Progression of the écorché

I spent this afternoon continuing to mold my first écorché in Mudbox.The form is starting to pull through a lot better, but there are still a lot more details that need to be added, particularly into the arms and legs.

I have also started working on the face, but have found this a little more difficult to shape accurately than the body, so I may leave this area till last.

Sculpting in Mudbox

Although I've loosely experimented with the tools within Mudbox, it is not a piece of software that I regularly use. In today's workshop I started working on an écorché, which is a visual representation of the human body's muscles. I've found it easiest to block out large chunks of wax and refine the detail after I'm happy with the rough shape.

Although it is still a work in progress, below is my progress so far:

Animation Begins

The Listening Project has continued through the the second semester and has finally reached the animation stage. Alice has broken down each shot from the animatic into a spreadsheet to keep track of the overall progress.

Above are the animatic panels from the shot I have been working on. The idea is for the Lego brick to slowly rotate before popping and disappearing. However when it came to animating I found that it looked more appealing if the brick shrunk slightly before the pop:

The file has now been uploaded to the Google Drive to be reviewed by the group for refinement.

Let's start a band!

This week we were signed up to digital tutors, giving me access to a plethora of video tutorials for a animation software. As I have an interest in becoming a 3D generalist, I have created a playlist full of interesting tutorials for Maya, Mudbox and 3DS Max to learn watch over the next year.

I have started off with a tutorial for modelling an electric guitar in Maya, which I am hoping to complete over the next two weeks in my free time. The whole tutorial lasts over 18 hours, but this is my progress so far after approximately an hour and a half:

Shooting for Scale

For scale I had initially planned to create the illusion of a tiny person walking through a patch of grass, however this would've required a session in the green screen studio, which was booked throughout the entirety of December meaning that I had no choice but to work around the problem. 

I wanted to tackle the issue by using a pop-up green screen, but the stormy weather may have been a risk to the equipment. Taking heavy inspiration from watching an episode of South Park, I decided to attempt increasing the size of a guinea pig. It was hard to find images for my moodboard, so it mainly consists of images from the episode accompanied by a Photoshop edit that I found on Google images:

I've always heard the saying "never work with children or animals" and was unsure if this would end up being a waste of my time. As I was creating the mock-up I quickly ran into a few issues; the mismatch lighting, creation of shadows and making the guinea pig look like it belonged within the environment.

Luckily I have eight guinea pigs at home and when it came to the shoot a few of them were very cooperative for cucumber. As this was merely experimental to begin with, I filmed with my own camera in an attempt to avoid wasting time as I could quickly export and review the footage without worrying about the deadline for returning the camera.

This paid off in my favour and I was able to establish which guinea pigs would be suitable for filming the real shoot. As shown in the screengrabs above, some of the guinea pigs were overexcited and sometimes moved too quickly for the shot to work. On the other hand, one of the guinea pigs behaved well and I was able to use her for a re-shoot with the P2HD camera.

At this stage, I also needed the woodland footage for the background - as I was worried about the rain damaging the university's cameras, I unfortunately had to film the shot using my Canon EOS 1100D rather than the P2 - which doesn't shoot in raw. I tried to capture various areas of the woods to later make it easier to work around if my initial recording was deficient.

The post-production process ran fairly smoothly as the composition worked well. Although I would've liked to attempt creating this shot in Nuke, I chose Adobe After Effects as I didn’t begin editing until the Christmas break and the free version of Nuke is limited. After discovering the importance of lighting through creating my mock-up, I took extra care in trying to match the back plate. The shot came out better than I had planned, but I can tell that various aspects prevent it from looking professional, such as the grainy video quality. Treating the cucumber as a separate layer, I tried to edit its appearance to look like she was eating a log (similar to those on the right-hand of the shot) in an attempt to emphasise her size.

Storyboarding for the BBC's Listening Project

My team consists of Alice Seatherton, Kayleigh George, Krissy Ewins and Megan Ryder. We decided to work on the BBC's listening project for our live brief assignment, which requires us to choose a pre-recorded conversation and create an accompanying animation. The conversion we chose takes place between father and son, Roland and Laurie, who are discussing Lego.

We started the project by having group meetings early on to solidify our idea: keep the animation non-linear, with random objects and characters entering and leaving the shot to accompany the audio. 

The colour palette will be made up of multiple pastel colours with the art style looking hand-drawn, as if created by crayons. We first analysed the script to establish everything that would need to be designed or considered later in the creative process. Alice decided to break the script into coloured segments, which were then assigned to each of us to work on throughout the pre-production process, including part of the storyboard. Below is my three-part storyboard:

Shooting for Invisible Effects

The Christmas break has given me plenty of time to shoot the footage for my visual effects coursework. However, the winter weather has left me with little choice but to compromise and break away from the shots I had previously planned. I still wanted to create a sky replacement, but the little amount of sunshine made it difficult for me to create silhouette shots.

I instead carried out a sky replacement shot on a Cornish beach and used various in-software tools to increase the brightness and saturation to give the appearance of a sunny day. I created a second moodboard to show the sense of vibrancy and the camera angle I want to use: the shoreline vertically cutting across the shot with an land enclosing the background.

Above shows screengrabs from a few of the test shots I created. Despite having a strong idea of the way I wanted this footage to look, I also created a few experimental shots, such as the top-left where I climbed across rock pools. Regardless, I still went ahead filmed the final shot as originally planned.

I decided to use this edit to push my initiative to explore Adobe After Effects and see if I could work out how to replace a sky without using any tutorials: the process was much easier than anticipated and use of layers allowed me to individually work on each aspect of the shot, breaking apart the environment into background, foreground, mid-ground and sky.

Rigging Masterclass: Day Three

Hand after rigging and weight painting

Setting a driven key for the IK/FK wrist

The outliner shows the finger after joints and offset controls constrained, and controls parented.

Curl attribute added to the finger. Connection editor established connection: can now freely curl finger in the Z axis, and also move joints individually. Using the same method, I connected the wrist controller and finger control to allow rotation of the index finger in the Y axis.

I think it broke...

Baring in mind this is my first attempt at rigging, this turned out pretty well.