This year I have learnt so much, transitioning from using Maya to using Blender was actually a lot more difficult than I had imagined and over the summer I will continue to work on little blender projects to try and get my confidence up! I’ve found the course difficult at times as I feel certain tasks aren’t communicated clearly and I get very confused on how to proceed with the task. I found working in groups a bit challenging as some classmates would pull their weight more than others. I would have liked a bit more support at the start on how to lay out the blogs properly as its something that I’m never sure how much or little information is actually required, and it wasn’t until speaking with Henry the day before this hand in that we got a bit more clarity on what is being looked at within the blogs. The class workshops were easy enough but I feel maybe slightly rushed at times, as we wouldn’t have certain things finished by the end of the class and then have our assignment to work to do at home and also finishing any class workshop content. I feel like the workshops were easy to understand but hard to apply to assignment work as the workshops would be a bit more problematic free, unlike the issues that arose with personal work for assignments! Possibly would have liked to have workshops were models had issues and we had to look at ways to fix them so it would help develop our problem solving skills. Overall, University has been an experience and a little more challenging than I thought but I’ve had a blast and I’m looking forward to seeing what next year has in store!
Our assignment for Animated Narratives was to create a 3D animation to convey a story of “journey”. We were assigned into groups and quickly got to work brainstorming ideas. The only criteria we had was the animation was to last 30-60 seconds and any characters were allowed arms – but no legs!
Research:
Initially our group threw out the obvious ideas i.e. Ghosts, bats, food etc. Sasha in the group suggested a dark twist on a fairy-tale, with reference to the Brothers Grimm. It seemed like the obvious fairy-tale to use, but we quickly realised that Little Red Riding Hood was perfect for us to adapt into our own styles and portray a “journey” through the story.
While I was off from class one week, the group met up and decided to go with puppet characters with a stage booth scene. When this was pitched to me, I loved the idea and was definitely all for it! We later met on a Discord call to discuss the style and all agreed to theme the characters based off woodland creatures and that we would trial both hand puppets, string puppets and a mixture of the two in our designs.
By having the four characters it allowed our group to create a character each as we had the Young Rabbit, The Motherly Squirrel, The Elderly Hedgehog and the Villainous Fox!
When we refined the story so started to look at character designs:
Pre-Production:
I created a mood board based off the ideas that everyone had pitched for character styles when we had a basic storyline idea.
Storyboard:
We made the story about a young rabbit going into the woods to collect carrots, she comes across a motherly (later decided pregnant) squirrel who warns the young rabbit it isn’t safe in the woods and to go home, the young rabbit doesn’t listen and carries on. Further into the woods the young rabbit meets an elderly hedgehog, who once again warns the rabbit not to continue but the young rabbit doesn’t listen and carries on once again. The young rabbit gets deeper into the woods and the day begins to turn to night, the rabbit realises she is lost… then out of the shadows behind her a fox jumps out and eats her!
My Design:
Character Designs:
In class we grouped together and decided what character we wanted to go with – we went with a wheel generator online to assign them! I got the rabbit – so got to work on sketching out some concepts.
Rough:
Original Final:
Refined design after not liking the realism look:
Based the rabbits design off the functionality of it being a hand puppet, so took a photo of my hand and used that as a base for the design.
Production:
Modelling:
My first trial model:
Didn’t like the style
Felt the head focused too much on realistic anatomy
Ears too thin
Definitely too low poly
I followed a YouTube tutorial on how to do buttons, but after talking with Mike in class and asking how to clean up the topology, he showed me a much easier way to create them with a neat topology.
One of my biggest flaws in animation is that I focus a lot on anatomically correct shapes and realism. So I started to think of the rabbits head shape as more cartoon-like with chubby cheeks and a rounder face – to represent the young rabbits youth and innocence.
UV Mapping:
As the model wasn’t too complex I found the UV mapping process easy enough, which is the part I usually struggle with the most!
Texturing:
Wouldn’t be making a 3D model without some issues. After texturing in Substance….it crashed! I lost all that work.. so I had to go back and try again and when importing my UV map over to substance this time, I kept running across an issue where only some of the map was coming across. I soon realised that I had done some changes in Blender on an older file and the model still had my rough material colours on it. So, I was able to delete these off and make the model all one material and this resolved the issue id been having.
I also had an issue when I was pulling the model over to Substance that it wasn’t bringing over the button eyes correctly. So in blender I separated these and moved them to the side of the model, joined them back to the main model and the exported the UV map over to Substance. Once everything was textured and back onto Blender I then grabbed the buttons again, separated them and moved them back into position on the rabbits face.
When this was presented to the class I got feedback that the concept design was preferred so I went back and tweaked these accordingly. I also had criticism about the square look on the ears which I rectified.
I was also tasked with modelling the stage prop, this is a rough design below:
Adjusting the Rabbit Textures:
This is the final texture design and is more relevant to the concept design I drew initially.
Experimented with a few button colour concepts.
I struggle with linking the textures in Blender. I watched a Youtube tutorial on using an Add-on Node Wrangler, which auto links. However, I did find I had to adjust a few things.
Applying The Armature:
Experimenting with just applying Automatic Weights:
Before using damp track I animated the ears manually. I found them to be very rigid, which is why I tried damp tracking and it worked and looked a lot better!
Weight Painting:
I had a lot of issues with the model when trying to apply weight paints and get it to move correctly. I realised I had overcomplicated the model and due to having the body and clothing separate it was causing vertices to protrude through.
Unfortunately my conclusion to this was to completely redo the models body and have the clothing and body as one mesh.
Due to this I had to redo the UV map and textures.
When testing the model this time, it worked flawlessly! (with a little tweak on weight paint) I was also able to keep the head and body separate as the group want to do a headless bunny scene at the end of the animation!
Stage Booth Design:
The group had a fair idea of how it was to look so I used discord a lot to ask for opinions and what was preferred. Had a few issues with using the bevel tool as it was either creating triangles or n-gons, there was instances that were unavoidable with n-gons when using bevelling on the top signage part to create the rounded edges so I had to manually go through and try and add edges to rectify this.
I found a tutorial for modelling a trellis design while scrolling through Instagram and saved it as it was using good topology and I thought I could incorporate this to the side panelling of the stage.
I split out the sections of colour difference on the stage to stop colour bleed:
I did feel like this wasn’t the neatest UV map…but it worked!
Colour choices:
I discussed everyones opinions in Discord, tried a few different variations.
We liked the sage shade as felt it would contrast well with the red curtains and was neutral enough to not be an eye sore in the animation.
Presenting what we had the week before submission:
We hadn’t started to animate our characters yet due to appending issues but we had looked at prop movements and used basic movements for the models to compose a basic animation to present.
Focus on getting the characters animated and into the same final scene file
Look at prop timings
Look into lighting
Getting Prepared for Animation:
Had issues Appending Rabbit file into the Scene file:
Scaling wasn’t working in the scene file – I rectified this by scaling in the original file and appending over. I had to do this a few times to get it right
Had issues with the basket doing its own thing in the scene file – I experimented with both Child of constraints and joining the basket to the model. After a few adjustments I did get the Child of constraint to work in the scene file.
Headless rabbit model:
We decided last minute to have the rabbits head fall off at the bow scene.
Had a few issues working with two armatures – but for a short scene it was easily animated as two separate objects.
Had an issue with the head not maintaining its form but found it was an origins problem and easily resolved… As well as adjusting some weight painting.
When I started animating the model, I did a few test renders to see the movement speeds after being rendered, it allowed me to adjust and tweak any little flaws. I would then adjust the speeds accordingly once we started to piece the animation together as a group.
Composing the Animation:
We decided that we would have one main file with the animated props and link in our animations so we didn’t make the file too heavy. Leagh wanted to animate the rabbit interaction with her squirrel which caused a few issues when trying to compose all the rabbit sequences in one file to link over. I spent a bit of time on this to make sure that the transitions into and out of the interactions were as seamless as possible.
We used discord and went on chat and shared screens to try help each other out and get everything composed into the one file.
Sasha and I spent most of the evening talking with each other and screen sharing while getting all the files into the final scene and worked through a few issues. Sasha was brilliant the whole way through this animation for resolving issues and helping me with any I came across.
Sasha and I split the render into 4 360 frames to have initial test renders.
I then rendered out the final animation in one file.
Post Production:
We used After Effects to compose the soundtracks/effects
Had issues importing in the MKV file as was flagging an error code – Used a converted to change the MKV to MP4.
Experimented with different sounds – some worked, some didn’t! Spent an entire day sorting out the sounds. Couldn’t source a little girl humming/singing so Sasha recorded herself and made adjustments to it and it was exactly what we wanted to go with!
We also found a short video of an old film filter, we added this – changed it to an overlay and dropped the opacity.
Aoife worked on the end credits and then sent me the final render of that without sound:
Leagh worked on testing sound effects and music on the credits – however we compared 3 different versions and decided as a group to not use sound effects and just use music.
I stitched Aoife’s file into the main file and added the music track to start just before the credits appear
We let Henry listen to the full animation and he advised us on adjusting the ominous music used in the rabbit and fox scene to be louder and adding in a ripping sound effect when the rabbits head falls off.
Sasha added these in and rendered the final product out!
The Final Animation!
Reflection:
I’m very pleased with the end result – we all worked extremely hard to get it to were it is! I feel like if had we had a little more time I would have liked to look at some slight timing adjustments on the rabbits movement and how fluid the transitions are, but it’s just me being a perfectionist and trying to refine my work. Everyone else did amazing and the animation as a whole turned out far better than I could imagine! We spent a good bit of time on the sounds – which were surprisingly hard to find in a good quality! It all paid off for the end product and I honestly think my group did a fantastic job! Really enjoyed working with the group of girls I had.
