The eagle and some major changes to its design

After doing a lot to the snake design it was time i started to pick up on the eagle.  Alot of work has been based on its structure for animation and re-doing a lot of pieces such as the talons, tail and the wings and even the beak so as it can be easier to manipulate in the future. I have found that it has been a challnge but with a lot of percerverence i think i have prevailed in improving its design.

First off you may notice that the legs are actually seperated now. I deleted the old legs and mostly extruded shapes from the original shape of the eagle and then moulded them into shape so that they will be easier to animated and not cause any mesh stretching. The actual shape of the eagles head has been tweaked and you can also notice that i have given it eyes. The actual sockets of the eyes have been moulded around the spheres to give it a much more realistic shape. This is because all eyes are spherical. There is no such thing as an oval in the design of a biological creature on this planet. Unless you want to break down into sphecifics but lets move on.

Here is when the wings feathers had to be extruded. I used the old sign of the wings and squashed them down and then started extruding the appropriate faces. But then i found out i had to extrude them all seperately because the edges are joined when the faces are extruded all at once.

Here with the wings it has taken a fantastic shape and im really happy with how it looks so far. The actual; bone is also still intact ready for rigging to animate. Although i have been tempted to possibly use a sine deformer like on the snake but on the bridge of the bird structure shoulder to shoulder. The feather would also need to have ncloth properties and wind resistance to give it an organic look.

Here is a shot without showing the vertices. Im very happy with its outcome.

As you can see i have also done it with the tail as well. So a lot has changed in the design of the bird. With this tail design i should be able to rig the tail and move it easily whilst also hopefully applying an ncloth script.

Next im probably going to work on the face more and then start texturing before the animation. But i’ll also take a look at how to right a script for the feathers.

The first snake draft scene

Well after a lot of working in the dark ive finally managed to create a nice movie to show of the snake. The snake has been fully textured using UV mapping and it has also been animated using sine deformers. The fire was also created by myself and then composited into after effects. I even constructed the surreal looking embers to give it a spiritual feeling. The fire was also multiplied and then manipulated so that it would be a lot more prominent and have different shades of colour so to make it more fluent. I am actually really happy with this current outcome. Any queries or constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.

I am planning to give it glowing eyes as i personally think that its eyes dont look prominent enough but hopefully it should work using some motion tracking. Athough recently i have had trouble motion tracking it because its got some motion blur which means the pixels go quite crazy when the  snake moves violently which means the trackers cant figure out whats going on. So i may have re-render the composition without motion blur, motion track it, apply the eyes. And then re-use the motion blur snake under the motion track. Thats my theory at least so i’ll give it a shot. Hope you enjoy.

There and back again

Well i must say i have a great time at download festival the attractions were fantastic and i met some great people on my travels in whch i have taken inspiration from some of the tipis i saw in the R.I.P camps. This has brought me the idea of thinking about maybe projecting a tipi design to come up on the set when scenes of the tribe come up in the story. I think it would be a fantastic venture into some compositing for me and to show some nice pattern work and looking into atmospheric change.

To get back to more technical things Elliott has been following Phil up all week on what to do about the technology. Elliott has made an arangmenet to meet him on wednesday to discuss terms with insurance and such. The delay has been caused by the fashion show who appeared to of booked out all of the projectors unfortunately. But seeing as there isnt a fashion show in the summer (that i have heard of) i dont see why we cant use simply 1 projector so there shouldnt be a problem once the shows are over.

At the moment i am going to be carrying on with the eagle, i shall upload a few screenshots later on to show how far i have got. My apologies for not updating the blog for a while. I sometimes get carryed away with work and dont update the blog.

Off for a while

Well this week i am off to download fest to marvel at the delights of the markets and the great music. It doesnt mean i wont be taking inspiration for the white eagle project though. I have heard they sometimes have native american style campsites with people who like to share their culture. So i am planning to find some and have a good chat and what they like about the Native american culture and their symbolism. Its going to be great fun and ive been looking forward to this all year. If i need to be contacted i will have my phone on me at most times. (Hoping my signal will be strong there.)

Then when im back its straight onto running some projecting tests.

Animated snake

The snake itself has now been animated using both sine deformers and rigging. Although on the movie i am about to show you the irigging isnt used yet. This was mostly an experiement using sine deformers as the main basis of animation. And i think it has been a very successful experiment. I disocovered sine deformers after looking for alterior methods in animation rather than rigging.

Sine deformers are evolving expressions which have different properties depending on what kind of animation you want to do. The beauty of sine deformers is that they have thousands upon thousands of animation expressions moving all at once. Which means you can have a very realistic and fluid animation without the major effort of creating complex and unnessecary rigging. The other beauty of using sine deformers is that you can combine them with other expressions so you dont feel as limited as you thought you would within a single expression. Different paths can be created if keyframed at different points. And another another beauty! Is that you can still keep rigging within the sine deformer! so any strange tweaks you’d like done in between can be placed at any point of the keyframe timeline. Anyways here is a rough movie on what i am imagining the snake to do on the projection for the play.

Feelin Hot Hot Hot!

Well considering i havent updated in a while i have decided to show you what i have been up to lately. I have basically been renderin fire for the snake scene. As i have managed to animate the snake which i will cover in a another blog pst i had the initial idea of it rising from the flames.

So with the particles i have managed to use the 3d fluid system within maya to create flames. It was extremely challenging because it is very difficult to calculate what you are doing at points because of its bad rendered real time playback. For example, if i wanted to skip to frame 120. The particle system would mess up, because it doesnt have enough time to make the nessecary calculations of the particles properties, thus making a what i like to call “false render.”

So what i did was create a fluid emitter box. This box controls the properties of particles that are being emmited inside. You then place an object shape inside and give it emitting properties so that it can emit particles into this fluid box. Now the fluid box can be used for many things such as water of gas but this time it was to create fire. Alot of technical tweaking and physics had to be addressed because the particles need to be told what to do. Otherwise they simply float and do nothing. So many attributes have to be taken into consideration. Such as bouyuncy, viscosity, air, Tempereture, fuel etc.

Other factors such as resoltution have to be taken into account. The resolution and the quality of the fire needs to be properly optimized before things can go into renhdering otherwise it will take hours. I managed to put the render settings on production quality with a resolution of the camera at about 1024 by 576. But tjhe resolution of the actual particles were 20 by 20 by 20. So imagine thousands of particles rendering at that resolution all at the same time and then smoothed out with production quality anti aliasing. Thats madness!

So here are the videos ready to show to you. The first one shows the emitter and how it works and the second videos is a rough draft of how i would composite the flames. The second video took 8 hours to render 10 seconds of footage!

Tongues and teeth

Heres an update on constructing the mouth in Maya. I started with sealing off the mouth from the rest of the body. The lighting in the scenes when animated will just not focus on that area anyway. The mouth was sealed by extruding the edges constantly until i could get them as far in as the neck.

This was the basic construct of the tongue of the snake. Very primitive.

Here you can see me shaping the tongue to take a more organic shape.

Here you can see that i have attached the tongue and also started extruding some fangs. I liked the way they turned out. I nearly modelled them seperately until Elliott nudged me in the right direction. (i keep forgetting about the extrude tool.)

Here is the mouth with finished teeth and some jaw tweaking.

Im not sure whether to do eyes at this point because i was thinking of compositing an effect on them. We shall see. On to rigging!

A partner in crime

Well today i teamed up with Elliott trent on my work experience and i think its a good decision. Weve already been thinking about raising the bar with the maya models and i think that we will make a fantastic team. Already today Elliott taught me how to texture map and how to sperate the jaw for my base models. As you can see from the images the snake is really starting to show expression.

This was deleting the faces off the main polygonal structure. I had to use the poly cut tool and then highlight each of the unwanted polygon faces to delete them and create a mouth opening. You can also see that i have tidied up the eyes as well. Elliott gave some advice on cleaning up useless polygons.

This is when i extruded the lips inwards to create some 3d space in between the openings. This was done by highlighting the edges and using the extrude tool.

Here is the jaw opened so i can start modelling the inside. You can see that it looks a lot more expressionistic and also that it has some great potential for the screen idea when the snake comes flying towards the audience. The jaw is still too long but i can soon sort that.

Here is the jaw when it has been shortened. I’m loving the way it looks so far and i think the snake has definately come a long way. The jaw will hopefully be rigged to move and also i shall start modelling the tongue soon.

Me and Elliott thought about an idea involving the scene where the Native americans are spearing fish. And that there could be some nice fish imagery happening. As the actor plunges down the spear, on the projector should appear the spear and all the fish scattering. I think it’d be a brilliant idea so Elliott has got to work on moddelling some fish. I’ve had some ideas about the floral effects for some scenes and they could be composited on after effects because of its superior motion graphics capabilities. Being teamed up has made us unstoppable.

Year Evaluation

At the start of the year I was optimistic and I am glad to say that I still am. Throughout the whole year I feel I have been challenged from many different angles helping me become a much more committed yet vibrant person in the world of media.

At the start we looked into using the program that was most famously used by Pixar, called Maya. It was a challenging project because it involved all aspects of modelling, sound and animating through a program that I was not familiar with. But I pressed on enthusiastically and always renewing an idea. The project was to model your own head or any other head and animate it. I went towards more of a facial expression in the end and animating the head to have a bump mapped stone texture. It was simply a brain child I conjured up one night after a lot of coffee to show a stone head getting angry and making a planet explode. So I started to model a simple face model and used twean blend shapes in Maya to animate it. Then I used 3d bump mapping and after effects to texture it and blend it into a wall. This project helped me bring software together and realise that I was never limited to one piece of equipment. I even used adobe audition which I already had experience in to manipulate and record sound. So it was a versatile project and I enjoyed it a lot. I could of improved on my time management, I found that some aspects were rushed and I should’ve paid attention to the much finer details at points. But I think it was overall successful because I managed to actually create a fully made animation rather than just a template of what “could’ve been.”

On the viral video project I think I developed some great team skills and learnt a lot in terms of sound. The project was to create an advert for Current TV to advertise an up and coming game for the PS3 called “Resistance”. Apparently current TV had some bad videos already made and wanted some university attention, a lot of the competing videos were just game play footage with soundtracks slapped on top, so we wanted to take a more figurative approach. I worked with members in my class Nicholas Reardon, Phil Andrews and Stephanie Wilson. I got to play around with adobe audition and create some weird effects with a guitar. I also managed to use sound equipment such as the boom Mc and portable hard drives to capture the sounds of the scene and mix them up using sound remixing. The whole team worked fantastically in picking themselves up after the camera disaster we had when the whole footage corrupted after we shot at a steel foundry in which was basically a one time opportunity. It nearly killed the whole project but we managed to pick ourselves up again.  We managed to use one of the photography studios for the shoot but it was the best compromise that we had. Although it wasn’t as spectacular as the steel foundry that we had hired, the tight shots and intense lighting made some great changes to the whole situation. I think I could of improved on some certain areas such as maybe gathering more sound samples for the whole music composition. Although it passed well with the other members of the group it didn’t’t in my books and I felt like I hadn’t done a decent job, even though I created about 30 different samples for the music. But in terms of teamwork I think I enjoyed the whole project.

The flash project I thought was a very successful project for me, because I managed to create an animation in a different program than Flash which was after effects. This is the project which got me into visual compositing and motion graphics so I guess you can say this is when I started to really find some interest in a piece of software. I wanted to create an animation to represent the statement “I can see the music.”
I thought it was a daring approach but I decided to take it, I managed to take a look around on the internet and managed to find some people using particle systems to create some nice motion graphics. So I started getting into key framing particles to move with wavelengths of music such as Bass and treble. I found this to be one of the most interesting projects which I thought could have been taken further into real time rendering for music shows and live gigs. I thought it was great because it helped me pick up a guitar and start doing something I love and finding out more in what I am very passionate about which is sound. It also gave me the confidence to work with a very powerful piece of software instead of using flash. I could of improved on maybe using some form of flash for the project and maybe taking some of the graphical elements to the next level and making their representations a lot more obvious to the human eye.

The next term was an optimistic one indeed, as we got together on the “Reunion” project. The reunion project was one of the most stressful projects of all because of having to depend on other peoples attendance. I think I did a good job because I kept enthusiastic in a lot of areas within the project. I enjoyed being director for my own episode because it gave me some organisation skills and helped me keep my composure under pressure. At some points like the exterior shots which went wrong because of the lighting I thought I had done some major things wrong like planning and such, but I wanted to keep things going and I managed to keep my enthusiasm up and working through the whole interior shoot. I think that was a real lesson in confidence and stress. It also gave me some great communication skills with actors and working with a large group on set. It also helped me understand the whole production process of films and how preparation and organisation is the key to creating a video piece. The post production was also a fun thing to work with, which was colour correction and such, it taught me how to keep a keen eye on all the shots that were shot.  What I could of improved on as a director was to have more cut away shots so that editors could have a lot more to play around with. I also dabbled in some more sound producing for my episode which included creating ambient sounds to create a very awkward and tense atmosphere. I was quite happy with my final outcome on the piece, I think it could have been a lot better though if everyone pulled their weight. But arguably all these people cant all be passionate about a singular idea. But then to counter argue that, its how the media industry works. Besides, it was a learning experience.

The last project was the post production project. This was one of my favourites because it really pushed me in the direction I want to go in which is special effects compositing. I feel that I had a good tutor who helped me gain the confidence to use after effects effectively and confidently. The whole project was to take something mundane and make it amplified using visual effects in which I was extremely excited to do. At first I thought about something mundane like sound waves travelling through space or waking up in the morning. So I still have many other pieces from this project. But I started to move into green screening for a while which was a great experience for learning techniques such as sky displacement. But then I went on to the whole fuelled by caffeine idea. This idea is something which was inspired to show the mechanics of how my mind worked after drinking a coffee. I managed to design all the Foley art, all the compositing, music composing, create a unique idea and use colour correction all within a composited animation including real time footage. My best completed work yet. I had no quarrels with myself on this one.

In conclusion I think the year has been a very vibrant and pleasant experience. It has taught me many skills and has shaped me to be a different person. I think I have produced a nice vibrant portfolio of work throughout the year and I have decided on a direction into special effects. At the start of the course I wasn’t sure what I really wanted until now. And luckily I have excelled myself with the help of digital media production and shown myself what direction I would like to go. I didn’t think I would be able to achieve this much and know so much at the end of one year but I have. And this has only intensified my passion for media.

Some modelling of a snake

well i got back on the computer chair and set off with some 3d building of a rattle snake. My initial idea is to animate the snake into the projection and use some compositing in some sort of program (theres debates on using after effects or shake .)

Here is the very very basic structure of the snake using simply some cylinders and a cube for the head. It starts to take shape soon.

Here is the shapes smoothed out and showing me tweaking the edges and vertices. I had to make a slightly squashed looking shape for the head and the body. A common misconception about the snake is that snakes are seen to be perfect cylinders when in fact they are more of a squashed shape than anything.

Here you can see the eyes being created by using the extrude tool. It starts to give me an idea of where thing can start to go.

The eyes have to be facing outwards rather than straight ahead so i had to widen them and then also shape the mouth and forehead. You can start to see the serpents head a lot more clearly now.

This is the rattle of the snake which was modelled using a smaller cylinder and then tweaking its vertices to have more of a bumped shape.

Here is a more detailed look on the rattle. You can see the cylindrical bumps get a lot more close together down here because of the amount of ridges. Can get quite busy when it comes to tweaking.

Here is the head of the snake after some modelling as well. The eyes have more of a frown and distinct shape and also the mouth has a lot more depth and tone ready to be seperated into 2 seperate objects. This is getting rather exciting.