Sets

I finished all the sets for the Get the Diamonds Kre-O short a few days ago. Its a super long in-depth post. A Duke in his Tpose in every set to show scale and lighting. I'm actually adjusting at least the reflectivity of them all before final renders.

The locations consist of Space:

This set is only used for one shot, so its made for the single camera view. There is an explosion that will add light to scene so I'm okay with how dark it is right now.

 Tundra:

This is the biggest set. The cave area gets most of the screen time and everything else is made up of copy and pastes of the same glacier and shards. I had a really annoying problem with Sun and Sky and setting an environment image in. The environment image would be washed out every time even if I tried messing with the gamma. So I ended up making a separate environment sphere, but that blocks the light coloring with Sun and Sky somehow, even with the sphere as single sided. So I'm just going to have to composite it. The very top image is the composite. The one below it shows the off coloring with the environment sphere in and all the others are without it.

I decided to save time and simplify thing by making everything snow white. The overexposure of white does make visibility issues so I had to figure out what camera angles were being used and fudge somethings a little. This environment also made it clear that I needed to dial back the reflectivity of the characters.

I plan on cutting out the ground where the animation takes place and trying out brave rabbit's deformer plug in to add footprints in a high density mesh. Crossing my fingers it goes smoothly. I did find an issue with scapula bones transforming when rotating the polar bear. Not having the time to really figure out what is wrong with it I just deleted iksolver that moved the scapula, and the lack of it seems to be not really noticeable.

Roller Disco:

This was by far the most time consuming and complex set. I tried out a lot of stuff to get the best looking disco ball effect without using photons. I ended up putting a light in the disco ball with a cookie in the color and then using an offset lower intensity copy to add a blurry refracted look to the light spots. I also have a a hidden copy of the disco ball with a texture on it for the glow. Everything is grouped to rotate together correctly.

The top image is pulled out further than any of the shots in the scene. The pac man machine as shown in my previous post has a light inside it and  and a glow on the screen which can be turned off or on. If I have time I may go back and darken the floor for the pacman machine shots.

Dungeon:

The dungeon set I first thought was suppose to be more like a jail, which is the difference between the images. Its a one shot set that will be shown on the screens so nothing complicated.

Command Center:

I made this set after the cobra one. The idea was to make it very similar. I started with a sphere with a more patchwork metal look inspired by the one in the old cartoon series. I had a lot of difficulty getting it to look how I wanted. I switched the type of lighting compared to the cobra one and added a red band to add more color.

Cobra Command:

Its a cylindrical room with a doorways and the same 4 screens and key panel copied to the other side with different images on the screens. As I get through the animation the screen images will be switched out with animated shots with graphics on them.  A lot of movement happens here so I kept the floor one single height to make animating easier.

Cobra Hallway:

I did this before the either of the command centers. I got the idea of using a streaked metal look from looking at the backgrounds from the old cartoon series. This room is going to be stuffed with characters so there was no need to decorate the walls. And I left the other hallways sparse like this as well.

Command Outside Entrance:

Again, this is for one shot. I took the image a bit far away. I'm not sure how many characters are going to be in the shot yet so, that will probably change the composition and the camera distance. And I just realized the forgot to correct the gamma on Duke's textures for that shot. So he looks a little washed out here.

In other news:

As I finish this post I am just getting done printing my inventory for the art sale. Lots more than last year. I'll be making a post on that tomorrow hopefully. Still going around cleaning up my files, making back ups and organizing everything for the Kre-O project. I want to be blocking animation tomorrow. Please no more rigging problems. *crossing fingers*

Fish Awakening

I've continued my work on my origami sealife short.

I've done a very basic rig using a joint chain, some simple expressions, and a few nurb curves to use as controllers.

I made a basic replica of the set used in the footage to scale including the lights.

After animating the fish in the shot I rendered and composted the effect. Here you can see the finished product, the animation, and the original film footage I took.

Modeling. It feels so good!

Hey, I have an animation project I can actually show! Yay! Super long post.

I've been working on this for a couple weeks. It's a teaser for an animated show that will hopefully be produced! The teaser includes, one character, and one setting, which I am modeling and lighting. I'll also be doing a tiny bit of cloth work later.

I started with doing some character concept sketches, based off a short loose character description.

Then I modeled the character.

The concept for the hair wasn't concrete here, so I went on texturing without it done yet.

The setting was rather easy to construct. A simple stage. The front current is nCloth rigged to locators so that it can be animated open and closed. The grey block was used as a placer for the character.

For lighting, I used a couple ambient lights for fill, and a spotlight. In this case, so I could better move and gauge the spotlight's beam I grouped a polygon cone to it, rather that use the light's built in lightfog. The cones material is transparent and has a glow to it making it function similar to the light fog when smoothed.

I'm working on the hair right now. And then I'll be pretty much done until the character animation gets back to me.

In the meantime, I'm working on page 4 of the La Jolla Mermaid illustrations aswell. And the Art Sale is tonight! Go, buy some of my prints!

While trying to fix some of the lighting issues I had when the camera looked toward the window, I found out about this magical thing called a portal light. Before this, I'd just been using normal direction lights and ambient lights with global illumination and final gather. I find the portal light looks more natural, is simpler to deal with as I don't need global illumination any more and it renders in about the same amount of time as my old setup if not faster in some areas. Next I'll be trying out some DOF, maybe the bokeh lens shader. I recommend looking up the portal light if you don't know about it. I found some good tutorials just by doing a google search.