Semester 2 – World environment setting

At this point I had now fully built the layout of the world setting where the robots would set pass in their journey. In this world section I built everything (except the bushes). I partially force on the building and the route the robot had to take. In the story they fall into two problems. One was the cave where they fall into by the roof caving in

(the caving into the shop scene was initially inspired by the movie Day after Tomorrow)

We mainly took the idea of an overground forest terrain that makes it seem that the robots are not on top of a shop and then they fall though the roof where its relieved that they are on top of a shop. It was also in our early concept art that the robots would wonder though a shop. This neatly tided to the early made art work

The seconded problem that was made in this terrain was the magnet crane. The idea was that when they leave the shop the robots get lifted and get stuck on the magnet.

Full render of the Car Park environment.

This was grass that was later added by my group teammate Ellie who had been working on the grass while i was making this world set.

At this point i reorganized my work folder so it was easier for my teammate to find things in the world set.

Screen recording of the world environment

This screen recording was a very quick edited video to show my team mates on how the environment was coming together. It followed the route that the robots would be taking though the animation story.

All three Robots in the environment scene.

Full render of the robots with there updated texture skin

Broken robot design

I made a quick Robot that would be interacted with at the end of the animation. The robot has a detachable head part that allows it to be animated to fall off to the floor. This robot designed as a node to the movie Wall-E which was a inspiration in the making of the animation world setting. Where only robots live on earth now and humans ruins remain.

Refences for the broken robot design (WALL-E 2008 Film)

Roof collapsing test

Test Animation of the Shop roof collapsing.

Using shape keys for creating the fall

Sketches of the scene

Dust emitter was small Gray sphere

Small bits of brick ruins off the roof

Rough animation trial of the Fall

Final animation of the fall – (At the end of the project)

I’m really happy how I made the animation of the roof falling and also how the practically effects looked. I created and used two practical effects. One was for the Dust effect and the second was tiny broken bits of bricks that fall along with the big rubble parts.

I created the cracks and the dent down that are seen in the animation to tell audiences that the floor is about to fall in. I did really like the shot of the robots looking down before the fall. I do think it still goes quickly but if it was any slower than this it would have looked floaty.

Cave scene

My teammate Robert sketched this for me in my art book notes when talking about the roof fall scene. I wanted him to draw me what he wanted the cave scene to look like. I think I achieved this look he had in vision of.

Volumetric Lighting – Yellow lighting

video i used – [2.8] Blender EEVEE Tutorial: Volumetric Lighting, Fog Effect

Volumetric Lighting – Blue lighting

I went and added very nice volumetric Lighting in the cave. I experimented and created two lighting colours, yellow and blue. I showed my team mates and we voted for yellow.

Early Animation of the Cave scene

Out of Cave

Cycles with the volumetric lighting on

So after this point when the robots get out of the Cave, a lot of problems appeared. The first was that Eevee renders could not handle rending the shop scene. This was due to the heavy blender file using all the computer memory. It was unable to render a single shot. I did try going into Cycles but was not happy with now changing all the work I had done to cycles after the group worked so hard to make everything working on Eevee.

Cycles working again

I went into fixing the animation and I ended up having to resort to using layer to render. Basically I had to cut up my environment set into 3 pieces. One was the robots and everything they interact with. 2nd was budling and objects behind the robots. Third was the trees and the sky clouds at the back. I got the rendering working again. But this lead to me having spend a lot of time on rendering every single layer. This often too a lot of my time in the animation process, especially with fixing.

B animation Shot list – (29/03/25)

I also started a Shot list to layout what I needed to animate over the following weeks. I created 4 column for ticking. The first was what was the animatic. I had to change a lot of what was in the animatic due to my team wanting a changes of the B section story. A lot of the animatic was cut out or changed slightly (marked in yellow). It was used more as a way to look at my animatic if I was working from it. The second row was animation. Third was rendering and last was composting.

Sky dome and sky Clouds

Refence image for the clouds

Ellie had found this refences image of fantasy clouds sky. She liked this look of the clouds and showed it to the group. She did walk away from the idea of making the clouds and preferred to use the HDIM as the sky in the end. I insisted that the group should still try making the sky dome after putting it in the world scene but no one worked on making it. I though it was interring’s idea and decided to try and make them anyway.

World sky nodes

Sky dome Clouds and the object nodes

I had finished making the clouds and I tried my best to replicate the ones from the refence image but it was very hard to achieve that look in the end. I do wish I had more time to work on the clouds because I think it would have been possible. The clouds i ended up using was still good for our world background.

B animation Shot list – 10 /04/25

The animation so far and is flying though the animation section. Often getting 2 to 3 animation section done daily. Was very well on the time Schule for finishing the B section.

Tress Problems

After a Render of the start of my animation I happen to notice straight away problems with the trees. They kept flickering a lot of black dots all the time and often flankered a lot when the camera moved fast. I eventually found out that it was caused by Z-fight among the tree planes.

Fixes I did for Ellies Bushes

How I overcame the problems was to go in edit mode, selected all the planes and go on transform, Randomize and move it slightly. It wasn’t a perfect fix. I tried deleting half of the bushes planes and move the trees further away but the flicking never truly went away and can sometimes be seen very rarely and not as obvious as before. I also moved the bushes slightly too just in case it also decided to have the same problem.

After the fixes of the Z-fighting with the trees and bushes

Cave Jump scene

This was my first attempt in making the Jump of animation. It was good but i wanted to push the animation more and asked on ways to improve this animation. I went to my Lecture for advise on how to improve this jump. He told me to look at the anticipation of the jump. I focus more on the push off the wall and how a person would swing up from the edge. The robot takes a mini try of jumping up but then re tries again and makes it over.

The improvements I added to jump animation. I’m really happy how it turned out.

Adobe after effects

Here is me creating together a one scene with 3 renders of each layers. I tested this to check if doing everything in 3 layers would work. It turned out well. The only problem i faced with doing layer was the lighting. Due to having it transparent i had to switch off the HDIM lighting for them scene causing many scenes being very dark. I went over later with area lighting to fix this

17/04/25 – Animation section fully finished

At this point all Animation was fully finished. There was a lot of problems I faced when it came to rendering the animation and it set me back a bit. I often had to re render a lot and the animation scenes where still very heavy that it took a long time to finish rendering. The scenes where I had to use layers had me render 3x for each of the three layers i was using.

3 Layers combined together (test)

Comp Lighting improvement

In after effects I went and changes the Hue and saturation of the animation to be slightly orange to give that post apocalyptic vibe to the ruined shop. I also made the contrast darker so that the lighting was popping out more in the scene

How well we followed the concept art and Art refence in our mood board

This art concept of the shop scene compared to the final render shot of the shop screen. I liked that the shop scene was nearly the same however the major difference was the slope out of the shop. The true reason I didn’t do that was due to having to create a manual walk cycle walking up the slope.

Again with the art concept of the shop scene compared to the final render. I think I captured the concept art light beams that pierce though the collapsed roof in the shop.

The robots leaving the shop reminded me of the art image used in our mood board. I always liked this low angle image shot and I think subconsciously made it in the animation.

I think I also captured the concept art of the grass over the shop look that Robert drew in week 1. It was an interesting idea and influence most of Shop/Car park scene.

B section animation beside the animatic.

I tried to put a video to compare the animatic our team made and the final animation we finish making. This shows what changes we made though out the animation process and what had changed from the animatic. My animation had to change things from the animatic due to changes made by the group and how we wanted the middle section to go as.

The big examples of an animatic change was at the beginning where the robots are walking on the roof and the slim robot is having a piggy back ride with the other robot. We also changed how the robots get themselves out of the cave and what the robot do. The rest was made as the best of my ability, It was hard to have the video sync up well but I did follow the animatic and I achieved the look that the group wanted me to make.