GailleanArts 'Soulmates' Journal

Rae's journal for the preproduction and production of the animated short 'Soulmates', created by Becca, Dwight, Rae and Tim at Yoobee Colleges Wellington. Release date: July 2021.

[soulmatesjournal]

Solving The Puppet Problem!

A solution has been found to the issue we were having with the puppet! 

I have discovered how to import a video into a Blender scene using an add-on that simply has to be enabled.

Once this add-on is enabled, we can add the image to a scene as a plane... this includes videos!

It is possible to export a video with a transparent background from After Effects. What needs to be done in the pipeline is simple.

1. The animation for the puppet needs to be done in Blender.

2. An image sequence with a transparent background will be rendered out of Blender.

3. The image sequence is imported into After Effects and then exported as a video with a transparent background.

4. The new video is then imported back into Blender and placed around the scene as needed. 

This will reduce the amount of pressure put on Blender as no rigged puppets will be thrown into the scene and making the program work even harder to process everything.

Here is a test render frame with a video I made earlier of an ocean simulation imported using the above method into the Blender scene.

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Tim’s environment with my fish animation added into it. Lighting effects are applied to the character.

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I have managed to animate the fishy puppet successfully! 

NOTE TO SELF: make sure you select “render video” instead of pressing F12, otherwise it won’t render.

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Rigging Video

Today, I recorded my entire process of building a basic rig, from drawing the reference to clean up. The rig still needs some constraints put on it, but it is working and I’m very, very happy about that.

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Solving Parenting Problems!

Note to self: Make sure all the necessary vertices are all weight painted to the lattice before parenting. Also ensure that the MAIN control is the section of the rig that is parented to the lattice, otherwise it will NOT move as one piece. Lesson learned, do not do that again!

[soulmatesjournal]

The Rigging Storm

I have successfully completed my first rig with the seal and have very nearly completed my second rig on a new and improved Milk puppet.

There is a very slight problem with the parenting between the head and the spine on the seal puppet, but it is otherwise working as intended.

This is Milk’s base puppet, although I have made some adjustments to the jaw due to problems with the mobility when I was testing the jaw bones on the rig.

Here is his completed skeleton. The spine and fin are controlled by bendy bones to give more flexibility. I need to do some general clean up of the puppet itself, including a few fixes to the fin to keep it clean when moving the limbs around, adding his eye to his head and removing the seams by assigning a new material to certain strokes on the puppet.

Once that is completed, I can parent everything together and have a functioning Milk puppet, ready for use. I segmented more of him due to him needing a greater range of motion and had to remove a marking on his fin due to how it needed to be segmented. But otherwise, he is looking good and close to completion.

The next puppet I build will have the entire process from building to rigging recorded and compiled into a video to showcase my process.

[soulmatesjournal]

BENDY BONES!

I figured out an alternative to the lattice bendy bones. While I haven’t yet completed the controls on it, I now have some basic bendy bones for the trails on the character.

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Rigging Problems

With the amount of problems I’ve been having with parenting, I went right back to basics to try and figure out what the issue was with the puppet I had built was. Turns out, none of the tutorials I was following were explaining the grease pencil properly and I wasn’t supposed to have all the separate components to the puppet in different collections. SO, I started again, this time using the seal spirit as my test dummy and things were going great! Until I learned that I couldn’t use multiple lattice modifiers on a single grease pencil character. Meaning I can’t rig with the bendy bone process I had been using. I’ve taken to recording my process as I go, so here is my workflow of rigging up until I reached the point of the lattice issues.

[soulmatesjournal]

Got No Strings!

Major progress has been made in the puppetry department and I’m feeling pretty happy with how things are going. I finally found a tutorial that goes over 2D rigs in Blender in a cohesive manner and now I think I’m on track to having a fully functioning rig for the side view of Milk by the end of next week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKGin1jwJ5I&ab_channel=LevelPixelLevel

Milk is now fully built but needs his bones and controls so that he can be moved around easily when it comes to animating.

He is now a fully built puppet with a separate jaw that, while not as cavernous as it needs to be, does function for now.

I set a bone... then instantly realized that I had no idea how to set the joints as I needed them. So I had to figure out what to do and that’s when I found the tutorial above.

I set a lattice and managed to set a basic skeleton. So far, so good. The lattice was moving with the bones when I set them and it was all looking like it was working.

However... as is to be expected... it wasn’t going to work.

I broke Milk.

Lesson learned, I am now trying again with a bigger lattice and I’m going to try setting the bones in better places. Hopefully I can also figure out how to stop his fin, eye and jaw from floating off into the void. But for now, it’s been a good lesson learned. 

[soulmatesjournal]

Puppet Time Again

After a good break, I have come back swinging! Right off the bat I am starting to build a test puppet for Milk, as he is the character that we are using in our master frame/teaser footage for the project.

The first thing I did was draw a basic reference for Milk based on the reference sheet Becca drew up.

I have now managed to create the body and fins in Blender and am looking into adding bones to the puppet, but I am currently struggling to do that. However, I aim to have a rigged puppet by the end of the week, with or without a face.

[soulmatesjournal]

Major Breakthroughs!

I have made a few massive breakthroughs in my technical research and we have now overcome one of our biggest roadblocks.

My search for finding a way to use an updated version of Blender on campus has led me to discovering a portable version of the software. Unfortunately, this initial test of software failed as admin had blocked the portable version of Blender. However, I realized that Blender was available on Steam. A quick check later and I found that the Steam app is already installed on the school computers. All I had to do from there was add Blender to my Steam library and then run it through the Steam app. Now we have full access to up to date software!

This has allowed me to test the grease pencil with lighting. I managed to get a light moving over a grease pencil drawing and change colour as it moved, showcasing the way the lights work.

My other break through is the discovery of the grease pencil being used to create motion graphics, which are essentially puppets. From there, I found a setting on the grease pencil that allows parenting and in extension, full rigging in a smaller amount of time than I had initially been led to believe. It’s almost as if all my problems are finally being solved and the rest of the team is really happy being able to work in up to date software.

- Rae

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Lighting test on the grease pencil in Blender.

- Rae

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Gauge painting concepts of some of the spirit designs. Playing with texture, gesture, colour and potential aesthetic for the spirits. 

- Rae

[soulmatesjournal]

Blender Time

Today started off as a “try to bring a traditional texture to the grease pencil” test, but snowballed into something much, much bigger. I have made a massive breakthrough through pure accident that has made me incredibly excited.

While I was trying to figure out how to paint texture what is essentially a plane, I discovered something that will make the puppet animation a million times easier to achieve. This means that I no long have to worry about rigging. 

The grease pencil lays down points along each stroke of the grease pencil and each of these points can be selected and manipulated.

This means that I can directly animate on the points! While further testing is needed, this cuts out a lot of the problems I was anticipating to face and means that once again, I can go back to building the puppets in Blender directly instead of using multiple programs.

Unfortunately, I was unable to achieve the big lighting test. Due to Yoobee only having Blender 2.8, I cannot have the lights react to the grease pencil. Thankfully, I have Blender 2.9 at home, which does have the option.

Eevee render test.

Cycles render test.

All I need to do now is some animation tests and figure out how to stop the stroke on the grease pencil from being translucent.

- Rae

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Puppeteer

I have begun testing the puppet creation process in After Effects so that I know what I will need to do when building the puppets in Blender.

Right off the bat I already have some notes to further improve on the puppet I currently have rigged. Just the process of rigging this puppet has shown me a few problems with limitations of movement.

Here is the puppet so far.

- Rae

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Ocean Man, Take Me By The Hand

I made an ocean in Blender.

Starting from the bare minimum, it was a simple case of applying the physics to a cube and playing around with all the available options. Baking the foam meant that the playback would slow down, but simply deleting the bake would speed it back up.

I learned a little bit about shaders and nodes. Now that I have a very base understanding of them, I can further play with them to try and to come up with some different ways of creating a nice looking ocean effect.

How the render looks in cycle mode. The problem with cycle mode is that it takes a very long time to render, but it looks beautiful.

Final render in Eevee render. It looks nice, but doesn’t have the same depth as the cycle render. However, it is a lot faster since it is a realtime render.

Final render!

- Rae

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Collection of character design concepts, testing colour alongside the designs of the characters themselves. The eel needs some major reworks as it looks too much like a dinosaur as it is.

- Rae