Screenshot_Storyboard

The last piece of work for the photoshop lectures portion of this term. This is a storyboard of sorts made up of screenshots from within maya of all my models with their textures.

Domino Effect Animation

Domino Effect Finished from Toby Rutter on Vimeo.

Introduction to photoshop work

This term along side maya we have had some lectures covering photoshop basics, some of the techniques learned are then intended to support the work we are doing on our maya projects.
This is a montage of various images of objects that would be appearing in my animation. This was part of our first lecture covering selection tools.


These images are textures I used in the final animation, we learnt how to create tileble textures so they could be repeated without seems. There are more in the next post but I could only upload so many at a time.

A few references

Here are a few reference videos I used when animating.

Muse: New Born Live Wembley stadium

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jKa_0xnTfU&feature=related

this is the song I was animating to and I used to live version as the soundtrack, so this video of the band live helped with some influences and also as a reference when animating.



this is a video of a bass cover, I used lots of videos of people covering the song as a way of getting a better look at the different instruments parts. Although I already knew the guitar and a bit of the piano.

Preview Animation

So here it is the preview test for my final animation. This is made completely of playblast footage from within maya (hence the quality) and unfortunately it is edited together rather choppy-ly due to having to use windows movie maker as uni is closed for the weekend (no final cut pro and adobe premier) that will all be rectified for the final edit of the render. Other points to note there seems to be a problem with the playblast footage around the time the fx cuts in prior to the guitar riff, the camera should be panning across the pedal at this point. But all in all I am rather pleased with how its gone so far. The characters are a little bit static still, although they are moving a lot more now than in previous test animations. The animating has been probably the hardest bit in my opinion, I prefer and feel I am better with the modelling stages and although I havent yet completed texturing thats again another step I really enjoy. Also due to the nature of my characters animating them to act in the same way as realy performers was always going to be difficult, I had to use joint skeletons in the arms and fingers to get the amount of movement you see here, and any more would have required different kinds of contraints, locators, actually painting weights to the meshs. All things that I am starting to get an understanding of but no where near enough to apply them to an idea and creation of my own yet. Its been tough knowing when to attempt more and when to accept things and leave them with this project. I want to make something that ressembles a complete animation as much as possible, and I picked something hard to do to challenge myself as I wanted to test what I have learned over the last 5 months, but I feel the animation is now, perhaps with a few tweaks, at a near finished state as I want to concentrate on trying to texture the remaining bits of my scene to get that finished feel.

Playblast Continued

Here is another playblast from camera 2's perspective. This time I've done a bit of animation on the bassist's fretting hand. Its a very basic animation, like the other bits of animation I created a small clip and used trax to repeat the clip over for the shot. I can't yet decide what level of realism I am going to animate the playing of the instruments to. For now I am going to leave the shots like this with simple camera and character animation. Enjoy

A Few Playblasts

Here are a few tests I've done of little bits of animation within my final animation. Enjoy.

Camera 1 test from Toby Rutter on Vimeo.

Camera 2 test from Toby Rutter on Vimeo.

Video References

During the character performance and believablilty topic I didn't record enough of my references, a mistake that I was't going to continue into Introduction to Digital. The first influences are quite typical "Rude Goldberg" machines influences of the domino effect, and later on they become more themed towards music and my particular animation.
First up is the Honda Accord advert, called Cog. This is one of my favourite adverts ever and is a perfect example of brilliant domino effect in action.


Next up is Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions, this is the first of two stop motion influences for this CGI project, sadly embeding is disabled to I have had to settle with a link. I really love Wallace's incredible and weird machines that often involve lots of small actions working towards completing a simple task. And have just started brainstorming ideas for the domino effect cracking contraptions was a good place to start.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuHUS-9laBI

I fairly soon realised I wanted to do an animation involving musical equipment, although I spent some time working how I would use the domino effect within that. I decided I would do a bit more of a conceptual domino effect rather than a literal one. By this I decided to animate to music and how the music building up and more instruments being added to be the domino effect. It was at this time that I became aware of Animusic, a series of amazing animations that are based around entirely the same idea.






Starship Groove was getting even closer to the kind of animation I wanted to make, I had already decided that I wanted to have machines and robots that I would design playing the instruments.


finally we have a bit of a weird influence, this is the second stop motion animation that has influenced me. It is a music video by a metal band call Austrian Death Machine (apartly influence by Arnie) and the song is called "get to the choppa". The music video is rather good it involves a stop motion robot band playing the song. Seeing as it drew parallels with what I was doing this thought I should get it in.

Guitar Animation Test

I have started to animate! This is a very cautious an slow process, first i rigged the right arm of my model and tried some quick test strumming and then the left arm to add some fretting action to the animation. I'm trying to keep this simple to make everything do-able at this stage. But if I decide I like the look of this section of animation it will become a clip to be used as part of the overall guitar part. I like using clips in animation because it allows me to easily re-use the bits of animation in different orders whilst preserving the original. I am quite pleased with this and i hope I can animate the rest of my animation with relative ease. I need to go back into maya and have a look at the play speed because this is running faster than it should.

Scene Render Basic Textures

Here is a render of my scene so far, I've established basic lighting and started to texture walls. I could do with using three point lighting to lift the shadows up a bit, but I like having the scene darker towards the top of the room. I am about to start creating joint skeletons for the arms of the characters and also heads/necks so i cant begin to animate them. I also need to set the camera up in the scene.

Meet the Band

I am currently nearing the completetion of all the modelling required for my domino effect animation. The room has all its details (no textures or lighting yet, this will be explained), all this leaves left to do is to finish building and adding details to my characters. So without further a do I'll let you meet the band

Bassist
the head is modelled based on big bass speakers, the pair of headphones I previously modelled but I liked the look it gave the character. The speaker he is sat on is modelled from reference images of an Orange speaker cabinet. The amp is a duplicate of the ampeg header I made for the guitarists stack. The bass is modelled from reference images of a gibson les paul copy, both from images and also first hand as its one of my own guitars. Areas that are going to be worked in on, the hands obviously need to be made, the arms need work and the lower section of his body needs to be built so he has something that is actually sat on the amp as opposed to hovering. Also the upper torso needs a little tweaking.



Singer
The vocals of the band are handled by this fella, the head is the key part of the model, it is based on a retro microphone (this was the first design I had for any of the band and so was fairly key in influencing how I made the bassist) again the body needs some work, the singer isnt intended to have any arms just the limb holding him to the mic stand. If I get time once I have modelled everything in a preliminary stage I would like to go back and spend more time modelling bodies and making them more individual rather than just duplication and some scaling to make them different.

Scene Update (another one)

So having now finished my guitar and ran into some problems exporting it as an obj (obj doesnt like nurbs) I familiarised myself with the convert to polygons tool and exported the guitar. It doesnt look as nice in wireframe any more as now it is a mess of triangles, but o well it looks just fine in renderview. So i decided to pose the guitar in the scene and do a little update to show the last couple of changes I ve made to the scene. And without any more rambling here it is.

Finished Electric Guitar

Right here it is the big moment, I ve finally finished modelling my electric guitar for my scene. As with the last time I'm using a wireframe screen shot rather than a quick render to show what I've done so far. You may notice that the guitar is missing some strings, this is because the entire object will be grouped when I export it into my scene as a obj. file. As a result of this I am going to add the strings in the scene so I can move them easily as they are most likely going to be animated during the animation.

In the end the model is a combination of nurbs surfaces construction from curves (the body, neck and headstock) and polygons (the frets, pickups and bridge) I also used nurbs curves and revolved them for the dials. At one point I looked at doing some fairly complicated stuff for some switches but thought that it was such small detail it didn't justify spending the time and probably wouldn't be noticed in the final animation so I shelved that idea. In the end I'm very pleased with the slightly simplified model but overall I think I ve managed to reproduce a lot of the detail off this guitar.

Guitar Progress

I ve made some progress with my guitar model and here is another image of it during construction. Due to the nature of the nurbs curves I chose to print screen an image in wireframe so it is easier to see whats going as without any texuring a lot of the surfaces merge into one an other.

Guitar Modelling

I have been working on modelling a guitar for a little while now, and its been a slow start but today I finally managed to crack into it and now im starting to make some serious progress. Here is a render of the guitar as is. Its all at a very primative stage, although the body has the finished smoothness this is due to it being made of nurbs. The detail is mainly being made using polygons and requires some work doing. I also need to model the headstock, which could be an interesting task.

Scene Update

Ok so I've got a bit further with my scene, I have modelled from scratch a Kawai digital piano (I have one at home so coupled with some reference images I know it quite well). However the piano still needs a bit more work, ie some keys and detailing. I have also done a bit of kitbashing and dropped in a chair I have made before into the scene just to get an idea of what it will look like, I am going to rebuild the chair because I dont feel the style of chair will fit the scene I am going for. Also I am unable to just edit the chair I've already made so looks like I have some more modelling to do. I terms of modelling for the rest of the, I only have a little bit left to model, however modelling the guitar is going to be a challenge so I am going to allocate lots of time towards that. I may also model some more effects pedals, and then its just a case of covering the floor in cables (i am looking forward to this) and building my machines (once I have designed them)

Domino Effect Animation

So as our introduction to CG animation tasked, we have been told to make an animation based on the idea of the domino effect that is 30-60 seconds long. We had to pick a theme early this week to decide what are animation is basically going to be. Now it took me some time get to get an idea of the kind of thing I wanted in my animation but I think I have finally cracked it. I decided I wanted the animation to be something to do with music after I spent some time modeling a guitar amp stack on monday. From this I chose that the setting of my animation would be a music practise room, and that the theme would be music. Armed with this I went around modelling some more essential parts of my scene, here is a render (I havent started texturing yet hence the excessive amount of 50% gray) but here are some of the meshes I have already made.



There are plenty more items on my modelling list: a digital piano, chair, guitar and possibly a bass guitar, and I think a drum machine a whole kit might be a bit much. Now the theme is the domino effect and I've decided that the way im going to animate the things in my scene is my designing and people lots of fantasitical contraption (think Wallace & Gromit cracking contraptions) that in a domino effect will start building a song up. This way I will also get a good idea that requires sound to work, so hopefully I won't just forget about it which I might have done if the project wasnt so sound oriented.