Animated Narratives – Development of Character & Character Animation

Before we decided on a style and theme, as a group we all did some concept designs for the potential story ideas we had.

Unused story concepts:

Monster plant shop

Rootin tootin venom shootin

In my groups Graveyard animation, we have in total 5 characters. Three larger characters, a small character and the smaller creature to be scared.

As a group we agreed to follow along the Creepy/Cute genre that I suggested, as I felt that the shapes and appeal of those kinds of characters was easier to develop and model.

Concepting for Cemetery S’cares:

I picked a larger character to develop, model/sculpt, rig and animate. I really liked how this concept looked, the aspects of creepy and cute I could push, and the type of movement he would create.

I generally stuck with a similar design, altering as I went to what was more fitting for animation like decreasing the amount of segments he has and changing the location of the boney extras.

The same applies for colour palettes, I felt the green and pink would fit well as a fantasy based plant monster, as well as gaining inspiration from various sources like Little Shop of Horror, The Sims franchise, and other natural plants I found for my visual research.

We also used Jorja’s concept for the skull shapes.

The pinterest board I used for this animations concept: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/feylock_/graveyard-plants/

Modelling the character:

I mostly used a combination of Maya and Blender for my character model. In Maya I created a sphere and in vertex mode with soft select activated I created those segmented shapesa and pulled the sphere to make the centre a little higher, I used cylinders for legs and softened them by bevelling and softening edges. For the more organic shapes like the leaves I felt blender was much more useful in creating them. I mainly used the move and snake hook tool to pull leaf like shapes out of the new spheres I added and shaped.

For the Skull and Femur, I stayed in Blender to create those, using the method of image reference to get the initial block out and shapes I needed, before going in and refined the shapes into the look I wanted. I was quite proud of my skull, it was a lot of combinations of brush tools like draw sharp, flatten, inflate and crease, as well as building up with the clay strip tool and smoothing out to get those cutesy round shapes.

For UVing I managed to get hold of Zbrush and was curious of a feature – Zremesher – following this video just to see how the character topology comes out. I was happy enough with the outcome and decided to keep it, I had explored retopo in Maya before and just wanted to explore new options.

The videos referenced –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PtmKtr1kx0

Texturing With Substance Painter:

I saved a highpoly and low poly version of my character, I baked my high poly onto my low poly to keep good detail without a dense amount of polys.

I really enjoyed handpainting in my previous assignment, so I wanted to do the same for my character. The think I enjoyed painting the most was the skull. I started with smart materials as a base, tweaked some aspects of it if needed and added black mask fill layers and further painted textures and depth.

I used the wax candle smart material as a base – the colour was already pretty accurate, I adjusted it a little in cooler tones and increased the roughness as skulls dont have that much of a shine. I did the same for the femur.

For the body I had originally used a smart material – green monster skin and altered the green colour. But as I was painting in more colours, I didnt like the skins texture and found that a plastic grain material was more what I as looking for – I was going for more of a firm feel to the plants body like a cactus or aloe but with a more rough look. I felt this was much more fitting and looked nice layered with other colours and effects.

After the texturing was done, I put in my character next to some assets that would be included in the scene – I knew it would be harder to resize once my character was rigged and textured – so I wanted to do a comparison to make my life a little easier and shared the sizing comparison and assets with my group members.

Rigging:

For the rigging aspect of my model Alec was kind enough to go through in videos for my group on how to rig my character. I followed those videos, with some minor errors that were fixed (with the help of google and Alec again, thanks Alec) my character was fully rigged with squash, stretch and emotive blendshapes. I followed the videos that the lecturers provided but I always like to look online to see alternative methods and different explanations.

I had originally used a lattice deformer to apply squash and stretch to my character, it was a quick and effective alternative to creating that animation aspect. Although my blendshapes currently with the advice of Alec do not use lattices, only soft selection and moving the mesh to where i felt suitable. The lattice blendshapes effected the legs too much which caused strange deformation that was not wanted when moving them.

Old Blendshapes

Current Blendshapes

I created a video to show off the rig movements and I also shared this with my group so they could understand how to move my character rig.

While rigging I wanted to check how the textures looked while moving in the render view and saw the skull had turned black – my natural reaction is to go to Mesh Display > Reverse on the selected mesh and it worked fine. Although it migh have been a strange glitch in Maya I havent found out still.

Lighting:

I did the lighting for my character separate from the scene that I lit – just so they wouldnt interfere with eachother in their own respective process. I went with the classic three point character lighting – with a cooler toned light to suit the environment. I also parented and light linked the lights with the mesh so it would be easier to control and whoever was animating didnt have to worry about the lighting any further.

These were my first go at lighting – I brought my character in to the scene and saw how dark everything was still so I tinkered further.

I think my final attempts at pushing the light a little more and adjusting the angles (due to his unusual shape and extra bits) the light highlighted him well, with consideration of the environment. Also green light added for the scare scene!

Animation:

We all tried to assign a scene that included a character we had modelled so that we had one rigged character we were familiar with as well as the opportunity to animate our own characters too. I had been assigned Shot 3 – When the little plant monster is saddened by his failure and recieves encouragement from his fellow plant mosters and source of his awe and respect. I was pleased to try out this animation, but nervous about trying to have each character feel as unique and lively as eachother. I really wanted to try and focus on the animation in this assignment since it would be the real first go at 3D animation, so I gave myself at least a week

Some animation and render tests/progress

First animation test with legs – the rig worked fine, but I didn’t like at all how his legs moved at all and thought then about the consideration of weight and something his size’s speed.

I really liked his character walk – sadly no matter how I tried to alter the scene to include it more it didnt visually work so I did a playblast of it in it’s early stages. I referenced for my later animation natural movements from octupi and sped up plants, the references really helped narrow down a walk style. Like I mentioned previously I tried to add more weight in his movements to really push how big and heavy he is, as well as adding a good amount of bounce, squash and stretch to also show how cute and goofy the character can be.

I saved over 30 progression files while creating this animation. Here are some videos that document its progress.

For the other character movements I wanted to apply aspects from nature and man made objects that relate to nature. I felt this created a unique personality to the characters as well as it logically making sense of how the anatomy will effect movement. I really like the goofy, comical yet grounded look of the movements, I think Jorjas was my favourite of them all.

Before I wanted to call it done i asked a final time if anyone had an input on their characters movement. Jasmin mentioned the neck movement of the taller character she made moved more like Randall from Monsters Inc. So I went back and did two versions.

I altered the keyframes that were already there.

Or, I redid his animation.

We both agreed the second version moved much more naturally and felt more encouraging so I went with that as the final animation.

After getting the thumbs up from the group I applied the rest of the textures using hypershade to the characters and scene to begin rendering.

Rendering the animation:

I had done a test render to see if I was happy with the lighting of the background characters and quality of my scene, they all seemed good, so I was happy enough to start fully rendering.

My test render-

It took me around 4 days to render my scene, but I was done by tuesday the week of hand in, it was a pain getting there but I learned how to render before most my group which meant I could lend them any help they needed, it also meant I had a few days to edit without time pressure.

I chose to render in layers, I followed Mike’s tutorials on how to set up layers, and how to render them separate. The background render took much more time than the character layer render. The main issues I encountered was Maya crashing and some strange grainy look I couldnt understand was happening. I also made the mistake of not rendering in .tiff and instead did in png for my character layer, which did not support transparency, but after googling I understood the issue and re-rendered.

My final outcome for Shot 3 –

before light fix

after light fix

I liked how my animation turned out, the background was darker than my render test strangely but an easy fix by brightening it in after effects and it matched my original test. I was going to continue adding more effects and maybe a subtle blur to the background to bring focus on the character then fade out when all are together to signify feeling alone to being encournaged by the monsters he adimired. But due to what happened next I didn’t have really a point or time to do so.

Maya group lighting issues

Sadly.. when sending in the video to my group we noticed an issue with our renders, my scene had much more dynamic and rendered lighting while others didn’t, we compared the lights and settings of our maya files and they matched, as well as the render settings so we were really confused how it happened. We spoke to Alec and he mentioned to make one master file, import everyones animations and redo the lights would be the best way to fix it. Naturally we were all devastated, Jasmin said she would start the masterfile on the uni computers as they rendered rather fast with minimal amount of crashes compared to some of our other laptops we were using. There was sadly not much else the rest of us could do other than lend support, help deal with issues that came up and took turns doing some lighting, as well as focus on out other assignment which jasmin thankfully was done doing. Jasmin did really well trying to sort it out. Alec mentioned he has no idea why it happened, but just to try and do the best we could with our situation and time limit.

This is our final animation using the master file and new lighting.