Hey! Terrifying that the first year is closing now, but hey finishing off with a huge project has been interesting!

This project throughout has been a difficult but delightfully freeing experience in terms of creativity and learning how to either work for blender or get blender to work for you. Again being put into random groups was worrying at the start as I was not comfortable with many people in the class, but It has been good getting to know and work with more people and getting to know them each.

The guidelines for the project set seemed daunting at first, mainly the part about no legs, but there being a journey anyways. However, coming together our group seemed pretty content after cycling through ideas on a whiteboard, to focus on the ocean in one way or another. We thought of a diver, a seal, a siren, a fisherman, the fish themselves, etc. We decided to focus on a journey of a Fisherman searching for a fabled fishing spot, where he must pass through the territory of some monsters, which are  a siren, kraken and sea serpent, however at one point there might have been a shark instead. The siren, kraken, serpent, fisherman and then the fish he catches would be nicely split as one character for each of the currently five in the group, however with one member leaving it left us some trouble to even out the work-load, so from then on, work that would have been for the fifth member would bounce around between the four left of us as time went on.

Each of us had plenty of ideas, sketches and more in our planning for the story, but I will mainly keep this post full of my own contributions and some of the more important pieces from my teammates.

We also decided to each make our own version of a storyboard then refine it into a more complete board.

Here are my original boards, then the kind of messy Frankenstein boards afterwards.

   

Frankenstein Group board

And finally, the complete board I made afterwards that we ended up sticking with. Some changes happen later down the line of course but mostly stayed consistent.

We started discussing the overall style of the animation, and after witling it down a good bit decided on our two main influences, two video games, “Dredge” and “Subnautica”. Both try to blend a beautiful, yet eerie style, lying somewhere between cartoonish and horror with their maddeningly vast oceans with its many monsters and isolation.

The colour palette from Dredge in particular stuck out to us, so we as a group tried to aim more for this dark murky water and the dullish red clouded skies. The colour of the monsters and fisherman also changed around a lot, as can be seen with these few examples:

We decided in the end that the fisherman would include much brighter colours, including a lot of yellow in his coat so he would stand out compared to the duller murky water, monsters with mostly cold colours now and the dull harsh sky. The fish, also being made vibrant gives it a false sense of security, seemingly disconnected entirely to the other monsters previously, adding to the overall surprise of the ending with the fish being deceptive in its design. Now with the story and designs by this point figured out we could move onto our previs animations, however again by this point we were unaware if we were really down one person or not so theres connecting pieces of the previs missing.

And now, from here onwards we properly got to move into production!

 

I personally was very excited to get into production and started right away into modelling my fisherman first, starting from his simple previs model and slowly building a new better one beside it.

First I had to make some references, so I grabbed up all of my previous art of the fisherman and the same for the siren, and got to work on a front and side view for both.

These were a huge help in being able to model these two and why the finished products look so similar to their concept art and references.

(yes the fisherman’s pipe got lost along the way because adding animating smoke on top of animating water was just too much)

These are my main three big contributions in terms of modelling, the fisherman, ship and siren. These models were all being made all the way up until about a week or two ago when the boat was finished, These models, particularly the fisherman were a technical nightmare in the armature, weight painting and posing department, but I had a lot of fun with the texturing, as I took a step out of my comfort zone and try out manual painting on a model so I could have much more control on smaller details and being able to achieve the specific style we wanted with these models. So, remembering hearing about Procreate having 3D painting features, I immediately got to work there and it all worked out really well, there were obviously issues with porting over exactly what and how I wanted, inconsistencies and mistakes, but in the end I think that experimenting with manual painting was a good challenge for me and added a lot to the style and tone of the overall animation, with both the fisherman and siren being set with some nice and interesting designs! The boat however, I just settled back into substance painter for, which was just as much of a nightmare to try and get to work how I wanted it to, as adobe products are known to do haha.

You might also notice in some of these later renders of my three models there is a significantly better lighting setup, and yes that is taken straight from the in-class exercise on lighting because I was quite happy with the three point lighting system and how it made the models really pop. This unfortunately wouldn’t apply so easily to the set of the actual animation as it just wouldn’t make too much sense for the environment and how open a lot of the shots are. However, it was fun, nice to learn how lighting really works with all of its confusing controls  and modifiers and hey it made my models look much more professional for the presentations at least.

Some other work I was a big part of in the production was the environment, this was a shared struggle between Victoria and I. I handled figuring out how the water would work and look and Victoria designed the sky and rocks. I am again very proud of how these in particular turned out, despite how much of a pain they were to figure out and how many iterations they went through. Here are a few pictures of the different couple old attempts and then the finished environments.

I will also say I had a lot of fun making shape keys for my models, they really help to exaggerate and push movements in the models nicely and the of course express emotions in the characters faces easily. They were a big help to learn and came in very handy many times, often in unpredictable ways for some super specific needs for a scene. I will come back to this in particular soon because there is a whole specific function needed for the boat that I made later on from this point.

By the time that we were prepared to move fully into the animating stage of production, we were just hitting our last presentation, progress admittedly was far harder to keep up when the second project, with the world of animation poster was well underway so we at this point were starting to get pressed for time. I tried to pull together all I had been working on for this presentation and any bits of animation I had done, which mainly was just the water being animated, the rowing animation loop just as I was starting it, and the introduction sequence which would have been the fifth member’s work before they had left. So Rachel and I worked together for these connecting map sequences. Rachel made the table and textures for the map we would be using a few times throughout the animation, I used a plane, a bend modifier and some other confusing technical nonsense and different frames being perfectly in-sync, I was able to make a very satisfying animation of a map unrolling onto a table for the introduction to the fisherman’s journey.

The video above was the first pass, then this is the final version below

Now it just has much nicer lighting, and now rolls from the left to right rather than the other way as when I was rewatching the old version I noticed my eyes were struggling to catch up with where I was supposed to be looking, figuring out it was because the first thing I was shown was really the last thing I needed my eyes to look at, so I mirrored it to roll the other way and yeah, I was right it is much easier for the viewer to follow the trail (which we also thought it would be nicer with a dotted line for convenience sake and because it emphasizes again the theme of journeys into the story). I also got to use the three point lighting here for a nice dramatic effect on the shot!

Directly after this presentation, since we were in the last stretch of tie for the project, I ended up spending maybe 4 or 5 days straight from when I wake up to almost midnight in the classrooms animating as much as I could manage. I have finished my scene, along with having time to help the others in my group, however problems of course still arise when it comes to just how much time we have. With others being much more busy or unable to work at times than I was a lot of my time as of recent have been not put to use very well, which has been a bit of a shame of course. Post production by far has been the biggest struggle because there was just nowhere near enough time to make good with the time we had, especially with some people being finished their scenes and others aren’t, its near impossible to effectively get through post production with much quality.

This is my finished scene

Yes I know its pretty fast paced haha, that’s from a mix of trying to cut down on time to fit space for everyone else, alongside the problem of blender running at 12fps meaning that you see the animation at about half speed so it is a bit hard to grasp pace during the animation process.

Here is the isolated rowing animation loop, the toughest part of this animation by far.

The latest bit of animation I did was this, which was for Erin’s scene, and since I made the boat and because I had some time to spare waiting, I tried to get this whole technical nightmare out of the way as soon as I could so it might be able to lessen the work load on my other team members. I’m also just very happy with how this little test ended up looking. Just using about 5 shape keys in the end but still very annoying to figure it all out.

All of my animating had gone underway pretty smoothly over the handful of days straight I worked through it all and I am very happy with what I have come out with since. Again my biggest issue is how difficult post production has been with trying to get everyone’s work together, thankfully the others in my group have been a great help in it, they have been communicating as much as they can and have been doing a great job with their own animation process, its just such a shame that with how tight for time we are at the very end that post production has suffered so much for it. I would have really enjoyed post production, sound and music design all much more if there was more time for it and everyone was at the same place in their work, but that is obviously a huge ask and we just have to make do with what time we have left.