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

THE FINAL MOVIE and blablabla...

Ok, it's done finaly I uploaded the movie here and on youtube (oh, I forgott to upload it to aniboom)!! I hope some people will see it and comment on it.

I have mixed feelings about the movie. One one side it was the first movie project in 3dsMax, so I am already quite happy that there are some textures and it moves but on the other side was my script so much deeper and involved so much more that could have helped to understand what's going on.
I am quite ashame that I had to cut out nearly all of the live footage Jon and me shot in my flat, but the movie would have been far to long with it.
But I am still happy we did the shooting because it was fun and an also a piece of the project. It involved storyboarding, planning and getting the equipment, building up the set with the lights and the props and finaly the shooting.

Nevertheless I am somehow happy with what I achieved. At least it has a quality high enough that I don't have to be afraid to add it to my portfolio and to show it to people I wan't to work with.

...after all I had a great time here in Nottingham. I learnd a lot about me, some other people and got alot of inspiration through the teachers. Maybe not so much through the actuall teaching but through little discussions, some hints and recommedations for books and artists I could possibly look at. (Great thanks for showing me Edward Gorey and Jhonen Vasquez!!! They will definitifly stay in my life for longer and influence my style)

The library was always a great inspiration... My Nottingham life is very easy to describe. If I wasn't working at my Laptop on the project I was in WAV 105 working on the project. If I wasn't working on my project at all I was possibly in a lecture or a tutorial learning stuff usefull for the project so I tried the learned to apply to my works. But sometimes I was just straying around in the arts department of the library to do myself a favour and have glimpses to this or that book. (I also found three or four I took home and read) And there where also times I bought a lot of booze and switched my brain off for one or two days while laying half naked (its only the half of the truth ;-) ) in front on my laptop and watch tons of cartoons.
Hm...maybe I shouldn't write this in my final feedback paper for both of the universities... I will see... HAHAHA

Tomorrow

Finally I am at the stage were I can say: "OK, tomorrow on the same time the movie will be uploaded somewhere and a link will be here in the Blog".

Its still not perfect but (nearly) the best I could do in the time given ;-)

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!

AMAZING!

Something really amazing happened few minutes ago in 3dMax.

I needed a smaller version of Silly Billy and thought about scaling the mesh, Bones, controllers and all this stuff knowing it wouldn't work - but why not try at least...

And the wonder happened! It all works normaly and perfect - even the morphtargets and the textures are OK... WOW... I must have built a really good rig ;-)

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 ;-)

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)

SILLY BILLY - ENVELOPES

The Rig for the fish was surpisingly easy to do compared with the cat. No legs,no shoulder, no other funny stuff just a head with some fins and tailish things.

It took only a day for all the bones, IKs, helper objects control shapes and the parameter wiring - hahahappy!

OK, it needs still some work on the envelopes but hey I am not a wizzard or something like this and I need to sleep, to eat and sometimes my body should move its muscles to not loose all abilities of movement.
But sooner or later I will create my own 3d body in 3dMax or Maya - the GOD edition of course - then I'll load my mind in to the new body and done. HAHAHA - I already mentioned that I gradually develop a nice little lunacy - Oh I like it very much!!! The world is great yeahhh! Screeny screeny boom boom ;-)