Drawing for Animation

My name is Caitlin Smartt, I'm a second year at QUT, and my student number is N9448829. This blog is for all my student work, mostly for Courses knb112 and knb122, Drawing for Animation 1 and 2.

[cartoonbrew]

How to Draw and Animate with Weight

“The Simpsons” storyboard artist Mike Morris demonstrates how to add gravity to your drawings by applying implied weight to characters and items large and small. via the Wacom Youtube channel

[caitlinsmartt]

Lighting

So I’m doing the lighting for Grandma’s House. At this point, some of the meshes still haven’t quite been finalised, but I’ve been told to ignore those and make sure the file gets back to the group leader as soon as possible. So I think the best way to document this process that I’m a bit unfamiliar with is to document each problem as it comes up, journaling it.

Architectural lighting design for kids in the us is a field within architecture, interior design and electrical engineering that is concerned with the design of lighting systems, including natural light, electric light, or both, to serve human needs.[1]

The design process takes account of:

The kind of human activity for which lighting is to be provided

The amount of light required

The colour of the light as it may affect the views of particular objects and the environment as a whole

The distribution of light within the space to be lighted, whether indoor or outdoor

The effect of the lightened system itself on the user

It is important to appreciate that the ultimate criterion of success in lighting is the human response, that is. whether what is to be seen clearly, easily and without discomfort."[1] Lighting designers are often specialists who must understand the physics of light production and distribution, the physiology and psychology of light perception by humans, the anatomy of the human eye, and the response of the rods and cones to light.

This is from the Wikipedia page about architectural lighting design. I’m going to try and take into account all of the things listed when designing the rooms, as well story telling aspects, realism aspects and sticking to the concept art.

This was the placement of the lights in the house when I received the file. I outlined the static meshes that the lights are supposed to go and put a dot for where the light actually is In this top view, you can see that the lights aren’t quite in the centre of their respective rooms or spaces, or even in the centre of the static mesh.

The rooms aren’t anywhere near bright enough either. I’m not sure if this is just the version they gave me, because when I saw the previews they were a lot brighter. The intensity of most of the lights is also set to 100, which are the default brightness.

These are some reference photos I took in my own house since our house seems to be a fairly similar style to Grandma’s house. I’m especially noting the light fall-off and colour of the lights. Most of the lights in our house have been switched to LED but there are a couple of incandescent lights still around which give the rooms a warm glow. The walls in the hallway are the same colour as the ones in the living room/kitchen, but look different. Because incandescents are older (and grandma’s house is probably older) and I want to make the rooms warmer, I’m making the majority of lights look incandesent.

I fixed up the placements of the lights so they’re more evenly spaced in the centre of their respective rooms. This means I added a few extra lights in places.

Here I just changed the intensity of all the main room lights to 2000 and the attenuation Radius to 300. I also set most of the lights to a light yellow-orange colour, to give it a warm feeling, which will contrast with the cold darkness in the nightmare house. That fixed the majority of the lighting issues, but the living room and kitchen seem to be a bit dark and gloomy compared to the bedrooms. This might be because the walls are a different colour.

To fix it being too gloomy I brought up the attenuation radius to 800, and while that makes the room lighter, it still doesn’t have the same ambience as the bedrooms.

Changing the colour doesn’t do very much either. But it’s working for now, so I’ll come back to it later.

There seems to be a lot of ambient lighting that isn’t coming from anywhere, and I strongly suspect this is why the living room and kitchen are so gloomy compared to the bedrooms. In the screen shots above, the lights are all set to 0 intensity and invisible rendering, meaning that they shouldn’t be emitting any light at all. Which means the rooms should be pitch dark, except for the small lamps and such. I suspect it makes the shadows much darker in the living room and kitchen, while it blows out everything in the hallway, and makes everything just right in Grandma’s room and the spare bedroom. Granted, this is where the entirety of the animatic takes place so it may not matter much, but with the consideration of making it VR in the future, it’s an issue that needs to be addressed.

The animatic pretty clearly shows the moon behind the house, and since it’s at the end of the house which isn’t in the animatic, it probably won’t be seen. I still want to put it in, though, because VR.

It also changes position over the course of the animatic, but I’m not going to deal with that.

So I want to use directional lighting to achieve the moon’s lighting. I used a light cool blue colour, to contrast with the warm insides of the house, with a very light intensity of 1. so that it still looks like it’s night time.

Without moonlight.

With moonlight.

However, the issue I have now is that directional light seems to go through objects, which means that you can see it in the house when you don’t want it.

Without moonlight.

With moonlight.

Come to think of it, there aren’t any cast shadows in this project at all.

Wow, that’s annoying and I feel dumb. All that needed to be “fixed” was to change the engine scalability settings.

I spent a long time trying to read up on skylights and rebuilding the scene (which takes a really long time since it’s so huge) and that was the problem all along.

This is the lighting of the living room after the lighting has been built with the engine scalability setting set at epic. I think it looks pretty good.

After building it, there seem to be several issues with a couple of the lights, meaning that some of them didn’t load properly, and have that red cross symbol on them.

I fixed it by changing some of the lights from stationary to static because apparently there can’t be more than 4 stationary lights overlapping. I’m not sure what this will mean for VR performance, though.

Apparently, it means weirdly low-quality shadows. This is after building it.

I tried to fix it by making all the lighting dynamic. It... well, it’s clearer, but also darker and my group members would likely murder me for putting so much strain on the project.

It’s also blurry when zoomed in, so that doesn’t really fix the problem. I think I’ll set it to static and tell my group member there was this issue.

Other than that, though, I think I’m ready to hand it back to the other group members.

[caitlinsmartt]

This is the 8th version of the animatic. Upon advice from the tutor and lecturer, the camera angles have been changed to be more similar to the animatic and the expressions are closer too. Her hands are more away from her face most of the time

[caitlinsmartt]

I was also tempted to add a lock on the inner side of the door but decided against it because it would seem odd since, in the animatic, the grandma frequently bursts into the room, which she wouldn't be able to if it was locked. I might still add it later since the other group members are talking about adding locked doors to the house that potential players can’t go into, but completes the illusion of a full house. Near the base of the knob, on the stem, is a small place where I purposely made the UVs almost overlap, to give the illusion of being able to turn the knob at that point.

For the texturing of the screws, Substance painter has a texture for screw heads, but only with a rounded top, and it didn’t go small enough for the metal thing and the knob. So I exported the normal map to photoshop and made the screws smaller by 50%, and erased the inner parts of the flat head screws to be the same height as the rest of that side of the door. The screws are also a different metal to the knob, which is a different metal again to the metal bit. 

I found that the default wood texture in the program is far too bright and cheerful for an old house, so I dimmed down the base colour, put a layer of old paint and faded paint over it, and masked out areas with wear on it like near the doorknob, where people’s hands would have touched it a lot, and at knee height and around the edge of the door at door knob height, because who wants to touch an icky doorknob (observation in my own house). I added dust to the top and stains near the bottom, and then my computer crashed. Still managed to upload an OK version though.

[caitlinsmartt]

I was tasked with making a “simple wooden” door. My group members didn’t want to bother with rigging hinges or doorstops, so I put all my research into a nice, simple elegant doorknob and the metal thing on the side. The doorknob was modelled by starting with a default sphere, and then using the proportional editing tool to give it more shape. I also did a lot of research into screws, trying to make it believable as possible. I used the dimensions for the gauge 3 screw from the table and modelled two different types of screws (the round head one for the handle, and the flat head one for the metal thing) before someone said it would be much more efficient to just texture screws on. The polycount was around 1000 at that point. So I deleted the screws and a lot of the default polys that were unnecessary for the knob to hold its shape. (By default, blender puts in lot of vertices in just a simple circle). So now it is elegant, deceptively simple, with just enough polys. 

[caitlinsmartt]

References for the rugs

[caitlinsmartt]

My group wanted more picture frames and rugs to put around the house, so here is another batch of props, still with really simple geometry and textures. Again, these are in the order they were created. In the first one, I tried to make the frame look slightly dusty, by adding a layer with high roughness and brushing over the vertical bits, as if dust had settled on the horizontal planes. Unfortunately, this same effect could quite be achieved the same way with the other frames, since they are more square. For the fifth one, the oval rug, I made an alpha mask and made it into a stencil to achieve the straight patterns it has.

[caitlinsmartt]

Some of the references I used for the photos.

I couldn’t find the photo of the three people that was used directly.

[caitlinsmartt]

I textured 5 objects, for of which were also modelled by me. They are displayed here in chronological order. The first one is up there again because I made some changes to the texture because I felt like it didn’t suit the style enough. I tried to have really subtle textures in everything, which is why a lot of the screenshots are really close, so you can see the texture. The first and the fourth photos in the frames were hand-painted by me, based on research on fashion and hairstyles of the age range that the grandma would have been in the 40s and 60s respectively. The second photo frame is not as prominent in the shots, so the photo is just a picture from google of a family in the 20s. 

The bed frame has the texture of faded paint with bits of wood showing through and a very subtle fabric for the mattress. The rug is a bit deeper fabric, with stripes painted on.

[caitlinsmartt]

This is the fifth playthrough of the animation. (The skin is green because of lack of a rendering engine or something. It’s not that important.) I fixed the facial expressions and the hands, as well as adding spline to make it look better. It still has some issues to work through, like slowing down or speeding up in places, or making the movements more or less subtle.

[caitlinsmartt]

This is the fourth run through, with added props and hand gestures so you can better what she’s doing better. The tutor also said to animate facial expressions, but I hid the facial rig controls a while ago and can’t figure out how to get them back.

[caitlinsmartt]

For the photoframes, the references from the animatic are pretty blurry, so I may take quite a bit of liberty with them.

[caitlinsmartt]

References, wireframe and mesh for the carpet. There’s not much to it, it’s pretty much just a flattened cube. I subdivided it in case in the future someone wants to allow it to move like a cloth, or they want to adjust the edges to be more curvy.

[katedrawscomics]

Backups and you

Heya, I wanted to write a little thing about how to automate your backups, since I’ve seen too many artists lose a bunch of work recently and it breaks my heart! Did you know it’s possible to nearly entirely automate your backup system? Because it is, and it’s really worth doing!

Where to store backups

External Storage: Buy an external hard drive. This isn’t the cheapest option, but it’s worth making the investment, if you can. I’m particularly fond of Seagate drives (£40-100, though people are selling them second hand for £25), and that’ll store between 500GB-4TB of your work- I’ve got about 1000 high-res comic files that’re between 50-150mb each on my 1TB drive, for reference, and I’m not quite out of room yet. They’re all very compact, and just connect via USB, generally, so they don’t take up much room.

If that’s a bit too pricey for you, maybe grab a USB stick or two- Sandisk are good- and that’ll cover you for 64GB for £13, which for me is a couple-hundred high res comic files. 

Cloud storage: Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage for free, so use it! It’s not a lot of room, really- I can fit maybe 50 comic pages in there- but it’s better than nothing. Google Drive also gives you 15GB of free storage! You could use both, if you like, 17GB free is not nothing. If you’ve got the money, here’s the current prices for upgrading those:

Dropbox Pro (1TB, or 1000+ comic pages) - £80 a year, or £8 a month Google Drive (100GB, or  about 600+ comic pages) - £1.59 a month                       (1TB, or 1000+ comic pages) - £8 a month

It’s worth having BOTH an external and a cloud backup. Please, if possible, do both!

Backup programs

(This will be all Windows-based, I’m afraid, if anyone wants to tag on a Mac version of these, please do!) Here’s a couple of programs that make the backup process really easy, and bonus, they’re free! 

FreeFileSync is my fav right now, all you do is set up the folder pairings- so you pair up your usual art folder with your external drive, USB, dropbox folder, or whatever- and let it run. So my dropbox backup looks like this:

meaning that when I run this, it’ll compare all of the files on my C:\Comic Files folder to the ones in my Dropbox. So if I’ve done some work on a file…

..it shows me, and I hit ‘Synchronise’ to copy the updated file over to the dropbox folder. Nice and simple. 

There’s also a microsoft product called Synctoy that does the same sort of thing, also free!

That’s all well and good, but I keep forgetting to run my backup program!

Then automate that too! You can use Task Scheduler to pop up your Sync program at a certain time of day, and that’s already inbuilt in Windows. 

Just set whatever time of day suits you here…

Then click browse, and find your Sync program. 

This whole setup means your very easy to use sync program will pop up at a set time of day, every day, and all you need to do is hit ‘synchronise’ and you’re all backed up. That’s it! Easy, stress-free backups.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have something in place for this- trust me, as someone who’s had a whole unbackedup laptop stolen previously, losing all your hard work is pure pain. Please back up!

Edit: Thanks for this info about programs for the mac, @theblamegabe !

To fill in the gap: Macs have a built in feature called Time Machine. It’s pretty plug and go - turn it on, indicate how often you want it to do back ups, and choose your external HD as the save location. It’ll run all by itself. Easy!

You can even get it to keep multiple separate backups throughout the hours, days and weeks.

[caitlinsmartt]

Since I lost all of my work recently this is extremely relevant.

[caitlinsmartt]

Third blocking stage, getting more of a feel for the character’s motions

[caitlinsmartt]

This is the second playblast. It has the main key poses, and from here it’s mostly inbetweening refinement.

[caitlinsmartt]

This is the first playblast of the scene, made in Maya. It just has extremely basic poses, to see what it looks like through the camera.