finished film

please follow the link below to watch the final film.

http://www.vimeo.com/11510137

another updated animatic

in this animatic ive only shown whats been changed. i changed the scene when he opens the bog door because it looks like he's sitting on the toilet still. the new shot i think helps add a bit of tension. the second half is only a draft of the animation, there for the quality of the video is pretty tosh, but again just to look at the timing.

updated animatic

so the first bit has been animated, the backgrounds are all changing, i just wanted to get a sense of the timing. quite happy with how its looking so far though

adding personality

after a chat with adam and some helpfull feedback, it became apparent that i needed to add more personality to my characters. Gordon needs to show at the beginning he is a little worried and envious, and after taking the pills he has a sudden false sense of confidence. one way to show this i found in my character, is with the help of blinks and shoulder movements

visibility tracks

I learnt how to do visibility tracks today. it took a little getting used to but got it down to a t now!
visibility tracks are used to mimick the picking up of an object and are a little bit of a fudge but it works with the first rule of animation.

"if it looks right, it is right"

Stretchy Legs

I followed a tutorial to help me get a nice strecth system on my legs. it helps to fake a bit of weighting and is really usefull if i just need that extra little bit of help reaching the ground mid run. It stops the mesh from ripping apart, and still lets the legs bend normally.

Foot Controll

I took a little while learning how to set up a nice foot system. i decided to do a reverse foot rig so i could get a nice roll going on. I had to learn a little bit about custom attributes and writing scripts, I no it wasnt really necessary for the character but this year for me is about experimenting and pushing yourself, so i decided to give it a crack. so far it seems ok. i managed to put a slider system on the side so i can just use it to get a nice foot roll. i had a seperate slider for a toe wiggle and a knee rotation.


this picture shows the effect of the slider when skinning has been applied.

New Rig

so I spent some time with a new rig. i decided to put a lot of time into this one as i think it will greatly help the look of the animation at a later date. ive managed to get a lot of controls so i can really get a nice weighted pose. il put up a video shortly showing what all the different bits do. heres an overall idea of what it looks like though.


I stuck a hip bone in for the main reason that i can get a nice thrusting action going on.

Latest Animatic

Here is my latest animatic, ive replaced 3/4 of the animation with the 3d enviroment. Ive kept some parts to stills. I think it reads quite well now. ive added all the balls shots in flash, which was an experiment but i think it works quite nice. looking to probably do this for the final animation.

Lighting

Im still experimenting with lighting in my scene. I need to take some time over it to make sure the reflections and refractions of the equipment and mirrrors are correct. Not to mention weighing up the rendering times. All those reflections bouncing around sure to make that timer go up!
heres some initial ideas of what ive got going on.

Texturing the Gym

I wanted to get some nice reflections floating round the gym, the gym I was going for was more of a modern gym, clean, low ceiling with flat screen T.V's and loads of mirrors. I textured the changing room floors with tiles, and applied some nice bump maps to the equimpment. Texturing the Gym floor with reflective wood gave a really nice effect. Below is a few examples of the bump maps and textures I used to help create the look of leather, brick, wood and rubber.

Rigging and Skinning Sally

The rigging and skinning process was a lot easier for Sally. Mainly because I had already practiced the process with Gordon, but also because of her stance and structure, it was less complicated to skin the bones.

Here is how Sally's rig structure looked.



Sally has more of a straight back to Gordon, she has slightly more confidence, and less worried about her height. Sallys bum was really fun to skin, I wanted to create a fat kink in her bum when she walked. This I can tweak more for the final film.

Sally

Sally was used to represent the sad lonely woman who had a similar accident with steroid abuse. She is basically the female version of Gordon, and when they find each other at the end of my film, its a love at first sight scenario. They are happy together. Here is sally modeled in 3d


I gave sally the same trainers as Gordon, just a bit smaller. Almost as a separate hint that they are the same person deep down. I tried to stick to the theory that opposites attract here in regards to the shapes. It started by plainly drawing a vase shape figure and comparing the shape of Gordon to Sally. Where Gordon's shape would go out, Sally's would go in, almost like a jigsaw piece. The faces are pretty much identical, Sally's being slightly fatter at the neck and with hair, it helps bring the hole film together I feel. As you can see in the picture below, I was originally going to keep the characters to blue and pink, however changed this theory at a later date to keep with the realistic feel. Here is an example of early stages of Sally's face.


Once Sally was modeled, it was time to Give her UV's. As the shape is obviously very similar to Gordons i already knew where to make the seams and the whole process took a lot less time.
Afterwards, with the addition of paint and morph targets she was ready for the next stage.Below are some screen shots of the processes.

Sally's hair was where I decided to experiment with her, I tried a few different takes on it, but ended up sticking with this idea as I feel it works best. Simply painting on hair strands. I originally wanted to make Sally blond, however wanted to avoid the dumb stereotype that they were given, as this is not the sort of character she is. Here is how the hair turned out.

Skinning

It was time to skin Gordon, I could see straight away that how I made the arms in the rig were not going to work. I started with a hi-solver which had to be taken off as it was causing my arms to twist uncontrollably, I tried to rectify this problem however found myself getting into more indepth and complicating situations. I decided to scrap the arms, enter bone edit mode and make myself some new simple arms that just worked as independant bones. It did the trick for what i was looking for. However will change this when rigging my character propperly.

Another problem I was having was the neck, as i didnt place clavicle bones in, the shoulders, head, neck and back were being drawn totally to the wrong bones. There was only so much edit envelopes would do, therefore I had to bake the weights to the vertices and use a tool called paint weights. It basically allows you to go in and fine tune the weights to specific verts. It also gave me another reason to get my graphics tablet out aswell! Paint weights worked very well and seemed to do the trick when multiplied with another helpfull tool called blend weights. Below is a picture of the neck with horrible crimping.

Other problems I had with skinning were at the knees and elbows. They would collapse and look awfull. I used a gizmo which was made specifically for the use of knees and elbows. This helped a little but still didnt look right. Some more tweaking was needed!

Rigging Gordon

I went for quite a basic rig on Gordon to start with, it was always my intention to go in and do a more complex rig at a later date, as I felt it would benefit my animation a lot more in the long run. I didnt want to rush into a final rig, especially with the short amount of time we had to have the animatic done. Here's what I came up with.

Christmas Schedule

Here is a picture of my Christmas schedule, pretty hard trying to keep it on track, especially when you catch a bug just after Christmas!

Painting

Once Gordon had his Uvs He was off to Mudbox again where he would get some paint, it was quite experimental looking into Stamps and textures, but I'm quite happy with the results, I decided to go for a gormless blue, nothing to snazzy, and some red striped shorts. Hes also got brand spanking new trainers in white, showing that he doesn't use them much, hence he is the size he is and unhappy.

Unwrapping Gordon

Now Gordon is modeled, we need to give him some uv's, this prooved harder than it seemed with so many different shapes going on with Gordon there had to be a fair few seems made in order for Max to unwrap him right. Eventually I got there after many wrong attempts. But once i got it nailed it worked perfectly.

Morph Targets

One Gordon was painted I needed to get some morph targets made to give him facial expressions. As there is no dialogue in my film I didn't need to worry about making mouth shapes for speech. I set my original character to morph from and started getting to work on some mouth and eyebrow expressions. Having previously only attempted morph targets once before I was fairly new to it and managed to get myself very stressed out. I first tried making the mouth shapes, as my character had become more high poly due to his chin needing more detail to make it smooth, it was near impossible to make it look decent. Mainly because of the flat look to Gordons face. There was crimping and tearing and I very quickly lost my patience! I moved onto the eyebrows to give them a try and not to my surprise the same problems arose.

I needed a solution and fast.

Firstly was to sort out the eyebrows. The answer, was to make separate objects for the eyebrows and create very basic morph targets for these. Easy enough, and if anything helped with the stylisation of my film. Things started to look up. Now for the mouth. I obviously couldnt take the same approach as I took for the eyebrows, as the mouth needed to be attatched to the main mesh. I had an idea. I wasnt sure if it was going to work, but I had nothing to loose. I paid a proffesional to do it!

Only Joking.

I exported the mesh back into Mudbox and morphed the face shapes I wanted. It was much easier using Mudbox as it has a softer approach to morphing objects, and I could get down and dirty with my graphics tablet for a change. Once I had a face shape I liked, I expoted my mesh back into Max, picked the new mesh for the existing one to morph into, and amazingly it worked. I had tried something out of the blue and it worked. If anything for the better. I did this for all the mouth shapes and they all looked really organic! The morphs were done.

Getting Muddy!!!!!!!

After I had the initial look of Gordon, I needed to drop him into Mudbox to give him a face lift and a bit of nip n tuck! By doing this I could get the more desired look of his testicle like chin (the opening gag of my film) and give him a more gormless stance. Heres how he changed:

Now Gordon's looking how I wanted its back into Max to get him unwrapped!

New Gordon

Once my Gym was in place I had to have a character to put in it. Introduce new Gordon:
I tried to keep the gangly look about gordon and i think his new look works really well. Im deffinately glad I decided to redesign my character, I think he holds a lot of pottential.

My Gym

So I plopped the equipment that I wanted in my scene, which was to start with a box, and then moved the equipment into sections. I had to think about camera shots an what the viewer would be seeing as opposed to "what should go where." Here are some ideas on my scene and how the Gym started to form.