BA Animation Year 1

Just a Turkish Animation student who studies in England and works towards a better art life

[oykusubaskinnua]

After finishing my Mystery Box, it was time- to make my end of the year Showreel! I already made a small showreel for an application but this time, I have more footage, some nicer music to work with and no “first time with a program” shenanigans.

This took me half a day to put together. First parts were bit tricky in terms of balancing the footage, fitting everything into beats and not bore the viewer with the same footage. I am still not too sure of my Silhouette process and Performance walk duo in there but after some tweaks, they don’t seemed to jarring as first time. Another part was bit unsure of was the Morphing in terms of music, since I had to edit the music to The final part came out out of accident. While I was shifting things around, I realised a “Boxes and Struggles” theme there, and thought it might be a good parallel to this whole year; despite the struggles, we animated, we learnt and we are off to the next year.

Enjoy the work!

[oykusubaskinnua]

After weeks of blood, sweat, and another day of kicking After Effects, I finally finished Mystery Box.

Due to some unknown reason to me, I just couldn’t add any shadows in After Effects, thus I had to leave it at that. Extra lights I added to transparent animation surely worked really well. I’m bit sad for the broken lower torso and shadows but well, this is as far as I could go.

[oykusubaskinnua]

For my final analysis, I chose Howard Wimshurst’s showreel.

Overall, I think it’s a strong showreel. Good selection of strong clips, fit together well with the beat of the music and doesn’t distract from the reel. A few strong WIP shots still keeps the quality consistent and well. The clip used in the intro credits give a good first look into the video. The music could’ve continue until the very end as a fade away. The ending credit’s font could’ve been the same, thus less jarring. But overall, good showreel.

[oykusubaskinnua]

For my third showreel analysis, I chose Gemma Roberts’ showreel.

I feel like this showreel is a bit daunting to watch after a while. Showing the progress as before and after, as well as giving proper credits on the sides on the clips and at the end is a nice touch. The music is bit unfitting for the overall showreel, as it contains a lot of dialogue. There are some clips that could be either scrapped or placed differently, like the cat pencil test or the clips between 1:07-1:21, as they feel bit off between other works. I also think the showreel could be bit shorter, as you do lose some interest in the later half. Contact details could be given only at the end rather than the opening title.

[oykusubaskinnua]

Weekly Summary #26

This week was mostly wrapping things up, ready for post-production and ultimately, for the Showreel.

The presentation went pretty well. I accidentally cut Charles off because I was nervous but everybody delivered their part properly and overall, it was a success. We did a small rehearsal together, while some of us did some rehearsals by themselves beforehand as well. I am happy with the work of everybody, yet still feel bit bad that I was the one who did a huge mistake. Better luck next time.

I did a lot of finetuning on Mystery Box animation and did some render tests. I had to reanimate the first 3 seconds because of the problems that occured in the spline that was too problematic to fix. After the fixes, I got to render the backgroud and, after some events, the foreground elements like Tyr and the box. Right now they are in After Effects, ready for some post-production action.

Later that being done, I can finally focus on my showreel with brand new animations. I already analysed a few ones, both personal and cooparate to pick up what’s good and bad about them. I found some music and gathered the works that I wanna put in but I was waiting for Mystery Box to finish to have a better idea of the whole thing. Maybe I can work with the mockup I have so far to get an idea of the beat but we will see about that next week after the bank holiday.

[oykusubaskinnua]

Today I got to render my main animation and did my first compositing.

It was bit... eventful. I sent my thing into batch render after a few tests to get the best results. Beforehand, I did some experimentation between exr and png formats (for a transparent background) played around with diffuse settings and added Maya Area lights to represent the lamps that are not present in the animation render, and post-production approachs in After Effects to match the objects with the background, like AOVs to keep the emission of the mask slit and the box glowing, even if I change the exposure of the objects.

So I put everything into separate layers, rendered background separately with higher settings (because of the textures and lighting) then sent the animation part into Render Farm.

And here comes the event. Because Render Farm does a faster Batch Render, the Arnold just put tons of watermarks all over the animation- a great shock for an evening of waiting. So we discussed the matter with Adam and decided to run a Render Sequence. Now, it rendered perfectly fine- and transparent! Rest was just putting the whole thing into After Effects with the background, ready to do some editing (like fix the fact that Tyr is going through walls and lamps, and add some shadows into the scene.)

Rendered background at the end:

Render settings for the background:

For the foreground elements:

[oykusubaskinnua]

The second showreel I want to analyse is a studio one from Blue Zoo.

I believe this is a really strong showreel. It’s short, punchy and contains consistent, strong quality work. The music is carefully chosen to reflect the colourful, energetic style of the studio. The clips are cut properly to match the beats of the music. The fact that the intro is animated gives the impression that the studio takes their presentation seriously- which gives the professional impression that some clients might like to see. The only clip that seems bit out of place, is the black-and-white clip at 0:38, which is might take some viewers off with its different style, tone and relatively longer length from other clips. Contact information might’ve be given at the end but because it’s a company, it might not be a necessity.

[oykusubaskinnua]

This week we had our introduction to make our own Showreels to wrap up the year in a high note. While we are creating our very own showreels, it’s good to analyse a few ones to see what would make a good Showreel. For the first one, I would like to analyse Jeroen Jaspaert’s Animation reel.

The work showcased here are high quality, especially the ones in the first minute keeps your interest. After tha, because of the length, and the amount of diversity  in the work drags the showreel off. The music is pretty fitting, although because of the length, the music also takes you off after a while. One good thing about it though, is that the clips beat together with the music.

[oykusubaskinnua]

This week started to cleanup my Animation. And well, it didn’t go well. In the first half, where the character turns around the corridor and runs to the camera, the model simply decided to go around the walls, turn around as it pleases and legs defied gravity. I tried my best to fix it but as I dug deeper, the core was already corrupted.

Thus, after some feedback and suggestions, I reanimated the first 3 seconds. I opened a small hole on the roof and now the character gets a dramatic drop into the scene.

Right now I am finetuning the animation and I am shooting for Friday to send it to render. I am still thinking about some lighting to help compositing Tyr and the Box, but I am leaving that until the animation is done.

Otherwise, some fun renders from behind the scenes:

[oykusubaskinnua]

Weekly Summary #24-25

These weeks were busy with getting everything into refinement stage.

I fixed and considered a lot of my CG stuff to make absolutely sure everything will go smoothly into rendering, with high quality sights- thus decided on making a composite by rendering foreground (Tyr and the Box) and background separately. I made a stepped animation as an animatic to calculate my animation time and take my storyboards into the next step. Right now I started to refine the animation by taking it to spline. It’ll take a bit of time but here we are.

We got introduced to Lip Sync. It was a short and sweet unit to practice some primary research and learn about cutout animation on After Effects. It was fun to make and helped me relax from the highly technical CG. I really missed making 2D.

We couldn’t get any chance of reply from our professionals but we are trying our best by reading interviews and articles about our focus-points. I will be talking about the independent side of the storyboarding. I did  small rehearsal by myself but hopefully I will be delivering my best.

We also got our introduction to create our showreels for the end of the year! We are tasked to analyse a few other showreels to create the best as we can. Since we can only make our showreel based on our schoolwork only, we will try our best to present those. I chose my music and a vague rundown for my showreel but I will be waiting to finish my Mystery Box to put things together and finalise it.

[oykusubaskinnua]

Over the two days, I started and finished my Lip Sync project.

It was a pretty quick and relatively easy piece to work with. Last week, we did a small intro to After Effect’s cutout animation to get a hang of it. Later the week, I didn’t know what to do with the project until I was doing some simple doodling in my sketchbook and came up with sad Viking character. Thus born Olaf the Tiny Viking:

Later I detailed and cleaned up the design in Photoshop. At first the design didn’t have eyes but I changed it to simple dot eyes to fit the brief and the simple texture-y design I decided to make.

Rest was blocking in the mouth shapes in the timeline and add flair! For the block in, the I decided to cut the sounds into 10 second chunks and put them in the timeline first, then tweened them depending on how the words play out. It turn out to be more easy than the straight-on dope sheet method.

To get a sense of the mouth shapes, I myself did the shapes with my mouth to see how they play out. For some sounds (like R or some I sounds) I cheated and used other mouth shapes to fit into the monologue. 

[oykusubaskinnua]

Over the weeks, I made my animatic for the CG work. I used the stepped animation as a basis to work out the timing, pace and poses, as well as to calculate the render times and how to get around to shorten that time.

At the moment, the whole thing takes around 5 seconds- I do feel it should be a bit longer, maybe giving more breathing time when Tyr is looking at the box. Otherwise, running sequence and the glancing back looks fine.

For Tyr’s approach to the box, I also filmed myself to get a sense of a tense, silent walk which might contribute to give Tyr more character, which I might work around when I’m going through the sequence once again;

Some of the “behind the scenes” for the real render look;

[oykusubaskinnua]

Media Practices- Contacting the Experienced

Over the weeks, I made some research and made a small contact list for our presentation about being a storyboard artist. We decided to focus on different aspects of being a storyboard artist. I personally decided to focus on the independent side of being an artist, and how to navigate through the crucial pre-production stage almost alone.

For the project, I gathered a small list ofpeople and already contacted two;

Steve Ahn: Ex-Dreamworks TV storyboarder who is now producing his independent mini-series,

Jeremy Luther: A multi-talented artist with a fine art background but does a lot of directing and storyboarding for advertisements and short indie films,

David G. Derrick: A Disney and Dreamworks storyboarder who recently worked on Moana, and runs his independent comic on the side.

I decided to send the mails with a certain sets of basic questions regarding storyboarding but then ask a few specific ones regarding their specific style or area.

Right now, I didn’t get any replies (even when I sent a follow-up for Mr. Ahn) but still trying. I haven’t contacted Mr. Derrick yet since he doesn’t seem to have an email address, thus I might send it on his art page on FB. One thing we realised about storyboard artists, is that they don’t give many options when it comes to getting in contact. We believe it might be because of how they might get into jobs in their close circles but even then, it’s an interesting phenomena in the current age of globalisation.

Still, we have hope and we will try to do the best we can to deliver some good information.

[oykusubaskinnua]

Weekly Summary [Break Time]

Over the break, I made a lot of progress on the Mystery Box project. I made a rig from scratch for Tyr and skinned it properly into the model. It was a hard progress with a lot to learn but at the end, it was rewarding to see the model walking. I also modelled my Box and my background with the lighting and camera, ready to put the model in.

For media industries, we are doing about storyboard artists. To have more information, we made some research on storyboarding and start contacting a few artists we found and we known for sometime. Over the break, I contacted Steve Ahn with some questions we came up together, as well as a few ones I was curious about particular to Mr. Ahn’s work. Hopefully an answer will come.

[oykusubaskinnua]

Yesterday, I made my background for the animation based on the vision I planned on. I played around camera setup and some lighting.

I wanted to set a camera for this project so I don’t have to worry about re-imagining the angles every time I have to animate. It was an easy setup, at least for my purposes for now. I also added my box and an examplary shape to help setup the camera and check the lighting.

For lights, I used MeshLight of Arnold at first but they were gone when I reopened the file, even when I saved and closed properly. I then tried to use the aiStandard with the Incandescent Bulb preset with increased diffuse samples. It still looks pretty noisy and didn’t like it. Yes, even if I tried to work with MeshLight again, the programme didn’t cooparate. I searched the interwebs a bit but seems nobody has the same problem. Otherwise, Monday is around the corner and I can ask all my questions on the lecture.

I still feel like I need some more invisible light sources to light up the scene, as it’s quite dark even with the extra bulbs I put in the scene.

Next up, being able to export Tyr properly into the scene with the rigs and everything (I tried object export and it didn’t worked at all. Oh well, let’s keep trying.) Maybe a few test animations to get a sense of animating with such rigs as well (and actually get the hang of animating as well, I feel so rusty.)

Some tutorials I used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSAvNPnqyCs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdiKmm1_gu4

Some nice shot I accidentally rendered out but I liked it quite a bit:

[oykusubaskinnua]

Over the two days, I finished up skin weighting and properly skinning Tyr. It was a wild ride made out of nightmare-level warps, tons of bindings and unbindings, some inner crying and almost-sleepness night inbetween. But here we are, Tyr is finally out and running!

I made a few test renders and posed them around. Next up, I will be doing some test animations by setting up some cameras.

Two tutorials I mainly used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcl1fs7Bn_M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah-Jk7d30ks

Bonus:

[oykusubaskinnua]

Over the two days, I finally finished up my rig and properly got to skin it to Tyr.

As I saw my previous was not working as good as I wanted, I decided to surrender and use the provided rig by the course. Of course, I made quite some changes to it, like making a handle system to the arms rather than an IK handle,changing up the leg structure a bit and most importantly- a hand rig. It was quite easier than I thought, with some extra geometry I added to help it properly bend if it’s needed.

Right now I’m at the “final” stage before some animation tests- painting skin weights. This stage will help me to assign the joints into their proper roles and avoid scenes like this from happening:

Meanwhile, the skinning problems where not as dramatic as I made it to be! It was all about the binding settings:

I was keep selecting the “joint hiearchy” option, which was what the tutorial I was using was doing. But then it struck me with a difference: The tutorial was making a human character while I was doing a robot character with no organic feels. Thus, I looked around the Maya’s setting tutorials and read what the settings are used for. After a bit of a play around, I came up with the settings you seen and bang! It is all working. Properly (well, little bit) bind skeleton which turns to the bind pose properly.

Well, not all is working. Legs, which are made up of IK handles still doesn’t cooparate as good. I can’t turn them back to their original position while the rest of the body cooparates just fine no matter how much I mess up the pose. For now, I disabled the IK nodes to avoid messing up the whole thing but still searching for an answer.

More news shall arrive.