As with all productions, as time goes on things need to change, as our story has shifted so have our needs for the soldier. While Lawrences original sketch helped us to become inspired and created the idea for the "Rite of Passage", he unfortunately needed some changes to the design. After some talk Lawrence and I were afraid that the audience would identify with the Soldier far more than the Lascer, as would only be natural when people are presented with a creature/alien/beast/monster and a human. So in order to combat this we chose to take a page out of the George Lucas/Star wars book, that is to cover his face. Just like the Storm Troopers and just about every other grunt in the Imperial army we gave our soldier a helmet. Thus shrouding his face and making it harder for the audience to identify with the soldier. While this may not be the only thing it will take to help the audience to realize that the the Lascer is indeed the innocent and protagonist of the story, that job will have to live up to the animation and story telling.
For the modeling of this character I decided to do it all withing Maya. Due to the predominately hard surface nature of the Desert Shock Trooper (DST) because of his armor, I decided that a standard box modeling workflow would be best for the DST, keeping in mind edge flow around the armor and the extra edges to maintain the hard surface nature of the armor after being converted to SubD. I created the head as a separate piece which I than parented to the body. The complex nature of the helmet and its design did no
t mesh well with the needs of the edge flow of the rest of the body. Also the fact that a helmet comes down below the jaw line mean if will mask off part of the neck and the audience will not be able to tell there isn't actually a head or flesh beneath the helmet.
I than rigged this character much like I did the Lascer so that it could be passed off to Lawrence for animation duties. The final pose and the baton were done by Lawrence for the render below, illustrating the attitude and range of motion of the DST.
It's taken a lot of work to get to the fun stuff. With Jason proving himself not only an amazing modeler, but a competent rigger as well we're finally at the point where we can start bringing stuff to life. So the first shot is pretty long and involves an immediate introduction to one of our characters. This shot is about 700 or so frames long. This immensely long shot also reveals out creature and then cuts to the scene posted here. To keep up with our soldier and find out what he's up to our creature here has to keep up as inconspicuously as possible. One of the best ways Jason and I thought this could be done was by having the creature take full advantage of its environment. Since my idea of this otherworldly desert included rock spires it was hard to avoid the notion of the visual of our creature jumping from one to the other. The spires had always been part of our original environment design as can be seen in the concept sketch in the post below.
Research for the shot began by watching a whole lot of Animal Planet. Anything that included the behavior of big cats was Tivo'd without question. Youtube proved to be pretty useless here. What was captured from Animal Planet was put to sketchpad, but a lot of the footage proved to be either too hard to read or was shot at a very useless angle (front, back, etc.). What was really needed was a nice profile view of a big cat jump. Since finding live action for this was proving to be just as much a challenge as animating the scene itself, I decided to turn to what I consider to be the film with the single best big cat animation in film history; Disney's The Jungle Book.
Look at Bagheera's fantastic animation really made the anatomy of a big cat jump clear. The bunching up and almost full body collection of power before the jump, the near relaxation during the apex of the jump, and the sudden compression and decompression of the body during the landing was easy to extract from a number of key scenes from the film. What also helped was watching some animation from Blizzard's World of Warcraft. There are a number of big cat creatures in the game and the use of a free program called the WoW Model Viewer proved to be an essential tool in dissecting out what I needed for the shot. For you Blizzard fans out there, I referenced a lot of animation from the Druid Cat.
Depending on the needs of the shot, I generally animate with a combination of pose-to-pose and straight ahead animation. In terms of pose-to-pose I like to sketch out thumbnails of all the major positions. I then tap out the timing using either my metronome or just counting off seconds in my head and imagining the motion. After that I jump straight into Maya. The straight ahead approach comes from all the minor movements in between the major movements that I had already planned. I've found that animating this way lays down a really strong foundation for my scene, but leaves it open to some rather nice and sometimes surprising spontaneous action that I had not planned for or extracted from my research.
I generally like animating straight in spline, but for this jump that traversed a pretty long distance, I knew something was going to have to be different. My first take was a good lesson in this. The jump lacked energy and a nice clean rhythm. It seemed clumsy and ill defined. For my second take at this shot I decided that the best way to animate this scene was in stepped mode with flat tangents. This allowed me to make clear definitions of all of my key poses and nail the timing. After setting and tweaking all the needed key poses I selected all of my controls, selected all of my keys in the graph editor, and converted them to clamped mode. I should also note that I set Maya to playback all frames as opposed to the more traditional 24 frames per second playback. This allowed me to view a more accurate playback speed. I was later able to define the traditional 24 frames per second spec in the video conversion stage after render.
In my experience I've found that for a really cushioned texture to the animation, spline is the best way to go. However, if a more realistic and defined movement is needed then clamped is the surefire way to go. Converting from stepped to either clamped or spline is never a straightforward approach. In fact, it can seem to almost ruin the animation as the computer takes control of the inbetweens and literally re-animates your scene. After settling the urge to scream at the computer and threaten its fate to the gods, the next major step is tweaking the tangents in the graph editor. One of the major tweaks needed was getting a natural feel for the jump. Computers never take gravity into account so the translate Y curve for the ALL control of the creature was going to need the most attention. Basically the a good jump will necessitate the shape of an upside U for the translate Y axis. To achieve this I took Chuck Grieb's, my 3D animation teacher, suggestion for weighting, freeing, and in some cases, breaking the tangents. Weighting the tangents enables them for such modifications as freeing. Freeing the tangent allows the animator more control over the influences a key has on a graph line. This really gave me the ability to get that nice upside down U for the jump behavior. I was finally able to convey a sudden burst of energy, a slow gradual losing fight with gravity, and an exponential accelerating drop to the other rock spire.
After some major tweaking and fighting with the all too dreaded gimbal lock phenomenon I was able to nail the performance. One of the best things about animating this scene was the amount of knowledge gained from it. I learned a brand new approach to animating a scene and when to use it. I want to give a shout out to my buddy and partner Jason for the model work and the fantastic rig that I now have to work with. Can't wait to post more.
Alright so I've been a little lazy updating this page but I have been busy producing assets for the short film. Today I'm going to show a little of how I tackle the task of creating an environment. First and foremost you have to decide what kind of environment its going to be, whether its a forest, underwater, mountain, tundra, or what have you. Once we decided that we wanted this story to take place on an alien world in a desert like environment we started brainstorming. The hardest part of creating a desert environment is that a desert is usually bereft of life and vegetation so you have to come up with other ways of making the environment interesting. So I started with a couple of thumbnails and chose one I liked and did a quick redraw of what I was thinking.
This is what we decided to stay on. A very rocky canyon type of environment. The rocks would give us a lot of options in populating the environment with visual interest. As well as be used for hiding seems in the environment since the canyon would have to be broken into pieces to make it easier for the wide range of machine this project will be created on to run it smoothly.
Once I had that down I created a poly plane and shapped the canyon out. Once I had the canyon shape I like I boke of the plain in even sections so that I could focus on each section as well as make it easier to normal map the canyon later if we so choose. As I made random cuts and and extrudes to give the feeling of rocks eventually you get to a point where the default smoothing groups don't give a good idea of whats going on so I reassign each objects smoothing so that I can see what they actually look like. I than moved onto the spires which I created from a cylinder to start with and than tackled them much Like I did the walls. Finnally ending with small rocks and boulders to clutter up the scene with. Than Lawrence set up a nice mentalRay lighting setup which we used to render out some previews of what the untextured environment will look like
So as Lawrence stated in earlier posts I was working on the Lascer model. I thought I would post some WIP images and try and explain the process I went through in an attempt to bring this creature to life. Like all art it starts with an idea and sketches, which you have all already been introduced to and shown. I than take those drawings and begin to work out what needs to be done to bring them into the 3D realm. I look at things and identify problems with the design that may not work in a 3D environment that may have worked fine if we were doing a 2D animation. Such as where the shoulders were originally attached and their scale would not have worked on this creature in real life so I had to change that. I started this creature out with a speed sculpt of the bust of the Lascer so that I could get an idea for the forms of the head and get a better understanding for the feeling of the creature and possible problems that may arrise from the complex solid forms on the head and neck. I try to keep the speed sculpts under an hour two at most.
I than being modeling. I prefer drawing the basic body shape with a spline and the extrude that out to get the basic proportions of whatever it is I am modeling. I than create openings in the topology to make the arms and legs.
I than go about modeling as if I was doing it for a game model as it is a very efficiant and conservative way of modeling which will all pay off later when I import it into ZBrush. Which is exactly what I will do.
Once I have my low poly finished I take it into ZBrush and begin working my way up from large forms to small forms. Once I am done with the high poly sculpt I will be using it to generate a Normal map, we will be using a lower poly model for animating for the sake of simplicity and time constrants seeing as this is for a class so we need to make sure it will launch on the schools Apple computers. After all that I will begin to texture the Lascer which will have to wait for another post. So until than I hope you enjoy the images. Oh and the final high poly model. It is missing the teeth and eyes because they will be creating within Maya.
These would be the concept sketches for the Lascer. The one that shows just the head is actually the very first drawing that Jason and I approved of. The very first attempt at this design ended up looking way too much like one of the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal. I realized that I needed to keep the muzzle t-rex-like to retain the aggressive look I was going for. I eventually ended up with this head that I really liked. Jason took notice and added his suggestions and I eventually ended up with the rest of the drawings.
At this point I already knew exactly what the body was going to look like. I wanted a creature that walked on its knuckles so I started researching gorilla anatomy. I wanted the creature to have the ability to stand and push off with its hindquarters so I researched velociraptor and t-rex anatomy. It definitely had to have a tail and since this guy was going to need all the natural weapons he could get, I decided to add a spear-like bone protrusion to the end of the tail. The armor plates on the head and neck were improvisation. I always liked creatures that had aesthetically pleasing rhythm in their designs so the swept back armor plating helped achieve that feel. I think it was Jason that suggested that the eyes remain pupil-less. If anything, it gives the creature a creepy, but cool look and I can play with eyeshapes to express emotion.
I have a lot of his movements mapped out in my head and I've started thumbnailing some of them already. I'm currently working on the walk and run cycles so I'll post those once I have them refined. I even have a cool idea involving the lascer taking a few steps and diving from a standing position onto his forearms and taking off into a run.
So this is basically where it all started. One of Chuck's (our 3D and final film teacher) first assignments was having us come up with five different core concepts and rendering them out as illustrations. My concepts ranged from two envy driven pirate parrots to a T-Rex coming out of a cardboard time machine. Jason had his main focus on a cool little story involving a small Easter Island inspired tiki character. He has actually done a short animation on this concept for our 2D animation class.
I seemed to get a lot of feedback on the T-Rex/time travel story and the soldier drawing. I inevitably went with the soldier idea and started developing it before Jason and I paired up. This is the very first drawing of Jake and my very first stab at digital painting. I had no idea what the lascer looked like and I'm pretty sure that I didn't know I was going to call it a "lascer" at this point either. The one thing about the creature I was sure about was it was going to have irked Jake in some way and that it was going to be big. I think it's safe to say that at this point I was fiddling around with the idea of revenge as the core drive to the story. Revenge makes for angry fighting which makes room for mistakes on both sides. This in turn makes for an interesting and emotionally driven confrontation...
...just kidding, I had no idea what was gonna drive the story at this point. I just knew I wanted the opportunity to build and animate a cool creature and a soldier.
Welcome all. From now until we yell "FINAL!" this shall be our production blog for the short film Jason Downing and I, Lawrence Grijalva, are doing for school. We were originally going to do our own thing, but our teacher allowed us the luxury of working together. Jason loves modeling and makes it look easy. He has really taken off with ZBrush and has done some extraordinary work so far. I love animation so we saw the benefits of working together. We're like a two man VFX army! We get to concentrate on the one, or more, aspects of 3D animation that interest us the most.
So out of the ideas we had started working on we chose to go with my concept. The sole reason behind this is that both Jason and I are creature junkies. We both love the same movie creature moments and can easily list off ILM's best creature work. In a quick attempt at summation, my concept is basically a rite of passage story. It takes place on a different world where the native race is under siege by a hostile alien race. The native race is comprised of soldiers who train their whole lives in combating the alien race, also known as the Lascers. Our short film focuses on one young soldier, Jake Archer, who is searching for a friend. What he finds instead drives him to hunt a rogue lascer. An act that is considered a rite of passage for an experienced and prepared soldier.
More of the story will be revealed later as we develop the storyboards. We have a good idea of what we need in terms of 3D assets as well as the inevitable fight between the two. Jason has already sculpted a concept maquette in ZBrush and is well into modeling the creature in Maya. Once he finishes the primary form he'll take the model into ZBrush and begin sculpting in the details. In the meantime I'm brushing up on my rigging skills as well as researching how I want the lascer to move. I've got a good idea of how the walk cycle is going to look as well as a few key hero movements that are going to eventually come into play. Once we finish the lascer, we'll begin work on Jake. A stylized human character is a tad difficult to do, but shouldn't be much of a problem to pull off. The key is to keep him as stylized as possible so that his movements and look are more acceptable. The basis for why The Incredibles worked as well as it did.
We both hope to use the blog as a means of documenting the production of the film. We'll be posting concept art, 3D models, and eventually animatics and rough animation. There may even be footage of us making complete fools of ourselves in out attempt to rough out the choreography of the main fight. All this and more to come.
