Week 15

Now the final piece is finished I am over all very happy with the end product, everything we set out to achieve we did achieve, even if it all didn't look as seamless and professional as we had originally hoped but obviously there are a lot of things that I would do differently if I were to start the project again. The biggest thing that was a problem for me and my group was collecting the motion capture data, I think we were a little naive in thinking that we could stroll in and get what we needed without really having a very good knowledge of the software. That being said in a strange way I'm quite glad because of all of the things that went wrong, we now know how to rectify so when I use it again in the future there won't be many obstacles that I won't be able to over come.

    I am happy with how the main 3D character turned out but because I did the rigging and envelopes so many times it became very frustrating and obviously I had time restraints so if I'm completely honest I don't think that I can say that on the final guy I did the envelopes as well as I could have done and that is probably the biggest thing I regret about the whole project. One of the parts of the project I enjoyed the most has to be the time I spent sculpting in sculptris. Although again I ran into a few problems that I had to overcome which led me to be better on the program. The main issue I had was the amount of faces I was creating when modelling anything, I made the mesh to complicated so programs wouldn't be able to handle, including sculptris. 

The part of the whole thing I probably found easiest was the video editing side, when I was putting the sound on and the health bars and stuff nothing seemed to go wrong. I think this was down to the higher levels of planning I did in these areas. I did a lot of research into what sound effects would match and what sound track would complement the piece in the best way, however finding a suitable song to fit alongside the fight with the right timings proved hard to find, so in the end I described what I wanted to a friend involved in music producing and he created a track to suit my needs. I also find programs such as after effects and final cut a lot more strait forward and easier to use, everything is just right there in front of you and it's pretty much just a matter of dragging it to the right size an then dragging it into the right place, be that with the sound files or the health bars.I was really hoping that after this project and indeed the whole first year, my skills in the these complicated programs capable of creating some really nice work would improve greatly and I think they have. 

When I started this year I didn't really know what I wanted to do after my time at uni, mainly because I hadn't experienced many aspects of animation, I had just worked in flash and not much else. After this year I am definitely leaning towards something in 3D, even if the 3D programs are the most complicated. I am thinking perhaps some sort of animation loops for games or something, however I know there are a lot more things I need to learn and so my mind could change as the years go on. I am happy with how much I have improved over this year, I find myself watching people as they do the most mundane things, like walking to try and relate them towards work and I think this really helps. I like to think it is my mind turning into an animators mind. The foundation project really tort me attention to detail, with it being stop motion and me moving everything by hand, I had to be really careful that I was doing everything right because if you noticed something was wrong 200 frames ago it is a lot of work to go back and fix it. It also made me aware of how important planning is when embarking on any project, the dope sheet alone made the foundation project a lot easier. Over the entire year 3D is probably the area that I have improved most in but that is mainly because at the beginning of the year I didn't really have many skills in that area. I regret to say that in the final project I think my higher level of interest showed in that it was my highest area of concentration and I think I might have let the other areas of the project take a bit of a back seat. 

As I mentioned before I spent some time in the motion capture studio, initially I was quite excited to get to have a bit of a mess around with the equipment but I quickly realised it was also a very good chance to get involved with things that are used even at industry standard. With a lot of help from Andy Serkis the involvement of motion capture in professionally created products is becoming more and more common. I really wanted to try and bring my skills in that area up to a decent standard and I feel, because of the time I have spent around the equipment, I have done that. Even if I do still have a lot to learn. 

Over all I am happy with how my skills have developed this year and every day I feel like I am getting a step closer to being able obtain my ideal job and I eagerly look forward to what the following years have to teach me. 

  

Week 14

I decided to go back into MAX open up the mesh with no rig and texture it using the sub divisions like I had originally tried first then put the rig in afterwords, with the help of Steve and the other two members in my group. For some reason it worked this way round and here is how it looks:

I also managed to get the health bars completed using flash and a little bit of tweening to get Tom's health to go down when he gets hit:

Here is how it will look when it is stretched to the right size in final cut:

 and the sound track, I sat with one of my friends and he created a track tailored to the needs I had. I am now just waiting to get the finished file with out the health bar and sound so I can incorporate them into it using final cut pro.

Week 13

This week I was mainly focusing on sorting out the envelopes of the character, with the guy now being in a Tpose it was a lot easier but still took a lot longer than I had hoped. after a lot of messing about I managed to get it up to this standard: 

After this I Attempted to get some colour onto the character, this did not go well. First I tried making a texture that had several sub divisions, so his trousers could be a different colour to his skin etc. When I tried to render this out for some reason only his trousers stick to the biped but the rest of his body stays still, extremely annoying and I have no idea how to fix it so I started looking into UV mapping but because the file is so big it is too hard to see what you're looking at with the map and 3DS MAX starts too lag. I started looking into other programs like blender and zbrush to see if I could solve this problem. Despite trying trying and trying again I couldn't get to grips with the UV mapping on a mesh this complicated and with so many dodgy polygons. I am going to wait until the next tutorial with Steve to see if I can get some help.

I have also started looking at sound effects and a theme song to be running in the background of the action. I also did a bit of research into the health bars and what they should look like;

Week 12

This week we tried again to collect the motion capture data, we booked out the studio for double the time to make sure we could get what we needed this time. After calibrating the cameras I put on the motion capture suite and we took a few takes and this is the data we go just on the biped, the actual character isn't ready yet as I haven't edited the envelopes yet. 

I realised this week that I probably wasn't going to be able to use the character I had modelled because his arms were far too close to his trousers, I now realise that I should have modelled him in a 'T pose' because I either widen the influence the arm and hand has and the leg moves with it or I widen the leg envelope and the hand moves with that. Luckily I have a save of the model in sculptris where everything is done but his arms so I am going to go back and sort the arms out:

Week 11

This week It was time to do the filming in front of the blue screen, this was for the live action that we are going to put into the 3d environment. Using markers on the floor I was able to direct Tom, the other member in our group, to do his actions so it would line up with the 3D character when he is imported into the 3D environment. I also started looking into turning the drawings I had done for the background of the project into the 3D environments they needed to be. I wanted a rocky mountain feel to it so to create most of the geometry I created a plain and put a displace modifier with a smoke map onto it which made it spike up giving the basic landscape  I wanted:

I then messed around with the gradient map and bump texture until I got the desired rough gravely look:

After that I messed around with a few different backgrounds and stuff to see what designs would have what effects:

Week 10

This week I ran into a bit of a problem when I tried to insert the 3D character into 3DS MAX, the face count of the character was a little over 3million and obviously MAX was running incredibly slow, that is when it wasn't crashing. I tried using the reduce tool in sculptris but it was simply taking far too long so I had a look around to try and find a better solution and I stumbled across a program called Mesh Lab and this allowed me to choose the number of faces I wanted the mesh to have rather than pretty much doing it one at a time so I managed to get the face count down to about 60 thousand and MAX seems to run it fine, obviously some of the quality was lost but it still looks good and even if it didn't I wouldn't have a choice because it needed to be small for it to run in MAX. Here is how it looks before the faces were reduced:

and after:

After opening the character in MAX I Dragged a biped in and in figure mode I moved and resized the biped to fit in the mesh. After this I put a skin modifier onto the mesh and added all on the bones from the biped, now if I move the biped the mesh will follow it. 

Week 9

This week the attempt to gather the motion capture data went a little better than last week but still not well, It took me a while but I actually managed to get the cameras calibrated but unfortunately it took me so long to get to that stage we had no time left to actually do any motion capture.

 Again we booked it for next week and we should get it all done then. 

I managed to get the 3D character completely modelled this week, though I still need to texture him and rig him up:

Week 8

This week we booked out the motion capture studio so we could get to grips with the software and how to use the program, because we want to map the motion capture movements onto the 3D guy when he is finally finished. Unfortunately even with the guide there to help us we could not get the cameras to calibrate and we ran out of time in the studio before we even had chance to capture any data at all, however we have booked out the studio for next week so hopefully we can get everything we need then.

Our group had to deliver the pitch presentation this week and we did it in blog format, to which we each had access and each added our own work and concepts. This was presented to Steve, one of our tutors. He seemed pleased with our progress and gave us some good feedback. I was pleased with how it went and Steve seemed to be too. 

I also furthered the creation of the 3D character:

Week 7

This week we began filming some tests for the section of the sequence where the real life character goes through the portal into the 3d landscape. To do this I set up the shot I needed by referring to the storyboards I previously created. Once the shot was lined up I got one of my house mates to simply stand up and walk to the other side of the room, and then took another take without anything happening in the scene so after the filming is done, working in final cut the two sequences could be cropped together to make it look like my house mate is  dissapearing as he walks and eventually the portal will be added so it looks like he is dissapearing into the portal. Here is the footage without any editing:

 Another member of my group was to do the editing in final cut. 

I also started creating the 3d character in Sculptris, he is based on one of my character designs I did in the previous weeks. Unfortunately progress with the it is moving rather slow but I am happy with how it looks so far:

Weeks 1-6

This is an online journal to keep track of the work that I do towards my groups final special effects 

sequence. The first six weeks of the project was spent doing the weekly tasks set in lesson and adapting the

things we learnt into practical applications to help us along with our project. We all agreed the basic outline for our project, basically a real life guy is playing a game and he gets sucked into it and has to fight the game character in the virtual world, then we all went away and drafted up basic storyboards, character and set designs. I have decided to initially focus on the combat character, to start this I am going to do some research into the type of character we are looking for:

From my research I have decided that if nothing else the character I create has to be pretty ripped, I want him to be a big tough looking guy that you wouldn't dare even look at.

After creating a few basic character designs I decided to go onto researching into the types of backgrounds we are looking for:

I have drafted up a few rough ideas for what the background could look like: