Four: Polished Pre-Vis In Progress

 The last couple of days have been busy ones. With the bulk of animations ready I took several hours to re-compose all the audio recordings I had into a more flowing picture, with some additional sounds gathered on Freesound.

  The tunnel segments were added so as to build the scene for the final composition, as there is one moment where Four leaps off a wall, it was vital to get the position of the wall and Four's feet right, requiring the full geometry.

  A re-synced animation is currently in the works, but should not take much longer than a couple of days to construct ready to send off for batch rendering. As of this post, the animations I have more closely fit with the soundscape, all that is really required is for some of the last animations to be built, some expressions added and to finish off some of the textures.

Four: Early Demo Ready for Display

  I am at a stage where most of the animation is in a decent state. There are still some gaps left but the majority of what I had in mind is in a good place for an early update. This also provides a good chance to see the piece in its entirety in current its current state of production.


  One challenge now is to sync the animation with the soundscape. This will extend the piece slightly as there are areas where breaks in the monologues might be worthwhile.and areas where a soundscape could fill in some of the blanks.

Four: Adjusting Cameras, the Grub is Live

  For the past couple of days I have primarily been working on creating animations for the creature to move about the world. 

  More significantly, the camera's focal length has been changed to provide a more natural look. Looking back and forth the previous camera angle felt a little wide, exaggerating the distance between the foreground and the background which made the rooms look enormous. So far it is only the sequences before and with the grub and with the adult form that the camera angle has been adjusted. The camera angles for the juvenile form will need to be updated and that is on my list.

Most of the camera angles have remained the same save for the distance the camera is from the subject, save for one or two minor changes to improve flow and keep interest. Some of the angles had to be re-tilted as they pointed towards the floor but the improvement does feel significant.

Four: Sequences Improving and Teasing Finer Details

As I'm getting into animating, I'm finding myself occasionally adding the smaller details. As can be seen in the final few seconds, her face does indeed move. I had initially planned to reserve this for second pass animating (to add finer details after the bulk movements are sequenced) but it certainly adds a certain something to the character's life at this early stage.

Four: Perfecting A Jog

  Animation sequences continue. Much of today was spent in an attempt to get Four's jog/run right. A bit of referencing on otter run cycles helped to correct things after some difficulty and this might be good enough to install into a previous segment.

  A pre-vis section will come soon  I am nearly done with the first pass of the juvenile sections to the piece.

Four: Office Exploration

  More progress done, this time the sequence where Four explores her owner's office as Amelia expresses doubts continuing a relationship with him. A bit of time was taken to get her rise to the table looking right.

The way she pushes the phone off the table, maybe there is a connotation there given the way she pushes it? She's not entirely sweets and strawberries especially as she gets older and the other scientists and the people upstairs start thinking of David less.

Four: Texture Rework Phase One

  Some time was taken today building texture work for Four as well as creating a displacement map to simulate the texture. The greatest focus today was on her fins which graphically speaking required a complete rework. I based the design on butterfly wings, the intention of numerous patterns on such are to intimidate any larger predators but can also be used to attract a mate.

Her head fins are about done, and lay the foundation for how the tail fins work, the techniques I used ot create the textures on the head fins can easily be used to colour the tail fins.

Some work was also done on Thursday too refine the juvenile's animations to make her jump to the floor and her approach towards the incubator more animated.

Four: Walk Cycle Development

Progress is coming along coding Four's walk cycle. Most of the bugs have been ironed out of a basic cycle that I might see about varying, the main good thing is she's coming to life. Finder details like her facial expressions will be something for later on when the bulk of the animations are down.

Indeed perhaps her tentacles could do with a bit of a bounce to them to make them appear flexible.

Four: Presenting Play and A New Adult

Written into the script, one idea was for Four to knock over the phone as Amelia is talking. This scene should be more interesting than Four simply wandering into David's office and giving the camera puppy-eyes.

Anyone with a pet cat knows they love playing with inanimate objects by giving them pokes, jabs and pushes to see what they do or how they fall over. As a creature of predatory heritage, Four might have similar instincts so this might be entirely in-character for her.

Preparing for the third act I went back to the adult model. While installing the spine to simplify control over Four, a slight problem came out in that when installing a curve to a spine, the joints will contract to fit the CV curve, which would make reattaching the blendshapes problematic. The solution so far (which has given freedom in correcting the skeleton) has been to essentially fix the skeleton then rebind the skin and paint the weights back on. 

As I had done this before a couple of times now I might be able to re-paint the skin weights fairly promptly. That is the plan, as the deadline of mid-May is coming and I have to reserve a week or two for export to a render farm and post-processing.

Four: Pre-Vis Progress

I believe I am making good progress with creating the basic elements of my animation. There isn't much movement yet but my plan is to go over and create more refined movements after all the animation is in place and the recordings have been synchronised and sequenced. There might be a slight delay as I believe I have to rework the pose space corrections on the adult model. Hopefully this shouldn't take too long now that I have more familiarity with the system.

I had a feeling that what might help the scene is while Amelia is talking, the attention is on Four. At this point in the story, David might have shut her out and stopped talking, too enamored by the creature that hatched from the cocoon. She's offering him one last chance to communicate but Four has come to dominate his perception of life.

While Four does look pitch-black in the pre-vis, that's more of a side-effect of the mila shader as it is rendered in the workspace, where it renders a shade-colour version of the the top (quite dark) texture map, which would be the monochrome specularity. It am quite confident that it won't come out like that in polished renders.

To test out posing I created a small quick "tester" animation. Far from perfect but it does give me a few animations to start off with and a proof that the model for the juvenile functions reasonably smoothly.

Four: Animation Buildup

A rework of David's lines are in the works, for now I felt it was worth my time to continue the animation, and then re-synchronise the footage to the new lines once a full reading of the script comes back to me.

There was one benefit - while it looks like the movement of Four has errors, these gave me the opportunity to go back and make some corrections to the model, fixing a few errors (the bending of the neck turned out to be an off-zeroed curve, once the values were all reset the spine worked correctly) and attaching some of the finer controls.

Four's initial movements in the animation, that of just sliding round on the ice, will be the foundation. With the grub complete, I can add that one in to better ground the camera and its focus.

Group Project: Wednesday Animation Work

Much of this afternoon was spent creating a basic animation as well as putting together all the assets to show what Forge has so far created.

I ended up making more footage than I needed, so I decided to upload a full video of what I had made. This footage is useful as it shows the total progression of the scales as they grow across the Fish's body.

Before the textures were rendered and before the scales were applied, I took a test recording to see how effective the camera was.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Animation Pre-Vis

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Hepatocyte Infection

Took some effort to get there and there's always room for improvement but here is my planned animation for the phase where a sporozoite enters the liver cell in order to create merozoites.

Playblast: Sporozoite Arrival

    One playblast completed. Many more to go. At least I can use components of this scene (which took about a day to make) to make other scenes.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Initial Tunnel

Created some basic mock-ups for the blood vessel. Because of the structure I found a little difficulty in lighting it the whole way though. But so far a spotlight appears to do a good job of basic illumination. I toyed around with different lighting and ambient occlusion settings

1: FIrst attempt with basic light and ambient occlusion setup. Seems very dark near the end though

2

3: Tweaked the brightness of the blynn and the ambient occlusion node

4: I upped the raytracing on the spotlight. This created softer shadows behind the rings and less of a film grain look.

5: To add a feel the tunnel is continuous I considered giving the tunnel a slight bend, which would be joined at the end by a continuation of the model I have right now for the tunnel.

With image 5 I like how the bend in the tunnel adds a certain flair to the hilights especially near the end.

@Simon From Script To Screen: Animatic and Pre-Vis construction

    Lacking audio but I have managed to complete an initial animatic. WIthout any sounds it is...eerie even if I havem ost of the story spent on actions instead of dialogue. Today has also been a little crash-course in moving the body parts of the pre-rigged characters being used in the scene. But for the most part I'd say the first scene is roundabout ready for animation.

    This is my current pre-vis setup. with 12 seconds done (I should look at my camera angles and animation lengths as theoretically I should he 20s on my animatic)

    This is the biggest obstacle I have encountered: it seems on copying the project onto my flash drive, Clarette's rig appears to have detached from her body so if there is a way I can reconnect it (I have yet to do the walk-cycle tutorial which I probably should consider for the second half of the animation) things can progress as planned. My current contingency is to work on her animations on the original file at university and then import that into the scene.