My work

1000 Cranes finished

2009-06-22T02:40:00.003+01:00

So its been a stressful week or so for me recently, Anja gave me half a week to do just under half the movie in after effects, I roto-scoped so much stuff i cant even explain it, cleaned up about 30 frames altogether (sounds very little when you say it..but 15 minutes per frame is a long time especially for my poor wrists).

I managed to composite everything that was asked of me though and Create animation of the Crane in after effects using key framing and the graph editor, something i previously didn't even know existed in after effects.

I'll upload the scenes I composited and animated within a day or so, but now its almost 3am and I don't feel like doing it right now as id have to wait till its finished to click the "publish post" button.

Thoughts on this year (Simple project overview + Time_table

2009-06-20T17:13:00.006+01:00

Well the year is over now, we handed in the final(ish) movie Friday just gone.

This is just a quick post to talk about the movies Ive worked on, this is in no way to insult any of my team members, I have respect for everyone I have worked with, even if the experience hasnt been quite what i wanted at all times.

Il start with Junk food and then speak about 1000 Cranes and then finally go onto The Light Of Us.

Its been the most stressful 2 weeks of most peoples lives, ive had to composite almost all of Anja's movie in just a few days, composite what we had of Chris's movie in just 2 days and set up god knows how many jobs on the render farm...Which brings me to my next point.

Render farm:

Everyone thought that once we started rendering it'd be done in just a day or 2 due to the immense speeds of the render farm, oh how wrong we were...The render farm is temperamental, it ignores commands at random points and sometimes even when it does finish ALL frames it just doesn't actually send them to any directory so they don't even exist anymore which in turn makes them useless.

Ive had a LOT of problems with the renderfarm, so serious that in the end we began rendering through Local computers instead, which due to the high level of texturing detail and lighting details, not to mention the memory needed to render the models alone, made rendering on Local machines a complete nightmare. Renders took litterally DAYS to finish individual shots and i must have re-rendered the opening scene over 15 times due to opacity not being included, sophies face turning invisible, textures being missing or even the renderfarm just failing hundreds of frames but not notifying me.

Im the only person in the group who knows how to use the renderfarm and i would have liked to show the others if we had the time, but unfortunatly we didnt so instead setting up the files for the renderfarm fell on the shoulders of Me and Louis, Louis is the only person who seemed to know the shots and frame numbers (though im unsure why he never thought to tell everyone else that way no one would have to rely on him so much).

We took on Ali (our producer) as a last minute animator but his stuff wasnt enough, and instead the stress fell on the other animators in the group, I was unable to help animate due to being so busy fixing all the textures and scenes whenever problems arose, setting up the renderfarm, and trying to keep Anja from breaking down.

In the Junk food movie I cant say anyone in particular is to blame as its everyone fault really, , I managed to keep myself busy with testing dynamics and texturing styles for the movie and Louis began modeling Sophie based off of a concept art he did for Chris. I'm not an animator myself so i cant really make an opinion on whether the animation was fast enough because it might have taken me 6 months longer for all i know.

unfortunately i didn't receive the Environments on time and then I didn't texture as fast as i was expecting too as i ran into a few small problems and needed a little advice from Chris at certain points. Chris created the textures for Sophie face I edited it slightly but in general the texture is Chris's work and that probably explains why it looks so awesome. Chris also taught me a great deal in Photoshop and im eternally grateful for that, he is a great friend and a fantastic artist, im really looking forward to going against him in the next upcoming Dominance wars, and almost anything else he enters ^_^, I might set my bar high in this respect but its a challenge il dedicate myself to.

I don't regret working with Chris as his movie has great Potential, my only and Main qualm would be that Chris is a nice guy, that sounds a bit strange i know, but he is a little too nice, he tries to avoid confrontation whenever possible and that probably led us to a few problems, though it probably also helped us avoid a more problems too. Whilst at the same time as i say that, even if Chris was angry at people its not as if he could force anyone to work hard/harder or even at all, the responsibility lies predominantly with each individual in the group, if you work on someone else s movie then its obvious that you are responsible for someone else's grade and that's not always a good thing.

1000 Cranes:

Working for Anja is extremely stressful, her movie has so much potential and her artwork and visions for the movie are extremely beautiful and im happy that we managed to complete the movie in time for hand in ^_^. If i could go back then i would probably still work with Anja as i just get on well with her, she isnt easy to work with due to being a little unorganised at times, but only a littl, but despite these slight flaws she is a great friend and she has one of the most important things a director needs "a constant passion" for her movie.

If it wasnt for her passion then she probably would have given up a long time ago, she might be bad at explaining things but the movie was completed and the final thing looked absolutely amazing and i have the utmost respect for her fine art abilities and abstract mind. I may not like her style of artwork ( this is personal opinion...i think its well drawn but its not pretty or elegant to me) but i can see that its amazing and i could NOT do nearly as good as she can.

Heba did the work eventually even if it wasn't always on time, but its a bad thing because Heba had less work to do because Anja kept saying "its fine its perfect" and then did it again herself, this puts more stress on Anja and unfortunately leaves other team members such as Heba thinking that the work they did so far was acceptable and then not being set much other work.

I was producer for Anja, I will admit that im not the BEST producer ever, I managed to set Simon and Heba work and have Simon complete it in time and im very thankful to Simon for the hard work that he put in. I spoke to Anja about dates and hand ins and i cant MAKE someone work faster and as director Anja is allowed the final say and she overrules everything i say anyway so all in all I only managed to get most of the work at the correct times and try my best to organise things.

I managed to composite and put together and even animate several sections of the movie that ammount to about 40% of the movie in total.

The Light Of us:

The work i did for Luisa in the 1st and second terms was fun and she is a great person to work with, like a normal director, she cant fully explain how she visualizes things herself, but that's perfectly acceptable and a perfectly normal trait. Luisa is a good director and a great friend, she is easy to talk to and discuss the movie with and I think working with her was very productive and During the 3rd term i felt very uneasy about the fact that i was now unable to help her with anything as she was creating the entire movie in after effects and because it wasn't fully planned out it meant that the workload could not be shared.

I got a little irritated when i modeled things that Luisa decided not to use, but in retrospect its fine i guess, Directors DO change their minds, its perfectly normal, not everyone likes it all the time (me included) but we just have to deal with it, Im sure if i made my own movie id probably change my mind every now and then too as its just a way of working.

I am yet to see her final piece but i am confident that it will be a great sucess and I am happy to have worked with such a strong and dedicated person.

What i Learned:

My main learning experiance this year was learning RealFlow for both Luisa and Chris, its an amazing Program and its been used on some of the most breathtaking special effects in movies.
I hope that my knowledge of realflow can help me get a job somewhere one day.
Another thing ive learned is that working with friends is a double edged sword, sometimes its great and othertimes it just makes things harder, so my aim for the future is to try to avoid working with friends if given the oppertunity, though of course this depends on the people and the project so i cant really be certain about anything.

I learned how to use the renderfarm i guess, im not sure if that counts as a possible learning outcome of anykind though, but this year had a few great lectures that ammounted to further insights into my future careers.

This wasnt quite the most professional project overview and yet it wasnt the worst, but this is how i feel and I dont think its right to insult anyone on a blog as its impersonal, so ive keep that to the very minimum and havent (in my opinion) insulted or intentionally offended anyone in any groups. This year has been an experiance I wont ever forget be it for better or worse.

Here is a timetable, its not the most detailed timetable ever, as this term was a very busy term for me and some of the jobs i did im not sure what to really call them i guess.
So this just shows what dates we saw tutors and what dates were organised for our groups, I showed up to every single group meeting we ever had and notes were taken regarding the work id done so far.

Rendering Woe's

2009-06-15T01:34:00.003+01:00

Well...the past week and a bit have been a bit of a problem really, Rendering hasn't been going nearly as smoothly as we wanted it, due to Sophie having to be tweaked several times so she doesn't appear too dark or too plastic looking.

I started rendering the movie in different passes, diffuse, shadow, occlusion ect, though in the end its worked out that we only really have the time for a beauty pass and an occlusion pass, well actually im squeezing the occlusion in as without it sophie looks like a barbie doll, the shader is great, the model is great, just the lighting without occlusion makes her look like she is made from plastic.

I thought this would be a good oppertunity to upload the occlusion, the beauty and a combination just to show how it works, its not going to be detailed at all because i dont really have much time,what with compositing Anja's ENTIRE movie and Chris's at the same time.

This 1st image is the Beauty Pass (though she doesnt look very beautiful here just yet).

The image below is the occlusion pass.
This is the combination of the two, it adds some more depth shadows so sophie and makes her look a LOT nicer.
So this is pretty much how most of the movie is going to look, in this render here i didnt apply the occlusion to the environment but that doesnt really matter as its just to show off sophie anyways.

Information for the masses

2009-06-07T18:28:00.003+01:00

This is just a quick little thing for anyone who might read this blog and is new to 3D, as this wont benefit our class as all the information in here is a low key version of what anyone in a 3rd year animation class like ours should already know.

This is something i posted on another blog not to long ago, i thought it might be informative so i thought id paste it here too for more people to see.

Textures

Most graphics hardware requires that your texture images always be a size that is a power of two in each dimension. That means you can use any of the following choices for a texture size: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, or so on (but unless you have a really high-end card, you'll probably need to stop there).

The textures don't usually have to be square: they don't have to have the same size in both dimensions. But each dimension does usually have to be a power of two. So 64 × 128 is all right, for instance, or 512 × 32, or 256 × 256. But you can't make a texture image that is 200 × 200 pixels, since 200 isn't a power of two.

To convert a texture from .tiff (or whatever the format) to .map just simply go to the render preferences (in Maya preferences) and tick the convert textures box.

Note: Maya software will NOT read .map textures as .map is purely for Mental ray. To render in Maya software you must convert the images from their original format to a .bot format. I am not sure how Maya hardware renderer works so unfortunately i cannot supply a format for that, but it does reply on your system hardware only so if your graphics card cannot support a texture size then neither can Maya hardware renderer.

Large jpegs over 6 meg can sometimes cause problems, for example im using a .tif file that is a total or 60 meg and it DOES cause Maya to be a little slower so i decided to convert the file to .map to speed up Maya a little.

Photoshop Textures:

For texture creation many people use Photoshop, some prefer to use Zbrush and other prefer to use Mudbox, but most people even if they start in a separate program, eventually come back to Photoshop to clean their textures.

Photoshop CS4 has a new POLYPAINT ability for 3d, though unfortunately this does not yet support layers and from my own personal experiences it doesn't look very nice as its in the early stages of development right now.

If you wish to texture an object in either Photoshop or Mudbox or even Zbrush...the object MUST HAVE ASSIGNED UV'S otherwise it will not work properly and you will get some very ugly results. Also any ramps or anything applied in Maya will not work in Photoshop, as the ramp is connected to the material and OBJ export ONLY exports the object and texture references, it exports UV's too but not the textures assigned to the UVS.

With an OBJ file there is a .MTL file, this is the MATERIAL references file, if you delete this then the OBJ will not know where to collect the textures from and all texture references will be ruined, this however does NOT delete UV's as the uvs are part of the OBJ file and MTL file is just for texture names and references.

On a quick side note...UVS and PSD networks are NOT related...a PSD network assigns a texture and a UV decides the texture coordinates, if the object has bad UV mapping then a PSD network will just look extremely ugly. PSD networks are created for the purpose of testing, so that when yo make a change it instantly updates in Maya, this is a fantastic feature for testing but not for the final result. Once all the textures are finished they should be converted to another format such as .jpeg, .PNG, or any other format you wish. Though PSD networks DO work when you render, but this is purely so that you can view your results faster and not for the final film output.

Unfortunately the MAIN drawback for PSD networks is that you cannot use any texture size, the maximum texture size that you can use in a PSD network is 2-49 x 2048 sized image, as the slider doesn't go any further and entering your own Numbers doesn't work. This image shows what i just explained. its unfortunate really.

Dynamics and particles:

Once something is finished and perfected with particles or dynamics they should either be cached (this saves it to memory and makes the file run a LOT faster then without a cache) or converted to key frames. Dynamics act different upon each individual render so they need to be converted to key frames and then edited if they aren't already perfect. This changes it to an animation and increases both render time along with playback and playblast time.

I didn't know about dynamics caching or about converting them to key frames and this caused a previous project of mine to look different in the render to in the viewport and i got a lower grade for it. I would prefer if my friends did NOT fail or get lower grades or even struggle because of something simple they didn't know, as sometimes when you spend all your time learning complex things...you don't notice the smaller things.

Bit of Break

2009-06-06T20:01:00.004+01:00

Now that all the films texturing is done I have little to work for Junk Food these past few days.

Me and Chris set up a 500 frame environment Fly through for the Graveyard environment on Thursday but due to human error it failed, though we didn't discover that until the next day.
So on Friday i went in and fixed it all up and now it SHOULD be rendering that 500 frames through the render farm perfectly fine.

During that time ive had to get my images ready for Harvey, Which wasn't as simple as i was hoping, it took me a while to find out the correct sizes and render something that didn't go blurry or even 1% pixelated at re size. They didn't go bad or anything...im just really picky with stuff like that.

Today natasha sent me a scene containing some rocks that she modelled (go to Natasha's blog to see the post she has on those), and asked me to UV unwrap them and texture them.
So I uv unwrapped them quickly using XSI as im listening to music and the UV editor in maya seems to screw with my music player(s) (i need to reinstall a few things to fix this...fresh reinstall).
Once i unwrapped them i imported them back into Maya and assigned a texture and a Bump map.

The once plain rocks (the original models looked like rocks still) now look nice and Bumpy all over. This was like a 5 minutes job at most and the results are rather nice actually.

This is one of the shots i gave to harvey for the D&D animation showcase, im no good with lighting so i just threw a quick light behind the crane so that the cranes scaffolding would come across.
Though this shot does shot a 100% textured environment.
Tis is the 2nd shot that i gave to Harvey, just showing the 1st environment fully textured, though this isnt the final cliff face texture as thats all down to Chris now.

Sophie Animation Test

2009-06-01T22:03:00.006+01:00

Well today i started to think that my animation folder is a little lacking, I have the after effects credits for Anja and also the entire scene with the feathers but i think i need more still...

So i came home and seeing as Photoshop was randomly acting up (causing me to be unable to texture anything now...) i decided to play about with Sophie's skirt a little, i thought that it would be nice if it animated in the wind. Its not for the movie as the movie is blend shaped whereas this is just done using the Lattice deformer and key framed, It took a while as I havent animated in a LONG time and animation is not my strong suit...So doing this did take me a fair few hours of work for something so simple...well initially it was too strong, then not strong enough. And now i did a nice in between so a small gust of wind is supposed to blow the skirt causing it to kind of ripple across the Fabric a little, then it calms and its all over and done with. I think i got to this result alright, Im sure there is probably a MUCH easier way to do this, with rigid bodies but i tried that and the skirt was stiffer then stone...so that wasnt nice at all...

Crane Textures

2009-05-31T12:52:00.005+01:00

In the late evening i began to UV unwrap and texture the Crane, and a few short hours later it was completed.
The model was Created by Mehmet (as was every model in this scene actually) and textured, unwrapped by me.
Here are a few shots of the crane's this top snapshot is a render of the crane up close with another crane in the background as this scene contains several cranes layed about the Crater.

This is just a quick viewport grab to show how the texture looks in the viewport without shadows.
This is a render from just above the canyon showing how things look, i think things are looking okei personally, the color pallet isn't too varied but that's just the style of the movie, it all blends rather nicely together i think

Combination Haven

2009-05-29T23:39:00.003+01:00

So...this work isnt 100% mine, the Original (rather awesome) ground texture was created by Mister Harrison the director, All i did was UV unwrap the object to apply it to, along with make the texture seamless, this canyon was a bit of a struggle to unwrap as maya kept crashing, so i delete a bunch of basically completely useless geometry (it probably had a purpose in the earlier stages) and then opened up XSI to uv unwrap and flatten it as the UV unwrap tools in XSI beat the maya ones without a second thought.
And this is the result, 2 different renders of the same little area.
Ones a little darker and has a different angle.

Launchpad Environment Textures (props)

2009-05-29T18:47:00.004+01:00

Below are some shots from the Launchpad Environment.
The 1st shot is of some Pipes, which are presumably sewage pipes of some kind, Ive made a few variations of this texture so they don't look too repeated when several Pipes are onscreen at once.

The shot below is of the New rings that are included into the scene by Chris, No matter how i look at them i cant help but call them STARGATES. These 2 images have a different level of Bump mapping applied to them, i cant decide which I prefer unfortunately.

Graveyard Texture Development

2009-05-26T16:56:00.003+01:00

This post is primarily to show the tests and changes that went on through the texturing of this environment.
Note: Everything is unlit and using default Maya lighting, which is why it doesn't look as nice and moody as it could.

The Pillars, as you can see in the shot below were originally going to be Green. I was aiming for the look of oxidized copper breaking through lightly painted pillars.

The 1st test of the fathers grave, the most important part of the grave is the plaque saying the fathers name and whatnot, as you can see in this test, the original overlaying didn't look to nice and its not very readable either.Considering the original texture was perfectly square and the model created ended up having this shape leads to things having to be a little smaller in order to fit perfectly. I fixed this soon after wards though.
The original idea for the pillars is that they would be made of marble, as you can see this didn't seem to work so perfectly, as if the building is in ruins then there is no reason that most of the pillars would be so perfect looking anymore.
This is the next texture test for the pillars was to make them a little more destroyed and dirty looking, so as to fit better with the feel of the film and the building being rather rundown and derelict.
I then changed the Columns to a rusted color, as if they were originally painted green but the paint peeled off due to a buildup of rust underneath. I rather like the final result actually.
Another render of the Colums but with a lighter version of the destroyed texture, i dont think it works too nicely myself.
The almost final result, before i changed the wall texture to something slightly more gritty looking.

Texturing complete

2009-05-26T16:36:00.003+01:00

This post, is to commemorate the day i finished every texture for the 1st scene of the movie.
God im happy that's over with, its great when you do it nice 1st time but it sucks when you spend hours tweaking and making tiny edits.

Take these Rusted Grey looking Arches for example, originally they were made to be Green, but that did NOT look nice at all so i spent an hour or 2 fixing them up to get the current result.
The wall texture took a look of tries and re-touch ups and even many re-re-re-touch ups, but its finally done now, Complete with some Latin Writing and the Pedigree of man to top it all off (dont worry it all has relevance).

The shot below is the movies establishing shot. Camera Angle Decided By Director Chris Harrison

Well this is a development shot really...You can see the newly imported graves though, and their textured state too. In this shot you can see the Latin text aswell as the new building texture.
This shot is purely to show off the Latin text and the Pedigree of Man.
The older Building texture, as you can see...not everything is fully textured here, the maps are all made but a few objects seemed to escape my selection tool.

1000 animated feathers

2009-05-24T15:46:00.003+01:00

Well...its not actually 1000 its probably around 60 altogether...probably lower then that...
The video below demonstrates the scene that ive animated for anja, I created attributes for the bend and then animated all the cog's, clock hands, gears, ect.

Anja seemed satisfied when she saw it, she said it was really nice, which is good, you never really get close enough to the clock tree's to actually fully see the animation in detail.

Its nothing amazing, But i have to have this working for Anja and also to fill the folder, it was a nice little experiment though.

1000 cranes worth of geometry problems

2009-05-17T23:35:00.003+01:00

Despite the name of the post, the geometry didn't really cause any problems, im just not a fan of importing from illustrator and lofting curves in Maya, it gives off horrible topology and a lot of it doesn't even serve a purpose.
Anja asked me to animate the fethers and the clocks turning, at 1st i wasnt sure the best way of doing it and i was contemplating using nCloth for the fethers, then after playing about with it for a moment i decided i havent used dynamics in a few weeks and i didnt feel like putting more work in for the exact same result. Rigging was out of the question due to the horrible geometry, so instead I just used the Bend deformer. I know its a bit of a cheap way out, but its effective and its not memory intensive or anything, PLUS it works on all versions of maya (to my knowledge).

Once the bend deformer had been applied to each individual fether i decided to create a nurbs curve and create an attribute to control the bend of the fethers, everything worked out perfectly fine and im pleased with the result, its easier to edit then a rig with keyframes or nCloth, and thats the most important thing, being able to leave something open for adjustments.

Once this is handed to anja thats all the scenes done and all thats left is for Anja to ANIMATE things and for me to finish the opening credits 100% (its only a few hours work at most so i keep putting it on hold because of other more important and closer deadlines).

The valley that never seems to end...

2009-05-17T23:14:00.002+01:00

I spend the weekend working on the Zepplin launchpads runway segment, doing many many tests for that, and thus i dont really have much to show for a weekends worth of work now...My PC was freaking out all weekend and i took some time out to work on a Mod for Unreal Engine 3 (il probably post some updates for that on a seperate blog or something) and fixing up and animating the scene for Anja.(Check above post for details).

The render below is of the runway segment with a kind of grating texture ontop of it, we figured it makes sense to have one, otherwise it might all look a little plane or something.

I also redid the texture for the stairs so its more made of stone instead of just carved from the land, of course i can just overlay this PSD ontop of the old texture and itl be perfectly fine so if need be il do that too i suppose.
I still cant get over the rocks, there isnt as MUCH detail as id like, but im sacrificing detail for a REASONABLE render time, each frame currently seems to be taking 2 minutes at most, sometimes even 3, its mostly the texture sizes and the displacement mapping itself.

So as i was saying... The stairs are now made of stone but that looked a little plane too, so i added some metallic boudering around the outside, just to keep the stone in shape and also because the stone on its own looked a little TOO out of place so i had to even that out.
A closeup shot of the stairs, as you can see the staircase stands out a little in the center but the edges Blend rather nicely into the rocks, im happy with the results and i hope chris is as happy with it as i am.

Final Scene textures completed (almost)

2009-05-15T21:35:00.004+01:00

Today...was...a LONG day, I went to uni, and the displacement completely stopped working, it hadnt been working for a few days prior but i was focusing on other things so i didn't take out time to look at it, turns out after a million and one renders and some crazy smoothing and unsmoothing of the mountains...that Displacement maps (in maya at least) have to be applied with the final UV map...They cannot be applied BEFORE the final UVS, and once you have a displacement map you cannot tweak the UVS (though im sure ive done this before).

And this is the final result, this shot contains both bump maps and Displacement maps together and the effect is really nice actually. It gets a little ugly in the far left corner but thats due to a lack of light hitting those faces.

Below is a shot from inside the vally looking out, the detail stands out quite nicely and it looks pretty natural i think, im rather happy with this result.
Of course...before the perfect results, there were some HORRIBLE results, below is the bump map turned to minus 0.500 and it looks horrible. reminds me of the moons surface for some reason.
Another render from the final result, this is just to see if the displacement or bump mapping effects the area around the Staircase leading down to the Zepplins launchpad, fortunatly it doesnt effect it and it looks really nice and convincing, of course the lighting isnt very nice, but that will be fixed soon enough.
Thats all for now, il upload some fixed to the staircase over the weekend along with some work for Anja

Old find

2009-05-13T12:43:00.004+01:00

This is a new post to show an old find, I was shifting through my hard drive this morning and I came across the block out I made for Junk food, i didn't realize i still had it laying around and i didn't realize i never posted it either.

So i decided to post it now even though its really a little late.

Rocking the launchpad scene [TextureS]

2009-05-11T23:34:00.005+01:00

Yeah....I'm unable to think of interesting names for my posts these days, its possibly due to the fact that ive now fused my body with Photoshop to produce some interesting results.

Below is a shot of a quick render of the final environments main section textured out, the steps are still untextured as are the lights, but this was just for me to complete a texture for the background rocks and rocks in general. The texture is only 2048 for once as i was starting to realize that my last 2 textures were 4096 and each of those 2 tiffs amounted to a massive 108 + meg each. This texture is only around 48 meg which is quite nice considering the size, i started again around 4 times each time didnt take long but i used a few layers from each version to get a nice feel for things including some cracks here and there.

An earlier test i did whilst at college, it seems okei but the movie has a real "orange" overtone to it (probably due to the rust) so i wanted to stick with that so i decided to edit this texture into a more rustic orange texture.
The same texture again just with a Normal map and Displacement map applied, they are both pretty subtle to be honest but they give it a little more depth i think.
Another render of the Zepplin launch pad with some small edits i did at college. this is using Mip map texture filters.
Another shot of the texture from above, just to show the detail from a lower angle, still looks nice to me actually, the rock in the background though isnt very nice looking.
Another render of this with a different texture filter turned on, i think its quadratic now (though for something this size i really see no difference myself...someone else might).
A super fast test from last night, No UV mapping involved at all. I simply just threw the texture onto the model, somehow sections of it look really nice, even going as far as to look as if its sinking downwards in a spiral. But everything outside of this little image looks rather nasty, it was just a quick test though so i wasnt expecting anything out of it at all...so im rather suprised parts of it looked so nice.

Graveyard Environment Final Floor textures

2009-05-10T19:20:00.006+01:00

Todays update:

Got Natasha's scene back from Chris, he did an awesome job moving bits around and replacing one bit with another bit, basically some artistic recycling but still nice.
So now ive got it back i decided its a good time to fix the floor texture i had before, i thought it was a little nice but i decided to try to make it a little less "flat" and "uniform", in the hope to make it look a little more of a natural formation.
So this is the result i got.
I think its a tiny bit Pixelated so i decided to make it a little larger.

This is the larger texture in the Maya render, it looks better then the 1st i think.This is the same texture but zoomed in on Sophie a little, it got a little blurred looking so i decided to add some more detail and heighten the resolution from 200 to 300 and from 2048 to 4096.

The final few renders are just different shots, comparing tiling and mirroring of 1 2 and 3. they all look perfectly fine i think, So this texture is now complete as soon as i make a slight displacement map for it, which shouldn't take very long as this has to be relatively low displacement anyway, otherwise Sophie will step through the ground every now and then, as displacement maps are only visible in the render, you cant see them in the view port so thus the animators wouldn't notice them until its too late.
So now its onto making the rest of the textures for that scene, and some mountain textures for Mehmets mountains in his scene. a days work is long...tiresome...but i rather enjoy it actually.

Zepplin Launch Pad Textures.

2009-05-10T13:10:00.003+01:00

Seeing as chris had natasha's scene that i was originally texturing i went onto texturing the things in mehmets scene that i know 100% are not going to be edited or removed. So far the most certain thing that will not be edited (aside from a slight resize) is the Zepplin launch pad itself. ive been working on this texture for almost 2 days now, and had some awesome help and tips from our director, most of the INNERMOST circle belongs to him and I will edit it to fit a little better with my rusted outside, and whatnot but for now here is what i have so far. I will probably upload other images within the next hour or 2.

For some reason...the render seems to blur the textuer a little, so i included a maya viewport snapshot too.

As you can see here, the quality of the texture stays intact even when zoomed in this much.
The Viewport Render itself.

I think once lighting has been setup that this can look REALLY NICE, as lighting plays the largest part in making textures look realistic or completely fake.

Wall textures

2009-05-08T13:14:00.001+01:00

Below is a quick wall texture that i made at college, its abit basic as I was using a mouse, but it came out alright really, i dont think its too bad, though i think the Lighter one looks nicer then the darker one. For now chris has taken the environment from me and began editing the layout of it...Which is cool but slightly inconveniant as i cant UV map because then il have to RE-UVMAP once i get the scene from him again. Oh well im working on mehmets environment during the small hiatus of Natasha's environment.
Getting better on Photoshop these days, pretty happy with how fast im getting, still behind mr harrison but im slowly trying to get as good as him.

Junk food Progress

2009-05-04T17:42:00.003+01:00

Here are some renders from Natasha's environment that I've been given to texture, the environment itself is really nice i think.
I had to fix up a few tiny things here and there and completely replace all of her windows, but the effect is identical so its perfectly fine, im just improving on a few thing area's that would otherwise be difficult to UV map, the environment itself is still very nice though, and lucky for me everything is on layers for once.

I will begin work on Mehmets environment as soon as this environment is done...OR once i get sick of staring at this and decide i want to try something a little different, as the environment textures for both area's are drastically different, natasha's is more natural whereas Mehmets needs to have a mode "man made" feel to it.

The floor texture is NOWHERE NEAR the final before anyone asks, right now its truly horrible but i was getting annoyed staring at a Grey floor as it was making it difficult to select objects so i decided for render and test purposes its best to create some kind of base texture to work on top of in the future.

ive done a few small variations of the Building, i cant decide if i prefer the lighter colored one or the darker one myself, though the darker one seems to be rather reminiscent of gears of war for some reason (thats just the feeling i get when i look at it...i really would love to see the gears environments one day though, they are amazingly detailed.)

Just the wood, ive textured most of the wood in the scene so far, its mostly the same texture actually, i uv mapped some and then i just used a plain overlay wood texture i made for others that are in the distance, ie: the wooden scaffolding on the window on the second floor of the building. As i said before....this ground texture needs some serious work.

Some more wood...Just to show the different shades i used i guess.
I'll post some more updates on this all later on.

Butterfly Texture

2009-05-04T16:35:00.004+01:00

Below are the Butterfly renders and textures made for Luisa, there are 1 or 2 variations but this is what she has chosen.Im pretty happy with it, i think its rather nice. I'm really tempted to go a little overboard and add some realism to this texture but that would defeat the simplicity within the movie i guess ^_^ so im leaving it as is as this is the way Luisa liked it.

Textures for the win!

2009-04-24T21:13:00.003+01:00

Here are a few more textures so show some progress, I have a LOT actually...But i dont plan on uploading every single texture i do as that will take ages...and then even longer to watermark them all one by one.
Below is a render of the planks at the front of the graveyard, im pretty happy with this texture i think it works rather nicely.

Below is a texture used on one of the graves, i spent a while creating the perfect rock texture and i think i did a nice job too, I can make some nice variations of this texture for other stone graves so this is really nice. There is a second layer applied with dirt and bumps, chunks taken out of the stone from wear and tear ect.

Todays most awesome texture, the plaque is really nice, i tried pretty hard with this one and my hard work really paid off fortunatly, even chris seemed impressed by it so thats great. The text is a seperate layer and i managed to blend the 2 together perfectly and it looks asthough its really indented into the rusted metallic plaque.
Thats all for today, im going to take a break for an hour or so now and relax a little. il upload some more work tomorrow, hopefully il be able to Show Luisa the bird texture and the Butterfly textures tomorrow too. Mudbox is an awesome program and its simple to use so the butterfly is being done in that.

Graveyard Textures

2009-04-24T21:07:00.005+01:00

The past few days have been rather busy, were back to college now and i havent really had the time to post unfortunatly, though i do have a lot of updates to show here.
The top shot is from the graveyard (its a MUCH earlier render then the later ones, im starting with the front row of graves and slowly moving backwards).
Im on the final row as I type this, im REALLY happy with how this is going, the wood needs a little touching up as im not 100% happy with it right now, it looks too "clean" i think, but this term ive learned a LOT of photoshop, i havent drawn this much in a long time so im starting to get a good eye for this kind of thing, creating some effects i wouldnt otherwise know how to create.

NOTE: being able to use photoshop cannot be used as a subsitute for drawing, applying filters and effects is more likely to destroy work then improve it.

This grave has a bump maps as you will soon see, however it took me a while to get the PERFECT bump setting in maya, here are some render results from several tests.

Chris, the director, seems to be most please with this one underneath.

Fishy style Textures

2009-04-10T14:10:00.001+01:00

The past few days have been spent working on Luisa's fish and bird for the film 'LIGHT OF US'.
The original fish, as nice as it looked wasn't exactly the way Luisa wanted, unfortunately for us its difficult to work in perfect harmony over emails and Instant Messengers, so thus it took a little while for things to work out perfectly.
This...however simple looking...is the final fish texture, i edited the model Luisa sent me a little as there were a few tiny topology issues with the mesh but everything is fine now.
Luisa has gone away until tuesday but hopefully she has checked and approved of the final model so far

Texturing Sophie again

2009-04-06T19:18:00.003+01:00

Below is the work on Sophie from the past few days, fixing up the original face texture by Chris was a lot of work, it took almost a whole day of touching up, editing and moving UV's in all possible directions, but finally its done as you can see below, its a joint effort but it looks really nice.
Louis fixed up the lips a tiny bit and Lightened the contrast on the image.

Also ive done the full hat as you can see below, the hat wasn't too hard afterall as its a similar texture to the Jacket.

Sophie:
- Boots completed
- Scarf 99%
- Skin completed
- Eyes completed
- Legs 80%
- Hands 80%
- Skirt Completed
- Hat 100%
- Straps and other little things on hat 100%
- Jacket 100%

This image is really just to show the hat itself nothing more, as i finished the hat before i created eyelashes for Sophie.
Now Sophie has some eyes i made for her:P

This texture here is using Sophie's original eyes i got from Louis.

North Star to light of us

2009-04-04T15:02:00.002+01:00

Luisa's movie 'North star' (Originally named 1st story) has now had its name changed to 'The light of us' so for all future refferences i will be using the name 'Light of Us' in my posts and comments.

Unfortunatly all my previous posts are labeled 'North Star' and due to having over 100 posts i dont plan on wasting a day or 2 renaming all my labels at this point in the term.

On a side note, Luisa's work looks fantastic and im now texturing a fish and a bird:P

Sophie Jacket And scarf

2009-04-04T14:51:00.005+01:00

As you can see here i began and finished texturing Sophie's jacket, turns out making leather textures is actually rather difficult, but i got a few great tips from Chris (Junk Food) Harrison on using Photoshop (i swear he practically defines what Photoshop IS...),
Anyway... here are some screen shots of the jacket and the scarf, unfortunately blogger uploads things in a rather backwards order so im currently unsure exactly what order this work goes in, but the top image is the oldest and as you look through you should be able to see differences in the jacket and scarf textures.

It looks as though this texture is going to be axed and not used, due to the fact that its too 'tablecloth pattern' looking, its not very nice really, But i didnt realise until i applied it.

Im going to continue with sophie's scarf texture over the course of today and hopefuly also begin and finish the hat texture by the end of today.

Sophie Boot textures

2009-03-30T02:55:00.004+01:00

Well i textured Sophie's boots mostly now, in fact it was a much faster job then i expected, the wrinkles in the leather don't seem to want to show through in the renders unfortunately

Also here is a test with the skirt Bump mapped, for some reason it didn't load in the previous post.

Woe is 1000 cranes

2009-03-30T02:47:00.003+01:00

Im still producer for anja and ive emailed GreenPeace and the Japanese Embassy, so far no one has replied which is a little irritating but its only been a few days so hopefully il get something soon.
Still looking about for festivals and things, unfortunatly im rather picky so im yet to find a festival that i think the film would suit best and would benefit the most from, though there is the gay and lesbian film festival coming soon...Maybe i should ask anja to pretend to be Les

Recieved simons animation scene from him yesterday, i asked him how its going but he hasnt started it yet, i told him i want to begin compiling scenes really really soon so that anja doesnt have a heart attack when she returns (hey...its a producers job to keep the director in living condition right?)...Actually it turns out he hasnt ever animated in maya before...which confused me a little, but he can still animate it even if i try it myself, his might be better then mine after all.

I decided that il give the animation a go myself, planning to animate along paths and possibly use the trax editor (as the fish will have a lot of repetitive swimming motions), this is the idea at least...Im not an expert in maya animation by a long shot so this should be an interesting experiance for me. Anja unfortunatly hasnt given us much to work on aside from a bunch of hand movements dictating the fish's movements within the water. But il just do my best and hopefully it will be what she wants, as now she is on holiday so im unable to contact her.

Junk Food makes sense now...

2009-03-30T02:40:00.003+01:00

The final day of term our group received some serious Criticism due to both lack of work, lack of direction and lack of a solidly coherent story.(Though the story wasn't too well explained unfortunately so that might also add to why we had to remake things, but its all for the best i suppose, once we get a MOVIE DEAL THEN we can work on the original:P)

Although i did like the original story i will admit that i knew that if we didn't work hard from the beginning then we weren't going to finish it nearly in time.

So after the meeting with our tutors we rewrote the story did a story board and began an animatic, we had a formative type thing the following week in which the movie was once again green lit as production ready and production worthy. So were good to go again.

The movie is a lot shorter now, coming down from 7-9 minutes to around 4 minutes at Maximum, voices have been added to the story and a little less animation, as the previous story required an animator to start months before the hand in date, and we were nowhere near ready to animate.

So now everything seems to be going kinda smoothly, people are working harder and work is being produced at an acceptable rate now.

Im currently awaiting the models from Luisa before i can texture anything so im currently free to work tightly n Chris's project 'JUNK FOOD'.
Sophie is half textured and everyone's loves the new story, so im actually looking forward to the coming term as i think we've really come together in this moment of crises (i say moment...its gonna be a term of crisis i suppose).

Sophie Skirt Textures Creative Suite 4

2009-03-30T02:21:00.004+01:00

Here are the Bloopers from texturing Sophie, these 2 original tests came out wrong as id stated before due to me forgetting that i left transparency turned on within my TIFF files and thus it left transparency within the texture, so when i applied it in Maya...it gave Sophie a slight "street corner girl" look to her...completely not what i wanted so thus i instantly went and fixed it.

sophie skirt texturing

2009-03-29T20:18:00.002+01:00

Well i spent this weekend texturing parts of sophie...Unfortunatly i did several tests with Photoshop CS4 extended's ability to import OBJ files and paint onto them, its a nice feature but you cant work on layers with is a serious downside. After a few short tests with that i decided to continue texturing on Zbrush, one downside however...is that i have always been unable to save my work in zbrush,turns out that to save work in Zbrush you have to go to "save tool" instead of "save document", which explains why all my previous work got destroyed upon saving, though the few things i did do in Zbrush were only a few hours work and i exported the normal maps long before i saved my data, and thus those are still perfectly intact really.

So i decided to just go back to unsing Photoshop for now, i will do something smaller in ZBRUSH but not sophie, i need to get fully used to texturing in ZBRUSH 1st as its very different to texturing on a 2d plane.

Here are some results from sophie demin skirt textures, the texture itself appears to be either too light or too dark, im not sure which one i will prefer, as once demin gets worn and old it becomes lighter, however the movie itself is rather dark so im unsure if light jeans will work, so for now i just did an inbetween and its easy to darken or lighen it from now on anyway.

1 test as you can see went a little wrong, i forgot i had transparency in my layers in photoshop so once imported into maya the opacity changed to complete alpha and those area's become empty in maya which provided a rather amusing result actually.(see below)

Render tests (once the texture was changed of course)

1000 cranes After effects particlar composition

2009-03-20T23:01:00.003Z

This is just something i did quickly today just to showcase the buildings disintegrating in this particular scene.
Effect still needs a lot of work, this is currently only around 500 particles but I plan to use between 10,000 and 30,000 to get the final effect.

1000 cranes After effects composite

2009-03-17T22:38:00.003Z

Actually this video isn't a composition at all...i just wrote that name so that the text advertisement above stays relevant to my blog.

Okei this is a quick update to say here is the animated test for 1000 cranes the Bomb scene.
So far the Bomb explodes but right now im not entirely sure if I should destroy the city completely or leave it in ruins instead....
I will have to ask anja on this i suppose.

1000 Maya fluid tests

2009-03-17T21:46:00.003Z

I came home today and spent a few hours making some tests for the explosion in 1000 cranes.
Unfortunately im still trying to think of the best possible way to destroy things once ive done the explosion but so far i think its looking nice, Possibly a little bright though, i do kinda want to have the explosion in black and white, so its a direct reference (well the whole movie is really...) to the Hiroshima bomb itself.

Here are a quick few tests, possibly finals if anja turns out to be happy with them.
Not sure exactly how to make the mushroom cloud begin a little higher up but after a few hours of playing around i think i got a nice enough explosion anyway. The actual "viewport" view looks completely different to the rendered view.

All of these tests except one are rendered using Mental ray.

This is the 1 test that was rendered using maya software, they have quite different looks i think, im not sure which i prefer personally.but they both look rather nice i think
Now back to the opening credits as im rendering a pass of this for a test now to see how it looks and everything.

1000 CREDITS update, After effects CS4

2009-03-17T12:54:00.004Z

Here is a quick update to the 1000 cranes opening credits sequence, i know its not much but ive been busy texturing for Chris and Luisa this week too.

Still on my to do list:

Create Mehmets Credit
Create Heba's Credits
Possibly create Simon's credits if needed
Finish the page folding animation between each name

1000 cranes opening Credits

2009-03-12T23:13:00.004Z

I recently began work on the 1000 cranes opening credits, so far its all going fine, the only downside is that i cant use one layer due to the fact that the font changes width constantly, this however isn't really a big deal as i just use several layers instead.
So far Anja's name is complete. fortunately for me if Anja wants her name in a different order its not at all difficult to sort out because of the way ive set this up.

I'm going to speak with Anja tomorrow at college and see how she wants the opening credits to look and if this is how she wanted it (she hasn't said even 1% how she wants it...just that she wants names, paper and cranes...) as right now i don't have much do go by other then how i imagine she would want it.

Oh well I will continue to work on it either way and fortunately this is one piece of work that i can also do at college, so that's great, my days at college waiting about to see a tutor wont feel so wasted (i get in on time but i end up having to wait for some of my group members from whatever group is about it be seen, and thus I wait about a few hours unable to work as i don't have my work with me).

A more then 'normal' Grave

2009-03-12T21:20:00.003Z

As i stated before i have been working on the tombstone model that Natasha sent me a few weeks back and after cleaning it up for a while i began to texture it. I realized that making normal maps IN Maya was too long a process and Maya just begins to run too slow once i smooth the model 7-8 times to add details to it. So instead i decided to add the high poly detail using Zbrush, unfortunately i haven't ever used Zbrush before, well i used it once briefly but i didn't know how this time. Fortunately i picked it up pretty fast and produced my first ever piece of work and then exported the normals as a TGA. Then i imported the normal map into Maya and wallah here is the final result, of course i might week the edges of the cross a little more but aside from that its done.

Here is a quick screen grab from within Zbrush itself, unfortunately everything looks nicer in Zbrush then in Maya, in in Zbrush its actual geometry whereas in Maya...its just faked geometry really.
Now dissertation is out of the way \(^_^\) (/^_^)/ i can finally get back on track with these movies properly.

1000 cranes Kanji Credits test

2009-03-11T22:15:00.005Z

This is just a quick test for the Kanji opening credits, im still not entirely sure if anja wants her name written in Japanese order (Tolar Anja) or English order (Anja Tolar).
One will be written above so the entire name is there i suppose.

here is a QUICK 40 second test of how it could look, of course the letters don't write in perfect and generally speaking it isn't really all that compared to how i envision the final piece itself (but hell i have the entire Easter to work on those opening credits).

Another thing i worked on for half an hour today was the Gravestone that tasha sent me a while back.
The polly was high compared to what we needed so i cut it down by over half and showed chris and he said its perfectly fine now (best thing is...it looks identicle in shape to before, not a loss of detail at all).
Here is my one (The edited lower poly version) on the LEFT and Natasha's Original on the right (original version).

Right now im subdividing it a few billion times so i can create a nice dented weathered look to it, it should be okei i Hope, that's the plan at least.

Lack of updates

2009-03-05T10:24:00.000Z

Well currently i have a lack of updates due to the fact that im working on finishing and perfecting my dissertation.
On a side note ive changed jobs in anja's movie, and im now working on particles and texturing for her as opposed to modeling like before.

Going to also lend a quick hand to 'THE RIDE' movie by helping jake with animated textures and particles for the movie, his work so far is really nice though ^_^.

Baby tests Luisa

2009-03-02T16:40:00.004Z

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All different tests for the main character, i think in some he looks alright and in others he doesnt, I think he should be created PURELY with shaders though, perhaps a moving textures as if he was made of some kind of force would be cool, but im not sure right now.

Tree tests

2009-03-01T16:49:00.002Z

Well i edited the shader as requested and these are the results i came up with, still trying to find time to work on the Ink lines though, havent gotten a solid idea on how to create those yet.
Test version one

Watershader test version 1 from DanElvins on Vimeo.

Test version Two:

watershader test 2 from DanElvins on Vimeo.

Watercolour tree tests version ?

2009-02-26T22:19:00.003Z

Today i met with Luisa at college and we discussed the watercolor shaders mentioned before and she seems to be pretty adamant to use them, which is okei if i can still texture ( ^_^ ).

At the meeting it was decided that i would return home and play about with the chinese ink watercolor shader, unfortunatly though the shaders nodes are all dependant on eachother, i managed to change a few options but i didnt really manage to get any USEABLE results unfortunatly, everything i change either turns the texture to 100% solid red or another color within the ramp, removing the ramp just deleted half the nodes within the texture network.

I really like the results given out by that shader though, im going to try and create the "ink line" on the original watercolor shader, that way its a lot less complicated. Thats my plan at least, but looking at it earlier its a lot of work to try and recreate that node network, it might turn out that using the maya toon shader might be better and more efficient. whilst writing this however i thought of possibly trying to customize the maya toon shader, so that the color IN node is connected to the texture from the tree model, and then possibly itd be a darker edge, unfortunatly im not completely sure, maybe that compiled with a "//////" type texture for the transparency might work too, then it gives it that undefined edge that paintings have, howeve in theory this seems to work (albiet with afew unkown problems) but i dont expect it to work in practice at all but il try hard to customize the effect of the maya toon ouline.

For now i edited the simpler watercolour shader network to create this result, its not perfect and i need to set to th reflections a little lower i think but its a good start and personally i really like the result.

Texturing Brigade ^_^ Maya 2009 Photoshop cs4

2009-02-26T13:15:00.002Z

Today i continued the textures for the fire hydrant Tasha sent me, unfortunately due to disseration i put off working on this for a while.
But now its finished, well...so long as Chris decides he is happy with it, i think smoothing the model is actually a good idea with this one as its a very curved object anyway.

Though that for once i would upload the UV map itself, its not the best uv layout ever of course, in fact its actually not very good for once, usually im really detailed, but this model had some unusual topology but i worked my way around it anyways. Despite some unusual topology in one or 2 place the model itself still looks nice ^_^ as the topology doesnt really effect how it looks, just how the wireframe looks really.

Texturing the Tree

2009-02-25T22:48:00.003Z

I already stated that i was texturing the butterfly but ive also been texturing the tree, the shader Luisa chose is nice, and i do rather like it...though personally i would prefer not to use it because A: If shaders do all the work then I have no job as a texturer anymore (same goes for Danny Barnard.
B: I'm not really big on the idea of using someone else's shader or work unless its HIGHLY edited until its basically mine...i wouldn't call editing the colors on someones pre-made shader EDITING as such...though i suppose that's what the shader was really made for, for people to edit slightly and use themselves, I might try my hand at making my own watercolor shader that still incorporates the use of textures though and see what i can come up with. Who knows maybe il come up with something nice.

Anyways here are some test texture's and layouts for the tree itself.

Texturing The Butterfly

2009-02-25T22:23:00.003Z

1000 flowers Maya Modelling

2009-02-21T15:00:00.004Z

Today i started work on the second version of Anja's flowers for the scene she requested me to do. The original flowers were SO BAD i don't actually want to show them on my blog at all...so now im remaking the flowers using NURBS and the lattice tool (ive never used it before its actually kinda cool i suppose.
Below is a view port shot of the model in progress (i have 3 as i experiment differently on each one.

Below are the sketches anja did for me, to show the differences between her origami flower and the origami flower named "karusage".

These images are the flower anja has used as reference for her sketch, though she has changed a few small things, instead of being a Bunch of flowers its only 1 individual flower now.

Texturing the HYDRANT, Photoshop CS4 and Maya 2009

2009-02-21T14:49:00.002Z

Today i started texturing the fire hydrant model that Natasha sent me a few days ago, I would have started earlier but i was really enjoying the water tests, but seeing as those are done now and im happy enough with the results its onto texturing the objects and then applying the water to them if need be. (I'll have 2 separate files, 1 for the rain scenes and 1 for the dry scenes).
The texture so far was maybe 15-40 minutes in photoshop, 5 minutes where i made a huge mistake overwriting the original texture file and having to create it again from memory which wasn't fun to say the least.
This is really just to show the work is actually being done, im back on dissertation full time again now so Blog updates might be a little slim, sorry.

Renders

2009-02-19T10:47:00.005Z

Righ this is the render i mentioned last night, unfortunately i noticed a huge problem with it just now, but after 4 hours of rendering im not about to fix it, the problem being that one of the sides of the cube the water runs UPWARD instead of downward, not sure how i managed this nasty little mistake but il post it once its fixed. FOr now il post this version and then later il post an animation of just the water flowing down, that way you can see the full seamless animations ^_^.

Final render

2009-02-18T22:56:00.005Z

This render is just over a day old now but i forgot to post it when i had the chance, its another render of water flowing down an object, it looks better then the test i posted the other day.

I only mapped ONE (side) face of this test, the face (side) on the LEFT, so that's why the face (side) on the right looks like a horrific Frankenstein extra.
The displacement maps on this are a little strong possibly, definitely on that RIGHT side(face) but aside from that this test came out rather nicely i think.Looks like real water almost.

Waterfalls with maya, Texturing like fire.

2009-02-18T22:19:00.007Z

Continuing on with the water tests ive been doing recently I began studying video games and how Rain effects are created in real time environments. Thinking that if i can figure out how water and fluids are done with engines such as UNREAL 3 then i can find a more CPU efficient way of making water in Maya, as previously i had been using realflow meshes but soon realized i was going to have to turn those meshes into rendered textures as realflow exported meshes are simply TOO HIGH POLY for Maya to handle properly all the time, render times take forever and its simply not time efficient for the movie's deadlines. unfortunately.
Luckily for me i managed to study the water within Bioshock (A game i personally am not too fond of but graphically its awesome), the water within Bioshock is truly beautiful and well done. If stared at carefully like i did then you can see where things are tiled and where things don't flow naturally, but its like that with any game and any movie, if you "over study" something then you will find flaws, its unavoidable. After studying the Bioshock water i noticed that most of it isn't fluid effects of particles at all (I mean I already knew this but i wasn't sure HOW they made the textures so perfectly) Its infact just lots of really nice Bump mapping.

Though right now im a little unsure and trying to figure out how to do Bump mapping of the object itself and then another Bump map ontop of that for the water Bump map, I havent thought of anything just yet aside from possibly layered textures, or using Normal maps for the objects and bumps for the fluids only.

Here are some tests ive been doing for the past few hours, Nothing amazing but chris seems damned impressed (though he is often impressed so im unsure if its "more impressed" or "less impressed" but still slightly impressed recently. Im glad he seems to be on my side with the water stuff, and im glad he understands that its not a FAST job as simulations and renders take a very long time to complete, so even a test can take several hours until me or Director Chris are able to view it.

Render 1:
This is the final render actually, it looks rather nice but as its a still shot its not possible to see the fluids in motion, but i promise they do move ^_^.
This is the final result from the previous few tests, its not too much reflection and not too little refraction either. The most realistic of the bunch i think.

Render 2:
This test was... a failure, I was testing to see if me plugging something into the reflection made a difference...and well...It did...a big one, a big nasty colourful one. Now i know never to make that mistake again, still i think it is rather nice at the same time, something about the colours i think.
Just thought id show a little trial and error.

Render 3:
This render was nice, i like it but i think that it looks a little more like STILL frozen water, its too clean looking, the water reflectivity is set too high so i had to lower it down for the tests you see above, i tried to rectify tihs mistake with the render further below but il talk about that down there.

Render 4: This render was nice, But the rocks look asif they were wet some time ago and are now mostly dry, the water doesnt look asthough its still flowing at all, and the effect of running water was completely destroyed in this render, still i think it looks kinda nice. Im not too pleased with it though, but i spent a few hours on it so im rather attached to it to say the least.

The image below is a shot from my Bioshock research, it shows that its mainly specular and reflection mapping that gives the illusion of water, this isnt the best example but unfortunatly it was the best i was able to find, its still amazing though, thy must have some very talented texture artists on board, i would love to be as good as this but i have to try a lot harder, and put many more hours and heart into my works.

Maya Dynamics and Particles Integrated with Real flow

2009-02-17T18:34:00.006Z

Here is the video i forgot to upload a few weeks back, it shows the integration of the texture i previously made placed into maya, and no its not seemless at all it needs a fair bit of work actually, but i cant really do that until the final LAND has been created, otherwise im just gonna have to keep editing and changing it again in the future.

Poster designs

2009-02-17T10:55:00.005Z

Just uploading these to show someone at college, they are NOT my work, i repeat NOT my work.

Maya 2008 Real flow integration, Photoshop CS4 for the win

2009-02-17T10:21:00.005Z

As you know for the past few weeks ive been texturing and doing physics and dynamics and fluid tests for JUNK FOOD. I also modeled the stuff Luisa asked for me but that's not important as this is a JUNK FOOD post.

After all this time doing fluid tests I thought that i might try an alternative method, one thats much less CPU intensive, so i tried specular maps along with bump maps for them within maya, just practiced on a cube, it looks nice actually and Mr Harrison was most impressed.Still i have a lot of work to do, Right now im maping an animatedWetmap Texture to go onto objects within maya.It animates down so it should be fine and SHOULD work fine, I might speak to someone at college about a slightly betterway to do things as the specular map looks nice but you can tell its a map (or maybe thats just me because i know how i made it).

This tes is made purely in Realflow (the fluid i mean) then rendered on an object in maya, Came out looking okei but its not "drippy" enough i dont think, Doesnt look to realistic.Oh well back to the drawing board for that i suppose.

This is a floor texture that ive completely forgotten to upload until just now.Sorry about the wait,

This strange looking mess below is what i used in maya to create the waterfalling effect on the cube, I just plugged a black and white version of this into the Specularity and this into the Bump (I tried plugging it into the Dissplacement but erm...that was terribly ugly.

Sophie Testing

2009-02-16T11:12:00.001Z

I spent last night rendering water in Maya (which took...HOURS for 200 frames...in mental ray) and whilst doing that i also began testing a few quick things on Sophie.

I added lips, WHICH didn't look so real, they were too plain and didnt have any creases, so i researched into lips a little and added creases onto my texture, which still didnt fit so i enlarged shaped copied and pasted and resketched it several times.
Here are some snapshots of the results as they went. (not nessesarilly in order though).

As you can see i quickly added some cheap freckles to Sophie, they werent there in the original sketch but i thought the face texture might be too plain otherwise.

Tree complete

2009-02-12T23:23:00.004Z

Well ive finished the final stage of the tree in Full 3d and done a quick MOCK texture for it.
I still have to do the 1st 2 stage of the tree's unfortunatly, but i figured out a slightly faster method of building tree's.

I'm still unable to think of a way to ANIMATE the tree's...
Blend shapes wont work on these Tree's obviously so im not sure what to do actually, there isn't a MORPH option in Maya, il see what i can pull out with the deformers in maya, hopefully something is possible.

Anyways here is what i have so far.

Thats all for now.
Wait for the next blog update and i might have something interesting...then again..I might not...

Dan

Modelling the Tree's still.

2009-02-12T14:51:00.002Z

Well Luisa didn't like the tree's from before as i said, after saying she wants 2D things she noticed that 2D doesn't look so good, so im making the tree more 3d for her.
Which is simple and difficult at the same time...

at one point making a 3d tree is simple so long as i know whats on each side and whatnot, but this time i have 1 front on sketch to work from, which proves rather difficult, though her sketch seems to show things that are further back so i should be okei for now at least.
Our groups getting along fine recently, works being done rather fast which is great, people are modeling out of 6000 objects to make 1 simple thing but aside from that all is great ^_^.

Danny has completed his tasks so far as i know, i think he will probably go onto texturing it soon too which is awesome, as soon as im done with these tree models i will begin texturing them too ^_^.

Tree Models finished

2009-02-06T15:41:00.005Z

I've just officially finished the models for the Tree's now i just have to Texture them, though im a little unsure if luisa wants the Curved bits from her sketches in here too...
Here is a sketch, as you can see the 2nd and 3rd tree have Strange curves on them, representing bushy parts of the Tree's Im not sure if she wants these to be ON TOP of if she wants these to be shown as Part of the model, They will not be particularly hard to implement, I just dont want to add them the wrong way is all, for now i will add them to the texture, Using her sketch as a base to texture with so i know where the curves and everything are then I will apply it to the models, but im not sure if this is exactly how she wants them. I will email her and ask her now.

Here is my model of all 3 tree's they are to scale and they arent 100% IDENTICLE to the original sketches but they are as close as modelling can get unless i take days and days to do it.
Im going to curve it all a little more though, and possible smooth it and probably also normalize the Vertice's to more comfortable positions.

2.5d Trees, Maya 2009

2009-02-06T14:35:00.003Z

Well i think that this is what Luisa wants for the tree's, She said 2D and she specified it to me so im pretty sure this is what she means.But im not 100% how animating through these 3 tree's will work actually...I might do a blend test to see it.

Here are the models so far, They aren't smoothed, they are still in the "straight after modeled" stage and they don't look too fantastic, But the shapes come across rather nicely i think, I mean you can tell one of them is a tree:P

Raindrop puddle (Maya Fluids, RealFlow Dynamics,Mental Ray)

2009-02-01T17:08:00.005Z

I continued to work on the rain, Chris and everyone else said that the rain didn't look too fluid like, the ripples looked as though they were made in Honey apparently, so i went and simulated it all again, turning down the viscosity of the fluid and changing a few other little attributes.

Here is a playblast from Maya from a different angle so that you can see that the ripples are infact fully 3d as are the splashes.

The video was rendered in mental ray and is 200 frames in total, though only possibly 30 frames actually contain ripples, the rest of the frames just show the ripples dispersing and the water slowly coming to a stop.

Dynamically wet, (Real Flow, Maya 2009, After effects, Particles, Dynamics)

2009-01-28T13:54:00.005Z

As i said before ive spent the past few days doing water tests for Chris and finally i have some nice results, Ive showed them to the group and everyone APPEARS satisfied with it so far (/^_^)/.

I could do with fixing one or 2 things i think but overall i think its come out alright.

This is a topdown shot just to see how it looks from above.

The following video is perspective shot within Maya, this is just to show the splashes a little better.

The next video is the top down view thrown into after effects and edited and rotated to make it cover an area Properly, this works fine with a lambert...but im not sure how well it will work once the caustics and whatnot get added...not that caustics are particularly evident in a normal sized puddle.

Publish Post

As you can see in this video it is pretty seamless (or at least it is to ME), but i still need to do something so it doesn't appear so symmetrical, as raindrops don't follow a particular pattern really, they just land in a random order, so im going to play about with fixing this up a little now i suppose.

1000 cranes UPDATE

2009-01-27T12:03:00.004Z

Im just kinda posting this here for the talk with Keiron today so he can see what work ive done since last week on Anja's movie...which isn't much as currently these are kinda just placeholders, decided last night to use the paint geometry tool to copy these over as right now for some reason ive been placing them all manually...which is very time consuming (I dont know why i didnt think of other ways of doing things...).I still have to add the particles for the flower Petals as she runs by as i havent done that yet as realflows been playing up and ive been doing things for Chris too.

But il speak to anja see if she actually wants Particles in there anyways, I think a little animation makes sense really...I mean...the world isnt ever still...things are always moving just sometimes you dont notice it.

Side view, not particularly well modelled at all but as i said Place Holders, the entire scene is viewed from above anyways so polycount matters very little.

Ripples, splashes and Rain (Realflow Particle Effects)

2009-01-27T10:38:00.005Z

As i said before ive recently been learning REALFLOW for the 3rd year as its an amazing program, Ive been trying to figure out the best way to create rain in Realflow for the past few days, ive done about 7 tests (3 of which crashed and became corrupt) and most of them seem to work.But they're all a little CPU intensive, even in maya once exported they slow things down a bit. For now ive managed to find a nice little work around in Realflow for creating ripples and splashes within a puddle (as if a raindrop was to land in a puddle). So far its only 1 drop of water but i can clone the drop with realflow BINARY LOADER (binary loaders use cached data and duplicate it so it doesnt need to simulate the data again as its pre-recorded as such).
Ive enclosed a screenshot of the raindrop in the air, and then the raindrop touching the water, and the final shot is the water rippling ect, Il export from realflow later on to show the final results of course, but due to several million errors within realflow its taken a longtime to get this far, eventhough i had results 2 days ago realflow started filling objects with particles along the wrong axis, and it was undo-able even when i created a new scene, but i seem to have found a way around it by constantly changing and saving particle initial states for the puddle itself.

Raindrop about to hit the water just to show the ammount of particles in the scene really, the resolution is currently set to one but i might possibly change it to 2-4 but this will greatly decrease simulation time.
And the ripple itself being created, once exported to maya and turned into a MESH this should look really nice i believe.

I will soon start work on the other dynamics for Junk food.

Land Formation New, Realflow 4 Maya 2009 Plugin Texture Fluids

2009-01-21T19:41:00.004Z

New Land Formation tests, Recently ive begun using REALFLOW 4 for both Luisa's project and Chris Harrison's project, the program turned out to be awesome, I can do some fantastic stuff such as great a man out of bugs (i can replace the particles with geometry like in Maya) and many other things that for whatever reason i wasn't expecting to find in a program so famous purely for its fluid effects.

Here is something i made for Luisa, the simulation took ages and its NOT final, Its just a test, i know particles overflow but thats because i didnt add a volume daemon on RealFlow so the particles dont die, but its simple to set it to die the instant they leave the object, that way nothing confusing happens, Also on my to do list is to change the viscosity of the fluid so it flows a little more smooth, right now it looks a tad Lumpy, its extreemly high poly right now unfortunatly, But im going to get some new ram this week so the extra 2 gig of ram should greatly speed up the simulations in realflow, I quickly applied the texture of the land i made a while back as a test to see how it looks and for a test its perfectly fine, needs a little tweeking but essentially its perfectly okei so far as i can tell.

I hope Luisa is as pleased with these results as i am.

Tree Textures

2009-01-14T12:46:00.004Z

Well yesterday i started playing about texturing the tree for Luisa, I showed the tree at college to the group and they seemed to like it.So now texturing the tree was the next thing on the list, I made another texture and applied it to the tree along with a few older ones, just as test too see how it'd all look, fortunately some of the tests look nice and others look bad, but thats to be expected really.
Here are the tests along with 1 of the textures itself (watermarked of course).

note: The 1st image is the most successful test and i even added some slight toon lines just to see how they look, they appear to add a little depth so i think i might keep them unless Luisa states otherwise.

This is the 1st test where i just applied a texture, its not mapped or anything i just simply applied to see how it might look.
Same wit this one here, i just duplicated the amount of times i want the texture to wrap arround the tree and this is the effect that came out.Looks like at a distance with a little blur but upclose it just doesnt look nice at all unfortunatly.
This is the texture itself, its still not seemless but im going to fix that with a few photoshop edits (i suppose it would have been better for me to originally PAINT a seamless texture but thats difficult, it works out faster to fix it afterwards so thats what im doing now).
Thats all
Dan

3D tyre Textures

2009-01-12T20:06:00.003Z

As you already saw ive finished Modeling the Tyre, and here i just edited and tweaked a few bits of the Tyre model to make it a little bit of a nicer shape, but the main thing that i added was textures.

The model contains a total of 2 materials, a Lambert tweaked to have a rubber effect for the tyre itself and an anisotropic material for the inner tyre (sorry im not much into cars so i dont know the names for many of these parts.).

Dan

Stylized Tree Model in Maya 2009 (Organic, Stylised)

2009-01-10T00:03:00.003Z

I already posted here some tree tests in Maya, and i posted a half made tree before i left for Poland as well, Well here are the final results, I was going to make loads of little leaves with alpha maps and fancy things but this just looked kinda nice i thought.

I'm going to send these to Luisa, yes i know that the tree tops are basically just sphere's but it looks nice it has a modeling style very similar to Luisa's artwork style, and for this movie, my textures have to try hard to emulate her style so i think this is rather nice, the shape is simple, you can tell what it is instantly, its not fancy or overcomplicated or anything similar but its whats best on the eye really, it fits the style of the movie nicely i think, Once ive textured it il upload a textured version, probably within the next day or 2.

That's all from me for today its just gone 12 and im still running on Polish time (so thats 1 hour ahead for me thus making it 1am), and im rather tired so il just work and try to upload some things tomorrow in the day.

Dan

3D tire/tyre model Maya 2009

2009-01-09T19:44:00.002Z

Well i returned from Poland yesterday and here is the fruits of my work since i returned, its a low poly tyre/tire model, made in Maya 2009 With Polygons.
Its nothing special but once ive made the normal map and Bump maps and textured it it should be perfect,textures make the model, the model doesnt make the textures.

Quick: Render (Jus tto check incase any normals freaked out and whatnot.

Screencapture:
These are for Junk Food Film.

3D Tree model/Maya 2009

2008-12-27T20:36:00.002Z

Here is a tree ive modelled for Luisa, seeing as she wants a nice stylized look and so far all the tree's have been rather realistically proportioned ive modelled this, its not complete yet, this is only the base of the tree, i still need to add the leaves and things but so far its coming along nicely.

Render:

Screencapture:

3D movies, Research

2008-12-26T13:42:00.004Z

Here is a video I found online called "Lame De Zoe", i dont know who its by unfortunatly, it was on a random webpage, but if i find the author il say straight away as this is a great little piece of artwork.

Its just a little film, but the style blew me away, its really nice and simple and cute looking, a perfect refference for Luisa's movie "the Noth Star"

Particle Rain Effects in 3D In Maya

2008-12-20T11:57:00.006Z

Here is a test i did with particle effects for rain last night, i think it came out rather nicely for once too, I would like if someone modeled an entire scene and sent it to me though...then i can apply different rebounds for different objects, for example a girls hair wont rebound the rain nearly as much as a sheet of tinfoil, or an umbrella.

Here is a video rendered in maya hardware of the particles and the rain hitting the land.

I realise this video is terrible quality so ive uploaded to youtube aswell.
Here is the youtube link

Here is a quick screen grab

Hand Painted Textures/Leaf/Tree/Bush/Corel Painter X

2008-12-19T16:02:00.002Z

Okei here are some more textures done for Luisa's movie "the North Star", unfortunatly these are so good as for some reason my painter X is freaking out so instead i just used Painter Essentials 3 that came free with my tablet, so due to the lack of features and different brushes this isnt as good as i had hoped.

Anyways here they are 3 brand spanking new Textures.

Maya Gear/ Cog Bump Mapping/Textures

2008-12-17T19:30:00.005Z

Well 1st off im going to say that the inspiration to create this random Cog is because ive been playing GEARS OF WAR 2 so much recently, and of course its metallic so its bound to be laying about, after falling out of whatever else.

Anyways here are a few screen shots of the Cog and The renders with different Textures.

This 1st image is a quick oil painting i did in PAINTER X, its not ORIGINAL its based off of an original texture which il upload at a later time, so whoever took that photographic texture deserves credit aswell as me, i just repainted it with OILS so it had a few morebumps and dents here and there, but thats it.
Texture 1 Render
Texture 1 render with Bump Map plugged in
The cog itself with no textures in the maya perspective View port.

Maya 2009 Fully textured renders

2008-12-17T19:17:00.003Z

Here is the same washing machine as i posted earlier on, though now ive greatly reduced the poly count,(poly count should be only as high as needed, otherwise it will greatly increase the render time of the final production shots).

The Textures have been added now and then reworked to resemble the correct materials, im using an Anisotropic shader for the washing Machine as that is the best render for metallic objects such as cars so i figured it would work well for a metallic washing machine as well.
Though the washing machine is, of course in a pretty beaten up state so i had to apply a Bump map (which Chris Harrison gave me a quick hand on as for some reason it wasn't working on my Maya 2009 until i restarted the PC), and dirty the object up a little using some more textures and some displacement.

overall i think the final Result came out nice.

The render was creating using Maya 2009 with Mental Ray and Final Gathering set to Production Quality. (I WAS yet to really play about with Final Gathering, and since other people in the class are attempting to cover up their work with fancy renders i figured id do the same, even though it doesn't need it.)

1963 Washing Machine In Maya

2008-12-16T23:14:00.003Z

I know its Christmas Period and most people probably aren't working on their movies and they're taking a well earned break...well...Not me...i don't actually take breaks very often.

Spending the entire Christmas working on textures for Luisa's "the North Star" star movie, and creating textures and models for Chris Harrison's "Junk Food" movie, aside from that im just programming a new game design i have in mind recently, and trying to do dissertation, and learn another language all at once, its pretty stressful, but if it gets me a good grade il do whatever i need to do.

Here is a washing machine from 1963 that i made for Chris using some reference Photos, im going to create some textures for the machine in the morning and then apply them and upload the new texture results as well, but until there here is something small, im planning to create between 5 and 10 pieces of Junk for the movie, and try to design a map of the world aswell.

Reference Pictures:

Adobe After effects - 2nd animatic

2008-12-04T23:41:00.006Z

Here is my 2nd animatic, its a little more sketchy then the 1st but i think its adequate enough for the presentation tomorrow.
This took me around a day in Adobe after effects CS4(Creative Suit), the new features of Adobe After Effects CS4 are very useful to me and my work flow is much faster compared to when using Adobe After Effects cs3(Creative Suit 3 ).

Quick update for Anja In Painter X

2008-12-04T16:25:00.004Z

I threw the original poster that i created for anja into PAINTER X and use the AMAZING realbrisle feature to create the following effect, i painted over the original image so its not as amazing as it might sound, but the final result does look rather interesting.

And this image is just an edited version of the original crane texture, i was going for a watercolour feel...but painted decided to add flow to the paint which gave the image a nice texture but it ruined my original idea.

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro made Storyboard

2008-12-03T21:04:00.008Z

Well ive just finished doing the new storyboards, not EXACTLY the same as Memets, as i interpreted certain bits my own way, and changed some bits because im really bad at drawing in perspective angles.
Storyboard starts from top to bottom.

Junk Food Film: Group Update

2008-12-02T20:54:00.006Z

The group had a talk the other day and Chris asked us all what we want to do for Friday(summitive hand in date), I was already working on my own animatic so I told Chris I'd carry on with that, Louis is working on his animatic and Tasha and Memet decided not to work on their animatics and instead do concept work to fill up more of their concept portfolio.

So me and Chris said we would take over Tasha and Memets jobs with storyboarding and animatic'ing for Friday as otherwise things wont get done, so those 2 are working on concepts (Checked their blogs 5 minutes ago and the concept work is awesome, nice and fitting with the movie so thats fantastic for them and the rest of us), and me and Chris are redrawing all their thumbnails and making them into final storyboard quality for the animatic.

Of course my work doesn't look as good as some others but im trying for everyone and it seems to be paying off in some shots...not so much in some others, but im going to keep trying.

So basically ive got a lot of work cut out for me... 1 more entire storyboarding process and 1 more animatic, but im going to use the storyboard as the animatic and just add a few effects here and there.

Dan

Adobe After Effects: Finished Danimatic

2008-12-02T20:53:00.006Z

Last night i managed to finish MY OWN entire animatic which im rather happy about of course.
Here is the animatic so far.
This is my animatic, I'll post up the animatic i did for Tasha as soon as its finished, im still storyboarding at the moment, her concept work on her blog is fantastic, its great to have such talented people on board this Project

Corel Painter X Chalk Concept artwork

2008-12-01T22:47:00.007Z

I finally finished all of my OWN animatic, i still have to Do either Tasha Or Memets animatics but i need to speak to Chris tomorrow morning about who is gonna do who's, so neither of us take too much work compared to the other person.

So after the finished animatic i rewarded myself for 15 minutes finishing off a sketch ive been doing over the past several days in chalk for Chris, its not my own work, its my impression of Chris's piece but in chalk, I used painted X and chalk and then added water to my chalk (something i was surprised worked so well), then added some blur to cover up the mess i made of the sky so no one notices it, anyways here is the piece of work.

The original Piece is on Chris's Blog i recommend anyone see it as its awesome.

Been learning a lot of new things in Painter X, there are a bunch of windows and tools im afraid to touch as A: i might ruin my image and B: my version of painter on this PC is a little temper mental, i think it has something to do with my Graphics card.

Dan

(Image took me around 6 days on and off, and thats slow as hell eventhough it came out looking alright it doesn't hold a candle to the original, BUT i learned to use the chalk and add water tools a hell of a lot more...

Team work at its best

2008-12-01T15:00:00.006Z

Today i finished coloring a scene for the animatic that i drew way back for my storyboard, unfortunately i didn't draw in a face as thats my worst skill..(faces).

So i gave the piece of work in question to Chris (Mr Caoh) Harrison to add the face for me, so he just drew a face on top of my original sketch, he also added some goggles replacing my original headband idea and then redrew the scarf i did.

Updated collaborated version above
My original less detailed version above

Overall i think it was a fantastic collaboration, and i only wish i had the skills my director shows in every sketch, but il keep working to that level even if Its unreachable.

Dan

Corel Painter X Oil paintings

2008-12-01T14:48:00.012Z

For the past week ive been working solid on things for Chris really, and part time working on Luisa's project, created the textures as shown below and decided that i didn't have any paintings of the scene so i whipped up something in oil color and something in watercolor, alas my oil color didn't come out nearly as well as planned and no matter how much i played with the strokes moving them about virtually with the Blend tool and the Blend knife nothing seemed to make a difference... instead its made many of my strokes fly off in different directions.

Oh and before i forget here is a quick render from Maya using my textures, unfortunately its not 1% as good as i wanted it, i might have to try playing with some tools in Maya instead...OR possibly design a new shape for the tree with a real canopy, much similar to the sketches i had before.

I put it onto Luisa's storyboard in the hope it might look nicer, the tree shape is fine though, but the watercolor illusion doesn't appear to come across.
But i will keep working, I'm becoming more and more dedicated to my films by the second.

Dan

Adobe After Effects: Animatic on the go

2008-11-30T13:24:00.004Z

The last 2 days ive been working on the animatic, redoing up sketches and using images and tweaking everything really, But this is what i have so far, of course its barely anything, but this is getting somewhere im 90% through my next scene as well, so im doing around 2 scenes a day if i keep going at this rate.

After every addition i send the stuff to chris and i get hs approval on the work before i go onto something else, if a director isnt please...well...it can make things extremely difficult.

Dan

Creating Leaf Tree Textures part 2

2008-11-27T21:51:00.009Z

So this week ive been working more on watercolor textures for Luisa, all these tests are done using watercolors except one (i will mark the one even though its kind of obvious) which was created using Oils...as i was accidentally using the oil brush whilst painting without realizing and i already painted a fair amount of the bush before noticing and by then i thought it looked rather unique so i figured i should carry on it instead and see how it comes out.

The above test was created using water colour and then added a few highlights to it in Photoshop and then added a filter using Photoshop, the background in all 3 files is grey as for some reason my background came out grey and its a seperate layer so it makes no difference, i just forgot to remove the background layer in the upload...so the filter also applied to the layer behind as im still new to how layers work in Painter and i just painted on all layers.

This image came out much clearer and actually i rather like the lack of detail within this one, it looks simple enough..you wouldn't think i spent ages perfecting this one and changing the contrast back and forth again and again but it came out rather nicely i think, as i said before the background is white but after the other 2 tests i worked out how to use layers in painter and only painted what i wanted.

This image was painted using the oil imitation brush in Painter, with this test i really started to learn how to imitate Brush strokes within the painting, turns out its a magical new feature of painter that i just didn't look into before called "real strokes", its cool though, it simulates the bristles of brushes realistically, and this is the 1st time ive ever used oils before, and it added highlights to the edge of my strokes which was really nice actually, im starting to like some of the paintings i do... even if each one does take me hours...this one here took me around 2 hours because im just slow with painting, but i am getting gradually faster as times goes by and as i work more.

Research

2008-11-27T09:54:00.004Z

Last night i finished collating and creating the Music reference CD for the 1000 cranes sound designer, whilst writing the CD i searched through my CD's and found the "1 liter no namida"(one liter of tears) Soundtrack.
The show is similar to Anja's movie in the way that it has a tragic story about a young girl who dies from a serious disease (though in this case its not Hiroshima or radiation related and its not Leukemia either), the drama was aired in 2005 and i watched it whilst it showed in Japanese television.

The show is truly heartbreaking and tear jerking and i actually struggle to watch the Music video's people have created for the show.

More information on the Drama series can be found here

Here is one such clip is this one below.

Creating a Tree Texture in Maya and Painter X

2008-11-24T21:46:00.009Z

So...i started texturing the tree Charlie sent me and Yeah...the leaves don't seem as though they'll be too hard..But the bark...thats where most of the Problem seems to lie, I cant seem to get it looking nice...so far ive only used the default types of mapping, but il go onto mapping each part of the tree individually when it comes to the final model, so far the tree, unlike the water and the land tests, doesn't look very watercolor at all, in fact it doesn't even look particularly painted so far, I might actually need someone else's help with the texturing of the watercolor tree, it seems to be the most difficult thing ive textured so far this year...

Here are the textures and the tree's they've been applied to, the tree was just a quick job in Maya,smoothed nicely though.but i don't like that it looks similar to a default paint effects tree...because it sure as hell isn't a default tree.I made a default tree and spend the next 15-20 minutes rotating adding branches removing branches adding leaves removing leave changing the shape, making the tree pend more in one direction.

The following few images are refferences images i searched for online, il update soon with the names of the images and the artists involved in painting them, but it seems generally they are just made by casual painters as opposed to professional's.
The final image is a render of the tree itself.as you can see it didn't come out quite the way i envisioned it.

Creating Tree Texture/ Creating Leaf Textures In Maya and Painter Part 1

2008-11-21T18:03:00.008Z

The following images are tree's i did for Luisa, i didnt create the tree SHAPE the tree shape is registered to Media Molecule and Little Big Planet, i just used it as a base to tryout different texturing styles.

I know charlie is making a tree and it looks pretty cool and stuff and im happy for him to test things out as thats what were supposed to do, but i havent had a chance to speak to charlie or Luisa all week because i dont think the tree style is right for the movie, Luisa's work is very stylised and charlies tree (although its good) its not stylised towards her art style, i can texture it to look stylised but i cant change the shape of it at all, it will still keep its perfectly realistic proportions (which the rest of the movie doesnt share), i think that Luisa's movie tree style would be more like the african tree's from Lionking that are in the background.

These are what i mean.

This tree shape is from Little Big planet bit its very stylised and simple like Luisa's style of artwork for the movie and i decided to test out a few texture styles, i will make a tree n 3d within the next day or so, but i think that to have a tree where you cant see 100 leaves is the best idea, it will take forever to model a tree with many many leaves and take long to texture them too, so i think a very stylised tree is best, plus...this way nobody can cheat and use a default maya tree they made in 10 seconds either (note:Nobody has done this so far as i know and i dont expect anybody to do it either...).

Dan out

Junk Puppets

2008-11-21T17:41:00.004Z

Today i started doing some tests for the animatic, Last night Chris was panicking a bit about the deadline being in 2 weeks and we currently dont have an animatic in the making...or even the start of how we want an animatic to be.So i came up with this quick test for the scene where the robot is digging cut the arms off and such and threw it into after effects, from here i just move the individual parts about to create an quick animation, its not impressive and its not groundbreaking either, its been done a thousand times in old cartoons and Cheep tv shows, but it works and i think its the most time saving process instead of trying to actual model and animate bits here and there.Without further ado here is the quick video.

I showed chris the video and he loved it (not sure why...but he was amused to say the least), but after speaking with chris for several minute si suggested to him that An animatic is a rough in a way, its not ment to look PROFESSIONAL, its there for the pacing and timing of the movie,its prety much a slightly improved storyboard if you ask me.

So i spoke to chris about it and he said that he thinks my idea could save a lot of time,(time we dont have much of) i suggested to chris to make his robot as a PSD with each different body part being a seperate layer.

Essentially the PSD would be a Puppet, able to be animated and moved about with ease, this will greatly save time on the final piece i think, as once i have the file im able to quickly create the animatic in after effects without too much hastle and problems.

So yeah its been a rather productive day id say, some good idea generation done, i cleaned up a few storyboards as requested by our producer Alireza.

Dan out

Animated Texture in Adobe After Effects

2008-11-09T14:42:00.004Z

This is just a basic test i did this morning using a 2D fluid container within maya and then rendering the 2d fluid out and adding it as a luma Matt in after effects and then creating a video and adding the video into maya as a texture file, of course if i remember how to plug in a fluid as a texture in maya then il be able to make it look 100 times better.

This is the original after effects exported AVI which i then plugged into MAYA 8.5 as a texture for the land base i created.

Its not perfect but it shows whats possible and makes it easier for Luisa to decide what kind of effects she likes and she said she likes this and it looks nice, though i might still try another few tests and see what i can make.
I created this animated texture in Adobe after effects and exported the file out as a Tif sequence to be read by Maya 8.5 with ALPHA.

My storyboards

2008-11-04T09:20:00.005Z

These are the storyboards so far, il upload more as i do them, some are colored some are not,...some are bad others aren't...drawing from my mind isn't exactly my strong point sorry guys, il retouch them though see if i can make them look a little nicer.

Particle Animation using Curves in Maya

2008-11-03T23:03:00.009Z

Here are some more tests for ways to show the texture covering the Land, I still have one or 2 idea's but I'm yet to actually use those ideas but im pretty confident they should work (then again...i was pretty confident about the fluids too...and the sprites idea...and they failed...).

This 1st image below is from a test using particles with the "spheres" option turned on (this means that the particles look like polygon spheres of my chosen diameter ) . I used the spheres to stick to the land (which i set the opacity to 100%) and after 265 frames the green spheres finished the particle animation and this render is the final result, its not exactly the way i wanted it but it does kinda layout the shape of the land.This st video is of a fluid test that failed horribly and the 2nd video is a test i did in after effects with paint splatter.

Unfortunately im unable to replicate this effect LARGER...though im currently working on a way to do this in Maya.

Research Styles

2008-11-03T22:43:00.004Z

I suddenly realized today that i haven't shown any of my research for Luisa's textures, so i thought now about a good time to show them.

I know its a bit backward but sometimes a workman doesn't remember to sign all his papers and hand them in at the correct times.

This 1st image is from Prince of Persia, a video game which is going for an original Hand drawn style of texture work (apparently they're straying away from the Realistic style of Assassins Creed, the style appeals to me personally and I have used this as a basis for my texture creation research.
Another shot from Prince of Persia, this is a character shot but here you can see the detail on the character textures as well as the Background.
This is from the video game "VALKYRIA CHRONICLES" this is more of a traditional hand painted look as opposed to the super sketchy style of Prince of Persia, this is softer where's Prince of Persia is very grainy.

For my textures im trying to get a nice balance of in between these 2 styles.

Geometry using Particles in Maya

2008-10-31T18:00:00.006Z

Here is a quick test, il explain the test soon enough but 1st i wanna test my internet with this one.

Toon Shader Water Color Maya Ocean

2008-10-30T15:42:00.005Z

Well i just found the 1st ever batch render i made of Luisa's water tests, so here it is.
No toon lines or annything though.

Water Colour land texture test in maya

2008-10-28T22:53:00.006Z

Well here we are, i applied the textures in maya,(after maya crashed on me around 4 times) and here are the final results after some fiddling around with a few options, perhaps my next render will also use Depth of field as im very interested in using this tool.

The 1st few renders are just to show the land and its test shape, and the 2nd few renders are to show the land and the sea together in maya, it doesnt look fantastic considering the island has a square base and doesnt act very naturally and also i need to think of a way for the island to act as a boundary so that the water doesnt flow happily THROUGH the island as it currently does, so i guess thats another few days testing and looking at MEL script (as im sure the answer is in the MEL).

I really like the result given out in this render, this render was made by having the Canvas underlay texture from Photoshop, the effect is nice i would like to test a few more times with this aswell.

This is the worst of the 4 tests but i decided to include it to show both the good and the bad testing as not everything produced goes according to plan unfortunately.

Hand Painted GRASS textures in maya, Painter X and Photoshop

2008-10-28T22:47:00.006Z

Well today ive painted a few textures for Luisa's island and added some toon lines and, painting grass proves to be extremely difficult in comparison to when i painted the Ocean.
Here are a few of the textures i painted, and here is one TWICE with an added canvas grain which i applied in photoshop.

I'm now using PAINTER X (10) instead of the default PAINTER 3 ESSENTIALS that came with my Wacom tablet, and i have to say that painter X is truly remarkable, its assortment of watercolor brushes is amazing, and i can even create and customize my own brush shape and everything.

3D Origami Crane Model in Maya

2008-10-28T20:31:00.007Z

Here is a 360 degree rotation of the fully textured crane that Anja has asked me to create for the animatic, I have all the frames rendered with no background so they can be easily superimposed onto any image easily and quickly.
Above is a high quality still from the animation, just to show the likeness to an actual Origami crane.

Here is the animation itself

Refferences:

Toon Shader Water Color Maya Ocean tests

2008-10-28T20:25:00.004Z

Here is a new test of the water, its a little more sketchy looking and ive heightened the quality of this test aswell.
Hope you enjoy