Saturday 19 May 2012

Have A Look At MY Prezi's!

I've made all my Prezi's I've created so far Public so that anyone can view them; previously I've mentioned the client presentation, client pitch and my graded unit, now you can see the Prezi's I created for them, also you can see my latest Prezi which I created for Aberdeen College's student show which includes the majority of my work which is arranged chronologically.

Student Show Prezi:
http://prezi.com/yeusfksxcj5u/harry-houghton-3d-animation-work-for-aberdeen-colleges-student-show/

CGFX Client Presentation:
http://prezi.com/i97upc-dxn3k/nash-for-cgfx-presentation/

CGFX Client Pitch:
http://prezi.com/xelxi0ulnave/nash-for-cgfx-pitch/

Graded Unit Presentation:
http://prezi.com/wikmovzavtlr/aberdeen-college-hnc-3d-computer-animation-graded-unit-presentation-skateboard-character/

You'll notice that there's not a lot of text in my Prezi's, that's becase I don't think it handles text very well so instead you'll see lots of picture which I instead talk about.

Client Brief Helicopter Animation

After I had rigged the helicopter I began to animate it, in the end I had around 700 frames of animation at 25 frames per second.  Our brief said that our total animation (which also had included still shots and close-ups of certain areas of the helicopter) should be a minimum of 50 seconds and we already had a 10 second introduction featuring an animation which involved the CGFX company logo, so I cut out the first 200 or so frames of our animation so that it wouldn't go on too long (render times were also also something I was concerned about).  Once the animation was complete, I started experimenting with the rener settings - now, I feel as though I have to mention that this was on Tuesday evening and we had to make our presentation (which still hadn't been written) on Thursday, I knew we'd finish on time but I was unsure about how good the video quality would be (I was adament that we needed to include motion blur to really sell our animation).  Thankfully 3ds Max's QuickSilver renderer came to the rescue, allowing us to render at 720p and have really nice glossy reflections, AO, indirect illuination and motion blur with each frame only took approximately two and a half minutes to render.

In total, there were four memebers of the team working on this brief and I had positioned four cameras in the scene, so I saved scenes containing each individual camera and set the timeline to read the frames that the camera had to render and the next day distributed them among my other teammates and got the animation rendered out in a couple of hours.  Another member of the team, Aaron, was also rendering out the helicopter in the HDRI environment with mental ray and the close-ups, which included clay, wireframe and diffuse, with Vray.  After he had rendered out everything, I composited everything together in After Effects and since I was the only one who knew how to use Prezi, I created our presentation which included a lot of rendered stills.

The brief was a lot of fun, but I found communicating and sharing files over the internet to be quite challenging and looking back, we didn't give ourselves any room for error - distributing the scenes for individual rendering worked great but it would've been hard to get it all rendered if all four of us hadn't been doing it.

You can see the final animation here: https://vimeo.com/42083546
Below is a frame from the final composition.

Monday 7 May 2012

Client Brief Rigging

Ultimately I'd like to one day be a rigger, so I put myself forward to be the one who would rig and animate our object, the rig is very simple, other than the landing gear where there's a piston rig, it's just basic linking.  I used spines as control objects to make the scene look a bit more clean and easier to animate.

Cleint Brief Fully Assembled

It was finally time to put all the pieces of the helicopter together and I was pretty nervous, only being in college for one full day and two half days means that you don't get a lot of time to sit with your team members and make sure that everything is to the same standard (I mean that in terms of size), so it came as no surprise when the main rotor blade was about 100 times larger than the main body.  There were further problems to compound the issue; we needed to import our objects into Nick's scene becuase he'd already set up a rig for the landing gear and scaling bones with links and constraints is not advisable, but the rear landing gear was out of proportion with the front and when positioned correctly would touch the ground from in the helicopter.  So I deleted the rig, scaled the objects and put in another rig which solved the problem.  There is an issue of the landing gear properly fitting inside the helicopter when the side and front flaps are closed, but we'll just have to use clever camera trickery to solve that...

(The main rotor was modeled by Aaron, the landing gear was modeled by Nick and the rear rotor was modeled by Scott)




Client Brief Texturing

My plan from the start was to create the helicopter body with nice relaxed UVs and a clone with Planar mapping.  The reason for this was so that I could use Mudbox to paint on the second object and then use Mudbox's 'Transfer Paint Layer' to the first object.  I briefly mentioned this a few weeks ago to the client, CGFX, during our pitch in college and at the time one of the representatives, Graeme Palmer, suggested that I should use Max's 'Render To Texture' feature to transfer a diffuse map from an object with Planar mapping to one with nicer UVs as that was what they used in their work, I tried both methods and the one that Graeme Palmer suggested work best.



Client Brief UVing


It's been a few days since I've updated my blog, UVing wasn't hard, it just took aaaages - in the end I had 179 UV shells all of which had to have map seams manually selected, and then positioning the islands so that they fitted inside the 0-1 square was a bit tricky.  The reason I wanted to make the most of the texture space was because I'm expecting to render out some close up shots and so I'd like the texture to hold up at close range.

Thursday 3 May 2012

Client Brief Update


Finished adding the supporting edges for my helicopter and took some screen shots of my scene using a Skylight for lighting with the Viewport rendering mode set to Realistic with Shadows and Ambient Occlusion turned on.  I'm fairly happy with how it turned out, it gets a bit ugly when you look underneath, I had to create cavities in the helicopter body for the landing gear and adding the extra edges around those areas is what gave me few lumps and bumps.  Anyway, it coming along quite nicely and the next stage is UVing, I'm going to use TexTools for the first time to help, mainly to keep the texel density consistent across the UV shells, I'll use Pelt mapping to create non-distorted UVs.