig for my character, I added all of the controls that I fell I will need for my planned animation: IK legs, foot roll, hip controls, knee controls and centre of gravity controls. Having rigged this character, I know feel a lot more comfortable with rigging, which I didn’t feel before, I really enjoyed rigging this character.

Paint Weights: Adjusting the paint weights of my character after rigging let me have full control on how each control/joint manipulates the model, I found paint weight quite hard to get to grips with, but after playing around with the tools for a while I started to feel comfortable with it.

Testing the finished Rig:After completing the rig I tested it out by animating a walk cycle with my character, this helped me check that all of my controls were working as they should and that my paint weights were correct. When testing the rig in a walk cycle, I chose to ‘reference’ my character into the scene rather than ‘import’ it, meaning that if I did need to change any paint weights that I could adjust them in the original rig file and have the new paint weights transferred over without messing up the animation I had set up on the character. I will reference my character into my final scene as well, just to be safe in case I do need to go back to the original and make adjustments, should I run into any problems further into production.

Animation:I began my animating with the blocking stage, adding in the initial keyframes (in ‘stepped’), then added in a few in-betweens before going into the graph editor and moving over into ‘splined’ and adjusting the tangents to polish the animation. I am not 100% happy with the final animation, I could have done with polishing the scene a bit more. The basic movements are there, but it is not completely polished, the legs are a bit jolty and the knees pop occasional. During animating I did ‘playblasts’ of my scene to not only keep a record of my progress but also watch back how my animating was looking.

Post Production

Cameras: After animating the scene, I adjusted the cameras based on my initial storyboard, but making a few changes to the shot types when I felt something would fit better. I chose to use one camera, animated to different angles. Using the graph editor I put the camera’s frame into ‘stepped’ so they would be stable camera’s without motion.

Lighting: I then added lights to my scene, positioning them to project good light onto my scene and have them at an angle to give good shadowing without distracting from the scene. During this phase of post-production, I did a lot of render tests of selected frames to check that the lighting looked correct and make any adjusts before moving into a final render. After playing around with the lighting setting I decided to use the ‘indirect lighting’ tab in render settings to create a ‘physical sun and sky’ as I like the washed out effect it created.

Rendering:Once happy with everything with the scene and having checked the lighting, animation and render settings, I began a ‘batch render’ of my scene. Once all the frames had rendered I compiled the frames into a video file (at 24 fps) using ‘Fcheck’.