Extended Practice: Robot Character Tests

I decided to do two different tests with the robot character, one where the robot character is just standing still in the T-Pose position and dissolves, and the other one is with the character and some motion capture data placed on it along it the character dissolving as well. 

Again I added a volume axis field to the scene so that when the particles emit from the character it'll be dramatic and have more motion in the flow. However I have made the field a bit too strong so the particles fly off at a rapid speed, which makes it look a bit odd in the scene and not pretty to look at. The field is too strong because the scale of the character and the whole scene is very large so I had to up the effectivity of the field because the default settings weren't doing anything, but I increased the settings too much.  

Extended Practice: Robot Character Design

The robot character was also referenced from the 2D designs I created, the character wasn't that hard to build due to the simple geometric shapes of the character. The one problem I might have is when I place the girl character on top of this character and some of the limbs on the robot character poke through the girl character, but I can just resize the robot. For the robot I wanted only the joint parts to move and not the actual body itself. To achieve this I'll just have to experiments with painting the weights so that only certain parts on the geometry moves with the joints. 

With this character it took me longer to UV map because of all the different limbs, however it will be easier to texture due to the simple shaped. I also tried to organise the UV so that when I try to add the ramp shaders to do the dissolving effect on the character, the character will start to dissolve from the top down. 

These are some examples of what the character looks like with the dissolving effect is taking place. I found that while the character was dissolving some parts dissolved before others but in the wrong order and the wrong way round. To fix this I'll just have to flip some UV shells around in UV texture editor.

Extended Practice: Character Mocap Tests

After modelling the girl character I then wanted to see what she would look like when I added some motion capture data on to the character. This was an easy process to do, all I had to do was place a human IK skeleton onto the character, and then positioned the skeleton in the same places and the character i.e. place the head joint where the head it and so on. Once I've done this I then bound the character mesh to the skeleton so that when the skeleton moves it would drive the character to move in the same way. 

To add the motion capture data I downloaded and imported some from the internet because I haven't recorded any yet. I then, using the human IK system, made the skeleton in my character reference the other one I got from the internet. 

So looking at the motion capture test above I do need to re paint some of the weights on the character so that her movement don't mess with the geometry. However I feel like other than that it look alright, I might go back and change the shape of the girl just a bit so her body don't look like a square and bring the shoulders forwards a bit.   

Extended Practice: Dissolving Tests

Before trying to make my character dissolve I wanted to make sure that I could actually create the effect in Maya. To create the effect I needed to make two different types of ramp shaders, one that was black with white slowly covering the black to create the transparency/disappearing effect, and the other one which was black with a white beam going across it which acted as the emitter for the particles. 

To make the particles fly away I added a volume axis field on top of the ball so that when the particles are emitted from the emitter shader the particles fly off dramatically. With the volume axis field I had to change some of the attributes to get a better look out of the particles when they are flying away. I made the magnitude greater, made the direction of the field go one way, added turbulence and made the particles ignore the gravity within the scene. The out come is shown in the image below.    

Afterwards I wanted to make the particles look more realistic, so I added some motion blur to the particles when I rendered it out with Arnold renderer. The render itself took a full nigh to do because of all the particles that where being emitted, which was about 500,0000 particles.

Extended Practice: Character Design of Girl

To model the girl character I used the 2D drawn versions of the character and used that as a reference when I modelled her in Maya. She didn't take too long to model due to the fact that she is a simple design, and because she is wearing a leotard I didn't have to worry about modelling any clothing for her because I could just design a leotard on the UV map. 

The hardest part of this build was the face because it was the first time I tried to model a realistic face, this took me about three hours to complete. The ear then took me another hour or so because of the complexity of the geometry.  

Looking at the two images above I then went onto changing a couple of things to the character, these changes are the eyes, ears and hair. The previous eye attempted I did went bad because I combined the eye mech to the body mesh without thinking about texturing the eyes, so I had to delete the eyes and create them again. The changes I made was that I kept the eye mesh separate from the body mesh but I just grouped the two together, this made it easier for me to texture them later on. For the ears I just totally re modelled them because I wasn't happy with the first design due to them not looking realistic enough. And Finally the hair changed because I wan't so keen on the hair bun design on the 3D model, so what I did was I created one piece of geometry and duplicated that across the head and then textured the one piece of geometry to look like hair and saved that as a PNG so that when I import the hair texture back into Maya from Photoshop it's transparent. Making the hair look interesting and different from the previous design. 

Extended Practice: Art book

For this module we had to create an art book which shows all of our pre production work we've done so far. The art book had to be between 16-20 pages long and in A5 format, so that we could present them in an exhibition at are college. I feel like my art book could be better and I'm hoping to print another on off for my final exhibition at the end of the year. I noticed that some of the pictures in the art book are a bit pixelated so I'll have to re-render the some of the pictures off. We also had to print of some A3 posters of our work, so I chose to print off my character design and concept artwork because they are the ones that are not pixelated.    

Extended Practice: Reference Dance / Practice

For the actual dance itself I got my sister who is a professional dancer to choreograph a dance performance. The music was composed by a Leeds College of Music student called Georgia, who I meat at a meet up between both are colleges. The dance that my sister did was more contemporary which is what I wanted, and was inspired from my previous research on the music videos. It took my sister and I one and a half hours to come up with the choreography and I feel like if we keep practicing and going through the dance we'll be able to nail the performance and be ready for capturing the performance through motion capture.   

The place where I went to go film my sister dance was the Dance Studio Leeds building and I rented out a studio for two hours. It's a really nice place to perform and it would be a great location to do some motion capture using the IPI software we have in college. The place is very cheap and spacious and they will allow non profitable filming in there studios, which is great for what I'm wanting to do.     

Extended Practice: Concept Artwork

I did a couple of concept designs for this project so that I and other people have a better understanding of what it is I'm wanting to pull off and create. So the things coming out of the character are the particles, which will reveal the inner robotic figure within the girl character. This will happen throughout the dance performance and will increase more throughout the animation. 

Extended Practice: Character Designs

These are a couple of character designs I've created on my iPad, there are three different kinds of characters a girl dancer and two different styles of robots. With the girl character I wanted her to look like a contemporary dancer with defining muscle shape and she'll wear a tight leotard so that the girl character can show off the human for. This will exaggerate the fact that the character is changing into a robot throughout the animation.  

With the robot character I wanted it to still have humanistic features and forms so that it doesn't look too different from the girl character. However I won't be giving the character a face because it will emphasize the fact that it's a robot in control and not a human. I also wanted a the joints to be separate from the limbs just so that when the girl character starts to break away you can tell just from an arm that it's a robot underneath the skin.   

The second robot character I created had different styled joints to the other one because I wanted to test out if having piped joints mad the character look more robotic than the previous robot character. I also gave this robot a full face visor just to make the robot look futuristic. I feel like I might end up with a robot character that looks more like this one because it look more robotic but still has a human like form and figure.

Extended Practice: Moodboards

Before I started the character design process I decided to create some moodboards and research the human form and how I'd like my characters to look. For the girl character I know I wanted her to wear tight clothing like a leotard so that it expresses the human form and it exaggerates the transformation from when the girl turns into the robot. 

For the robot character I still wanted the robot to have a human like form because it needs to hide underneath the girl model but I also wanted it to look futuristic with simple panels and have the joints separate from the body. This will exaggerate the fact that it's a robot performing. With the robot as well I didn't want to give it a face because it would look too uncanny, I was thinking of giving the robot a full face visor to emphasize the futuristic technology. 

Extended Practice: Animation Test / Research

This was my first animation test using nparticles and a stock mocap fpx performance of a character so that I could emit particles from it. It was just a simple dance where I emitted particles from the whole body of the character so that I could see that it would look like and how the particles would fall. I realised that the particles attributes need tweaking loads to make them look good enough and believable, and that the bounce on the particles would have to be small because they would just fly off the screen if any bigger. I also feel like the particles lifespan would be constant and not at random due to the fact it looks strange if the particles just disappear as well.

For this animation test I made the limbs of the character disappear after the particles have been emitted from the limb. I also did the emitting of the particles in stages and not all at ones, so that it gives it more of an effect when a part of the body is disintegrating. With this animation I left the particles visible after they where emitted from the limb to impact on the fact that the character it dissolving away. However the bounce on the particles when they hit the floor need less friction so that they have a little bit more movement. I also want to make the particles interact with the character when the particles are on the floor because it looks like the particles are going straight through the characters foot.  

Extended Practice: Research

This is a great video I found on YouTube that is a tutorial explaining how you can emit particles from moving textures that are placed on the object. This video show you how you can create an image sequence as a texture and then emit particles from that image sequence to give off the effect of the object dissolving. He also shows you how you can use an image sequence to make the object disappear gradually and not all at once, which is really helpful. There are still a couple of things I didn't understand like how he placed two different textures on one object but I'll have to speak to my tutor about that later on when it comes to me actually testing out some animations.

It also shows you in this video how you can manipulate the particles using different fields like gravity and turbulence to give the particles more exaggerated movement when emitted from the object. Doing this will give the particles more of a realistic look to the effect and animation.   

Extended Practice: Research

I found this video on YouTube explaining how to use nParticles are emit them from a character to create the effect of the character disintegrating away. It explains how the character disappears int he scene and how you can make the particles follow the action of the character. You do this by emitting particles from the character and then going in to the attributes and tweak the particle settings to move with the character and then key frame the emittion rate to start and stop for the amount of time that you would like. After you finish with the tweaking its time to make the character disappear, doing this is easy, all you do is key frame the visibility to when you want the character to disappear, that it simple.    

This also shows me how I would change the look, shape and texture of the particles by creating one main object and linking that object to the particles so the particles imitate the main object.  

Extended practice: Research

Shadow & Light (new audio) from Mat Clark on Vimeo.

I've also looked at some work from my tutor Mat Clark, who has done some walk/run/jump animations using particle effects so this is a great chance for me to ask him how he was able to create that look and effect on the character he used. Mat made the transition of the character to the particles look so fluid, which is what I would like for my animation and I feel as though it might have something to do with the texture he uses on the characters, but I'll have to ask him.

To get this kind off effect I'll have to experiment within Maya using stock mocap footage and creating different particle effects on the character to see how the particles fall off the character and how they flow from the character to the grown.

Extended Practice: Research

THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS Wide Open (feat. Beck) from D O M & N I C on Vimeo.

This is the second video that gave me loads of inspiration for my animation. It's the music video for The chemical Brothers - Wide Open. This video inspired me because of how well the video is shot and framed so that you don't notice when the girls limbs change to a wireframe sculpt, they make the transition look so smooth but fast that you have to look twice before realising that the changes to the girl has happened.

With the behind the scenes video it show you how they've incorporated the live action to the 3D animation of the wireframe effects. This gave me a good idea of how I'd create my animation and what I'd need to do to create this effect in my animation. I won't be copying there method of how they created this video but I will be using it as influence and a tiny bit of guidance.

The team behind the fx used LINDAR scanning and Bespoke in-house software written for this project, the tools in which I will be using are the motion capture facilities at sheffield university and Maya so hopefully I'll be able to create the same effect with them tools.      

Extended Practice: Research

2016 AICP Sponsor Reel - Dir Cut from Method Studios on Vimeo.

I have two main videos with inspired me for my idea for the animation I am creating. The first video is the one you see about which is Method Studios AICP Sponsor reel, where they show off their particle effects on characters and how they can change the effect smoothly throughout the video.

Another reason why this is very inspirational is because there isn't really much story, it's just people messing around in mocap suite dancing around to a piece of music by Major Lazor. This inspires me because it shows off the ability of the studio and builds there portfolio, which is the main reason for why I'm doing this kind of animation. I want my animation to be fun to watch with no real story or reason behind it, just something to show off what I am able to create.

I'm pretty sure that the fx artist for this animation video used the software Houdini where it is apparently easier to manipulate the particles to make them look and move the way in which you intend. However, for my animation I will be using Maya because for one it's free and two I'm very familier with it because of my work that I did for CoP.  

Extended Practice: Pitch

This was a pitch presentation that I created for my final year animation project explaining what I'll be doing and what influenced me in doing said project. The main inspiration came from my Context of Practice module where I research about particles simulations and how you can manipulate them, so I wanted to explore more into particle simulations while experimenting with motion capture.