joechalmersanimation-blog

[joechalmersanimation-blog]

A running looping character animation!

[joechalmersanimation-blog]

The result of a lighting experiment in Maya.

[joechalmersanimation-blog]

These are definitely my favourite lighting render tests! The fog really adds something to the scenes! Will definitely have a play with volumetric shapes in maya more often!

[joechalmersanimation-blog]

Few more lighting tests with more of a blue/grey grade. Also experiment with different fog densities.

[joechalmersanimation-blog]

I was given the challenge of lighting this scene in maya. These are a few low resolution renders of the book slope. I did this by setting up a base light using mental ray’s ‘sun and sky’ light. This give a very nice natural light to the scene. These various tests where a result of me making adjustments to the saturation, brightness and colour of the scene and its lighting. I also made use of extra scene lights to shed light on the individual areas of the shot, to highlight them as focal points in the scene. I also introduced a fog effect to the scene to add to the gloomy feel of it and reflect the vast height of the mountain.

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The xgen tool would add more fine detail to the shot without a huge amount of effort. The tool allowed Maya to automatically overlay piles of individual book models over any surface in the scene. Arranging the formation of the xgen books was a little bit difficult because the books often looked a bit too tidy and formal. It took a lot of layering and replacing the xgen books to make it look a lot more rugged and mountainous.

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Here is another scene I was assigned to model, in it’s basic form. I later went on to make use of Maya’s xgen feature to give more detail to the scene.

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Here is another scene I was given to model for the third year film. In this shot they wanted to be able to see the base of the mountain and the grass circling around it behind the character. This was a difficult and confusing shot to model because of the obscure camera angle. However, I think that with the character rig in position, it is much easier to understand the shot.

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In my second year I had an opportunity to work on a third year film. For this film I did mostly 3D environment modelling. Here is an example of one of the scenes I modelled. The direction I was given was to build up a fairly steep surface rising out of the right side of the scene (a foot of a mountain) and then to strategically, yet messily, scatter books over and around it to give the impression of a book avalanche. They wanted the foot of the mountain to appear daunting and overwhelming from the character’s perspective.

I was then asked to position the 3D character rig in the scene to act as a reference guide for the 2D animators. This would help them to draw the character correctly to and scale.

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The finished product (though without additional sound effects).

I feel that our final piece has come together really well and all the 2D and 3D elements seem to compliment each other. However, I feel that our group could have really capitalised on the organisation of the production work. This slip-up definitely cost us a lot of production time and caused the group to cut corners on a few things. Though we had regular weekly meetings, there was definitely a lack of communication from several members of the group about the work they were producing and that also definitely brought the speed of our workflow down a lot. Despite this, I think that the final animated piece is still hugely successful and captures the light-hearted, funny and warm essence of this conversation between a father and son.

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Here is my second piece of 2D clean-up work for this group project.

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I also helped the 2D team of the project with some of the clean-up for our ‘Vision’ character’s shots.

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In other contributions, I designed and coloured the backgrounds for all of the shots of the film. We wanted the backgrounds of our film to reflect on the theme of the boy and his father’s conversation, so I proposed creating Lego texture around the boarders of the screens. These were actually created in Maya so that the Lego texture seem real from the viewer’s perspective. I also used toon shaders on these models to give these nice solid colours. We wanted the colours of these backgrounds to seem warm and representative of classic Lego brick colours, but not overwhelmingly strong and invasive. I think that the warm, almost pastel colours shown above successfully embody the mood and tone of the recorded conversation.

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There is a section in our animation where we show a boy sleeping. To add something more interesting to the scene we wanted to included some sleeping Zs. Here they are in action. Again, I’ve applied a toon shader to fit with the 2D style of our film.

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Here was a rough test I did a while back to see how all the animation in the scene would work together (definitely not final).

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As you can see here, the heart rig is very animatable! I had no trouble with it at all.

[joechalmersanimation-blog]

For another scene in our Listening Project animation we wanted to animate a heart appearing on screen and then fluttering off like a butterfly. After just getting out of a rigging masterclass, I was proposed that this could be done as a 3D animation through Maya! Rigging the heart to move like a butterfly was tricky and took a lot of trial and error with the joint positions, but eventually I got it to work. This is a snapshot of the fully rigged model, equipped with controls for ease of animating.