In the second year of our 3 year course, we are expected to help a third year student with their major film production which they are supposed to do in their year. I spoke to two 3rd-year students - Vicky, who's film is called ' The Bird ', and Matteo, who's film is ' Headless ' and I'll be helping them.
17th Feb 2015 Log:
The Bird:
For this film I have to use Maya to create a sequence of Ivy Vines growing out of the ground. Since the film is in 2D, I will have to apply toon shaders to the objects in Maya when rendering them out.
Here is my first sample:
%5B0001-0130%5D.mov)
Here is my second sample where I tried to make the main vine spiral out slower and make the leaves more flappy:
%5B0001-0170%5D.mov)
Log: 23rd Feb 2015
Headless: This is the other film I am working on. The story is about a character who has been seperated from his head, but they still continue to operate. The task I have been given is animate the headless character walk on a street, when it accidentally kicks the head that is lying on the sidewalk, and then the head turns back and gets angry at the character. This is being animated in Maya. I made an error the first time, by not placing the animated characters in the centre of the frame of the camera.
Log: 3rd March 2015
The Bird:
I made another sample of the vine growing animation. Here I smoothened out the leaves, camfered them, and assigned a skeleton to each leaf, and rigged them to it. I then elaborately animated the leaves, to make them flap in a very smooth, and mellow manner. This one looks much more graceful than the previous 2 ones. However Vicky recently told me that she wanted the vine's to burst up at the start and then spread out in all directions after rising up. For that I'm going to create the vine rig again from scratch and design it to behave in the way she described.
Log: Sometime during the middle of March (Posted long after finished work)
The Bird:
I discovered a good way to create the vines, according to the requirements. Start at one small 3-sides cylinder, and then keyframe extrusions extending from it. At some of the extrusions, spontenously use the split polygon tool to make 2 new faces perpendicular to the direction of the main vine. And then seperately extrude them out in parting directions. And those branches themselves will further branch out by using the split polygon tool to create new faces within them, and extrude them in the same way. And there will oftne be multiple brances spreading out a the same section of the main vine, allowing a very vast network of vines.
(Starting out simple)
(Branching Out)
.jpg)
(Smoothed out mesh and with a toon shader with two tone shaded brightness)
After finishing that animation, I found that finishing it off by smoothening the mesh, makes it look very natural, organic and smooth.
The animation itself looks marvellous. It doesn't appear jerky, or unnatural at all.
Log: 11th April
The Bird:
The earlier vine animation, in spite of being ambitious and working out terrific, wasn't the syle they were looking for in their film. I was showed a Blender tutorial, for growing a vine along a curve, which tapered at the end. And the extrustion can be keyframed, which means it is a lightning fast easy solution to create vines growing out without any hard work. Initially I had trouble transfering that principle in Maya, because I couldn't find any Maya tutorial that specialized in that, and so I was experimenting around in Maya, trying to work out a similar method which with one could easily making growing vines.
Initially I tried just making an EP curve, and then manually extruding a flat circile along it, using my gut instinct to position the centre of it at the curve, rather than use another method to snap it directly.
I found that that was working well.
Test 1:
%2B1.jpg)
%2B2.jpg)
.jpg)
%2B(smooth%2Bmeshed)%2B3.jpg)
%2B(Screenshot%2Bwith%2Bcurve)%2B1.jpg)
The images above describe the first test. In this test, I made a bezier curve, and then created a polygon cylinder (deleted every part of the cylinder except for the top cap), then positioned it at the start of the curve. Then manually extruded out the cap, and positioned each new extension at the
key points of the curve. After reaching the end of the curve, I smooth meshed the entire
object. However now a problem is that the exact perpendicular angle at which the faces
are at each point, makes the animation look unnatural.
Test 2:
%2B1.jpg)
%2B2.jpg)
%2B(smooth%2Bmesh)%2B3.jpg)
These images are of the 2nd test.
This time, I repeated the same procedure as earlier, but I deliberately did not position
the faces at even spaces to make it look less mechanical. I also rotated the faces at
each frame to be perpendicular to the current position at the curve in relation to the
face, so it should look more natural now. Further changes required: It looks better now. I could use the tapering function to make it thinner as it extrudes out.
Test 3:
%2B1.jpg)
%2B2.jpg)
.jpg)
%2B(Smooth%2BMesh)%2B2.jpg)
These image are from the 3rd test. This time, I also scaled down the faces at each keyframe. It looks much more natural now and less robotic, as it has a streamlined, organic shape.
Log: May 20th
Here is the sample of the vine growth animation that the crew approved of.
And here is the animation I created with the help of a reference image of a room setup that the crew had given me. I used the same method used earlier for the approved sample.
17th Feb 2015 Log:
The Bird:
For this film I have to use Maya to create a sequence of Ivy Vines growing out of the ground. Since the film is in 2D, I will have to apply toon shaders to the objects in Maya when rendering them out.
Here is my first sample:
Here is my second sample where I tried to make the main vine spiral out slower and make the leaves more flappy:
Log: 23rd Feb 2015
Log: 3rd March 2015
The Bird:
I made another sample of the vine growing animation. Here I smoothened out the leaves, camfered them, and assigned a skeleton to each leaf, and rigged them to it. I then elaborately animated the leaves, to make them flap in a very smooth, and mellow manner. This one looks much more graceful than the previous 2 ones. However Vicky recently told me that she wanted the vine's to burst up at the start and then spread out in all directions after rising up. For that I'm going to create the vine rig again from scratch and design it to behave in the way she described.
Log: Sometime during the middle of March (Posted long after finished work)
The Bird:
I discovered a good way to create the vines, according to the requirements. Start at one small 3-sides cylinder, and then keyframe extrusions extending from it. At some of the extrusions, spontenously use the split polygon tool to make 2 new faces perpendicular to the direction of the main vine. And then seperately extrude them out in parting directions. And those branches themselves will further branch out by using the split polygon tool to create new faces within them, and extrude them in the same way. And there will oftne be multiple brances spreading out a the same section of the main vine, allowing a very vast network of vines.
(Starting out simple)
.jpg)
(Branching Out)
(Vast Network of branches) (Smoothed out mesh and with a toon shader with two tone shaded brightness)After finishing that animation, I found that finishing it off by smoothening the mesh, makes it look very natural, organic and smooth.
The animation itself looks marvellous. It doesn't appear jerky, or unnatural at all.
Log: 11th April
The Bird:
The earlier vine animation, in spite of being ambitious and working out terrific, wasn't the syle they were looking for in their film. I was showed a Blender tutorial, for growing a vine along a curve, which tapered at the end. And the extrustion can be keyframed, which means it is a lightning fast easy solution to create vines growing out without any hard work. Initially I had trouble transfering that principle in Maya, because I couldn't find any Maya tutorial that specialized in that, and so I was experimenting around in Maya, trying to work out a similar method which with one could easily making growing vines.
Initially I tried just making an EP curve, and then manually extruding a flat circile along it, using my gut instinct to position the centre of it at the curve, rather than use another method to snap it directly.
I found that that was working well.
Test 1:
The images above describe the first test. In this test, I made a bezier curve, and then created a polygon cylinder (deleted every part of the cylinder except for the top cap), then positioned it at the start of the curve. Then manually extruded out the cap, and positioned each new extension at the
key points of the curve. After reaching the end of the curve, I smooth meshed the entire
object. However now a problem is that the exact perpendicular angle at which the faces
are at each point, makes the animation look unnatural.
Test 2:
These images are of the 2nd test.
This time, I repeated the same procedure as earlier, but I deliberately did not position
the faces at even spaces to make it look less mechanical. I also rotated the faces at
each frame to be perpendicular to the current position at the curve in relation to the
face, so it should look more natural now. Further changes required: It looks better now. I could use the tapering function to make it thinner as it extrudes out.
Test 3:
These image are from the 3rd test. This time, I also scaled down the faces at each keyframe. It looks much more natural now and less robotic, as it has a streamlined, organic shape.
Log: May 20th
Here is the sample of the vine growth animation that the crew approved of.
And here is the animation I created with the help of a reference image of a room setup that the crew had given me. I used the same method used earlier for the approved sample.
