Animating Vivien

The animating I could do for Vivien was a bit limited due in part to the simple rig I had done and also the skinning of her skirt. I had done the skinning in a way so that the skirt would move but not too much and not too crazily. However this restricted the amount she could move and I had to keep that in mind when animating.

Going into the animating phase the sequence I had in mind was Vivien being dropped down onto the concrete block we had filmed, walking forward then being picked up and dragged back to the centre like a puppet and waving and curtseying when she is put back down. This came as a great challenge and with the limited time I had I had drop everything else in order to get it done.

When I had blocked out the keys and began to really fine tune the animation I came across many problems when it came to moving the rig. My main problem was getting the proper weights behind her movements especially when it came to the part where she gets picked up and dragged back. It looked completely unnatural and when I presented it to my teacher for advice on how I could fix it he simply told me that I wouldn't have enough time to fix it and I would be better off leaving it out.

Removing that part of my animation meant that everything after it had to be re-keyed. This was a rather quick process and the animation moved smoothly and her movements were nice. I spent quite a bit of time moving her arms around until I got the movements I wanted from her. This meant instead of waving as she stepped forward she swept her arm out as if she were presenting herself to the audience and then finishing with a curtsey.

Her movements are very light as she's a doll and doesn't have much weight anyway and they're also very artificial looking as if she were pre-programmed to move that way or as if she was being controlled.
Her walk is very rudimentary and looks as if it's a child who only just learned how to walk because she doesn't know how to walk properly on her own.
Her hands and arms remain rather stiff throughout the animation and that's a result of restrictive 'doll' movements. As a doll/puppet her arms and legs move in a more restricted way when compared to a more organic character.
To get these movements I watched some Barbie Doll stop animation videos on YouTube and noted how they moved and also watched some puppet videos with puppets controlled using strings. I noted how they move and how they're restricted by their structure. I also made note of how the dolls and puppets look without seeing and how their joints won't move during some movements or how things like their shoulders will stay the same while their legs move.

Here is the final animation:

Compositing my part of the Animation

When my turn came to do my part of the compositing for our scene this is what Ainsley had already done.

When my turn came to do the compositing I changed the colouring of the live-action footage. I also changed the lighting on the character itself. I also added a tritone layer over the top to give a sepia tone to the scene. I also had to change the colour of the text from black to white in order to be able to see it.

After that I did the finishing touches. I added some fractal noise to the tricolour layer to make it slightly cloudy and on a layer on top of that I added a Rolling Shutter Repair effect to make it appear as if the camera was shaking.

After that I added a stock video file of old film footage effects and set the later to multiply so that it would have the old film look that I was aiming for. Then it was shown to me how I could get rid of the car tyre in the top left hand corner using photoshop.

I then replaced the old background of the live-action footage with the new altered image and rendered out the whole thing.

Here is the result:

Walk Cycle Redone

After receiving feedback on my walk cycle I started over again and implemented the advice and feedback given to me to make the walk cycle much better.
I started once again with the basics following the basic four key method (contact, down, passing, up for each pass) as illustrated in the Animators Survival Guide.
Blocking out the legs first making sure that the feet and the rotations were right before moving up the body. One piece of feedback I had concerning the feet was the turnout. So this time I made sure there was a slight turnout to the feet but also kept it as natural looking as possible. I also made sure there was some overlap with the feet as last time I neglected to do that properly and also received feedback for that as well. For all the fine tuning I used the graph editor as I didn't use it enough the first time around and my teacher could tell straight away that I hadn't used it much.

Moving up to the body I positioned the hips and shoulders making sure that I don't get too much swaying in the shoulders and that the movements are more subtle this time in order to keep it as a neutral walk cycle. I made the spine controllers move slightly so the body would follow the movements of the shoulders and hips.

I then posed the arms on the keyframes and fine tuned the animation making sure that the should movements weren't all over the place and that the elbows didn't bend too much but also weren't too stiff.

Here is the final rendered product:

Rigging Vivien

Rigging was by far the most difficult thing I've done so far. For some reason it just won't click with me and I don't think it ever will.

The easiest part was making the skeleton which I had no problem doing. The problems started up with rigging the skeleton.
So making the skeleton I built it down from the hips and up from the base of the spine and down the arms. I then had to make sure all the joints were oriented properly before I mirrored the joints on the left side to the right.

After I created the skeleton and oriented all the joints right I placed in the IK handles and then my trouble began. I had no real idea on how to set the controls and constraints and what not. So I ventured out into the internet to find information that would help me understand this process better.
Despite doing a LOT of reading I'm still confused about a fair few things when it comes to rigging but I do have a basic character rig now which is all I need to complete this project.
So I read online sources and watched tutorials and eventually got my rig done.
For the base of the rig I used THIS tutorial and I fixed it so that it would work properly on my character as the rig in the arms broke whenever I tried to skin the character.
I used THIS site to help me with the arm controls. After I got the arms to work properly I read most of the information on the page as it helped me to understand the rigging process better than the other information I had read and listened to.

Overall I'm quite proud that I got this rig to work at all as I had a great number of issues and a large wall I had to push through to understand this process.

Texturing Vivien

Texturing is something I'm not that keen on. I can do it but it's not my favourite part of the pipeline (of course my least favourite part is rigging).
I've always been a fan of painting in real life and I'm quite good at it, however I feel this doesn't transfer into a digital medium and this seems to be my main issue when it comes to texturing. Digital painting has always felt very unnatural to me no matter how much I practice it so it is no wonder that I don't like doing it.

Nevertheless I got the texturing done. I first blocked out the colours, green for her dress, grey for the shoes, brown for the hair and a very pale blue for her skin. Then for the dress I added noise and blur to give the dress of bit of texture.

I painted her lips and the basic shape of her button eyes on a separate layer and then on top of that I had a dark layer for the darker colours which included the lines on her hands for her fingers and the soles of her shoes as well as the darkness in her hair. On top of that I made a light layer for any highlights I needed.

After all that was done I went onto decorating her outfit. I wanted it to be simple so I put some gold buttons on her top and then I matched that with a gold stipe at the bottom of her skirt, I also added some gold buttons to her boots.

I didn't use a spec map on her as I didn't want any of her parts to have specularity. The Normal map is pretty straight forward as well.
Block out the parts I want in black and white and export it into crazy bump, play with the settings until i get what I like and apply that to the character in Maya.

This is my textured character.

Filming

For our filming Ainsley and I went to a park to find a place suitable for our scene. The original idea was to film a park bench and animate Vivien sitting on it and rising up and walking over to some dead flowers. Ainsley booked in the equipment and that morning we picked it up and headed down to the park.
It was a good day to film as it was partly cloudy so if we timed it right we could film with the sun behind the clouds giving us less shadows in the film.
We looked around the park but were unable to find a bench or area suitable for our idea. We went and checked out the bricks next to the road as I had the idea of filming her walking along the bricks but with cars driving past all the time we ruled that out.
Then we found a nice block of concrete.

We played around with the exposure and aperture a bit and then settled on the settings that we wanted and took note of them. Then we took all the measurements of the block.

We then went back to uni and uploaded all the footage and pictures that we took and put them onto the google drive so we would both have access to it all.

Compositng

We did a class on compositing a while back which I missed. What I've done with this exercise is a 3D Shadow composite in After Effects following THIS tutorial on Video Copilot.
It was a quick tutorial and was easy to follow.
So I started with the image that the site provided and I made a white solid which I rotated and moved down to the ground. Then I created a camera which allowed me to move the ground plane into place properly. I also turned the ground plane into a grid which allowed me to see the image behind it.
After that was done I put the layer into Multiply mode.

 After that I created the text, moved it into place and then I created the light. I turned on shadows and changed the text layer so that it wouldn't take shadows. I also changed some other settings on the light but I can't remember what they are called anymore.
I then moved the light around until I got the shadows that I wanted.

I then used a colour ramp on the Text layer to make it look like the light was hitting the text.

This is my final result.

And here it is after I rendered it out.

 It's not the best but it was a quick compositing exercise. When I have more time I will definitely be going back to Video Copilot to do more of those tutorials.

Modelling Vivien

The character model is the first time I've ever modeled something like this before. In the past I have done things like a car and a treasure chest but I have never modeled character.

I started by blocking out the general shape of the character. Getting her feet and legs right before building up through her hips and bringing in her waist. I then built up her torso and neck shaping as I went. After that I refined the shape some more until I got what I wanted.

I then went on the model her arms separately. I modeled only one and simply duplicated it before attaching them to the rest of the model. I found it much easier to do it this way than extruding out from the body like I tried to initially.

Then came the hands done in the same way the arms were. I had a little trouble modelling the hands but after looking at other mesh's online I was able to recognize the basic shape I needed to create and the way the mesh needed to look to make the characters hands simple but still able to be rigged and moved.

After the body was finished I moved onto the head. I did it a little differently than I did the body, which in hindsight probably wasn't the best idea I've had as it may have been faster for me to continue modelling the way that I had been. 
I deleted the faces on the top of the neck and extruded the edges out to make the round base of the head. I then kept extruding up until I had block out the shape of the head then I sealed the top by bridging edges together. I then began to model her face starting with her nose and mouth.
I modeled her eyes but I couldn't get them to look right so I ended up just getting rid of them and decided I would put her eyes on using textures.

After that I modeled her skirt and cleaned up the mesh and made sure I was under the tri limit. I then modeled her hair which was easy as I basically modeled some planes around her head into the shape of the bob cut I wanted. Then I cut the mesh in half to make unwrapping and texturing easier.

 

The unwrapping wasn't too difficult. I simply extracted all the separate parts of the character I wanted to stay together then combined them again without merging. After finishing the unwrapping I went and duplicated it as a mirror of the other half the put her back together. Then I did the AO bake and left it like that.

Walk Cycle

So I finally got around to rendering my "qRig" walk cycle (I'll be starting my character walk cycle when I finish rigging my character) and I feel that it's turned out pretty good. It's just a general walk and basically I just started with blocking out the movements.
What I did was set a t-pose at frame -10  and then set the first contact of the walk cycle at frame 1.
Before this I changed the key settings in Maya to "Stepped" so maya wouldn't automatically try to animate my qRig on it's own.
I followed the simple four key poses for a walk cycle which is Contact, Down, Passing, Up and keyed them each 3 frames apart.
So starting with the legs I keyed the poses for the first step and repeated the "Contact, Down, Passing, Up" procedure for the second step and ended up with a total of 25 frames. Frame 25 being a repeat of frame 1.

Once I had all the blocked out poses done I changed all the tangents in the graph editor into auto-tangents which created a smooth curve between each stepped pose on the animation.
Afterwards I simply had to clean up any jittering and any movements that didn't work quite right using the graph editor.
This animation is far from perfect but I do not have the time to focus on it much more as I have so much work to do that I'm behind on.

This was a relatively rushed animation and more time will be spent on my character walk cycle rather than this animation exercise.

Sculptures - Modelling

Ainsley and I were tasked with creating five different 'sculptures' for our gallery space and we decided it was best if I modelled and unwrapped most of them and she would do all the texturing.

The sculptures I modelled were:

• Button Clock
• Voodoo Doll
• Lock and Key
• Gravestone

Button Clock

There are three objects as part of the clock. The Base which includes the the base to the part where the face of the clock is placed. The button face which is the face of the clock and the top part or the 'hat' of the clock.

The base of the clock was easy. I started with a box and extruded up and out until I had it built up to the place for the face of the clock.

The face of the clock is a button so I simply used a cylinder and extruded in to create the button face and placed it on the front of the clock.

The hat of the clock was the hardest part to model. It was a lot of extruding and playing around with the edges and vertexes until it looked right. After that I cleaned it up and began unwrapping the clock which was easy as it's more or less a box shape.

Voodoo Doll

The Voodoo Doll also has three objects two of which are it's button eyes.

I started with a cube and smoothed it and played around with the edges until I had the shape I wanted for the body. Then I extruded some faces out for the legs and arms and played around until I had the general shape I wanted for them. I did the same for the head and then I used the smooth tool again to give the more rounded shape I wanted. I modelled one button just like I did for the clock and placed it on the face of the doll then duplicated it and scaled it down so that it fitted the lopsided look I had modelled for the head. 

I extracted the top half of the model so the seam in the textures would run all around the edges and on top of the head so Ainsley could texture it with a 'sewn' seam on those edges.

The unwrapping was easy, due in part to the extraction I had made on the model. The UV's ended up looking like two dolls. One the top half and the other the bottom half. The parts of the model I left separated were the ends of the arms and legs as well as a  panel in between the legs. And the button eyes were pretty straight forward to unwrap as well.

Lock and Key

The Lock and Key were the most frustrating to model mostly due to the tri limit and the modelling of the key.

The lock was straight forward. A simple rectangular prism which I added edge loops to. Then I moves some edges around to give the rounded bottom of the lock. For the shackle of the lock I tried using a deformer to get the shape but it didn't turn out the way that I liked it so I ended up just manually moving the edges and vertices of the cylinder then placed it into the top of the padlock.

With the key I started with a cylinder and added edge loops and began by modelling the tip of the key and then moving down a bit and extruding out the side for the bit of the key. I then added a few edge loops to the bit to get the shape that I wanted.

Modelling the bottom of the key I simply flattened the end of the cylinder and deleted the middle faces to create the hole. The I used the append polygon tool to add close the gaps.

After all that was done I noticed that I had gone over the 1000 tri limit so I began deleting unnecessary edges until I was under the limit but still had the shapes that I wanted.

I then unwrapped it. It was pretty simple for the padlock but the Key was a bit more of a challenge but I got it done with a little bit fiddling around.

Gravestone

The gravestone was probably the simplest model consisting of only two objects. The gravestone itself was modelled in the same way the padlock was modelled. Very simple and very little tri's.

The skull I thought would be difficult turned out to be surprisingly easy once I put a little thought into it. I started with a cube and used the smooth tool twice so I had a sphere. The I extruded some faces on the front, dragged them down and out a little and merged the top vertices so I had a triangular protrusion coming out of the bottom part of the sphere.  I fiddled around with it a little bit until I got the exact shape that I wanted and then I moved it down onto the top of the gravestone and combined the objects.

After I had done all that I realised I was WAY under the tri limit and thought I might as well add some more detail to the front of the gravestone as it was just flat. I extruded in and created some curvature to the top similar to the top of the clock and it ended up looking quite nice.

Unwrapping was pretty easy but needed a bit of thought into how Ainsley would texture it so I ended up keeping the "face" of the skull separate from the rest and the gravestone itself was very easy to unwrap.

Headphones

Recently I completed some modelling exercises that included a pair of headphones. I did two versions of the headphones. One was a gold chrome pair and the other a black painted pair.

Gold Chrome

Black Painted

For the modelling of the headphones I simply started with a cylinder to create the ear piece and continued extruding out until I had a half pair of headphones. I then cut that half in half down the centre edge loop. This simplified UV unwrapping significantly and the texturing as well.
When it came to the cord I used a NURB curve to get the shape that I wanted and using a NURB circle I extruded that out to create a hollow NURB tube which I then converted into a polygon. For the plug at the end I used a cylinder that I extruded out and attached it to the end of the cord. Then I plugged in a matte plastic texture and for the tip of the plug I used a silver chrome texture. The cord remained the same for both versions of the headphones.

Texturing the gold pair I used materials already in Maya to create the two different coloured chromes and then for the rest I used a matte black plastic material that was already in Maya as well. I selected the faces I wanted gold and silver and applied the textures that way. Simple and easy. This also allowed me to play around and experiment with texture nodes built into Maya.

With the black headphones I used a blinn shader with a a chrome ring on the headphones which is the same silver chrome ring on the gold headphones. The black headphones were painted in a way which took advantage of how to the mesh deforms. On the UV map all I had to paint was a simple semicircle and some dots in pink and the mesh deformed in a way that gave the appearance of simple cat ears when the texture was applied. This made creating the simple cat design much easier since all I needed to do was paint a semicircle rather than an ear which I would have to paint a way that would look good mirrored.  The padding on the headphones was a simple solid grey with added noise and blur. This is also the only part of the model that has the normal map as I wanted the cat design and the dots to remain smooth.

About My Chracter

Vivian my character is a gothic Lolita puppet with button eyes inspired by Coraline and other Tim Burton productions as well as modern gothic styles and horror/creepy puppets and dolls.

The original idea was a kind of disgruntled teenage girl which eventually morphed into the gothic style that I've always liked.

The original sketch:

Her clothing has since evolved into a long sleeved Lolita dress with wedged boots. Her hair has remained the same much like Coraline's bob cut but with a box fringe and bangs. I have paled her skin to pretty much white like a porcelain doll and have given her a cracked paint appearance and doll-link ball joints.

Gallery Project

I have teamed up with Ainsley my classmate in a gallery project.
The brief is to animate a character that one of us has made and composite it into a live-action still shot that we have filmed. It is then to be imported into a gallery set up in Unreal engine. We are to create 5 sculptures/objects to place in the gallery that fall under a theme that matches the character.

The character we have chosen to use is my doll character named Vivian. (posts about her will be going up soon)
She is a lolita type doll/puppet with button eyes inspired by the film Coraline.

The theme around the character is gothic/tim burton style theme which utilises misshapen objects that are quite simple in shape but wonderfully coloured. It is a dark theme that utilises unique silhouettes.

Character Inspiration