wakeupanimation-blog

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Conclusion

This was an epic year for me. 

At the beginning of the year, while doing the storyboard of my film, I was not certain if I could really complete what I have planned because of my very limited knowledge in CG. However, instead of staying in comfort zone and escaping from all the problems, I always chose to move forward to challenge myself because I need to learn new knowledge and become more and more strong and professional. I feel really grateful for all the teacher, classmates, friend, family who have encouraged, inspired, taught, and helped me during the whole year.  Without them, my film could never be done. Thank you all.

Evy Huang

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Color Correction

Thanks to my animation instructor, I got some information about the the colour correction facility. Unfortunately, I had no time to do the colour correction before the submission of the final film. However, I will go to CDA to check the colour before the submission for CFF

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Rendering

I actually started to some rendering tests since the beginning of the last week because if I have noticed something wrong on the test rendering images, I still have time to make modifications. 

The final rendering started on Saturday night. I was really exited 

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Lighting

In the beginning of March, I went to visit the 3D class teacher, Stephen Menzies to seek his help. In fact, there are basically four light sources in my set: the moon, two stone lamps and one big lantern. In my mind, the set up of lighting might only take a few hours. Once we finish the setting, I could export the light sources and import them into other scenes. It should be easy to success this task. However, according to the professor, I should work with him to adjust the lighting scene by scene because my characters move in every scene. Their positions, poses and the camera angles change too in every scenes. I needed to pay attention to all different shadows and intensity of the lights.

For example, 

In scene no1, the moon light was extremely strong; the shadow on the character was really sharp and crooked with weird shapes. In this case, I needed to lower the intensity of the light and its incandescence. In order to realize a natural moon light effect, I had to add a little bit blue in the light. Also, I had to increase the shadow rays in order to avoid the sharp shadow, like the one on Ming’s head. 

As I mentioned previously, I had to add shadow rays in order to avoid weird shadows. However, this act sometimes caused a dilemma. Increasing shadow rays would certainly influence the rendering time. For example, in sc26, it took first about 5min to render 1 frame. As we added 20 more shadow rays, the result became very nice. All the sharp shadows became really soft and pale. The only problem is that the rendering time suddenly increased to 22min per frame. 

It took countless tries to find a good balance between light and shadows. Thus, the process became extremely long. Stephen and me could easily use more than 2 hours to only light up 1 scene. Since the first meeting in the beginning of March, we have spent more than 60 hours together to solve different kinds of problems together. I really appreciate Stephen’s help. I learned many new knowledge while working with him. For example, I learnt how to establish fake lights in order to light up the character’s face when main light source are not powerful; I learnt how to diminish or stop casting shadows by adjust settings. 

Every second spent became more and more meaningful. 

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Wake Up Project Budget

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Protools Preparation and Final Mix

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Music Collaboration

I really appreciate the opportunity to join the music collaboration!

In fact, my storyline kept switching back and forth between the dreamland and reality. It was not easy for me to find appropriate music online for free. What I have done before the music collaboration was to cut different clips of three songs and put them together with the animation.

My music composer, Jerome Carayol, was the first person came to me after the first meeting. During the collaboration, he has been always patient to explain everything that I had hard time to understand. Also, He has been really punctuate to deliver demo, first ,and second drafts to me. After receiving the audio files from Mcgill recording session, he has still been conscientious to our production. He checked every tracks, found a few places that may need improvements, and talked with his teacher about our projects and coordinate with the music mixer..etc. I was really impressed by his professionalism. 

On the other hand, this was the first time that I really learnt to be a director. Every time I received music from the composer, I had to listen to it carefully. When I wrote emails to talk about the music, I always started with compliments in order to convey my affirmations and trust on him. Then I continued to talk about a few places that needed to be improved. I tried my best to explain the feeling that the film should bring to the audience at different stages. And I always told him that he could provide any advices at any time because I understand that all the suggestion are helpful to make the film better.  

My Composer!

I really like the music. 

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Dialogue Recording

In my mind, my character should be a young boy about 12 years old. However, it has been difficult for me to found a twelve year old Chinese boy in reality. All the young boys whom I know in Montreal are mostly about four or five years old. I think my story and my lines are too serious and demanding for these young kids. Also, I am not sure if their voices would fit with my characters. on the other hand, I have also considered to ask some classmates or my sound designer to perform for me because they know my story better. Then I just realized that my characters are designed as Chinese kids, so if they speak with , for example, Russian accent, it will sound really weird for my film. Due to these uncertainties and dilemmas, I finally ended up asking my boyfriend to be the voice actor for my animation.  

We went to the CDA recording labs four times. I have felt luck to work with him because we are really close. So, I could say anything, propose any requirements and ask for any improvements to him without feeling too much pressure. Also, because of my presence and guidance, my boyfriend has been really relax and free to perform. Although the audio files have a little distortion, I have been really happy with the result, especially his laugh. 

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Foley Note

Here is list of foley sound effects that I needed to insert into my animation. I prepared and sent this list to my sound designer in order to give him a general idea. During the following communications, he provided different approaches and possible improvements. For example, he added a few bird singing sound effects before Ming wakes up. It made the scene seem to be more vivid and make the audience feel relax. 

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Wake up Play

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Picture Lock with Rough Animation

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Color Palette

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3D Character Modeling

In the 3D class that I took last year, I learned basic knowledges about modeling, creating uv, texturing and rigging. However, I have never learned to build a character. Obviously, how to successfully create my own character became the biggest and hardest problem of the film production. In order to gain enough useful information and knowledge about the character modeling, I searched and viewed many tutorials on Youtube, For example, Maya Character Modeling Tutorial-Cartoon Mouse, Introduction to Character Rigging..etc. Basically, I follow the tutorials’ process, to draw and create first 3 planes of frontal, profile,and top view of my character. Then, I started to create the character’s eye lids and lips. In the class, I said once that building the character is like knitting a sweater, because every edge should matchable, and every vertex had to be connected with others. It was always easy to say but hard to do. Sometimes, if I move too much the positions of the vertex, they could not be aligned and connected anymore. The surface of my character’s body and head became rough and grouchy.  As a consequence, under this situation, using the mirror effect would always cause the deformation and crush of the polygon. 

On the other hand, the rigging technique that I have learnt in school seemed not sufficient for me to rig my character. By using the Create Joints tool, I was successful to create basic skeleton of my character. However, without creating different controls and constrains, my character was not able to move well. For example, his arms kept twisted whenever I raised them.  

Due to the lack of professional knowledge, the learning and modeling process became much longer than I have expected. I really appreciate this learning opportunity even through I was not successful to rig my character. Now, I know what I need to learn and improve, I will definitely find other chances to keep learning on this area.  

As the deadline of the picture lock approached, I had to stop modeling and move on to animate. Therefore, thanks to Sylvain’s suggestions, I found a free rig online. In order to make the rig to look more personalized, I put the rig into Maya to change the hair style, skin color, and cloth textures. 

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3D Temple Modeling and Texturing

Inspirations:

Concept Art Sketch:

I always started to model with basic geometries, for example, cube and cylinder. As the following pictures depict, I began with the main body of the temple. By using various cubes of different length and width, I created first the windows, doors, and Chinese style Columns. The most boring part was the modeling of tiles and roofs, because the process of the building and placing tiles are harder and longer than the rest. In order to make the tiles look symmetric, I had to build half of the tile and apply the mirror effect to the polygon. However, sometimes, the mirror effect did not work well for unknown reasons. so, I had to go back many times to do some check-ups and corrections of my polygons carefully. The worst situation happened once during modeling of the roof of the temple: the polygon seemed having no problems, but the mirror effect did not work at all. On the contrary, the polygon deformed and crushed. Therefore, I had to delete the whole geometry and rebuild it again. 

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3D Floating Island Modeling

As usual, I started modeling with a cube polygon in Maya. With the extrude tool, I was able to transform the cube polygon into an upside-down pyramid. Then, I stretched every vertex and edges of the pyramids towards different directions in order to change the appearance more precisely and make it look like a floating island. After the modeling of the floating island is done, I started to think about its textures. In the first place, I wanted to import the model into Mudbox to create a bump map, add colors and make it to look more natural. However, I discarded this idea for the following reasons. First, my model is low poly. Whenever I used the sculpt tools in Mudbox, it always deformed too much. And the deformation seemed to cause terrible generations of bump maps. On the other hand, I had to model a Chinese arena with different textures, colors and symbols in the center of the island. Meanwhile, if I applied the bump map to the floating island model, all the textures appeared and usually made the whole scenes to be too messy. Therefore, instead of adding bump map and textures to the island, I eventually chose to only use the lambert material and solid color. 

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3D Moon Modeling and Texturing

In my animation, the moon has been regarded as an important light source. By following the tutorial on Youtube, I successfully built the moon and found the real moon textures online. 

in the attribute menu of Maya, by adjusting the intensity of the glow and incandescence of the moon, I was able to make the moon to by shiny. 

However, after I added my characters and built the floating island, trees, and temple into the scene, the appearance of the moon did not look adequate anymore because it was too realistic. Also, in the dream world that I built, the moon should be very close to the main character. As a consequence, all the textures (black dots and blocks) became very obvious and distracting.  

In order to solve this problem, I went back to do some research on the moon textures because I wanted to find other alternative moon textures that I can use to replace. As a result, I found the following picture. It looked less distracting but still contained a few black blocks. By using the stamp tool and blurry tool in Photoshop, I successfully reduced the black blocks and made the moon to look more smooth and less realistic.