Specialist Project

I guess it's been a while since I last posted so I think I better try and get everything up to date.

Second year played host to something known as the specialist project, an assignment where one must research a specific area of interest and create an outcome based on the research. However this year an extra category was bought forward, working to a customer's brief, and this brief was supplied by Red or Dead house of fashion ( http://www.redordead.com/ ). The brief was to create a bump style advert animation that could be used on one of their in-store TVs, our category was the shoes and it was to be based around the Grimm's' fairytale "The shoes that danced themselves to pieces" ( http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm133.html ). Now for those who don't know of this fairytale, its more recently been revamped as the 12 dancing princesses and the story varies a fair bit from the original Grimm's version, but it's similar enough.

After researching the branding by looking at the products, website and target audience, I had to try and split the story down into key, manageable chunks and relate this to the story. Once this was decided I broke down the essence of the look that was wanted, which I eventually went with the cut-out style and to assert the fairytale aspect I did this as a story book.

The animation pushed my limited knowledge of Nuke at the time and most of the project was pieced together in comp. It was also a challenge of acquiring assets such as the shoes footage and an array of images. One of the things I found most difficult with this animation was the switching of the footage of the dancing legs at the end to a stationary picture which would fold down to close the book. It took a lot of patience and timing down to a matter of frames.

I was fairly proud of it when I had finished, although I knew it had been slightly rushed towards the end and so things such as stabilising the footage and extra details I had planned weren't completed.

Character Design Project

In the second year one of the bigger projects that we have to do is the Character Design project. A hybrid of our previous life drawing classes and cinematography, was a pretty mammoth task. Now imaginative drawing is not my forte, I can draw, just not from out of nowhere, as this is was a visual assignment I'll just let you look, so here it all is.

Basic turnaround of my character Trixie. She is only supposed to be 15cm tall and lives as a part of children's imagination, so she only comes out to play when adults aren't around.

To reflect the audience she was aimed at I gave her some brightly coloured clothing that didn't have too much detail, as quite frankly small children are less concerned with the details and more about the storyline.

 

And here is some facial expressions, I felt most comfortable with giving her a manga style face as I have been drawing that style for a while. The tips of her hat were also supposed to be an extension of her attitude and are positioned as such to reflect her mood.

Just some random poses, I tried to make her look like a playful character, but I also wanted to give her a bit of an attitude, sort of like Tinkerbell but less angry.

 

And some various angled run cycles....

 

To accompany the various drawing we also had to produce a short storyline that would show off the character and any props they might have. So I decided to do a little story aimed again at children centred around one item. I thought this suited the target audience as again small children don't like to be distracted from unnecessary background information, in most cases they just want the action, so I chose a plain white much like the show Pocoyo.

So I was pretty satisfied with my outcome it wasn't the most stunning piece of work, but I worked hard on it and I think it showed. Hope you enjoyed this post

Rachel

GP - Watercolour Shading

The director of our animation had this vision of a watercolour style animation akin to the Twinings Tea "get back to yourself" advert. Which we all jumped on board with and the task of sorting this out was myself and another girl, Jen.





We did numerous tests together mainly on cubes, we tried adding a pencil drawn outline, blurring the edges, adding a bump map texture and adding a watercolour texture to the shader. Some had effects we kind of liked but none of them were completely right.











So in the end we both decided that we would work with a flat washed out shader as a background and then we would add lines over the top and in Nuke she would add various watercolour textures to different layers. Below is my first attempt at the kind of shader we wanted, this kind of pastel effect. However this was scrapped as we quickly realised this was based on the ambient and incandescence and wasn't affected by lighting and wouldn't work in our scenes.

So then I moved on to a simple ramp shader so that we could still get the whited out edges that gives watercolour images a particular look. Below is what Jen did in Nuke, we loved it however we quickly realised that the colours would impede too much on our animation and we had to find a way to do this without getting the colour leaking though.

 So after a lot of messing around we got to something that looked like this. The very basic colours, which would be lightened more, with toon lines, some animation to check it and the faint watercolour wash textures over the top.

Eventually we got it looking really nice with some edge degradation and at one point we were toying with the idea of lined paper background underneath.

 However unfortunately after all this time and effort the look was scrapped within about a week of our deadline, so we ended up with just my shader which looked a little lack lustre on its own, but I simply had no time to fix it which was a shame.

Rachel

The Group Project

On a BU animation course, there is a little thing called the second year group project. Now this doesn't sound too daunting to the uninformed but believe me, by the project deadline everyone is ready to pass out from exhaustion, explode from ridiculous amounts of takeaway and potentially have some form of murderous intent towards other group members, oh and did I forget to mention, that the cleaners also decide that they are too good to clean your labs so you are also likely to get some kind of lurgy from the bins not being emptied.

But I digress, this is the first time you are allowed to work in groups to produce a full animation, up til now its just been assignments for individual skill sets but now we are put together at almost random and made to divvy up the roles to produce a minute of something decent looking.

I got TD which was pretty cool, I ended up doing the lighting, the shading, a tiny bit of texturing, some set dressing and ALL the rendering. Seeing as I had quite a few jobs on this assignment I've decided I'm going to split it up into smaller chunks so it's less daunting.


Rachel

Robo Comp

Right now here we are starting to get into some of my 2nd year work, for this particular assignment we were given a bunch of plates in Nuke and told to make it look good. I have to admit I'm not great at compositing and did not do so well on this assignment, but I thought it looked alright.

So here is my final version of the attempt. Admittedly, I made a bit of an oopsy by making it seem more rusty than shiny :/ . This comp gave us a lot to deal with, there were alphas missing from some plates, grading on the robot, adding the glass bits on the back, rotopainting (a lot), adding sunlight and sun flare and edge blur. Our lecturer threw us in at the deep end. As I'm on the CVA course at BU and not the CAA, this was the only bit of taught Nuke that we did anything after this is all self taught or wildly stabbing in the dark and praying it looks alright. Let me know what you think and maybe at some point I'll add the nuke network on here so you can have a rough idea of what I did.

Rachel

Bit Arty

Ok so, I thought you should see that I'm not all about the 3D and the code, and that I can in fact draw. Here is some quick stuff from my life drawing classes in the first year of university, I did try to select drawings with less on show as I realise not everyone wants to be reading a blog and having to look at somebody else nude. The second is demonstrating something called 4 point perspective where you effectively have objects above and below your eye-line so they get distorted when you view them (basically you draw them in a diamond).

Below you can see some more stylised stuff using inks inthe first and copic markers in the second. Our model that day came in in a suit and carrying a massive gun, and wasn't questioned by a single security guard, so I feel safe.

And my last image is me playing at home with a mirror and a black copic pen. I was very bored. I don't think it turned out too badly though.

 Rachel

Sine Wave Maya Python Script

Ok so not sure that this is the most exciting thing in the world, but this is my first year scripting assignment. It was a basic python script that when in Maya created a GUI window which in turn would create a lot of spheres and then depending on what options you chose it would move up and down in a wave like pattern. You could make it gentle or choppy, and it worked on the basis of manipulating a sine wave.

So here is some code for those that are interested:
(there is some boring Maya GUI stuff missing and applying the shader to it)

#define procedure to move a named object up and down on a sine wave.
def moveparticle(speed,Name,depth):
      #for loop to establish values on the sine wave – hence 0,180   
      for y in range(0,180):
               #make j the radian equivalent of the current y degrees eg. 180 = pi (3.14)
                j = math.radians(y)
               #using the j radians calculate the sine of that multiplied by the speed to increase the 
                 frequency of the wave within the range 180 degrees, and assign to x
               x = math.sin(speed*j)
               #assign a keyframe to the object’s translate y values by value x and key it at the time value
                  y / 2 + the depth value to determine the delay so all the objects don’t move together
               cmds.setKeyframe(Name, at='translateY', v=x, t=((y/2)+depth))
               #select the current object
               cmds.select(Name)
               #set the current object selected pre and post infinity to cycle so the wave will continue
               cmds.setInfinity(pri='cycle', poi='cycle')



#define procedure to make and arrange the objects made
def makegrid(*args):
    # check to see it the GUI window has appeared otherwise do else statment
    if cmds.window("myWindow", exists=True):
               #if the GUI does exist then take the value of the width slider and assign to variable width
               width = cmds.intSlider("width", query=True, value=True)
               #take the value of the depth slider and assign to width
               depth = cmds.intSlider("depth", query=True, value=True)
               #take the value of the speed slider and assign to speed
               speed = cmds.intSlider("speed", query=True, value=True)
               #take the name from the string typed into the string text field and assign to Name
               Name = cmds.textField("Name", query=True, text=True)
     #else statement for when the GUI doesn’t exist
     else:
              #print out “Query failed” so that it is obvious when programming has broken
              print "Query failed"
              #start to create a grid using the width and depth values
              #for loop to create the x values between 0, width value
              for x in range(0,width):
                   #nested for loop to create the y values between 0, depth value
                   for y in range(0,depth):
                        #create a sphere named using the Name variable taken from the GUI and add the
                        current x and y values to achieve a suitable naming system in numerical order, radius 1
                        cmds.polySphere(n=Name+str(x)+str(y), r=1)
                        # use the setLevelMaterial procedure to assign a blue blinn material to the current 
                        object and name the material after the name of the object
                        setLevelMaterial(Name+str(x)+str(y),str(Name)+str(x)+str(y)+'material', 'blinn', (0,125.00,255.0))
                         #translate the current object by value x in the x axis and y in the z axis to form grid
                         cmds.xform(Name+str(x)+str(y), t=(x,0,y))
                         #use the moveparticle procedure to add appropriate key frames to the object
                         moveparticle(speed,Name+str(x)+str(y),(x+y))