Dan Ryan 303 Animation Blog

Alas it's done!

2009-06-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

Well I'm going to keep this short, I've had a great time at Ravensbourne, learnt allot and made some amazing friends! I hope all the time and effort me and my group put in is really recognised, coming in to uni practically every day, working from 10 till 9 almost every day and giving up our Easter break to come in and work also. I've learnt allot on this project, developed my skills and produced some of my best work resulting is a film it quite proud of.

Good luck to everyone on the course and see you around! :p

Time Schedual

2009-06-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

This time schedual was put together by Anna.

Compositing

2009-06-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

Below are the shots I composited for the film using After Effects. I animated allot of masks in most of these shots to get them looking as good as possible given the time constraints! the larger images are in my folders for the assesment.

Lamp Post

2009-06-21T18:54:00.000-07:00

Here is a lamp i modeled and textured for the graveyard scene :)

Having looked at the grass Jake painted for the grave yard i felt it needed more work, so i added alot more grass as it was quite thin. There was also some grass that was going through the track, so i had to delet a fair bit and re paint the grass back in.

Tombstones

2009-06-21T18:43:00.001-07:00

Below are the tombstones i modelled and textured for the graveyard. i approched them the way i did the mausoleum :)

Zombie Hand!

2009-06-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

below is a collection of images that went into making the zombie hand that bursts through the mausoleum doors. I took the hand i modeled for the girls and extended the geomitry to make more of a fore arm. I then exported the geomitry as an obj into mud box and painted up the diffuse, bump and specular layers.

mausoleum re model

2009-06-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

Below is a brand new mausoleum i made, as the old one disappeared off the face of the earth. The only thing i had from the old one was the two pillars. So using the same technique to get the chunky jagged edges as before i did another one. The mausoleum has a few UV maps because its texture is quite high quality and there was allot of geometry. I painted all the textured in photoshop having planar mapped the model. the jagged edges worked out quite nicely as it allowed for seams in the texture, where a different material was coming through in the stone, so no sewing the UVs yay!

Getting things done

2009-06-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

The group's target to get the exterior finished to render out is well under way. Myself and Anna have positioned the trees and stalls out side, as well as the big wheel and helter skelter, going through each shot tweaking them to frame the characters as best we could.

Environment Modeling

2009-06-21T17:45:00.000-07:00

Here I modelled The stalls Anna drew up in her original concept work for the outside exterior. Here i positioned and re shaped the planks that Anna originally made for the windmill. I re UV mapped them and textured them. For the Cloth i created a plane and applied an Ncloth deformer to it. i anchored some of the planes verts to the four stall stilts, so when i animated the cloth they would not be effected, gaining the droop you see on the cloth. i painted an alpha map for the texture and worked away at the edges to get the weathered torn look i wanted the stalls to have.

Environment Modeling

2009-06-21T16:25:00.000-07:00

Below are tree models i made for the exterior environment. i did the texturing in mud box with relative ease. The most challenging thing about making the trees was working out how to do the leaves. I experimented with making a small selection of leaves and making that into a brush, which i painted onto the tree, but it looked a bit stupid. I couldn't get a thick gathering of leaves, so we opted for the trees to be bear and more autumnal. to UV map them i cylindrical mapped the larger branches and the trunk, then automatically mapped the remaining smaller branches. This was done for each of the trees.

Cho Animation

2009-06-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

Below is a walk cycle i did for Cho which shows off some of her character.

Cho Complete

2009-06-21T04:10:00.001-07:00

Cho is now done! fully modelled and textured :) I put allot of hard work and time into this model, making the model as best i could. making sure all the geometry works with the proxy model for Dan and just something that i could be proud of. every part of this character was modeled and textured by myself.

Easter (not so) break - Modeling/Texturing Cho's Hair

2009-06-21T02:44:00.000-07:00

Cho's hair needed to be done, not previously knowing how to model their hair Anna and Jake decided the best and most simple way was to model the hair as one simple block shaped appropriately, which would be taken into mud box and Zbrush to be further sculpted to get a better shape. Then to be re exported and modelled further in maya. Anna's hair looks really nice from what I've seen and the texturing looks nice also, however i went at it from a slightly different approach, i didn't use Zbrush to sculpt and i needed to pay more attention to the texturing of her hair because is was lighter, showing off the texture more. My 1st attempt to model Cho's hair was pretty bad, as you can see it looked like a sack on her head. this came from following the hair style in the original concept drawing, but it clearly was not going to work with the approach the group was going with for the hair styles of the girls.

I though about different styles i could give her, i really like Anna's bunches, the way they tail off to a point is the best way around the issue of not having a clump of hair, but that wouldn't suit Cho, nor did we want them to have the same hair. I came up with the short bob, which we all thought looked nice and suited the character, so i went about refining it and giving Cho a head band. I did all the shaping in maya, then exporting it into mud box to texture.

the fringe and side burns are two separate UV maps as they are both alpha maps. mud box has some good preset brushes which i used to paint the hair. starting with the fringe i just built up the texture in a series of layers, which i then exported into Photoshop and merged them into a single layer. for the alpha map i used the eraser tool in Photoshop to work away the blunt fringe, but it was looking lame. i looked at Anna's alpha and i saw that she might have done hers using the smudge tool. Using hers as a base, i used the warp tool to manipulate her alpha to loosely fit within my UV map for Cho's fringe. I then worked into it from there with a smudge tool until i got something that looked nice for Cho.

I went on to paint the main part of Cho's hair, going about it the same way i did with the fringe, working up layers to get a good texture using the mud box default brushes. As I painted it I made my brush strokes work with the flow of the geometry to get as natural a looking hair, in our stylized form, as possible. I lastly painted the alphas for the side burns, again using the smudge tool in Photoshop to get the wispy look i wanted.

Easter (not so) break - Texturing Cho continued

2009-06-16T15:57:00.000-07:00

HEAD

I UV mapped Cho's head using a spherical map, then I tweaked the verts around her eyes, nostrils and mouth so there was no stretch when painting finer details on her skin, such as freckles. Having finalised the UVs I exported Cho's head as on obj into mud box and pained the Diffuse layer with relative ease as there was no problem with stretching textures. yay.

HANDS

When texturing the hands I did a previous test to see how well mud box would map a texture on the geometry when an automatic map was applied, given the random separation of the mesh it created a lot of seams. Mud box freaked out when I painted on the hand, showing lots of the fine transparent seams, particularly around the fingers. So, I planar mapped the palm, back hand, and cylindrical mapped the fingers. This worked out well when I painted the blemishes and freckles on because the texture had no noticeable seams this time round. When it came to painting the nail varnish on I initially attempted to paint the nails in mud box, but the colour kept bleeding over the edge of the nail as the fingers were not mapped for such close attention to detail. I had to planar map the nails individually and then painted the nails directly in Photoshop on the UV map, which worked out well. The texture around the wrist of her top, where you can see some white geomitry has been fixed. there have been a few instances like that occur throughout modeling Cho. To fix it i had to tweak the UVs in maya to make shure that the texture I painted was fully covering the UVs, this is where mudbox tends to not map everything 100% to the very edge of an objects geomitry.

Easter (not so) break - Texturing Cho

2009-06-14T09:29:00.001-07:00

As you can see I've UV mapped Cho! I'll go through how as I talk about each individual item I textured :)

LEGS

Painting Cho’s legs was pretty good as far as stressful things go, although I had to get used to getting a brush I made in Photoshop to work well within mud box. I UV mapped the legs using a cylindrical map on each. I then took the mesh into mud box and painted on the base texture, using a brush I made. This brush wasn’t the one I had the problem with, it was the star brush. I used the projection tool in mud box to project the star brush I made in Photoshop to create her pattern. Initially I painted rather then projected the stars, and it looked terrible. Not only that, but the brush was making a dark shadow around the star, which was to do with where I made the brush and overlaid it on top of the already painted base texture. The projection didn’t give off as much of as shadow around the star, so I was able to touch the texture up in Photoshop with the replace colour tool. I went on to tweak the base texture in Photoshop by adding a filter that replicated a more material like quality on the tights.

WELLYS

To Texture the wellys I painted a block base colour on the UV map in Photoshop. I then took the boot into Mud Box and painted on the mud to give the boot more texture. It took a while to get both boots looking as though they were from the same pair because when painting on the mud, one of the boots would have a less amount of mud or a less smudged amount of mud etc. so it took a while to get them looking similar enough. I exported the layers from mud box and put them together in Photoshop, having done that I created the bump by inverting the colours and tweaking the levels to get a good bump on the boots in Photoshop.

JACKET

One of the apparent perks of using mud box was not having to be so particular with the UV mapping. However this was a big fat lie in hell and UV mapping still needed to be done accurately. So, I UV mapped the jacket using a cylindrical map, which worked out really nicely because I was able to get the seam to go along the zip of the jacket so it was discreet. I had a lot of trouble with the shoulders though. I took more tim e to carefully map around the shoulders so there was as little amount of stretch as possible when painting the texture. As the shoulders was a separate shell of UVs to the rest of the jacket, when I painted on the geometry in mud box there was a really obvious stretch in the texture where the seam was. I fixed this by over laying the UVs of the shoulders over the rest of Cho’s jacket; this might look a bit careless and messy when looking at the UV map, however it is what gave the cleanest result with the final texture. I painted the texture for the jacket in Photoshop using various filters to create a texture that looks like material…ish. Then I took photographs of a jacket and Photoshoped the material folds in as a different layer to add to the warn in texture of the jacket. I was able to paint a bump map for the jacket in mud box using a brush I made previously for the tights at a larger scale.

BELT

To paint the belt I UV mapped it by selecting all the faces and applying a cylindrical map to the mesh, I then had to tweak the verts accordingly so the texture wouldn’t stretch when I painted it in mud box. When I was taking photos for the jacket folds I took some photos for the jacket belt as well. I manipulated a photo in Photoshop to work as a brush in mud box for the belt. However, when I uploaded the obj file into mud box and began to paint the texture it want crazy and wouldn’t paint anything without a stretch. The same is applied to painting the bump layer; it was just destroying the belt. I thought my UV map might have been the problem so I re-UV mapped the belt using the same approach but I took more time when positioning the UVs. However, I still had the same problem, if not worse this time. so rather then paint the texture in mud box I did it in Photoshop which gave a more accurate texture but still slightly off, but there wasn’t much more I could do to improve the result having previously re UV mapped it a number of times, as well as taking into consideration the groups time schedule.

TOP/SLEVES

I UV mapped the arms with a cylindrical map and the chest with a planar map. I exported the mesh for both the arms and chest as an obj file into mud box so I could then paint the Diffuse, bump and specular layers which went without any hiccups.

Easter (not so) break - Modeling Cho continued

2009-05-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

Having briefly gone through the process of building Cho's head, I’m now going to show how I went about making her body. First of all i created a very basic body shape, modeling alongside the image planes to get the right proportians for Cho. this took a while because i felt it was important that i took my time so i had a strong foundation to build from. I didnt take many screen shots through out modeling cho regretably, but i think you can get a good idea from what i do have to show and say about how the development of cho progressed.

LEGS

I began by sculpting her legs, modelling the legs was pretty straight forward, I took the existing proxy mesh and modelled around that, adding edges where appropriate to sculpt a more curvy leg for the beast (aka Cho). I roughly modelled her waist which we don’t see, but it is there so the jacket has something to rest on when the Ncloth is applied later.

JACKET

I modelled the jacket by extracting the geometry I created as a basic body shape for Cho, I then extruded the edges to develop the shape of the Jacket. To form the pockets I extruded a selection of faces and shaped them appropriately. I wanted them to look as though they had stuff in them like sweets or something because Cho's a heffer. I sliced in more edges around the bottom half of her jacket so I could create a more crumpled look of the geometry, as though she had been sitting on it or something, rather than it look smooth and unworn. The upper half took a while to shape, like the collar around her neck because I wanted to get it looking soft and not so rigid. The zip part of her jacket took a while also where I had to shape the geometry as though the material was resting on top of the other. I did experiment with buttons, such as toggles, but I went for a more basic shape in the end as the characters needed to be done ASAP for Dan and to keep on track with the time schedule, and the toggles would require further sculpting in the jacket.

BELT

I took the geometry I left baring in mind the belt when shaping the jacket, and extracted it from the mesh. I again extruded the edges to form its shape. However. Once I did that the edges had been double extruded, I checked the extrusion settings and it was set to single division as I thought, so I’m not entirely sure what happened there. To fix the problem I selected a face and used the grow selection tool 'shift + >' until the doubled layer was fully selected and then deleted it leaving the single layer of faces.

TOP/SLEVES

To create the top I approached it the same as I did with the rest of her, by extracting the appropriate faces and sculpting the geometry by cutting in and extruding edges.

So, below is Cho with everything modelled but her hair, which is still prooving to be a problem at the moment for all the characters in the group. Looking at this image I think I will re skale her ears down a bit :) (Occlusion passes have been added at a later date, where she had since had hair and ears have been re sized.)

Easter (not so) break - Modeling Cho

2009-05-13T09:17:00.002-07:00

CHO HEAD

Having built more confidence with the maya interface and refreshed the modelling basics in my brain, I went on to build the head. So I started over, following the video tutorial from youtube.

This time round the basic geometry went more smoothly, not looking like road kill. Below is the progress of Cho’s head.

The hair is a problem at the moment, which is why our characters are all bald, as a group we have yet to find a way to make it look a good as possible, but we will find a way!

EAR

I went on to model an ear and a set of teeth that we could all use as a generic model for each of the characters. For the ear I wanted to keep it fairly basic, but I didn’t want to have an ear that looked like a piece of rubber stuck on the side of their heads, so I modelled in a small amount of definition.

Teeth

As for the teeth Jake had previously experimented with tooth shape but couldn’t find something that we were all happy with so I had a go at it keeping it “chunky”, which I think I managed to pull off and it’s something we are happy with as a group.

Blockouts

2009-05-13T09:05:00.000-07:00

TREES

Having scribbled out a shoddy picture in photoshop with Dan, looking at how we should frame the characters in the opening scene, I blocked out the basic tree shape that arced over the three characters as they run into shot. We took the tree block out and within the animation menu in maya gave the model a nonlinear deformer, which allowed me to animate the mesh to curve up, to quickly create a second shape for the tree.

GRAVES

Below I made some graves that we could use to block out some of the environment in the graveyard scene. They are basic, but we intend to add more elaborate graves with in the scene for a more elaborate environment.

FIRE EXIT

I went on to block out the 1^st corridor room in the ride, where the floor gives way and splits the girls up. The room is very basic and is meant to be quite bland, like a typical lame ghost train, so it’s just rectangular with a dugout floor for the cart and a fire exit off to the side. The fire exit is hardly seen, but its there as an extra light source and to add to the element of lamenss, so the blockout is more or less close to the final version.

STALLS

I blocked out the stalls for the outside scene, using Anna’s original art work as reference. It’s very basic but dose the job of allowing us to position them within shots, so we can frame the characters.

COFFIN

I blocked out a coffin that will be in the graveyard scene.

Wellys! I like that word, welly welly welly!

2009-05-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

I went on to model a generic boot, which all the characters would have. I think the basic design works well and looks nice! The colours will vary per character to fit with their colour schemes. I had to make sure the mesh for the boot would match up to the folds in the proxy model of the boot, so it would skin properly when it is referenced in later.

Mausoleum

2009-05-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

I wanted to model the mausoleum from the graveyard scene first, as it was a defining piece from the scene, and once I had that done I would be able to use that as a reference to scale the other environmental objects. I feel like the model is in keeping with the “chunky” style, and I will be adding the doors to it soon.

Cho's head 1st attempt

2009-05-08T02:21:00.000-07:00

Having finished the hand I went on to attempt to model the head of the Cho character. I followed a tutorial similar to that of the hand tutorial, which roughly guides you to create all the necessary basic geometry. It was tough, as getting the basic geometry done well is vital to having a good finished model, and I felt that it wasn’t coming together. Having been out of practice with maya for a while pre-hand, I felt I would benefit by modelling some environmental objects prior to Cho’s head, as a head can be quite a complex piece of geometry.

Hand

2009-05-08T02:20:00.000-07:00

Having spent some time away from maya over the holliday I wanted to jump back into it with something that would be a challange. Also, Dan needed the hand modelled asap so he could take the model and break it up for the proxy models for the three characters. I modelled a hand that all three of us could use for each character. This was to save time, rather then me, Anna and Jake model a hand each. Our style is “chunky” so I followed a really helpful tutorial which resulted with this hand.

further character development

2008-12-04T19:31:00.001-08:00

Above are some sketches i did to play around with preportions of the body and head. However the group felt like the characters shouldn't be too exagerated, as opposted to being stylised, as we all had the same vision already as to how the characters looked. So it was just a matter of refining the previous designs, and to give them a more stylistic feel.

So here are the final designes that the whole group are happy with. Befor the characters looked to real, as Mike pointed out, and i do think that he was right. The edited versions are more softer and have more vulnrability to them, which Anna Dan and Jake are happy with, as am i. I felt that most of the change was made in the faces of the girls. I gave them a more bean shaped eye, which i think was the most lifelike feature originally, and straight away they gained a more doll like feel to them. i gave them smaller chubbier hand and little feet to play around with preportions also.

2008-12-04T18:57:00.001-08:00

I asked if i could be the one to draw up the character concept sheets for annas characters, using her original designs as reference, which are shown above. In the meantime the whole group spent alot of time developing the story together, to something that we are all happy with as it currently stands. We all we'er happy to axe one of the characters so we could use Dan's design he made for his original pitch. His original character concept is shown below.

the ride!!

2008-10-27T07:44:00.000-07:00

So this is the LAST project i'll be working on with Dan, Anna and Jake... at ravensbourne. You never know! :D

I'm really looking forward to working on this story, as i think it has alot of potential to be something really fun and have alot of crazy action sequences in it and interesting stuff to model too. woop!