Character Demoreel 2012

This demoreel focuses only on design, modeling and texturing sides of character pipeline. Animation specific reel will come later.

The Making of Animated Short IVAN THE BIRD

Another book (revisited, expanded and updated) in my modest collection of Making ofs. No surprise, its on the Making of animated short Ivan the Bird :] With this post I believe to be putting dot to this project, at least for  next year as I will be working on other exciting projects like transcription of Cherokee legend about two wolfs within for minor and (hopefully) on Aistien culture inspired character designs for my major project.

The Making of Animated Short IVAN the BIRD

Ivan the Bird selection of Production Stills

Presenting Ivan the Bird by J.J. *Jolanta Jasiulionyte*

It's finished. And I don't have words in my pocket to describe the joy for having done it or the gratitude for all the help...

Moving forward.

 I think now I  know quite few ways how to trick stubborn computer into rendering. Easy solutions for silly problems. So it seems  I've reached act 3. Lighting design and render set up for those scenes and what left will be compositing. Itchy! :]

Rendering in (slow) Progress

 

Mid point of the  week I was over with animating and synching up the environments and thought,  now it's JUST to render... 3 days and it  barely gave me anything. Nothing would render. I can't describe how frustrating it feels to be a step away of finishing and then, for some out of air reasons , not be able to. But , really, I believe  Alan helped with solving problems and after these few avaricious days it will  only be better... Also and what I found uplifting were to see the  render stills. They kind of motivate to keep on going and soon, taking the time needed, I'll be happy to have done it. Gladly for a radical change straight off computer screen I went and was a part of acrobats, permormers and musicians team in FUSE festival and just let it all go :] Fingers crossed, next week it will be a whole another story on the making of Ivan the Bird.

Combined Setting and Base set up for Lighting

The sets now are all brought together and are sinking up. I've painted few more texture/transparency maps to make sure all is sticking ( example the far away water edge flows nicely into the sky or the tops of the mountains merge with atmosphere ect.)

Also Alan helped a lot with understanding the lighting set up, how to think about it. To my joy, it looks like its gonna be pretty much hands on when I will actually play with light types and it won't all disappear under heavy tables of maya generated lighting.

Closing Shots in the Island

SO that's it :] I'm done with animating Ivan for this animation. It already feels like I'm finished, because it was such a... loong loong thing this animating.Now lighting , rendering and composing the entire thing .





I had to rebuild Ivan's joyous flight , because it is supposed to be one of the most beautiful sequences. I hope now it is working better. There are also very short sequences ( for example CU of feets running through the air) which are not included in this video, but would be helping for better editting and jump cuts




ant this is pretty much all what would be happening in the Island. 5 more seconds left and thats done! :]

Dream Island's Lighting

Lighting tests. Firstly we see island in daylight but from far away, while the Ivan is exploring surroundings and himself.

 

By the time he flys and reaches the island it is a dark night and the island would be  lit only by lantern light. So far it seems that when the island is in a close up of a camera, it is better to have a setting covered gently by  darkness as then it keeps the mistery and softness of the place. However, when it will be about  a particular shot, I'll put in few more and dim lights to bring some of the detail back.

The Big Flight, Lifting in the Air and the Flick

Ivan for the first time lifts in the air and realizes where all of it is heading : he is about to reach his dream island. However, one last chalange awaits. He, not yet knowing how to use his new ability, is easily torn by the wind. Turns in story and cutting in the video is, again, a match for changes in the soundtrack ( which premiere refused to render in for 4 times :/ )




I swear, this easy and happy looking animated 10 seconds were the hardest I've ever done... still requires cleaning and tweaking... but I believe now at least it is hitting the notes and going the right direction.




the Flick

Dream Island Execution

Rainy Sunday asked for some serious painting. So I've coloured in the island. The image shows how a combination of matte paining and 3d set work together. Also, and this is the approach I've taken from work placement, this is a single test lambert shader (with transparency and normal maps)to see how colour pass does its work before going any further.

I've referenced festivals and carnivals,  as places for where you experience total joy and excitement,  for this environment. Together with deep rich purple and violet colour pallete I'm wishing to create a rich, dreamy and fluid, most painterly environment out of the three  , where all the elements seem to flow into each other. The challenge is not to make it a pile of stuff . But there is something in the toolkit still waiting , which should be handy for that.  That is  varied shaders, lighting set up, motion (ncloth simulations and animation cycles for props). 

And a CU test:

Animating Ivan

Soon after realizing he is not a ship and could never swim to the island, he discovers what he actually is - a bird-lantern. instead of swimming, he starts lifting up. Cutting pace is , again, suggested by music.





I'll use this single post to upload all the animations for my latest animated short - Ivan the Bird.
I'm moving into the third act and this is the point in the story where  Ivan  sinks instead of floating to the Island. After understanding that he grows into sadness. The very last shots move to the point of discovery , that he is in fact a sky-lantern:

Ivan the Bird, Continuing:

Before my work placement starts in past two weeks I continued on working on the animation. Dream Island is taking shape and colour. A lot is still left to be done: detailed texturing and lighting also some rethinking of the environment, mainly to make it suite the very last shots of animation. But I’m not concerned with that yet as I’d do polishing to the camera views.

test/base texturing:

The island works when seen from a distance. With refined texturing , added animation (windmills, cloth simulations) and lighting I think it would do its job

As for animating. I’ve pushed it for 20 more seconds .  The reached bit was the first culmination in the story, when Ivan supposedly is about to reach the Island. The pace of editing asks for many shots so… those 30 seconds have 16 camera views. Thinks tend to be quite confusing with cameras in postproduction as each has its own ‘name’  and two separate render layers to be stitched (AO and Master layers) together

I guess now I'll have a two weeks break from the project as I'm going to Picassopictures to do work placement. But who nows, I was  thinking to take  files with me and if at times it seemed not too busy I could work on this :] 

Transcription Crit: Project's Work; Entry 1

As it was said on the crit, The animation isn't finisedas a product. However, arguably, what has been achieved in ten weeks frame is pretty satisfying.
Like the bird himself, the 'mish-mash' of the story is presented in the following video:

The Making Of:

Here I present the first part of Making of, a visual document of the pipeline of Transcription Porject.
When The animation is finished, the document will include all the character design behind and the rest of project's development after the deadline.


The Making of Ivan the Bird Part 1

Technical Paper on Mechanical Bird's Rig

I wrote on the most challenging technical part of transcription project, Mechanical Bird's rig.
The paper covers methods and solutions for rigging. it is also very illustrated as , no secret, rigging with its terminology quit easily and quickly seems to be over too complicated.


Technical paper Mechanical Brds rig

Demoreel element

Finally the video is gathered. It was also a good practice of animating using motion path as in the following weeks I'll be dealing mostly with that kind of animation. It takes longer to animate, as now all body parts are fluid in the air and free to move. But it is much more experimental as it doesn't have to follow sometimes mathematical preciseness a walk cycles ask in order to be tidy and symmetrical.

But back to the demoreel element. The music used was played in Tivan's Sky lantern festival.

Hope you'll enjoy it:

Some Wrap Up Stuff

Its now getting to the  wraping up stage in transcription project so I decided to work on the brief's aspects before the deadline is too close. This post is most dedicated to self and project  promotion.


Demoreel element:

One of the brief's task was to create a showreel element using   the elements of the project. I chose to take the main character  and present it as an animated turnaround.  These are some stills from the soon to be resolved showreel element:

Environment definition:

Also, as I said last week, I saw it neccesary to spend some time on details of the outside scene as before it looked dull even if all the major elements were brought in.
So I thought of bringing in these elements:

 

And so far it seems they really gave that much more to the scene. It is lot livelier to my mind. And, as I did in the first act, the scene will be pushed even further but this time only to specific scene requirements so to compliment the composition of the shot.  

Personal Branding:

Next in line,  is personal branding. I was working on logo designs  from time to time. there were quite some cheesy ideas...  here are some  attempts of past few weeks.

this is one of the cheesy ones I've mentioned... 

Then I came up with an idea to make an elephant from my initials. Well, if you asked me why elephant, I would say only, that they are my favourite animal from , as long as I remember myself and they are said to bring luck as well  :]

However, for some reason the logo didn't feel as personal.. I think it  fails to serve as my initial. 

I gave it another go. Basically the following  example has both of the previous initial design ideas as well as some flavour from the past ones I had. So it actually is a graphical development of my signatures yet still fresh. I felt this is perhaps the strongest ( or closest to me) personal logo.

 

And the business cards, brief asks to produce, would look like that:

Front side:

 

Back side:

 

After 'excercising' with brand logos, and catching the right rithm for  designing, I've also worked on title design which will be used for animation opening sequence also throughout other promotional materials. It did take quite some time in the day as the entire design is one big work on details ( what as some would agree, takes the longest in any work). But as I said it is a rewarding work, as it will be used extenisvely.

So the good rithm stayed and I went on designing the dvd cover and disc templates. I used the idea of demoreel presentation, as it really apealed to me.I like the 'clean' creamy/dreamy aesthetics  in this one, as well as title fits in perfectly. Hopefully it feels a bit like a story-book cover as my entire project's idea was to make a story-bookish world , characters ect.

 

However the templates still need few  renders from act 2 and 3. Also an 'epic' descriptive text.

After finishing work on these designs the feel was perfectly summary and the mood great :]
Hope that's goint to help in the last week ( lets be honest, 3 days actually) before deadline. 

In the mean time soundtrack designs for act ,  demoreel video, maya tutorials,  some animation refining  is still waiting to be finished for Thursday. this week best be the lucky one :D

Ivan the Bird: Progress, Week 8

It's been a while since the last update on the project. But here it is.


Recently I worked on second environment, the outside of the house. It's taking reasinably longer to build as the space is many times larger than the workshop set's as well as include a variety of elements to consider.

Such as, to start with, the rendering of water and shoreline. I'm working on ocean shader and for the shore line, using dynamics to create foam.
These (VERY) developmental  images show what I have so far.

Other than that, the house has pretty much reached its final looks. It serves as a background detail for the most of the time.

Also, the field is now textured as intended in the concept. Also, Instrad of using bump maps, I used Normal maps, as the camera angle never reaches the point to reveal 'fake' bumps.

What still is not yet resolved is tree texturing.

Other than that this environment is in the stage of refining, but  to stay honest.. it doesn't yet have the right feeling even if all the elements are brought together (apart from lighting)  in the place. The idea   somehow hasn't translated yet  into 3D as I imagined  it.

So that was the set building of the project.

The other part is the acting. 

This is right after when Ivan encounters the Island and after a thorough look notices the house in the tree. Immediatly he is overwhelmed by desire to reach it. The ending of the clip suggests he realizes his ship-qualits.

But to keep on pushing the second act forward, I had to get back to rigging stage, where , quickly enough, system was created to help control Ivan's flight sequences. Motion path with additional groups for translation and rotation control is aded.
Here is the initial test of the motion path system ( no inentions of properly animating it there). I also aded aditional controls to the rig.



I used it to acquaint with the changed way of animating and see how the fall of from motion path would work.

To continue on, one another field of this project was lighting and rendering set up. ( this is where I failed to guess how long it would take to finish, where originaly I gave 3-5 hours it took me a week) .

Here is an example of lighting set up in one of the scenes from act 1

The lights have separate linking and affect only specific parts of either the scene or character. They are also animated to follow or change intensity according to storyline. Every scene has approximately 6-11 lights.

Here is an example of lighting adjustment int he scene:

At the beginning the general set lighting never seems to suit the specific scene. I first solve volumes of lightness then go and adjust how it falls, and causes shadows ( particularly concerning character).

And so, after quite some of adjusting and problem solving I have a scene which (supposedly) is fully resolved and should go to final sequence.

The Bird is waking up:



At the moment I'm dealing other scenes of act one in the same way, to get them rendered and ready for postproduction. Also I work on second act's flight sequences and set building. Oh and show reel element, I have an idea for that.

Project progress: Lighting and Animating

Today the time was spent to get the lighting working when character was finally set in to the scene.

Each bit of  scene ( in total 7 for act 1) is lighten separately.

For example in this scene  four more lights support the character to create a volumetric lighting. Key light,  few section boost lights and rim light shape the bird in this image. I think more work is needed still. For example light wings. Also it is clear now, the background is to empty .

This scene I'm pretty happy with. Though it looks like it still needs some tweaking on shadows.

In this scene I used rim  and Rembrandt short lights (light which is 45 degree to the character) to separate  the character from the background .

All the images have render layers combined. So this perhaps would be the end result of animation looks.

And here is the portion of animation. The Bird after encountering the enchanting Island rushes towards it and gazes at it in chill amazement.

As usually after seeing a sequence of animation I go back and do some curve cleaning, but essentially it is the same what's in the video.