Prologue

Pff! that took a bit longer than I had hoped -_-
The most horrible part is the long wait for every render.. over and over again for all kinds of small tweaks.. and it took me a long time to figure out how to get a nice effect inside of the prison. Luckily I finally managed to finish it. The rest of the scenes were easy as pie! I decided not to use the hdr afterall, since I thought I had more control over the results without that (might be my lack of skill in lighting though).

When I looked at the results on a tv screen it was all very light though, and because my girlfriend always complains about my monitor being to dark, I might have to drop intensity a bit.. but that’s quite easy now that this is done. especially the second picture looks perfect on my screen, but on the tv the darker corners are still too light..

Anyway, I rendered that 3d Storyboard again with the new lighting. Quite satisfied with the results! (on my dark monitor :> )

3d storyboard with improved lighting <– unfortunately this blog can’t make thumbnails for pictures that are this large :{

Crits and comments on the results are more than welcome!

On to Posing the female in the scene (no unfortunately no full walk/run cycles and animations in this moving storyboard) and creating a cloak for her so she can double as the mysterious man!!

Though I promised to have some renders up during the week, I found out that I needed to learn a bit more about Lighting a scene good. I’ve looked at normal lighting (again) and continued with Mental Ray render options, introducing me to things like Global Illumination and Final Gathering.

Friday I worked on the first scene, to lighten it correctly. I’m still having difficulties with inside area’s.. especially since I didn’t have much windows, so the inside area is very dark by default. The bad thing about using the nifty Mental Ray effects is that my render time is now quite long. Every time I redo a small thing to look if it looks alright, I have to render a few minutes to see the result..

The results still aren’t the best, and I still wanna try it with some HDR image, but for now, it looks a lot better than flat shaded:

Next monday I hope to finish the lighting.. so if there isn’t anything up by tuesday night, please kick me :>

Today I finally managed to finish my character. After setting up all the controls on the arm, and tweaking stuff, I continued to connect the skin to the skeleton. The way this works is that every vertex (point in 3d) gets a certain amount of influence by a certain joint.. so if you move this joint, it moves that amount along with it. If you slowly move your arm sideways, the first part of your skin is influenced by your shoulder joint, that moves with it (the rest of the arm moves because its child joints move as well) if you look at the area under your arm, you see that the skin moves just a little bit as well.. these would get a small influence then. you could take every vertex (or groups of them) and tell them which joints influence them how much, and in some cases this is the right way to work, but in a lot, this isn’t really handy to change small amounts of influence per joint. Maya has the weight painting tool where you can paint the influences directly on your model per joint.

Black is no influence at all, white is 100% influence, and grey the values in between.

While this method is quite handy, it’s also quite stressful to get the best results.. it takes loads of tweaking, and preferably a better model than mine
At least I learned more about the areas of the body that bend, and that my next model needs a lot more polygon detail there to move accurately

The final Rig isn’t by far perfect, but it’ll quite do!

Especially around the hip area there’s a weird folding that I can’t seem to get out.. ah well! that isn’t that important for now. It’ll do for the animation! My next model will be better.

Now I started to watch some lighting video’s so I can work on the lighting of the scene next! I’ll hopefully be able to make some nice renders tomorrow or wednesday to show!

So first on the agenda is female character rigging. For this I’m following video tutorials by Digital Tutors. They’re pretty good and also very importantly, not boring to listen to.

The character needs a skeleton (made of joints). It also needs Inverse Kinematics to make the poses easier (you also have forward kinematics.. picture rotating every joint of your arm separately when shaking someones hand, instead of just ‘pulling’ your hand in the right pose). Also these joints and IK handles should be easily selectable and changeable for the animator. Finally the skin needs to be attached to the skeleton so that it moves along correctly.

Today I’ve been learning everything but the skinning. I’ve almost finished all the joints, IK’s and ‘helpers’. I’ll try and finish the rest tomorrow. A picture of my current state:

While working on my character I start to get very annoying by the character I created.. It has a lot of flaws for animating that I’d like to fix, but since this project just needs a draft, it isn’t needed.. kinda working is good enough. Though I really want to make a future project about making a good looking character! Drawing, modeling, rigging and animating one as good as I can.. Maybe something for when I finish this animation!

Anyway, on to finishing the rest tomorrow!

As a 3d Orientation I’ve been working on the early stages of a 3d animation that will probably never see the light in it’s complete form.
The idea was to make a realistic short animation. Thus it shouldn’t take too long, and it shouldn’t have too difficult characters, which aren’t speaking (lip sync is way too complicated for now~)

When making a 3d animation some important steps come in play:

1. Creating Story Concepts.

In this step you think of the fundamentals of your story. I made a brainstorm chart where I had 20 different Characters, 20 different settings, 20 Motivations with each two obstacles in the way of reaching that goal.

2. Create a story

From this step I eventually chose one combination and made a story of it, with the help of the three act structure. Unfortunately for English reading people, this is in dutch.. please poke me if you’d like translation :>

Setup
In een donkere, kille gevangenis ligt een jonge prinses, gekleed in een vuile en
gescheurde kleren. Triest en zonder hoop is ze gevangen in haar eigen stad en
is ze een slaaf voor de nieuwe bezetters.

Catalyst
Op een onverwacht moment klikt opeens het slot van haar cel deur open, en ziet
ze iemand in een zwart gewaad wegrennen. Ze besluit uiteindelijk van de kans
gebruik te maken om te proberen te ontsnappen, waarna ze de mysterieuze
gedaante probeert te achtervolgen

First Turning point
Het alarm wordt geslagen, en spot lichten/vliegende camera’s beginnen hun zoektocht
naar de prinses

Climax
De achtervolging komt plots tot een eind wanneer de prinses een doodlopende steeg in
loopt. De camera robots omcirkeling haar, de mysterieuze bevrijder is verdwenen en ze
kijkt uit op een afgrond.

Final Confrontation
De prinses ziet haar kans, springt naar een camera robot die over de afgrond zweeft en
grijpt deze vast. De robot kan door haar gewicht niet meer blijven zweven en zakt
geleidelijk verder naar beneden terwijl hij de prinses van zich af probeert te krijgen.
Beneden vaart een kleine boot over een rivier, de prinses laat de robot los en valt veilig
op de boot, terwijl de robot in het water valt.

Resolution
De andere zoek robots zijn haar kwijt en net voor de boot de stad uitvaart springt de
mysterieuze bevrijder op de boot en maakt zichzelf bekend. De prinses omhelst hem en
samen varen ze naar veiligheid.

3. Moodboards

Collages are sooo cool <3 so I made one to set a general atmosphere of the surroundings. Actually I made two, but seems a bit shy so it hid from me :{

4. Storyboard

After that my l33t drawing skills came in the picture. I was forced to draw it with an edding marker so I wouldn’t go into small details

Storyboard Part 1 Storyboard Part 2

5. Moving Storyboard

The final step for this assignment which I’m currently still working on. The idea is to make kind of a draft version of the animation, so you can see the basic idea, camera movement and timing. I first started by modeling the surroundings and translating the storyboard pictures to 3d renders without characters. The lighting is sometimes a bit off though, so some look a bit dark.

So characters next.

First I created the Security camera robot. After some sketching I decided to go with an eye with wings:

After that the big Security robot:

And now I’m working with the Female Character:

The robot characters are already animating and moving in the scene. Generic Camera movements have been made as well.

So.. All this has been done. What still needs to be done for this project to finish?

• Female Character needs a good Rig (skeleton)
• Female Character needs to move in the scenes (not every move needs to be animated, just important poses)
• Lighting needs to be made in the scenes to make the scenes look better without Texturing
• Camera movements have to be made better for good timing.
• Very simple/basic sounds need to be added so you get a general impression
• Rendering~

First post in my new blog
In this blog I’ll try to post about the things I’m doing for school (and hobby).

I’m doing this in blog style for a number of reasons:

1. So people can finally see what I’m doing and have been doing.
2. So I can look back and see if the improvements I’ve made are good enough.
3. Hopefully it’ll motivate me to show everyone what I do, so I actually get to work.

That last point made me decide to make this blog. I’m doing college and I’ve been doing it for a while now (6 years). There is a lot of freedom in the final 2 years of my education, and I’ve been having a lot of difficulties to actually get off my ass and get to work. This is a new attempt to actually try and do just that!

The work you’re probably mostly be seeing here is 3d modeling and animation, some web stuff and hopefully some drawings.

The name of the blog, ‘Prologue’ refers to this being the very beginning of my road to become a good 3d artist, to graduate and hopefully to find a good job.

I’m always open for critics and compliments, and if I don’t seem to work quite hard enough, please kick me

Jasper