We have been given an assignment titled ' Funny In 15 in 5 '. The goal is to create a 15 second animated film that will make the audience laugh. We are also to complete it in 5 weeks, hence the title.
Our class was divided into groups, and my group has 3 members - Leo, Katie and I.
Katie is in charge of storyboarding, and the initial idea of the film was a half-witted seagull who is sitting idle in the middle of an ocean. A ship is sailing towards the seagull, but the seagull dodges it and flies away, only to hit against a buoy and then fall into the ocean.
The current storyboard is slightly different - The seagull dodges the ship, but then flies away and hits against the hull of another ship. And that other ship just happens to be the Titanic :) The Titanic then immediately sinks in a comical fashion. The punchline is that the seagull was the real reason behind the sinking of the Titanic, and not icebergs.
In this project, I have been given the role of creating and animating the ocean, the boat, and the buoy. But of course with the new storyboard, I will be creating and animating the Titanic as well. I am using Maya to create and animate all of these, and I will using the fluid effects in Maya to animate the splashes, ripples and waves in the ocean. Since we are going for a 2D-ish look in this film, I am going to apply toon shaders to all the elements in Maya.
At first I didn't know how to apply a toon shader to the ocean as it uses displacement textures. But after going through a few tutorials online, I discovered that the ocean first had to be converted to a polygon mesh without history, and then the toon shader could be applied. After applying the toon shader and tweaking with the outlines, I achieved the following look.
Log: 17th October, 2014.
I modelled the Titanic and applied the toon shader to it.
Modelling took a very short time as it has a nice simple, minimalistic, charming design. I also made a short sample animation of it sinking, and showed it to my team. I used two tone shaded brightness for the toon textures on both the titanic and the smaller boat. By doing this, the models have a 2D appearance, but at the same time it doesn't look flat and without a sense of volume, thanks to the shading element. I'll also have a go at making some splash tests with the toon ocean.
Log: 22nd October, 2014.
Due to a short amount of time before the deadline, we have decided to scrap the Maya simulated ocean, as experimenting with the toon shader and figuring out how to create satisfactory toon textured foam, waves and ripples, would take too long for us to get the film ready by time. I finished the final renders today, which were 3 sequences. One of the small boat sailing towards the seagull, the panning shot (where the bird hits the hull of the titanic), and the overall shot of the titanic sinking. Animating the boat was fairly simple. I just marked the start position and end position at the appropriate keyframes, and positioning the boat higher and lower from its default altitude a few times between the keyframes to make it bounce and up and down when it moves. I had to animate the bouys as well. And I made 2 bouys react according to the wake from the boat, as they were close to the boat.
The panning shot (where the seagull hits the hull of the titanic), was a laborious part. The speed at which the Maya camera moved accross the 2 buoys and titanic, was much faster than how the camera panned in the animatic. This was because of the number of frames that the animation had to be in. The animatic did not have a frame limit, hence it could pan the desired distance at the desired speed. However in this situation, time is a constant. The camera had to pan a considerable distance to have a satisfactory effect. So deciding how much distance the camera had to pan, how far the bouys had to be, how close they had to be to the camera, was a huge task that took a whole lot of time. After much tweaking around, we managed to get a good result after resizing the buoys, positioning them closer to the camera, and reducing the distance the camera has to pan, but not by too much so that it still looks close to what is in the animatic. We were then satisfied with the speed at which the camera pans.
The titanic sinking shot was easy to animate. However at this point, Maya was beginning to create horrible problems. The rendered images in the sequence that came out, appeared stretched vertically. I have no idea why this happened. I hadn't changed any parameters in Maya since the last render which happened perfectly. I googled, googled, and googled and didn't seem to find any similar problem to which there were solutions. I then switched the renderer from Maya software to Mentalray and that seemed to do the trick. The rendered images from mental ray came out alright.
I encountered the same stretched images problem when re-rendering the first boat shot because the earlier one had an unwanted polygon plane. Again I used the mentalray renderer and it did the trick.
Log: 24th October, 2014.
We finished the project! Katie and Leo were very happy with the final renders, and they mixed the sound effects with the final footage, and uploaded it on the Learningspace. It's a shame we didn't have enough time to create the 2D Maya simulated ocean. It would have worked really well I feel, creating lush, detailed splashes and waves.
Our class was divided into groups, and my group has 3 members - Leo, Katie and I.
Katie is in charge of storyboarding, and the initial idea of the film was a half-witted seagull who is sitting idle in the middle of an ocean. A ship is sailing towards the seagull, but the seagull dodges it and flies away, only to hit against a buoy and then fall into the ocean.
The current storyboard is slightly different - The seagull dodges the ship, but then flies away and hits against the hull of another ship. And that other ship just happens to be the Titanic :) The Titanic then immediately sinks in a comical fashion. The punchline is that the seagull was the real reason behind the sinking of the Titanic, and not icebergs.
In this project, I have been given the role of creating and animating the ocean, the boat, and the buoy. But of course with the new storyboard, I will be creating and animating the Titanic as well. I am using Maya to create and animate all of these, and I will using the fluid effects in Maya to animate the splashes, ripples and waves in the ocean. Since we are going for a 2D-ish look in this film, I am going to apply toon shaders to all the elements in Maya.At first I didn't know how to apply a toon shader to the ocean as it uses displacement textures. But after going through a few tutorials online, I discovered that the ocean first had to be converted to a polygon mesh without history, and then the toon shader could be applied. After applying the toon shader and tweaking with the outlines, I achieved the following look.
Log: 17th October, 2014.
I modelled the Titanic and applied the toon shader to it.
Modelling took a very short time as it has a nice simple, minimalistic, charming design. I also made a short sample animation of it sinking, and showed it to my team. I used two tone shaded brightness for the toon textures on both the titanic and the smaller boat. By doing this, the models have a 2D appearance, but at the same time it doesn't look flat and without a sense of volume, thanks to the shading element. I'll also have a go at making some splash tests with the toon ocean.
Due to a short amount of time before the deadline, we have decided to scrap the Maya simulated ocean, as experimenting with the toon shader and figuring out how to create satisfactory toon textured foam, waves and ripples, would take too long for us to get the film ready by time. I finished the final renders today, which were 3 sequences. One of the small boat sailing towards the seagull, the panning shot (where the bird hits the hull of the titanic), and the overall shot of the titanic sinking. Animating the boat was fairly simple. I just marked the start position and end position at the appropriate keyframes, and positioning the boat higher and lower from its default altitude a few times between the keyframes to make it bounce and up and down when it moves. I had to animate the bouys as well. And I made 2 bouys react according to the wake from the boat, as they were close to the boat.
The panning shot (where the seagull hits the hull of the titanic), was a laborious part. The speed at which the Maya camera moved accross the 2 buoys and titanic, was much faster than how the camera panned in the animatic. This was because of the number of frames that the animation had to be in. The animatic did not have a frame limit, hence it could pan the desired distance at the desired speed. However in this situation, time is a constant. The camera had to pan a considerable distance to have a satisfactory effect. So deciding how much distance the camera had to pan, how far the bouys had to be, how close they had to be to the camera, was a huge task that took a whole lot of time. After much tweaking around, we managed to get a good result after resizing the buoys, positioning them closer to the camera, and reducing the distance the camera has to pan, but not by too much so that it still looks close to what is in the animatic. We were then satisfied with the speed at which the camera pans.
The titanic sinking shot was easy to animate. However at this point, Maya was beginning to create horrible problems. The rendered images in the sequence that came out, appeared stretched vertically. I have no idea why this happened. I hadn't changed any parameters in Maya since the last render which happened perfectly. I googled, googled, and googled and didn't seem to find any similar problem to which there were solutions. I then switched the renderer from Maya software to Mentalray and that seemed to do the trick. The rendered images from mental ray came out alright.
I encountered the same stretched images problem when re-rendering the first boat shot because the earlier one had an unwanted polygon plane. Again I used the mentalray renderer and it did the trick.
Log: 24th October, 2014.
We finished the project! Katie and Leo were very happy with the final renders, and they mixed the sound effects with the final footage, and uploaded it on the Learningspace. It's a shame we didn't have enough time to create the 2D Maya simulated ocean. It would have worked really well I feel, creating lush, detailed splashes and waves.
