Thierry Guetta aka Mr Brainwash

I'm loving this art show currently showing over in LA by Thierry Guetta (Mr Brainwash)

 

 

 

Pixelation Experiment

I've been meaning to add this little project to my blog.

A few weeks ago a group of us were briefed to come up with an idea and immediately film it all within a couple of hours, this was the result, it was supposed to cut to a second scene but we ran out of time. All the same the combination of drawn animation and Callum's nutty pixelation technique produced something fun.

Since then I have just added a little soundtrack and looped it a few times just using it as an opportunity to experiment with some lighting effects in Final Cut pro.

Yeti Werp Invades Paris Exhibition

From thousands of entries world wide, Mr Yeti-Fraiser Werp was selected for the Yeti character wall. Somewhere on this wall of Yeti's at the Paris Gaite Lyrique Pictoplasma Exhibition you will find my Fraiser Werp Snow Yeti. 

can you spot him?

 

 

http://paris.pictoplasma.com/

PROBLEM SOLVED finally after 2 weeks of frustration!!!!!!!!

The got damn thing has been animated for the last 2 weeks and ready to set up the cameras and scenes but...

This problem has been driving me absolutely bonkers day after day for 2 weeks, wasting 2 weeks of time in which I could have finished this animation. I've searched blogs, asked advice, and clicked just about every conceivable tick box relating to lighting and textures receiving light that I could possibly find.

The issue occurred when I tried to light the inside of a cylinder, it's all fine with global illumination switched on with a sky object lighting the scene, UNTIL you want to add a light to create shadows, the result is a bunch of useless stripes along the inner surface of the cylinder. I can assure you I've tried every setting possible, setting up new documents and bringing in elements from scratch to eliminate the problem. There's always something that takes twice as long as you expect but this was ludicrous. 

I don't want pin stripe textures for the inside of a cup!!

I've solved it though. The torment is over! I thought  I had narrowed it down to the hyper-nurb setting on the cylinder as when I hit a screen render it looked fine...

No more idiot lines!!

 but then when rendering it out properly they were still there mystified I went round in circles a bit longer until I realised I needed to set the Subdivision Render settings higher as well as the Subdivision Editor setting for it to work. I boosted them both up to 4 and everything was looking sweet!

Increase the subdivisions if you don't want freaky lines!

I can't tell you how much relief I feel, I had visions of murdering santa as he popped down the chimney while I sat at my computer over xmas. I feel free to continue at last, and solve the next problem, (there's always a problem to solve) but this was a normal problem that you can solve in a half hour of tutorial searches.

The blob character needed to be lit independently of the surroundings as it is way too much in shadow, yet I didn't want to bleach out the floor texture and shadow it shed on the cylinder floor:

     

               Light bleaching out texture and shadows                            Spotlight excludes the cylinder object 

So I set up the spotlight to exclude the floor and shadows cast on that floor, this only worked if I applied it  to the Hyper-nurbs containing the cylinder!

My god it's starting to work, I just wish I was at this stage 2 weeks ago!

MTV Ident

A successful week with the progression our group MTV project briefed in last Friday. It's been a little tricky to plan things out from the beginning other than to get cutting out and animating asap so as to have enough time post production, but the way things have been panning out so far:

Monday

Mashed some ideas together and went with a crazy combination of cut-out/shadow puppetry style, frame by frame animation composited into live footage. Then we progressed with establishing the the look of the characters, which essentially Simon fell into the manic looking styling for us.

Simon's character scamps

Tuesday

Brought in materials to build our own MTV logo out of cardboard and sticky tape which I whacked together while Simon sketched out the characters (separate limbs of a cow, dog & crab) on black card for Linsey and Janey to cut out when they weren't looking for potential sound files.

 

cutting out the segmented characters from black card

 

creation of the MTV logo from card and insulation tape

In the afternoon we had a bit of fun producing a test animation on the light box with the crazy cow, using three of us to focus on and animate the front, middle or rear of the animal in a one second loop. This worked quite well due to the large amount of moving limbs to remember to move (in the right direction) each frame (bring on the crab).

The footage was then quickly dropped into After Effects and looped to produce a 10 second test/animatic to get an idea of the feel and pace and what we need to aim towards animating. It's helped a great deal and tomorrow should be easier to work out when we attempt the real things.

Things are also working out well because I am able to work on my Blob animation in the evening and the MTV animation during the day.

Wednesday

Today we produced quite a bit. Having established the timing for the cow version of the three idents, we set about animating the cutout/shadow style puppet character on the light box using Dragon to shoot the frames. We had an impressive work structure for animating each frame, to remember which way each of the many joints and parts were traveling Linsey animated the rear legs, Janey the udders and tail, me the head and front legs while Simon took the shots and gave us guidance from what was on the screen. This took a good part of the day, we then progressed to the second character, the small dog which was incredibly simple in comparison and only took two of us to animate (Janey & Linsey).

We're pretty happy we have everything we need and will be able to loop certain parts to create the finished animations. Tomorrow the crab character, then it is a case of cleaning things up and setting up the files in Cinema 4D placing on the film footage. (putting it simply). With most of the assets created this week it should be relatively simple to work on the production next week (although we have only until Wednesday!).

Thursday

Janey, Linsey and Simon all continued with the animation of the crab character, which took a couple of goes for us to get the walk cycle looking right, the legs looked best when they acted independently of each other in no noticeable pattern. I started work on creating a version of the MTV logo in Cinema 4D, so that it could be placed onto the characters later. This meant creating assets to use as textures on the sides of the three dimensional logo, I also embellished on the amount of paper/card textures originally used to build it using photoshop to layer up textures.

slightly funked up assets for the logo

By the end of the day we had all three character sequences completed and the logo assets done. 

Friday

This was the beginning of the technical stuff, Simon spent the morning cleaning up the rendered movie files from Dragon into After Effects, the file colour was inverted and the contrast boosted to bleed out most of the rubbish from the light box, the rest was masked out. The right hand crab legs were duplicated and placed on the left, only in a reversed sequence so the left legs pushed in the same way the right pulled, parts that were meant to be looped were duplicated and we ended up with 3 x 10 second sequences. 

I built up the 3D logo in Cinema 4D by importing an outline path of the logo from Illustrator and creating a spline with it in C4D from which the logo was extruded and bent around a little on the corners so it wasn't all perfectly neat looking. By setting selections of each face a texture could be applied to that specific section of the logo. It seemed to work quite well. We may simulate some tape fixing the logo to the animals at a later stage.

 MTV logo in C4D, made from 3 parts, M T V !!

logo tested in a similar environment to one of the intended Idents.

Over the weekend we hope to find a way to solve the issues we are having bringing the character animation footage into Cinema 4D and maybe a bump map for the logo. Then early next week we hope to have some environment footage to play with filmed by Simon's brother specially for us or we shall be sitting pretty and twiddling our thumbs!.

If I have time I might try to knock together some music over the weekend for it.

Even better render of scene 1

I lost the colours in the eyes for a while and it seem that it was due to lighting the scene with an image instead of actual lights, stick a light back in and it pulls the layers of colour back out of the eyes again. So I think I'm about ready to render scene one which I'll start tonight. There is so much global illumination and ambient occlusion in the shot that it takes about 12 minutes a frame so it will take a couple of nights rendering. I've had to forsake the depth of field in the camera as that would have simply taken for ever to render. Plus at the end of the day, this is supposed to be based on an old B-Movie so they wouldn't have had half the luxuries I've had.

Anyway looking forward to finishing this, I just need to know where we stand with the beginning of our group project tomorrow before I can plan out the next months work load, ideally I'd like to get the blob cracked by the end of the week but this week is more likely to be dedicated to the MTV Group project.

Composited Cricket

This simply needs sharing with the world, I'm not sure why a cricket has anything to do with it, but I found it during my MTV research and it does show an example of compositing a character into live footage.

The Fraiser Werp Storyboard

This is how my storyboard is looking for my main project this year, you may be a little confused about what's actually going on until the notes have been added, but it was presented and explained by myself last Monday with much success. 

It is all properly worked out though and I am happy that I know what needs to happen and where, the script is done, the story is set, and numerous ships in bottles keep appearing at my front door from ebay.

Le Blob Blog

Still progressing with my blob idea. I wanted to experiment with projecting a still image into a 3D environment and it seems to be going well so far.

I've basically I've been through these stages in the last week or so:

Taken a number of stills and movie footage of a coffee cup in the situation, I then broke this up into 4 parts, the cup, railing, foreground and background.

Added a few more buildings into the background and edited layers in photoshop so some of the background layers had the foreground elements removed to allow for perspective camera movement effects. Placed the main image into the background of C4D and recreated the scene using simple shapes.

Used Projectionman in C4D to lock off a camera looking at each element with psd file projected frontally of each bit. From this I was able to set up a short 2 second animated scene of the camera pulling backwards. The Blog will then be placed inside of the cup.

Finished off the tracking of the eyeballs to match the morphs of the blob stretching

Compete together a fake city from shots taken around Newcastle and Brisbane (beautiful combination).

Duplicated and created a file to use to light the scene in C4D by bringing this in as a sky object. I created a brighter area in one spot to project light from one direction.

Started to play with some colour in the background. I don't want the scene to look like a bit of news footage it needs to look dramatic with over exaggerated colours in the background that match the character, this has meant colouring some of the sky and buildings. I think it's getting somewhere near to where I want it to be. With global illumination switched on the character is lit by the sky and surrounding building create a great effect on the surface of the skin and eyes.

Basically looking good so far. Next I need to:

      A. Scene 2 - Set up the blob viewed inside the cup looking out and match the lighting effects

      B. Set up the blob in the cup I created at the beginning of this entry looking into the cup and match the lighting effects.

      C. Scene 3 - Match movie footage of the cup to all of the animation scenes.

      D. Create the sound

I'm going to struggle to give this a time plan because I'm about to get stuck into the MTV brief.

AD202 Non-Group Project

Got some catching up to do on my blog as there appears to be no current plan of attack. I've become out of sync with the rest of the guys on the course due to personal commitments leading to skipping class due to not being in Newcastle earlier last week. So I missed out on the group briefing.

What I am doing instead is using the opportunity to work on my Blob character within the course rather than creating additional work for myself out of the course, it means I get to apply a decent amount of attention to it.

I've drawn up storyboards for the narrative, yesterday I did a little recky around town and today filmed a little bit of footage with the aid of a bit of puppeteering from Tom and Sam.

The storyboards are looking like this:

MY YETI DESIGN TO APPEAR IN PARIS PICTOPLASMA EXHIBITION

I've just had great news from the Pictoplasma team. 

My Yeti design has been picked from over 5,000 entries to appear in an exhibition with a broad selection of other contemporary Yeti artwork from around the world at the Gaîté Lyrique, Paris. 

I entered my Fraiser Werp Yeti spin off design into the Pictoplasma call for Yeti designs last month. While experimenting with hair on my character it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. 

Needless to say I'm pretty chuffed about this, I'm used to my work appearing in shop windows and shelves but I haven't had anything in an exhibition since I won a competition aged 10 by painting a red mini splashing through a puddle. There's a whole new world awaiting....

The exhibition is on from 7th - 31st December 2011

http://paris.pictoplasma.com/

Le Blob

I feel I am getting somewhere with Le Blob character. His eyes are much better, much more stylised than the original realistic versions, (although creating them was a worthwhile experiment). The new eyes have black pupils that move back and forth into the eyeballs along a cut out tunnel which I am hoping will give a bizarre effect to the close up of the eyes at the beginning of the sequence.

 I've accidentally produced a strange background which I may have to reproduce properly I? Especially as Cinema 4D crashed while saving it.

Fraiser Werp Line Test

Today is a double whammy, I've re-vamped my blog with images and links a plenty to connect the viewers at home with my animations. Plus I have posted the first animation test run of the bounce cycle of my Fraiser Werp character below, which was handed in last Friday. Although it has to be said I've since added a little music and tweaked the colours a bit. It goes without saying it's not quite right, it sails through the air too swiftly, I think it should struggle to bounce a bit more like a sack of squishy potatoes than a space hopper but it moves, flaps, blinks and hops.

Obviously ignore the texture and colouring, they are kind or irrelevant at this stage.

PYTHAGASAURUS

I quite liked this little story, from what I can gather it's one of Aardmans creations:

Animal Eyes

There's some weird and amazing eyes out there, after creating my 'Blob' eyes and then the 'Fraiser Werp's' eyes I've come to appreciate the intricacy of the construction of eyes. Non with the piercing glare of a Fraiser Werp though.

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/animals-eyes-up-close

Pictoplasma Yeti Competition Entry

I've sent off an entry for the Yeti Comp. Seeing as how my Fraiser Werp has been decked out in winter combat apparel during its development it became logical that with the addition of a winter coat it could become a Yeti-like cousin of the same creature.

Who's to say Yetis need legs any way, all they do is roll around in the snow all day and then brush themselves down with a feather.

It took over 20 minutes to render this one frame!

I wonder if we get free tickets to Paris when we win?

AD208 Character Progression SMART TARGETS

This test render shows where things stand at the moment...

I've pretty much achieved this weeks targets, the character is effectively build.

SMART TARGETS FOR NEXT WEEK (WEEK 3)

In my overall plan for the whole project from the beginning next week was to be dedicated to rigging the character. Which shouldn't be a problem I just need to complete the feather and look at creating fur and whiskers (with some kind of control or dynamics)

          1 - Complete feather

          2 - Add fur to neck and face

          3 - Add whiskers to cheeks

          4 - Rig main body and eyeballs

          5 - Possibly rig whiskers and feather?

          6 - Set morphs on eyelids

          7 - Look into ways of maintaining body volume when 

               character bounces possibly using muscle dynamics

          Week 4 will focus on animating 2D styles and elements which will be aided by being 

          able to animate the 3D character and even use this to create the 2D animation.

          Week 5 will be dedicated to rendering and write up.

         

AD208 Character Progression - How it was done.

The aim for this week was to build a 3D model in C4D of my main character which I have essentially done.

 

The character was built from extruding a sphere upwards rather than using the symmetry technique used on last years 3D model. This simplicity of the character didn't warrant symmetry. The mesh was extended upwards over two smaller spheres which were used as a guide to build around the eyes.

The nostrils and mouth were then cut, modeled built built into the face, the mouth design was developed a little further enabling more expressive animation later on.

The arms were built by joining 2 spheres together, the spheres were the basis for the joints and these were then built upon at the bas and then united with the main body.

The 'ear holes' were simply squares deleted from the main body and extruded inwards, the outer of the squares were knifed to create and extra polygon boarder which helped to control the rim of the hole to a desired effect. Once HyperNurbs are applied they smooth out the holes into circles these have then been distorted individually to prevent the hole thing looking too uniform.

The tail was molded from half a sphere and then then attached to the body after removing an area of the mesh. 

The flipper was built and shaped from a flat plain which was duplicated and joined together, modeled to shape and then attached to the arm.

I had a little play with some lighting and rendering settings after applying a material (taken from C4D materials). It might seem like a waste of time but I find it easier visualise how the mesh is working if I can see how the skin reacts to light and texture.

Next it was time to create the eyes, I picked a mesh style on a sphere that would work best with the style of pupil I wanted so I could cut away a hole with as little distortion as possible.

   

The pupil was cut out and the hole was pulled into the eyeball slightly and a black disc was placed into the hole. This will enable me to animate the size of the pupil using morph tags later on.

I quite like these button-like eyes but have since added a sphere over the top with a transparent material applied to it to give the eyes a more glossy look. Remember I'm not using correct colour-ways at this time but it's useful to see how effects like reflections, etc effect them.

 

The screenshot above was take with the eyeballs plonked onto the top of the eye lids, which meant modeling the eyes properly. All I did was simplify the number of polygons on the lids and then open them up, re-shape them and add enough of a mesh to fold into the eye socked behind the eyeballs.

I encountered a slight problem when test rendering with global illumination and ambient occlusion, the eyes go black, logic lead me to finding a render setting to tick a tick box allowing it to process transparencies.

before                  (ignore the colour)                     after

Now for a real challenge which I haven't yet concluded properly. I draw a simple curved spline, select a circle plain and using a SweepNurb to create the stem of the feather after adjusting the size and shape of it within the controls.

The feather tag allows you to draw up the contoured shape of the feather and numerous controls allow the feather to be created in a variety of shapes from nice and neat to a real scraggy looking thing.

The results were fairly satisfactory but I wanted to explore another technique as I haven't yet worked out how the dynamics would be applied to both the feather spline and the shape of the feather core so that they would act like a feather when the arm is moved.

My other idea was to have no core for the feather and to Set Selection of a single point at the end of the arm, apply a hair tag and then apply a feather tag to the hair. This 'hair' instantly reacts like a 'hair' until you select the rigidity tick box and comb it to a curved shape. The feather is then built in a similar way as before.

  

The problem is, as you can see, I have some how ended up with a ghost feather (seen on the bottom right of the view port) I've somehow gained this by trying to use the set up of the old feather on the new one without having to set it all up again. The problem is when I delete it the other one deletes too! 

Something to keep me busy anyway.