The Two Little Kids is on Youtube

The animation is now available to watch online.

A Portfolio of my work and latest showreel can be viewed by clicking here.

Project Evaluation

Overall I am very happy with what I have accomplished but feel I should have spent a greater percentage of my time on the final animation. I am pleased with the animation I have produced, but would like there to be more of it.

The majority of my group work has been successful and some very nice work has been produced for me, if not all quite to the agreed time schedule. When producing designs for someone else to model from I have found that I feel everything has to be perfectly clear and spend far too long on the images, making sure they perfectly represent what I want to be modeled.

My biggest letdown for this project was allowing myself to get behind schedule to the point that my animation suffered because I no longer had the time required to do it all in. This was mainly due to my slow working style and spending far too long redoing my blockout based on various lecturers recommended improvements. I have however greatly increased the speed in which I work and learned the invaluable lesson of when to call it a day so as not to get behind schedule.

I am pleased with the film I have created and have built up a much wider knowledge of the animation process.

Rendering

I have spent the last few days solidly attempting to solve various problems, the majority of which it was later resolved were due to the mac I had been working on. The textures had a tendency to disappear and needed regular reloading, despite all my files, references and project being correctly sourced, named and tidied. The image transparencies would only work on the machine the files were created on, which after a lot of experimenting I got round by converting everything to .tga. The biggest problem I had was that Metal Ray was only producing blank images. Despite my best efforts I could not solve the problem and therefore had to find an alternative way to light my scene. I used two directional lights, one much stronger to use as the sun and the other opposite and weaker to use as a fill. I also used an ambient light to decrease the darkness of the shadows and two spot lights that followed the characters to make them stand out against the background. My lighting setup stop working and despite my best efforts to work out the problem, I had to recreate it many times. I found setting up the camera quite challenging as the mac crashed regularly despite only displaying on wire frame and me already having a pretty good idea of how it was to be filmed.

I then set up my batch renders and took my project to various other machines ready to render. However Mental Ray worked fine on every other computer, but it was too late to take advantage of it and I was happy enough with the results of my lighting setup not to mind. I managed to render out everything I was hoping, but on review of the frames, the lighting has not worked and it has switched back to default lighting. At this stage I do not have time to resolve the problem.

Goat Rig

Jay has kindly run my goat through Setup and Face Machine for me. There were a couple of problems with the eyes, but with a bit of tweaking he managed to fix these.

Animation

I have finally started animating for my project but I do not feel I can achieve what I want in the remaining time. I will therefore just concentrate on the beginning of the film where the boy is galloping around on top of the rock, notices the goat and gets the idea that he wants to ride it. I will try to give my animation a slight stop motion influence, as I have never been a fan of the very smooth cg style. This is a playblast for the boy galloping around on the rock. It still needs tweaking but I am happy with it so far.

Group Work: Animation

I was asked by Matt to do some animation for him. This consisted of three shots of his female character performing various actions.

Woman takes a couple of steps, glances to right then kneels down.

Kneeling woman gets egg from hip pocket and places it carefully on the ground.

Kneeling woman picks up egg, removes cloth from under it and places egg carefully back down.

It took me a long time to do these shots and I am not sure whether this is because I have had a break from animating or that this is more realistic than how I like to animate. I am quite happy with the animation and I have found it very useful to do just before I start my own animation, but it took me days longer to do than it should have done and I really need to learn to animate faster.

Textures

I will be using the following textures with additional bump maps that I have already created. I had lots of problems with various file formats only working on certain machines and image transparencies being very temperamental. With my many experiments I have discovered that the most reliable file formats are .bmp for textures without transparency and .tga for images that have transparency.

I am very pleased with the textures as they have managed to incorporate the styles I wanted in my film and have a sense of continuity between them without any of them looking out of place. I found the process of texturing and UV mapping enjoyable.

Boy Rig

Matt has rigged my boy using Setup and Face Machine. I had a few problems, as the boy's UV map seemed to be animated after it had been rigged. This was due to Maya not liking any adjustments to the UVs after Face Machine had been run on a model. I solved this by exporting the new UV map onto the model just before Face Machnie was run.

Lighting and Rendering Plan

For my lighting I intend to use the Metal Ray environment option of Physical Sun and Sky with Final Gather to help the light bounce. I will use render layers so that the characters will be on a separate image to the background. This will allow me to have maximum control over all the variables in compositing. I will also render out Occlusion and Luminance Depth passes. This means I can have self shading and depth of field, which I think will add a lot to my film.

Sound Plan

The piece of music I will be using as a soundtrack is Rossini's William Tell Overture. I had it in my mind to use from the beginning of the project because I think it will work really well when the boy is pretending to gallop around on the rock. However, I had all but dismissed being able to use it until I recently came across the CD royalty free. I'm sure it has been used in animation many times before, probably Warner Brothers and I therefore must take into consideration any associations it already has. However, the only thing it brings to mind is horse racing, which if anything will emphasise my use of it. I really enjoy sound and am therefore looking forward to applying it. For the ambient soundtrack of my film I have chosen a royalty free clip available with Soundtrack Pro. The only other noise I have is for the boy screaming, but I am having trouble finding a source for it. In case I cannot find someone to voice it for me or a usable sound clip, I have learnt the necessary steps in Soundtrack Pro so that I may edit any voice, including my own, to sound like a young boy.

Boy Tweak and UV Map

I have completed tweaking the boy model to my satisfaction. The main changes I made were to make it less symmetrical by adjusting the shirt collar and socks and to make the knees and elbows more knobbly. I also edited the nose and ears as well as other minor parts.I then mapped out the UVs for the boy. I found this quite easy as the mesh was naturally sectioned already according to surface material so seams could be subtly positioned. I also had to take into consideration the splashes of mud that would be on him, which also had influence over where the seems could be placed. I am happy with how he turned out.

Boy Model Continued

I do not really have time to complete the boy model at this stage so I gave it to Matt to finish off. Matt has done a very good job in a short amount of time (under two days) and has also agreed to rig it for me after I have tweaked and uv mapped it.

Rigging

Dave has informed that he will no longer be able to rig the goat as he has too much other work at the moment. This is very unfortunate and I will need to find someone else to rig it for me as I do not have enough time to do it myself.

Boy Model

I have finally persuaded Joe to send me his model of the boy after numerous promises, each that it will be finished within the next couple of days. After three months (almost 100 days) it still needs some work and I have decided it would be much quicker and more reliable if I finished the model off myself, as I have already lost a lot of time waiting for it.

Scene UV Mapped

I mapped out the UVs for the props and scene of my film. Most were straight forward but some proved more difficult.
Here is an example UV layout for the tree:

I also modeled the ground and surrounding hills of my set. I did this in two sections; one for the floor and nearby hills and the other for the distant hills.

I think it fits in well with the rest of the scene and with textures it should look even better.

Rope Tests

I have spent many hours in Maya trying to create the rope, which ties the goat to the tree. I have used several different techniques inspired by various tutorials, but the biggest aid has been the Maya Help file. Using ncloth produced quite a good result, however I could not make it retain its three dimensional shape. The video below was created using nine polygon cubes; the middle seven set to rigid active bodies and the end two passive rigid bodies. I then set up spring constraints between each of them and added a gravity field to the middle seven cubes. I created a curve and parented each of the CVs to the corresponding box's selection handle and extruded a polygon cylinder along the curve. This creates a rope that is animating depending on what happens to the end cubes. If I was to loop the cylinder at each end then I could set up constraints to keep the rope attached to the tree and goat. Unfortunately no matter how much I play with the settings, I cannot get it looking better than this and as I have already had to spend more time on this than I would have liked, I am either going to use it as it is or not at all.

Goat Tweaked and UV Mapped

I tweaked the goat model to make it more like my designs, as Joe could not find the time.

I also had to model teeth and the inside of the mouth. I was surprised as during my research I discovered that they have no top front teeth and there are big gaps between the front and back teeth. This is apparently quite common to herbivores as they use their tongue and front teeth to pick grass, then chew it with their back teeth.

I then went about readying the goat for textures by UV mapping it, trying to keep seems to a minimum and where they would least be noticed.

I am happy with how it turned out and can now go on to texture the goat.

I am very constricted with the remaining time left to complete my project and will therefore be asking for help to rig my characters, rather than doing it myself as I had initially planned. This is a shame because I have been following rigging tutorials, reading up on it and watching tutorial videos and was keen to put my knowledge into practise. Dave has agreed to help me and has said he will rig the goat.

UV Mapping

I have been watching a lot more UV mapping tutorials and decided I was ready to give it a go. I chose the mound first as it is a complex shape. It took a whole day to do, but I am very happy with how it turned out; there is minimal distortion and all of the seems are exactly where I wanted them to be.

Props

I modeled the props for my film, keeping them low poly so that they could be smoothed later.

Group Work: Book

I was asked to animate a page turn for James. His film is in 2d drawn into the computer and I therefore had to match style. To do this I attached his page designs as a toonshader and added thin black profile lines. As both sides of the page are shown during the page turn I had to enable the plane for double sided texturing. To do this I ran both texture files through Condition and SamplerInfo utility nodes. This allowed me to attach two files to the texture and display them depending on which way the normals were facing. I based the rig of the book on a page turn tutorial at http://www.highend3d.com/ and customised it to my needs. I had a few problems with the paint weighting but these were resolved with a couple of hours of experimenting.
I have not yet been given the final textures as one page is the credits, which can only be wrote towards the end of the project. This animation will be used in two shots of the film. I did a test based on the camera James wanted.