Storyboard
Environment Concepts
Character Designs
Animatic Pass 1
Animatic 2
Animatic 3
Final
Final Animatic
I was tasked to create the character model and texture maps for the zebra and the clothing pieces
UV Texture Maps with Textures
Zebras Skins
Clothing Skins
Zebra Model with texture maps and clothing
My role was the majority of the pre production and the character model and texturing I was not able animate many scenes but my group leader gave me the opportunity to animate the more humorous scenes
Dance Scene 1
Dance Scene 2
Dance Scene 3
Final Animation
Breakdown Sheet
A
Boy Who Lost His Name
Production
Diary
Meeting
1 – 25/09/14
The
group was formed, consisting of Sophia, Sunny, Kayla and Elia and the roles
were distributed to each member of the team according to their strengths:
-Director:
Sophia
-Producer:
Sophia
-Designer:
Kayla, Elia
-Modeller:
Sunny, Elia, Sophia
After
reviewing the list of scripts, the group decided to go with the story of the
‘Zebra’. Each person was responsible for different things:
-Kayla
is designing the zebra, creating character sheets and expression sheets for it
-Elia
is designing the environment/background
-Sophia
planned the initial storyboard, with the help from the other group members
-Sunny
took the initial storyboard to create an animatic.
Meeting
2 – 29/09/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Kayla, Elia, Sunny - Late)
A
group meeting was conducted, which consisted of Sophia, Kayla and Elia (Sunny
was late). The group reviewed the work that was produced for the project. Kayla
presented multiple sketches of the zebra character, whilst Elia presented
different sketches for the environment. When Sunny finally arrived, the group
realised that he did not complete the animatic, so Sophia and Kayla helped to
finish it. Each person was responsible of drawing out rough sketches of parts
of the animatic, before putting it together in Premier.
Meeting
3 – 30/09/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Kayla, Sunny)
The
group went in to get feedback from the lecturers. Both Paul and Eva suggested
improvements on adding more shots to describe and introduce the characters better
and also ways of making the shots look better e.g. composition
Meeting
4 – 01/10/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Kayla, Sunny)
The
group decided to work on the second animatic, implementing the suggestions that
the lecturers made. Sunny left early but produced a small part of the animatic
of the zebra trying on clothes (without background). Sophia created the
sequences of the boy walking through the woods, reaction shots of the boy and
the zebra. Kayla produced shots of the establishing shot of the forest and the
boy approaching the zebra.
Meeting
5 – 02/10/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Kayla, Sunny, Elia)
Everyone
attended the meeting and contributed help with the animatic.
Meeting
6 – 03/10/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla – Late)
Sophia
and Sunny was the first to attend and continued with the animatic. Kayla came
after and focused on the animatic too. The aim was to finish the second
animatic before Monday.
Meeting
7 – 14/10/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla, Elia)
The
animatic was presented to Eva and Paul, who both suggested that the zebra needed
more character to bring out his ‘camp-ness’, to give the animation more humour.
Sophia,
Sunny, and Kayla worked on making the adjustments to the animatic, to help
exaggerate the zebra’s character, whilst Elia modelled the environment.
Meeting
8 – 15/10/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla - Late, Elia)
Everyone
made contributions to the animatic to improve the character portrayed for the
zebra. Many shots were added in and shots of the zebra was altered so the body
language of the zebra could be more exaggerated. A small meeting was held to
discuss voice acting roles. Kayla was assigned to voice act the boy, Elia’s
flatmate was to voice act the zebra and Mat as the narrator.
Meeting
9 – 17/10/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla - Late, Elia)
Any
unfinished shots were completed and were put together by Kayla and Sophia in
Premier. Everyone contributed in finding sounds that were suitable for the
animatic. It was then put in and organised by Sophia and Kayla, who lined the
sounds and speech in the respective spaces. After Kayla left, Sophia added
additional sounds to make the animatic more interesting. Elia continued working
on the 3D environment.
Meeting
10 – 21/10/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla, Elia)
Eva
reviewed the latest animatic and made small suggests for the character poses
but was happy with the overall animatic.
Additional
adjustments to the storyboard were made by Sophia, Sunny, and Kayla, whilst Elia
began modelling the zebra character for the animation.
Meeting
11 – 23/10/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla, Elia)
The
shots that were suggested for improvements were corrected by Sophia, Sunny, and
Kayla, whilst Elia continued with modelling the zebra and environment.
Meeting
12 – 4/11/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla - Late, Elia)
Sunny
made an additional 3D model of the zebra, which was more suitable to use and
replaced the first model. Elia worked on rigging the zebra character, getting
advice from Mat about the mouth and eyes of the model and any additional
problems with rigging. Kayla and Sunny worked on unwrapping the 3D environment
and creating textures for it. Sophia began blocking the animation in order to
get the camera movements correct.
Meeting
– 10/11/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia)
Sophia
and Elia both worked on blocking the animation but encountered a problem. All
of the blocked animations were rendered in the resolution of 16:9 but the
producers had rendered the animation in the resolution of 3:4 because it was
designed for an Ipad content. This meant that Sophia had to change and readjust
the playblast movies to fit the screen resolution.
Meeting
– 11/11/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla, Elia)
During
the morning the group spoke to Eva, who had emphasised the importance of film
ourselves as a reference for our animation and how it would help us greatly. The
group decided to take this advice and record themselves acting out as the boy
and zebra character. Sunny and Elia were recorded first, who had difficulties
with the zebra character as they found it hard to act out the characteristics
of the zebra. Sophia and Kayla were recorded second and had slight difficulties
with the boy character as it was hard to think of way to portray his cuteness
it his actions. Overall, the experience was very beneficial and gave the group
valuable knowledge that they had to think about for the characters e.g. aspects
and characteristics that would define them.
Sophia
and Elia were responsible for blocking out the animation. Elia had to leave
earlier but Sophia continued this. Sunny began unwrapping and texturing the
zebra model, whilst Kayla began unwrapping the trees in the environment.
Meeting
– 17/11/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia)
Elia
continued blocking the animation, whilst Sophia approached Mat with problems
they had with the rig. The zebra rig had issues with unnecessary twists in the
body and certain parts of the body that were not operating properly, but was
fixed by Mat.
Meeting
– 18/11/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny - Late, Kayla - Late, Elia)
The
group met up with Eva for feedback for their block animation. Eva gave feedback
on the composition of the shot, stating that some needed to be readjusted
because it did not look right. She also changed some of the camera properties
to make the shot look better. Kayla continued to unwrap the environment and
apply textures onto it and Sunny resumed with the textures that he was
preparing for the zebra model. Elia began to animate the beginning sequences of
the boy, whilst Sophia had to readjust some of the blocking animation before
beginning the animating herself.
24/11/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia)
Both
Sophia and Elia continued blocking the animations. Sophia was also given the
rig for the zebra back from Sunny, who had unwrapped the model, and began
applying paint weights so that it could be used for animation.
25/11/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia, Kayla – Late, Sunny – Late)
Sophia
and Elia worked on attempting to finish the blocking animations, making sure
that all of the camera positions were correct. When the files were complete, it
was put together in premier by Sophia. Some of the block animations were
re-edited by Sophia because the camera movement was not correct. When that was
done, Sophia began properly animating the boy model. Kayla and Sunny both
continued with the textures for the models.
27/11/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia, Kayla – Late, Sunny)
Sophia
continued creating proper animations for the boy, whilst Elia also moved onto
creating proper animations for the boy model as well. This task was split
between the two, who chose the scenes that they wanted to animate before
splitting the shots evenly. Kayla and Sunny continued with the textures. Because
of the hand in everyone had for Pre-production, the meeting finished early.
9/12/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia, Kayla - Late)
During
the lesson, the blocked animation was shown to Eva, which also contained some
of the proper animation that was made. After viewing it several times, Eva
suggested improvements that could be made for the animations, such as moving
both hands and editing the timing of certain movements so that it made more
sense. This was also shown to Paul, who made suggestions on the body movement,
commenting that the body was very stiff and it was very obvious that the bottom
half of the boy was not animated and was static. He recommended that the entire
model should be animated, regardless of whether we see it or not, to improve
the quality of our animations.
11/12/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny)
Sophia
and Sunny went into university to work on the major project. Sophia continued
creating final animations for the major and re-editing the animations that she
already did to improve it, based on the feedback received from Paul about body
posture. Since a majority of the animations only show from the waist up,
animations were only applied onto the upper body, which made the model very
stiff and unrealistic. In order to improve the movement, animations should be
applied to the lower half of the body in order to emphasise the action. All of
the animations that were done were re-animated for improvement. Sunny worked on
the facial textures for the zebra model, so that the eyes and mouth can be
animated.
When
all of the boy animations were re-edited, Sophia moved onto animations with the
zebra. This was when she realised that there was a problem with the rig. The
rig that she was using in her animations was not the updated, unwrapped rig.
After realising this, she turned to Sunny for the update file of Maya he was
using for the zebra model but as it turns out, he has been working in Maya 2015
all along. This caused many problems because when Sophia tried to import the
zebra model into her scene that she was using in Maya 2014, the rig disappeared
and was no longer working. This could be a problem with the bugs and faults in
Maya 2015 that caused problems for the rig, which did not allow it to be
transported into the older version of Maya. After asking some 3D lecturers for
any possible solutions of fixing this issue but coming to no solutions, we
decided to use the previous files we had of the zebra and unwrap it again,
which took time and stopped the animating process.
12/12/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Kayla – Late, Elia – Late, Sunny – Late)
As
Sunny worked on unwrapping the zebra model again, Kayla continued animating her
particular scene of the boy walking over to the zebra and Sophia animated the
sequence of the boy skipping using references, whilst Elia worked on the
lighting of the scene so that it was ready for rendering. There was a few
issues with the lighting because the contrast of the light and shadows were
very strong, making it difficult to see and made the scene look scary. This was
solved by experimenting with a few different lights and changing their
attributes in order to achieve the desired outcome. After the zebra model was
unwrapped by Sunny, Sophia took the model to paint weight again, encountering
problems because there was history on the model that was not deleted when it
was rigged, which caused massive problems.
15/12/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia, Kayla – Late, Sunny – Late)
Sophia
continued with her skipping animation for the boy but changed the references
used for something that was clearer. Kayla continued her animated scene, whilst
Elia worked on perfecting his animated scenes and adding the lip sync to them.
Some of the scenes took several attempts to correct because it was difficult to
get the correct mouth movements and body actions. Sophia and Elia worked on
acting out as the boy character in order to achieve the correct movements.
16/12/14
(Attendants:
Sunny, Sophia – Late, Elia – Late, Kayla – Late)
Sophia
was preparing to render the scenes that she had finished animating but realised
that there was major problems with the environments lighting and background. First,
there was a single area light in the scene, which looked fine for the scene
that Sophia wanted to render, but did not look good for the general scene
because it only lit up a certain area of the scene, whilst the rest was very
dark. Secondly, the sky cylinder that we were using for the background has
issues with the texture because there was a harsh line on the texture sheet and
was not displaying the textures when rendered. Thirdly, there were shadows
appearing on the boy’s face that should not have been there.
We
began making the adjustments by asking Sunny to review the sky texture, so that
he could re-adjust the texture and see whether there was a problem with the
layout of the texture file that did not allow Maya to render the display. After
taking a look at the sky texture, it turns out that the layers in the texture’s
Photoshop file was not placed in order, meaning that the texture sheet was
displayed over the texture itself and did not show any colours apart from
black. For the issue with the lighting, Elia and Sophia both tried to add an
additional light in, changing the intensity and readjusting the shadow colours
to help improve the appearance of the background. This technique did not work
because there was unexplainable shadows that were appearing in the scene and
made it look very scary. Elia fixed this by changing the light completely and
created a spotlight, placing it in the middle of the scene, which worked well
but produced heavy shadows underneath the tree and tree trunk and did not allow
the textures to be seen. After a long time of trying to figure out the problem,
Sophia finally found the solution by changing the ambient colour of the textures
so that the objects had more light display on them, which made the trees
shadows less harsh. Another problem we had encountered was that the tree had
been combined into one object and the ambient light would not affect the tree
trunk, so it was still very dark and hard to see. Elia decided to fix this by
taking the environment home and remodelling the tree as two separate objects so
that the material attributes can be changed.
For
the problem relating to the unexplainable shadows that appeared on the boy’s
model, it turns out that the mental ray renderer was showing the shadows of the
eyes and the mouth plane and was creating shadows from these objects. Elia
figured out that if the shadow attributes of these features were turned off,
the shadows would no longer be produced, which solves the problem.
Elia
and Sophia then continued with animating their shots for the animation, Sunny
began creating the 3D models for the zebra clothes that were going to hang off
the tree and began texturing them, whilst Kayla worked on animating her shots.
17/12/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia, Sunny - Late, Kayla – Late
Sophia
and Elia reviewed the 3D environment and was relieved to find that all issues
with the shadows were fixed but wanted to improve the scene by changing the
colours of the trees because the environment was too ‘green’. Only issue we
encountered was problems with changing the texture sheets on the treetops. All
of the treetop models were copied as instances, which meant that all the
treetops shared the same texture properties and did not allow them to have
their textures changed individually. Elia decided to re-model some of the
treetops separately so that it could be assigned a new texture. Kayla was asked
to change the alterations for the environment, whilst Elia worked on finding a
way to create a controller for the eyes and mouth expressions. He began
following the tutorial that Mat put up for the facial controllers. Sophia
continued working on her skip animation, following the online reference that
she had been using from the start as Sunny continued texturing the clothes for
the Zebra and editing the texture of the zebras outfit.
18/12/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia, Sunny, Kayla)
Sophia
finished her skipping animation and moved onto other animations that she needed
to complete, whilst Sunny continued with the textures for the zebra and his clothing.
Elia resumed back to creating the controls for the facial expressions, whilst
Kayla continued with the texture alterations.
19/12/14
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla – Late)
Sunny
finally finished the textures for the zebra and its clothing and transferred
the completed file to the rest of the group members. However, when Sophia
received the model and attempted to animate it, she realised that there was
problems with the texture changing when the zebra model was moved. This was a
major problem and took a long time to figure out what the problem. After many
attempts of Sunny reassigning the textures and inspecting the texture sheets to
see if there was a problem, Sophia decided to inspect the model closer and
discovered that there was undeleted history the model, which was affecting the
applied textures. To solve this problem, Sophia had to detach the skin, delete
the history from the model and then rebind the skin to the skeleton. Meanwhile,
Kayla continued with her animations.
06/01/15
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia, Sunny, Kayla – Late)
Sophia
continued the animations she had for the zebra model but encountered problems
with a particular shot that consisted of the zebra putting the clothes in front
of him to try on. It was difficult to animate the clothes in time with the
zebra’s hands because of all of the additional movements that the clothes
consisted, which couldn’t be fixed, even through the graph editor. Sunny began
animating the dancing sequence of the zebra, whilst Elia took the remaining
shots and animated them. Kayla continued her animation to improve them.
07/01/15
(Attendants:
Sophia, Elia, Kayla – Late)
Sophia
decided to start her animation again and chose to parent the clothes onto the
hands so that it would follow its movement. This worked well and only required
Sophia to make minor adjustments to the rotation of clothes so that it stayed
straight, rather than following the twists of the arms. Kayla worked on the
zebra animations, whilst Sunny began animating the dancing of the zebra,
looking at references that would help to influence the movement of the zebra. Elia
worked on creating the controls for the eyes and mouth but found much
difficulty in this task because his outcomes weren’t the same as the outcomes
that were stated on the tutorial. Instead of using more time to dwell on the
problems, he decided to seek for Mat’s help. As it turns out, Mat figured that
the problem was within the texture files. For some unknown reason, some of the
texture files were corrupted and Maya was having problems reading the names and
required Elia to change the names of the files. Elia requested that all of the
shots of the zebra was given to him for him to take home so that he can apply
all of the facial controls onto the shots. There was a problem that the Sophia
and Elia discovered whilst checking through the list of shots. It seemed as if
there were some shots that were assigned to certain individuals but were never
animated. This gave the group more work and Sophia had to figure out how the
shots could be distributed.
08/01/15
(Attendants:
Sunny, Elia – Late, Sophia – Late, Kayla – Late)
Sunny
was the first of the group in university and resumed with his animations for
the zebra dancing animation. After Elia and Sophia reviewed it and offered
advice on where it can be improved, they suggested that Sunny should use
Beyonce’s dance videos as reference for a sassy dance. He was also given some
of the new shots to work on. Kayla began working on new shots and began lip
syncing. Elia had applied all of the facial controls onto the zebra models and
distributed the shots back to each individual and worked on his lip syncs but
had a lot of troubles with it. As it turns out, there were problems with the
mouth controller. When the mouth was keyed in a certain position and then was keyed
to a different expression, the mouth would sudden display a range of mouth
positions between the two keys, which made it difficult to animate because many
keys were placed in to sustain the order of the mouth expressions. Sophia
worked on an enthusiastic wave scene but found this difficult. After
negotiating with Elia, they decided to swap animations to speed up the
animating process. Sophia worked on the lip syncs whilst Elia worked on the
body animations.
09/01/15
(Attendants:
Sophia, Sunny, Kayla, Elia – Late)
Sophia
worked on her animations that required lips syncs, before moving onto the
animation of the first meeting between the boy and the zebra. Elia had already
animated the boy jumping in excitement, so the only thing left to animate was
the zebra. It was difficult to think of an action that the zebra would do in
response to the boy. She decided that it would be best to show an enthusiastic
expression of the zebra to not only show his excitement to meet the boy but to
also portray his characteristics.
Elia
continued with his shots of the zebra questioning the boy, making his character
very camp and full of himself. This worked out very well because of the
over-exaggeration of the movements. When the zebra’s animation was complete, it
was then handed over to Sophia to complete the zebra’s lip sync.
Kayla
worked on the lip syncs for her animations, having difficulties to fully grasp
how to do it properly because she was including too many mouth shapes. She also worked on the environment,
re-adjusting the ambient colour of the objects in the scene so that there were
no heavy shadows apparent. Sunny continued working on his dance scenes but
struggled to get it right, so he restarted again, focusing on the zebra’s
bottom to get the correct movement before animating the upper body to sync with
the lower body.
