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.

Narrative Project: Animation preview screenshot

  I was able to pull out a screenshot from what was being play-blasted. No time for a proper render but something is better than nothing.

Narrative Project: Improving The Environement

   Today I considered perhaps making short clips to show that Forge had considered an animation. I learned however that the environment had been designing had been discarded for a completely different arrangement. It was discussed, I expressed my concerned and it was decided that perhaps I could attempt to make the scene.

  With two and a half hours before the deadline before me I felt there was no time for texturing. So I took the assets that had been made - the plants and the rocks primarily - and looked into setting them into the environment I had been working on.

  When complete I made two render sets: The first set above are ambient occlusion passes while the set below are the objects with a default shader but illuminated with an ambient light.

  It is not much, but I felt it was better than trying to work on a sequence in a set that from my perspective lacked the feeling of upward travel. In the scene I was presented with this was resolved with a dead end, I looked at using geography to imply the only way is up orther than use a dead-end style barrier of rock.

Narrative Project: Occlusion Maps

  With many of our assets completed I looked into a few of the models I had contributed for and looked into creating occlusion sets for them. This helps give an idea of these models in their purest form with no textures, no shiny effects and no animation and a good idea of where things overlap, stand out in terms of geometry and cast shadows.

  I only made the scales of the fish, but part of their creation involved mapping their arrangement on our fish characters.

Narrative Project: Scales

  With other aspects out of the way I felt it was high time that the scales had their own texture maps. I created a somewhat quick but workable texture and created a shader that included a reddish specular light and an ambient occlusion node.

  When rendered the structure does not appear to look too bad. I looked into a render pass that included the figh's body to get an idea of how the body would look with the scales on. This was particularly important as these scales had to look convincing.

Narrative Project: Rigging Complete

   I can say with confidence that the coral is finished. The skeleton within allows for the coral branches to be posed, which will be useful when the coral is needed to pursue and surround our fish characters.

  There was a little refinement to do with the skin weights as there was a sizeable spread especially further up. This was cleaned up mostly with a bit of work and the use of the 'prune weights' feature, which removed some of the more persistant abberant weights.

 

  For the most part, rigging has worked. The coral is flexible yet rigid and aside from maybe one or two points at the very tips (fortunately not all the coral branches do this), the integrity of the coral holds up well.

  The stage after this was to set up a control network to position the coral branches, which took some experimentation to strike the right balance between amount of control and number of control nodes to use.

  As of writing, now that it is completed, the current number stands at six. With each control unit controlling between three and five joints. Where there was a split, the joints were labelled "-A and -B" in the channel box.

Development: Coral and Scales

  The final phases of mapping the coral are done and after a tweak to the shader the quality is solid enough that I can present this as a demonstration video. As well as a sequence showing the coral growing from a bud, I also created a turnaround to show the model as it would look in the final render.

  As well as these tasks, I also took on the task of adding the strange growths to the body of our fish. While my initial plan was to use a lattice, this fell flat when I didn't fully consider the eye, but I compensated, as the manual application turned out to be rather therapeutic and progressed relatively smoothly and promptly.

Coral Development

   I spent most of today working on correcting the UV map for the coral. The reasoning for this was an attempt to have the shader's progression up the coral correlate better with the contours of the geometry.

  The methodology seemed straightforward: Cut apart the UV map at each split zone, modify the UVs to give a flat-on shape, straighten everything out. As can be seen in the picture below, the new strategy allows the gradient map to better follow the flow of the model. The main reason for this was that on tests the model's gradient colour was static, so to give the effect of older parts of the coral darkening I had to animate the shader parameters.

  Using a shader I think gives me some freedoms, as it means I do not have to completely unfold the model in order to get the desired result and anywhere that appears non-existent (such as side-on faces) on the UV plane is not stretched to moment-ruining distortion.

  The effects are subtle, but the model is certainly proving complex as working on it ate up most of the day. Nonetheless this is time that might be useful. Even if we have to use a playblast for our animation, the effect is still there in the workspace and therefore will be visible on the playblast. 

  It's not quite finished yet, perhaps an hour or two to finish the final branches on Tuesday and I can move on to other tasks. So far the shader works okay although I might need more difference in coloration for the effect to be noticeable. While working I had noticed that the topmost buds (that have been mapped) aren't actually sprouting, indicating I missed a step. Fortunately this hiccup is hardly noticeable on the model and probably will remain such when the structure is used in the animation.

Coral Branch: Nearing Completion

  As on schedule, the coral has been assembled, staged and animated. I might look into rigging if we want to give it some freedom of motion and perhaps a few driven keys for the animation but at present this is the construction so far.

  It was discussed about adding a gradient to give the coral some life as it becomes more complex. There was gradient on concept art and there may need to be a little tweaking of the clolour values, the core animation (the progression from one stage of complexity to the next) does not appear too bad.

  I've come to appreciate the subtle details. When compiled, the final branches were less visible than the beginning stages. In terms of geometry it doesn't seem so complex when a single model is around 1.8MB of data. That may multiply considerably when there are lots of these but as mentioned in an earlier post some work was put into minimising the geometry so that lots of these could be on screen at once.

Narrative Project: The Reacher

  The development of the scales yesterday has given me enthusiasms for the technical side of Maya. The task I looked into today was making the coral/organism that would chase after our fish. Originally the plan was to use coral, but there were a few scenes that involved the coral reaching out. I looked up some source material and found some similarity to the tendrils of sea anemones. Which were a lot more flexible. But the stuff on the storyboard was still distinctly coral.

  First tests however resulted in a few errors that I managed to fix with later models that stemmed from the orientation of the joints. Turns out the joints were orienting themselves differently on occasion due to not being entirely vertical from the last.

  Initial attempts at a cleaner model involved joints at every lateral edge, but I discarded this as a control group would have 30 different joints to manage.

  To cut down the number of joints, instead of one joint per lateral edge I looked into one joint for every two lateral edges, which halved the original number. Still quite a few but now much more manageable.

  Each joint has three controls: X, Y and Twist. One bends the joint forwards, another sideways and the twist helps with curling. It is very flexible with little deformation. Hopefully it is simple enough to be used en masse. And it should also be useful for wrapping around things.

  The final parameter I added was a length control. Unlike the others, this one control affects the entire skeleton, which could really help with any scenes of the construct launching itself at our hapless fish. 

  I didn't forget the coral though, and looked into methods of construction. I've had ideas about making a model like this before and although I had a more advanced version that is now missing, I have developed a fairly sound method of reproduction. My plan is to work in a blendshape that will have the coral branches growing from a point of origin. I might simplify the geometry as the shapes get smaller, but right now the current shape is a hexagon which might make things a little tricky.

Narrative Project: The Scales On The Fish

   My primary task this afternoon was to get a working system for having a set of alien scales grow from the body of Ravine's main fish characters. To do this it was suggested to me to use blend-shapes, which I spent the afternoon working on in order to get the transformation right

  The core idea was to create a layer that would go within the skin. This layer would fit to the body by being wrapped around using a lattice deformer. At the time a model was unavailable, so I made do with a sphere contorted into a rough shape to represent the fish's body. The final setup would need more precise positioning as the the idea is that the scales would grow from around the eyes and sweep towards the tail as they spread.

   Because I was using blendshapes, I could not simply use the duplicate tool, as that would only duplicate the geometry of each scale and not the blendshape.

  Another possible change to the final model is perhaps something less formally arranged. This is supposed to be a parasite, something alien to the fish so sharing the aesthetic of the environment it should be distorted and strange.

  The idea was that the spread would progress along the side of the body. But to give it a natural feel the scales should ideally look like they're growing independantly. This was achieved by giving variance as to when the scales would start and how quickly they would stop growing.

 We may be able to simplify the visual appearance but this is the UV map of the scale. Structurally however I think I have stripped what I can without losing perceptual quality. Though I do wonder if smaller, lower-polygon versions would be useful at any point.