Advanced CG Week 6

This past week has been spent on a lot of different things that will allow me to start the actual animation process of the project. I've made a lot of progress, and while it will take some time to get the effects and massive elements worked out perfectly, everything else is in pretty good order. Some things I've done this week, in no particular order, is prop work, lighting and texturing the environment, finalizing the character rig, facial blend shapes, eyes for the character, finalizing the model of the character, caustics in renderman, and trying to get them all into one scene.



Pictured above is a test to make sure that the scale between the character and environment is correct, and I also just wanted to see what it looks like. The lighting has a ways to go for when I start working on the legitimate scenes, but so far I think it looks really cool. Correction, it is really cool. Fact.



Another thing that took a bit of time was getting the scarf and shoulder pads of the character to look good and deform correctly with the body. I had to go in and work on the blend shapes so that the shoulder pads moved with the shoulders, and the scarf moved with the shoulder pads. It also had to deform with the face, but have the influence fall off as it went down the scarf and not have a 1-1 thing going on.

The shot above is a few frames into a walk cycle I'm working on that I can import into massive and see how it works. So it's not the most exciting posture, but it's one of many "mini" animations that I have to do for animation trees within massive.


One thing that I worked on for a great deal of time is the blend shape facial animations of the character, and the facial rig. A lot of people like to use sliders with their blend shapes, and what I have isn't too far removed from that, but I find it more intuitive to have a facial GUI that represents the expressions you want to give your character.


I've hit a hurdle this week, just as I did in my past project with blend shapes. Hopefully some sleep and contemplation will help me figure it out. For some reason, when I use the blend shapes to influence of the main mesh, other parts of the body start to deform. If I activate multiple blend shapes at a time, things get crazy, and the mesh looks horrifying. I've messed with input order and re-applying the blend shapes. I may have to export the skin weights, and start over with a new mesh. It wouldn't take too long to try, but I don't want to do it unless I absolutely have to.



Above is a shot of the blend shapes I have. Since the body of the character is one mesh, I had to use the entire body for the blend shapes, even though I'm only deforming the face. There is a way to use just the head, but it takes a few more steps than I'm comfortable with, and don't want to waste time right now trying to figure out a new way to apply blend shapes. If I can't figure out how to fix what I have now, I might have to look into it, but hopefully it won't come to that.



Another thing I decided to do was experiment with caustics in renderman for the various light sources that will be lighting the room. I decided to have the light emanate from crystals in ornate lamps placed throughout the chamber. I had messed with caustics before, but only in mental ray. It took a while to figure out who renderman dealt with it, and even longer to come up with the right look for both the lamp and the crystal.

As you can see pictured above, I spent time modeling, UV'ing, displacing, and texturing the lamp, as well as figuring out how to texture and light the crystal with caustics. Next up on the to-do list is to figure out what's wrong with my blend shapes, get some animations finished, and import them into massive and see how that fares.

Advanced CG Week 5

This week was a busy week, and encompassed both environment and character set-up. I decided to jump back and forth between the two rather than work strictly on one aspect of the animation. This made the work-flow less tedious, and I made a lot of progress in both regards because of it.

The first goal of the week was to get the main character textured. To do this I took the base mesh, imported it to Zbrush and created displacement maps for the folds of the clothing. I then painted it in zbrush, and exported it into photoshop for some finer detail.


Though it may be a bit hard to tell, I added a bit of dirt and grunge to the shorts of the character, as well as a bit of dirt on the boots and gloves. I wanted to give the main character a slightly worn look, but not make him out to be beaten, with tattered clothes and on his last legs. While I want him to appear fatigued, he will be in relatively good health in the animation. He'll be a little bit worse for the wear, but not destitute.

The second goal of the character was to get the skin textured correctly. I currently have subsurface scattering applied onto the skin section of the mesh. Even though the mesh is all one piece, I applied a separate shader to the skin so I wouldn't affect the entire body. Having SSS on a pair of shorts would be pretty strange.

The picture above shows a better shot of the slight variation of the skin tone through subsurface scattering. Various subdermal pigmentations show up depending on the intensity and angle of the light. Obviously there aren't any eyeballs in that shot, but that along with the scarf and shoulder-pads are next on the list of things to do.

Pictured above and below are shots showing the progress on the environment. Right now I have a lot of the chamber displaced and textured. Currently maya crashes every other render in Windows, but it's the only OS that has Zbrush so I have to stick with it until I'm finished texturing. So the progress of getting everything tweaked is slow, but steady. I've begun playing with the lighting of the room. It's still got a ways to go, especially since there will be multiple light sources around the room.

This shot above gives a general idea of how it will look. There will be lights on top of the center piece, as well as around the giant tablets circling the room, which will be taken care of tomorrow. I still need to play around with the light fog coming down from the ceiling, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

Going back to character stuff, I got a lot of things done with the character rig. It's got all of the controls in place, and situated how I want them. The skin is bound to the skeleton and I'm getting the deformations that I want out of it.


As you can see in the picture above, I've been messing with the skin weighting. It's going really well and after spending a good deal of time, I'm very pleased with joint creasing and bending. The hands took a ridiculous amount of time, but that's the price you pay for going all out with a 4 finger setup (my last only had 3).

Next on the agenda is to continue working on environment props such as the lights, get the eyes and scarf finished, and start figuring out how I'm going to do the shading and particle effects for my shadow dudes. I'll also need to make a sword, but that shouldn't take too long, since I made a base model for the pre-vis.

Advanced CG Week 4

This week was spent finalizing the character model and working on the rig. My main drawbacks were trying to figure how how I should connect the appendages to their respective body parts. Its a hassle trying to get the weight painting the joints so that various parts don't clip through themselves. Right now, the entire character is one single mesh, and I intend on applying different shaders to different parts of the mesh.


Above is a t-pose of my character with the joints in place and aligned properly. It is ready to have control curves be put into place and skin weights painted on the mesh.

On top of this base mesh I will put displacement and normal maps onto it to add detail to the clothing, such as ripples in the clock and creases in the gloves and boots.


The goal of the character design was to have exaggerated proportion, so his feet and and hands are enlarged, as well as the head. Currently I am working on styling the hair, and creating a scarf.


Pictured above is a picture of what will be holding the sword the main character is seeking. Behind it will be a mechanism that will react to the sword being taken from its proper place. It won't be quite as difficult to create, as I won't be relying on displacement maps in ZBrush to make it look good. It'll consist mostly of gears and concentric circles.


Lastly, here are several experiments in hair styling using shave and a haircut. It's my first time messing with it, so I've got some more learning to do, and I'm not sure if I'll stick with it or not. Right now it looks pretty bad, and won't render in anything but white. Also I'm unsure how well it will animate, so I'll be uploading some tests on that in the near future. If I can't get the look right I'll just end up making poly hair and call it a day.

Advanced CG Week 3

Above is the most recent previs, with a few added shots, and some tweaked shots to improve pacing. While its hard to tell exactly whats going on, there are several shots that provide exposition for the story, and explain what has happened prior to the main character who I will dub as Lliam from now on.

There are close-ups of ancient tablets circling the room, with frescoes painted on them depicting the trials and tribulations one must go through to be granted access into the chamber. In the pre-vis there are just grey rectangular blocks, but in the final version they will be rough and eroded stone.



Above is the sculpted and textured center piece of the chamber. On top will rest the sword holder, or "altar". It needs a bit more work to make it look rougher, but I'm pretty pleased with it over-all.

Above is a slab that will have paintings on it. Right now I have three different versions that I will place in a circle surrounding the center piece. This one still needs a bit of work, and I need to illustrate the fresco, but that'll be a bit further down the road. The most important concern right now is the character model.

Advanced CG Week 2

This week I finalaized the character design and created the T-pose and Side pose of my character. I also created a storyboard for my story, and created a 3D pre-vis to get the camera shots and timing down.



Pictured above is the character design of the main character. I also have a version without his scarf and hair so i can model the head better. Having the scarf in place adds to the character, while also easing the work load of me having to have a fully deformable mouth. I also like the added challenge of having to evoke emotion from the model using only body language and eye movement.


Above is the storyboard. The second page hasn't been colored in, but since the story still needs some work, I'll probably have to change some panels up anyways. The general story goes as such:

The protagonist, roughly 14-15 years old, has just defeated a guardian of a chamber, holding the sibling sword of the one he is wielding. In order to vanquish the evil of the land and restore balance, the hero believes he must join the power of the two swords, and unleash its power. As the hero enters the chamber holding the sword, he looks around, and beings to approach the altar in the center. As a final challenge for the protagonist, the room has a magical protection that creates shadow versions of himself that begin to apparate from the outer edge of the chamber. They slowly begin to converge toward him.

The hero quickly realizes what is happening, and begins to pick up speed in determination. He climbs to the top of the altar where one of two light posts is shining. He approaches the sword, and apprehensively grabs the sword from its holder. In triumph he raises the two swords together. However, nothing happens. He looks around and sees that the shadow monsters are growing larger and more aggressive, and the device behind the altar has shifted and looks off balance. The hero looks at this, and notices the light has gone out of the post. He realizes he must give up both swords, and relinquish his power in order to defeat the evil. He places the swords back in place, and a shockwave blasts the evil away.

Below is a rough Previsual using a character from another animation, and a rough version of the chamber.

Advanced CG Week 1

I spent this week trying to decide the direction I'm going to take the story, and decide whether I should combine both Advanced CG and Massive. I went through a lot of different concepts in my head, with heavy emphasis on scope. I don't want to create a project that can't be completed in ten weeks. In my summer New Media course, I decided to create an animation using two characters. While I'm happy with the outcome, to create a complete animation in ten weeks, while having to model, rig, texture, and animate two characters is extremely time consuming and puts a strain on the production process.

With that In mind, I went through single character story concepts. There are some restrictions to what type of story you can create that spans one and a half to two and a half minutes using one character. However, one of the requirements of the project is to have crowd simulation. Taking that into consideration, I starting thinking of ways to have one character, but use it multiple times in a way that wouldn't seem cheap.


The picture above is a concept illustration that I began with, where the protagonist has to somehow overcome shadow versions of himself. That way I could use the same character and rig, but change how its shaded, and still have interesting animations on the crowd. Through the use of particle effects I could give some added visual effects to them and make it more aesthetically interesting.

In my first New Media class, I tried to create a character that I could use in future projects. While it was my first attempt at modeling, and the character didn't turn out as perfectly as I had hoped, it did give me a lot of inspiration. I like the idea of using child characters, and place them in adult settings. CG is the best place for that, as you don't require the use of an inexperienced child actor (lets face it, kids generally suck at acting, unless they're Haley Joel Osment). So for my protagonist I wanted the character to be an adolescent.


After deciding the character and general idea of the story, I wanted to come up with the setting. I needed something contained, but still unique and interesting. The picture above shows a cavern or tomb, with a center stone formation jutting from the ground, with a beam of light shining down. In this photo I have sort of a bottomless pit that the shadow versions of the character can emerge from, but I'm not really sold on it. The final version of the room will probably be around the same size, but have no pit, to allow more freedom of movement from the crowd simulation. With this I have the character and setting, with Week two ironing out the story.

Advanced CG Homework

Here is my submission for Advanced CG homework.