the youtube link

just in case the movie here dosn't work, here is the youtube link.
But Youtube did something strange during encoding... It added a black bar on the right side but not on the left or on both of them. Really strange!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Qk1I2rFQY

scene 7 shot 01 - preview

I am not in the mood to write too much...

Nearly all scenes have benefited now from a 2nd animation pass where I animated the morph targets and custom attributes a bit. I am really happy to have spent very long in building the rig. Doing the animation is quite easy and fun but nevertheless it takes hours and hours - so my back and the eyes hurt a bit.

Layer

Good that I worked with layers right from the beginning on. Because now, while testing the character animation, I can hide with some clicks all the stuff other then tha main character and just do a quick rendering of it...

Haha... sometimes organisation really seems to pay off.
First I thought I am a kind of nerdy guy who just wants to be "cool" so he places all things on different layers, but now I see that my subconscious must have hade the feeling that it might become usefull - as it actually did ;-)

ohhh... the story

after a review of all scenes together (some without real animation but the right length) I have to admit that maybe nobody will get the point what the story is about.

Once again I seem to fail to translate the narrative Idea to the animation. Also I am not very happy with the timing of the whole stuff. I really tried hard and will keep going on but at the moment I am a bit down.

I am very curious how this is going to end. After all my approach was and still is a challenge to me and I should be happy about how much I allready did but somehow I wont become happy right now %-(

Maybe will Monday cheer my up a bit when I get some feedback...

P.S. The fish will not will - not this time!

my workspace during home animation

I felt like posting an picture of my workspace at home so everybody can imagine how it's going on. Normally I tend to get lost as soon as projects get more complex and I loose my track but NOT this time!

This time I am well organised. At the beginning of the project I felt a bit silly in spending this much effort in documentation and writing down a lot of stuff. But right now I am really happy I've done it because it helps me a lot...

June

Damn... Now it's already june. Time passes sooooooo quickly.

In one week I planned to hand in my short movie - that means on the 9th of june.
I can't say that I have done nothing but I definitifely can say that I need to do much more.
Sometimes I wish I am a kind of 20 japanese workoholic mangaka & animators but even with a slightly split personality I never managed to become more than one physical person.

Here's a nice Screenshot ;-)

BLA BLA BLA...ish... ahh my brain hurts like a bread filled with chillies!

BUUURRRPPHHHHH...AHHHHHH... yeah it's over.

THE BARRIER IN THE BRAIN

Ohhhh look! Nice, cool it moves like water...

Ok - maybe fast water but I wanted only to export 15f for testing reasons. I like the effect - it's booked for the film ;)

scene02/shot01 - update

It's a bit later and I am a bit more tired but also wiser...

Now I am nearly happy with the Background... I hope I dont need to pan around because the shot is built up in layers and is not a real 3d space but only textured spheres, some rough geometry in the background and some good geometry on the rock in the foreground ;-)

Sleepytime...

BUZZCAT - textured

Here is the cat...

I think I should add some more "features" to the texture to make the cat look more interesting as it is now.

At least the tail tip, the paws and the inner ear needs some more work from me... but NOT tomorrow!

I like the matt felty look of the violett skin right now. If it would be ultramarine blue I would say the cat is a new Ives Klein work - hahaha! But it needs to be violett as it is a colour representing somehow creativity to me...

... and then I spent some time playing around to achieve the transparent look I wanted. But yeah, it reaches to 90% what I had in my imagination - thats Ok, I can live with it.

Cats that sit in a glass houses shouldn't throw stones... but cats that are a kind of glass house... ähm ohm... what the hell do I know what they should do? I don't live in my brain!

I definitively can say, that I prefer Rigging to texturing. Texturing is stupid, boring and not very sadisfying...

SILLY BILLY - Textured

Ufffffhhhhh... its done!

Silly Billy has all the textures on it and I even got his eyes glowing as I wanted and without rendere intensiv attenuated lights in his eyballs but symply the 3dMax VideoPost function (thx Andy)

...oh, but I see right now that I forgot the lantern tip... bah... Tomorrow is unfortunately Background Day - so I don't work on the characters...

Environement - concept scetches

It's better to think first then to go directly in to 3dMax and start to model an environement...

As I get lost in very time consuming work while sitting in front of the Computer I thought it might really be better to take my beloved fineliners and scetch a bit around to save a lot of work and time afterwards.

The rough idea of how the setting should look was already in my head but the challenge was to translate it in to a quite small 3d environement that can be used for the shooting with the character models.

Backgrounds ;-)

Today I looked after a long time again at the script.

The character development and all the technical stuff that comes with it in 3dMax to make them work is finished, so I can design the backgrounds for the characters to act in.


Basically they are already a kind of designed. When I wrote the script I had some sceneries in front of my inner eye. But now is the time to get hold of them in a more realistic way what means I draw a bunch of pictures along the storyline, a kind of storyboard. I drew the hole day till now and only one scene is missing... so I'll draw it tomorrow because the quality of the images gets worse with every hour that passes and every pint more in my belly... hahaha... and I destroied one of my fineliners while drawing so I switched to a wet medium for the backgrounds just to find out that it is much faster and gives much more depth to the image... Gee! Just great...

I'll post some of the stuff (or maybe all of it?) when I am back in Weaverly Building and have a scanner ;-)

Assemblies

Assemblies are useful for creating combinations of geometry and light objects that act as lighting fixtures.

You use them to represent the housing of a lamp and its light source or sources. You can use assemblies to represent lighting fixtures such as simple desk lamps, lighting strips, track systems, wall sconces with fluorescent or incandescent lights, chandelier systems, line voltage cable systems, and so on.

When you create light assemblies, first you create your objects and build a hierarchy, then set joint parameters and assign inverse kinematics (IK) . As a final step, you assemble the object hierarchy. The lights you use in the assembly have light-multiplier and filter color controls. You wire the Dimmer and Filter Color parameters of the Luminaire helper object to the parameters of the light sources that are members of the light assembly.

In order to wire the Luminaire controls to the light parameters, you must first open the assembly. Then, after wiring, you close it.

tunnel scene - a test

I spent the whole day making tests for the pursiut of the two characters in the tunnel... but obviously too much motion blur... The textures are also not the final ones. I just took the texture from the synapses and copied it to the tunnel...

Synapses - a render time test

Modeling:
Very basic, bacause its a background item. So Its a hexagon extruded along a spline. The top polies are extruded and scaled manually to get the supper shape.

First I had some problems with smooting because its so low poly modelling. I tried the smooth modifier but somehow it didn't work for me so I found in the poly sub selection group of the object also the smoothing group panel and was able to assign them propperly.
But I found something even better! In the Subdivision Surface Panel in the top- or polyoutroll there is "Use NURMS Subdivision" I set the render iterations to "2" and left the display iterations at "0" for faster display.

To test if the nurms don't take to long to render (as turbosmooth would do) I just made 1000ish copies of the synapse modell, threw a middle complex texture on it (standart OrenNayarBlinn, with falloff to 40 and Index of refraction at 1.3 in the ext. Parameters rollout - all other numbers stay as they are...) and hit the render button.
And it took only 16sec!

HELP! Did I change to a NERD allready or is it normal to think about things like this?

UVW - pelt it off the fish

Here is the unwrapped fish.

As so often the fish was much easier. I should have started with him.

For the end of the lantern I used a circular projected map the rest is again all pelt mapped. It was somehow the easyest to do.

I tried to paint it in the computer room but lately the maschine I'm working on has the tendency to not work propperly after 2pm... I basically wasted nearly two hours by restarting and breaking down again - but hey - I finally finished that SODUKU (or how they are called) it the piece of newspaper that lies in the pile of paper next to my computer...

UVW - pelt it off the cat

After several atempts with unsatisfying results the UVW Unwrapping for the Buzzcat works.

I did most of the parts with the pelt function in the unwrap UVW Modifier, some pieces with planar mapping out of the same modifier.

The unwrapping now works because I changed the seams of the body and cutted it in to smaller pieces. This would of cours not work if the character had a more complex body texture with strippes or so... But for me it will work and time is going on.

SILLY BILLY - he swims!!

OK, it took a bit of time but the computer was so merciefull to render out my desired jpegs so I could gather them together in AfterEffects. I am quite happy...there are still some problems but you don't see them in this rendering in this movements ;-)

First I wanted to render it with a skylight, because it looks so nice but then I decided to add Omnis without shadows and a Arealight with a 4096 shadowmap to make the shadow on the floor. It looks still petty good... and is fast (8sec per frame)

stupid Computers

Why do they crash when I want to render?
Is it allready to warm for them or do they not like my animation tests?

I don't know...

But if all goes as I want it to(HAHAHA... stopp dreaming, join reality! This will never happen) then I can upload a animated swimming Silly Billy on Youtube this evening. Of course I'm gonna create a link from here to the youtube Video.

It renders now... so I am just bored and to lazy to get up, thats why I write this post. It must be at least 30C in WAV105... but no sun to tain!

CUSTOM ATTRIBUTES - Morph Targets

The biggest discovery today was connected to custom Attributes. They are really custom...
Just for fun I tried to wire a morph target to a slider in the Attribute Holder of a controller and to my big suprise it worked!

I was jumping around in pleasure - imagine the clicks you save by this!

The skin stays frozen all the time because access to the morpher is no longer required as all his targets are now wired to custom attributes in p.e. the master body controller.

Happy happy fröi fröi :-)))))))