3D Animatic 1st Pass & Character Turntables

Here is the final assignment for this semester's class:

The 1st pass of the 3D Animatic

Leeroy Turntable:

Ollie Turntable:

Jumping into a pile of....

Reference videos for our Farmer falling into a pile of corn.

Concept Art & Color Script

Her are some pieces from our most recent milestone:

2 Concept Pieces

and an extended color script

Lighting/Compositing Demo

Hey Everyone! This is a lighting/compositing Demo in Maya by Giroldi Francesco who did the animation "The Monk and the Monkey". Suzanne directed us to it. I haven't looked through it yet because it takes a while to load with my internet connection, but I figured it would be a good thing for everyone to see! Enjoy :)

http://webspace.ringling.edu/~fgiroldi/Tutorials/Movies/LightingCompositingDemo.mov

Our First Look and Feel test for textures!

So the basic plan at the moment: 

-solid color and gradients in Zbrush via polypaint

-export texture map to photoshop

-blend layer with paper texture over top of texture map

-simple line details (clothing seams, patterns etc) painted on yet another layer

Some of the work from Milestone #6 (Which coincides with out 1000th pageview!)

Expression Sheets to prep for facial rigging,

Some Environment sketches for the inside of the spaceship,

and some animation tests.

Now that we have base rigs we can start animating! Check out the new "Animations & Dailies" section of the Production Bible (Conveniently located to the left of this post)

Finished Modelsheets - turnaround

Color Script -1st pass

More Aliens

Trying to build upon sketches from class.

Illustration of "spider" body

Variation of Spider Body in Zspheres

Second Variation of Spider Body in Zspheres

I did some more sketches of the Alien. There was something people kept responding to while we've been concepting and that was the alien from our rough storyboard with the tentacles, and the designs with insect attributes. Julian is working on the animatic right now and has given the alien spider-like behavior when you first see his silhouette and the creepy factor is definitely working. So I'm trying to develop a design that works this all in. Let me know what you guys think so far!

"Beauty Shot"

Dude's freaked out...

Farmer Face Studies

Some exploration of the farmer's face shapes and his range of expressions. :)

Style

Experimenting with style and texture. I thought about using a style of "carved wood" (just thought that a farmer is related to nature) defining big shapes and planes of the character. I also used rake tool (similar thing we would get from sculpting) to define shapes and give texture.

Farmer Modelsheets - Rough

Alien Modelsheets - Rough

Some Variations

Some Aliens

Story Boards: First Pass

Thumbs

Just for funsies! =D

Farmer sketches

(8/24/2011) more :)

Farmer Concepts

Alien Story - 1st draft

Characters:

1. Old Man
So far-- old, disgruntled, redneck. Exhibits extreme alien paranoia. Insists extra-terrestrials visit his farm, leave crop circles, steal his harvest and intend to abduct him. Routinely performs night-watch with a loaded shot-gun in case of alien invasion.

2. Alien
Flies a UFO. Loves movies and popcorn.

Brief:

A redneck old farmer stands watch for alien invaders on his front porch at night. In moments, his field  is indeed visited by a UFO. The old man jumps to defend his property from the invader but is drawn into the alien space craft. There, he realizes that the alien is actually running a home theater, and has merely been stealing corn from his farm to use as popcorn. The old man joins the alien to watch movies and discovers his paranoia had been misplaced.

Stories

Henry and The Circus

We open on an empty dressing room behind the carnival. A young man (Henry) sneaks in. He is wowed by the awesomeness. He pretends to own the dressing room he sits down at the mirror and starts fiddling. He sees costumes hanging on a rack. He excitedly grabs an outfit and runs behind a curtain. A spider crawls across the counter-top. Henry runs out from behind the dressing curtain and into the chair. As he straightens his bow-tie it notices the spider and screams. Henry crushes the spider with a nearby comb. As he lifts the comb he notices a tiny top hat hanging from it. He looks closer at the spider and notices its tiny costume. Henry glances around the room seeing posters for the amazing knife juggling spider. Henry begins to console the spider when he is interrupted by an announcer And our next act ladies and gentlemen is "The Amazing Juggling Spider". Cut to the stage, and we see Henry is a make-shift spider costume juggling knives. He struggles but manages to pull it off and as he leaves the stage he sighs in relief and rests against The Giant's foot in his spider costume. The Giant screams and smashes Henry.

Prairie Robot

Open on a farm, there is a farmhouse, a barn, and a silo of corn. A boy is lying on the ground looking up at the stars he is eating popcorn from a bag. He sees a shooting star and perks up. The star gets bigger and bigger until he realizes it is coming at him. He runs to the edge of the farm to a line of trees and hides behind them just as something huge crashes down behind the barn and shakes the ground. The boy winces, but when nothing happens he peeks around behind the tree, after another pause he takes a handful of popcorn and pushes it in his mouth. Nothing happens for a moment, then from behind the barn the boy begins to make out a huge robot standing up and composing itself. The robot pauses for a moment, looks up from where it came from and then begins to look around as though it’s look for something. It sees the corn silo and begins to walk towards it. It reaches for the silo and the boys eyes grow wide as it tears the silo off its feet and pops off the top. The robot then makes its way to the barn where is sits down with a thud that shakes the ground. Curious now the boy comes out from behind the tree and slowly creeps up behind the robot. The robot oblivious to the boy looks at his hand which begins to glow red hot. The boy creeps up behind the robot as he hears a loud popping noise, but he steps on a twig and instead of a pop it makes a snap. The robot whips its head around and stares at the boy. The two look at each other for a second, until the robot sees the bag of popcorn in the boy’s hand, it turns its body to reveal it has popped all the corn in the silo. The boy’s eyes become the size of dinner plates and the robot reaches down towards him. The robot picks the boy up and puts him on his shoulder. He then turns to the barn and a slot in his head opens, a projector lens comes out and he begins to project a movie on the side of the barn. Cut to behind the robot and the boy the side of the barn flashes and begins to countdown, 5 . . . 4 . . . the robot lifts his hand and offers the boy some popcorn. 3 . . . 2. . . The boys grabs an armful of popcorn. 1 . . . the projector flashes on the side of the barn. Cut to the movie playing on the side of the barn (which is just flashing projector light, over and over). The camera slowly dollys out to reveal the side of the barn is part of a mural on the wall of a little boy’s bedroom. The room is very reminiscent of the farm we just saw, the ceiling is painted like the night sky, there is a row of potted plants in the back where the trees would be, there is a toy silo on the floor, in the center of the room is a boy lying on the floor asleep with a toy robot and a half empty bowl of popcorn, and on a table next to him is an old projector. The movie has finished and the front reel is spinning over and over.

Rig Testing

So, we all need to be testing rigs, you can default skin a mesh (Use one you have or download one, I have the TF2 Meshes like the abAutoRig guy if you want them) to these, or just parent some primitive shapes to the bones, test them and edit this post with you tested animation bits.

Modular Character System
The MCS looks really promising (I'm a bit fan of the squash and stretch functionality), however it isn't released yet. I've sent email to the creator Jan Berger who replied
"I am currently preparing a release but can not give out details regarding pricing and license structure, yet."
On the very lucky chance it is released sometime in the next 3-4 weeks, I think it would be a very elegant solution for out rig.

AFR AutoRig

-I can't figure out how to turn off the stretchy IK in this rig, which renders is useless. If you can figure out a way to turn it off let me know, otherwise we'll have to go with one of the other two.

Rig-O-Matic
-This builds upon a skeleton that you build, frankly I think building the skeleton is the hardest part (Orientation, Joint Order, etc.) so if I'm gonna go through building the skeleton, I'm just gonna build the rest of the rig.

abAutoRig

abAutoRig Tutorials

-7/26 The proxy skeleton has the X axis translate locked out. I can only assume this is for a specific reason, but it means the character's legs must be modeled in a straight line.

-7/27 I put together the rig with Norman's mesh, abAutoRig_Norman.ma test it out!

I tossed together a walk, I didn't have any problems with it, I was worried about the knees, but I didn't have trouble with them in a walk.

-8/25 I'm working on a face rig right now, I'm hoping to have it done by the end of the week, I'll put it up when it's done and you can mess with it. I can see where changes would need to be made for a cinematic project (The basic bone structure was taken form someone talking about a game rigging pipline), but I think I have the general idea.

-8/31 Got everything except for the phonemes rigged on the face. It's dawned on me that you shouldn't need phoneme sliders, you should just position the lips the way you want them, unfortunately I didn't give enough control to do that without animate the joints themselves. I don't have a problem with animating straight to the joints (I actually find it easier), but there is no point in building half a rig, and then making you animate the joints for all the stuff that doesn't have a control. Put the face in dropbox (FaceTest01_Final.ma) if you want to mess with it, let me know if anything is terribly wrong.

-9/5 Suzanne said I should practice rigging on the farmer head, so I modified a head I found online, into the farmer, rigged, and skinned it. It was a LOT faster the second time around, I put it in dropbox (Farmerhead_Final.ma). Try it out, it would save a lot of time and hassle if we can get everyone comfortable with animating straight to the bones, and just keying selection sets, so I only made controls for the blendshapes.
Poked him with a pin:

Edit this Post with your feedback/ Pros & Cons for each rig, we'll decide on which on at the beginning of the semester.

Sup

Hai Guys!