Four: Animation and a New Laboratory

I've been working to improve the animations for my project. Feedback has it that where the most improvement is needed in when Four runs or walks. However one of the larger complications has been that in order to smooth out the way hands moved about, the control around the wrist was re-parented so that it moves with the base and not the torso.

This has the added advantage that she can more easily grasp things, and the hand stays in position better when Four is stationary, but it does mean that all the hand positions need readjusting.

  One update that might have slipped is an improvement to the scale of the rooms. Everything was a little large and off-scale so one of the challenges has been to compress a few things so the environment feels less cavernous. This may have a knock on effect in that Four would need to be smaller. Part of what I learned while researching for the project is that grubs can be much larger than the insect they grow into, likely because the fat and material they store up is also what keeps them alive during the energy-intensive metamorphosis project. It might be a simple case of not making the size differences as drastic but at the same time, Four isn't a low-level predator, and animals whose shoulders may reach the waist when on all fours can stretch taller than an adult human when they try standing on their hind legs.

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: Back in the Game

  The Easter break knocked me out a bit but now I'm back in the game! The Juvenile has been roughly worked out so what is upcoming is working on the adult's animations. For all the work I made on the model, this one is the briefest on screen, but it's also perhaps the most tense sequence as it shows Four's final escape.

  At this point, most of the sequences are done, some basic polish is needed for the corridor escape but with its completion I plan to go back and improve the placeholder animations for the grub, as all that form really does is slide around its incubator like it is living on ice.

  To demonstrate her freedom the idea was that she would open the airlock to a blinding light, finally getting a chance to see the world outside of her laboratory prison. Initially a basic white, this was tinged to be more golden to better indicate it is sunlight.

  Four's model does receive light, however due to the shader used she doesn't have an ambient occlusion shader on her form, this and a lack of any external lighting is what is creating the pitch black shape of her profile.

  The idea for the final moment is she will be temporarily blinded from the light from outside, before leaving the base and running to freedom.

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.

Four: A Return to Work and Development

Returning from a hiatus refreshed and ready to continue, I'm moving along with the essentials of the project. UV maps have been cleaned up and most importantly for the model, the walls and floor have been separated from each other.

  Together they felt too much like one combined structure, separating it out made it easier to define where they met. After a discussion that it might be inappropriate for Four to be raised in the same room as plants were studied, I set up a system that would effectively 'switch' between a plant lab and an animal biolab. To control the switch, a control was added over the room, in later stages this might be used to switch between the stages of progression. Multiple states would exist on one spot that can be set using this control.

  Separating out the walls, ceiling and floor also allowed me to develop cleaner geometries for these large surfaces. Much of the more dense geometry was due to the edges used to hold the geometry around windows and doorways in place. With these more separate, the layouts for the floors and ceilings could breathe more.

With the rooms set up and the distinctions made, I also set about reworking the camera to make better use of the new layout and serve as a foundation for what objects to place and where, and where in the lab might be seen. At present, only David's first recording and Amelia's first message have been matched to a camera but I'm sure more will quickly come over the coming week or so.

Major Project: Camera Positioning

  With frameworks for the rooms in place, I set about placing cameras. Each one would pan around the room, allowing the viewer to explore the environment. The thing I realised I had to bear most in mind, second to taking length into account, was the speed of the camera. Too fast and the viewer would feel like they're flying rather than walking though the scene.

  Ideally I would like to get a playblast by Thursday. I could substitute Four's place with a sphere or a very rough shape for the creature. Whether I can get some sound effects for the doors is down to available time, to which I have Tuesday, while Wednesday at the very latest should be used for assembling the interim presentation. 

  With the tracking cameras, the laboratory does not feel as small as I thought it would have been. In fact it seems quite appropriately sized. Perhaps this plays to some profound effect that while David's quarters on the station are comfortable, he's still a dead-inside workaholic. All the luxurious living in the world is no replacement or comfort for his lost little girl

  Somewhat inspired by the environments from Alien I decided the laboratory needed a pair of viewing windows, which can also clue the viewer as to the room they are approaching. In the final animation there'd be glass, giving a little reflection to the world. But for the playblast an empty pane is enough to get the idea across.

Major Project: Voices Ready and The Base Starts

  I decided to take a minor break from making Orthographic drawings after I received the recording for Smithston-Wessex's opening advert last night. With all the recorded assets, and some time spent polishing the Wessex Representative's voiceover file the voice-overs are at a stage where they can be considered ready for presentation.

  Largest drawback so far is while my goal in the initial pitch was a 3-4 minute video, the monologues totaled around six minutes 30 seconds, and that's with only momentary breaks between dialogue sets. I can mark this as inexperience with using voice-overs but it did validate the rule-of-thumb I was using when writing the screenplay where one page equated to one minute. I might be able to trim off some of the spoken words (two examples are I decided the year can be told though the scene, not David saying "year 5/year 6" several times and I cut out his speculation that Four was only a grub when it emerged form the soil). Still, all part of the development process.

  As well as voice-overs today I decided to make a start on the locations. These are only loose frameworks for now to confirm possible camera angles, so at present I only need outlines of the rooms, hence the extremely low-poly furniture in the stills provided.

  The roof is a separate piece for now largely because it makes modeling the rest of the room far easier. When it comes to shooting with the camera, it's position is likely to be more permanent. I plan to use this principle when assembling the other rooms.

Colo Colo: First Animations

  I was unable to update my progress on the weekend but after essentially re-skinning the model I feel confident I am at a state I can animate. So what I attempted this afternoon was an animation for Colo Colo running to start me off. Errors in the model have come up, and I feel I may have made the thighs too wide but progress is progress. Over the next couple of days I hope to build a set of action animations to give the creature some personality. The time spent correcting my mistakes has however eaten into time that could have been spent with other preparations.

  I am not dissatisfied however, as this entire project has been ambitious compared to what I have done previously, and I am not disappointed as I have always enjoyed the concept of a challenge. What I have produced so far I do not feel came out badly.

  Enough confessions, I also prepared a playblast. The difference between this and the rendered version is mainly from improving from what I had discovered using this initial animation sequence.

Colo Colo: Rigging the face

  With a partially done texture in place, priority today was on installing the final controls which were for the eyes and eyebrows. This was achieved by keying the transformations to blendshapes set separate from the main model, the transformations on these blend shapes would be reflected on the main model. The main downside to this measure is there are three instances of Colo Colo in the scene, but these can be hidden both in the workspace and in the outliner.

  The eyelidss were a bit of trial and error to get the angle right, as they're not human eyes. One of the alleviations I found during testing was angling the eyes so they twisted slightly as they closed. Not what normally happens but it allowed me to somewhat preserve the positions of the corner joints. I also made the discovery that I might have added too few polygons and so there is quite a bit of stretching on the upper eyelid in particular, but this can be rectified by a tweak to the UV.

  The sub-surface scattering is so far coming out reasonably well, even on the current skin. This can especially be seen i nthe light-obscured areas of the body such as the right-hand thigh. The priority now is goin to be textures, so I can make Colo Colo look really nice

  When rendered out, I think the texture comes out fairly well. There's some artifacts but these can be fixed by some minor modification of the texture map inside Mubox.

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.

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.

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.

Summer Work: Philip Treacy City First Flyby

    This is an initial proposal for the flyby sequence that shows the city I built in Autodesk Maya for the project "The What If Metropolis". With this, I cna find out what buildings need to be obscured, what needs to be covered and what needs to be moved about in order to get a smooth view.in a flight towards the opera house.

 EDIT July 2nd: Embedding code was broken. Fixed now.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Animation Pre-Vis

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Mosquito Motion Refinement.

    I did some editing on the Mosquito's animations. I'm not sure what happened during encoding to compress the video at the sides the video like this but I suppose it's not too bad as the essentials of what I want ot convey in the video remain in there. The 1920x1080 resolution is still on my computer so at least I have the undistorted version on record.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: The Mosquito's Arrival

     This animation was rather fun to do, especially the initial approach there the mosquito adjusts itself as it prepares for landing, something helicopters and VTOL jets to to align themselves ready for landing. It took a little tweaking to make sure the corrections didn't look like the pilot was having trouble keeping the craft steady.

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    The model's textures are still, unfortunately a work in progress, but after liking the results of the chromed blood vessel tunnel I decided ot investigate doing similar with the legs of the mosquito to reinforce a metallic look. I was also drawn to the idea of a reflective cockpit window though with that oen I am considering toning down the reflectivity to keep the window dark. One advantage though is that I have less that needs being given a texture map

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    I also tried tweaking the direction of the light, although I do feel that the initial angle allowed the viewer to see more.

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Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Refined Mosquito Apporach

     Looking to refine the Mosquito Approach clip I added a camera and gave it some motion along with refining the Mosquito's motion path (it was a little wobbly in places). I thought it might suit the "airborne approach" feel if the camera glided with the mosquito's journey, along with a bit of shake to get the feel of the speed and power of the mosquito as it heads towards its target.

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.