CINEMATIC :: 24/06/16 - Finalizing and Finishing Up

Its been over two weeks since I last updated, and I unfortunately can't say I've been up to anything different outside of mattepainting the backgrounds.  I've had quite a few external issues that slowed my progress, and I was struggling to keep on top of these backgrounds and work on assignments for the other classes, but overall, the past two weeks have proven to be enough in terms of completing the mattepainted scenery for our final animation!

I realize my efforts seem quite minimal compared to the contributions from the rest of the group.  Still, working on all these backgrounds really gave me a feel for painting scenery in general, and encouraged me to try out a lot of new techniques and brushes and it was a good experience overall, minus the looming deadlines.

There are 10 background plates in all, and Tea ended up helping me with the last two shots - I couldn't figure out how to angle the islands for the intense low and dutch angle shots, and she ended up sketching the positions for shot 8 and giving me a really rough paint of shot 9 to clean up.  A lot of shot 9 is reused assets, just warped, in order to save time.  I would like to think that it doesn't show unless you were specifically looking for it.

Here are all the final plates for our assignment hand in, and the shots that they are used in!  Some of them like the complete dark world and a giant version of the dark world's tree weren't used in the final production, but pieces of them such as the islands and bits of the tree branches will be used for other shots.

SPIRIT SHOT 01 - Establishing Spirit Shot:

SPIRIT SHOT 03 - Low angle Islands:

SPIRIT SHOT 04 - Birds eye of Islands:

SPIRIT SHOT 05 - Close up of the Spirit Tree:

SPIRIT SHOT 06 - Low Angle Phone Shot:

DARK SHOT 07 - Extreme close up of Tree branches:

DARK SHOT 08 - Low Angle Dark Island:

DARK SHOT 09 - Dutch Angle of Island:

ASSET 01 - The complete Dark World:

ASSET 02 - The Dark World Spirit Tree:

CINEMATIC :: 12/06/16 - Long overdue updates

The past two weeks has been a bit all over the place for me in terms of productivity and development!
After the decision to move me into animation, I was placed in charge of in-betweens for shots 4 and 7; the creature circling the island from overhead, and the creature turning its head to look at the screen while twitching its spines menacingly.  Tea's keyframes for the idea were amazing!

Shot 4 was tweaked a bit from last time, making the creature's movements a lot more evenly spaced and fluid.  It now moves in 3s, the purple lines being the parts of the animation that I added.

Shot 7 needed to be redrawn, with barely any of tea's original keys left in place.  Keat told me to straighten the creature's pose when it turns to the camera to show its attentive state, and the movement of its spines is now keyed in ones.  I spent longer than I wanted to on making them move convincingly, as the angle was one I found difficult to work with.

Both shots have since been passed onto Oscar, who has done a wonderful job of cleaning them up!

Since then, I have been placed back on backgrounds, and I'm now trying to get as many of them up as quickly as possible.  Over the past week I've been working on the dark world, a larger dark world tree to be used in several of the later spirit world shots, and the three remaining pre-glitch backgrounds of the dragon flying towards the tree, the dragon landing on the roots, and the dragon looking up towards the ipod.  There is potentially a third dark world island that I will need to attempt for one of the shots Jo was working on.

I was told to tackle the dark world and its tree asset first, as the islands and tree can be reused in many of the dark world shots.  I had to scale the tree up significantly and repaint it in order to get rid of the pixellation lines, and made the mistake of painting of the pipes on the original small tree.  I lost a day re-painting them for the larger tree, and ended up scaling the tree's island down to insert into the full dark world scene.  

Having updated the large tree's shading, I shrunk it down and added it back to the original spirit world pre-glitch background for the sake of consistency.

In addition, I also completed one of the spirit tree shots.  Hilariously the branches took me a long time to do, while the leaves which are mostly texture took under half an hour.  The branches don't have the right contrast level on them at this point, but if I have time once the rest of these shots are done, I'd like to go back and adjust them so they stand out a bit more.

I hope to at least get the other spirit tree shot done by the end of tomorrow.  It might be a bit of a long shot, but I'd like to have all of these backgrounds finished by next weekend.

CINEMATIC :: 13/05/16 - Updated References

Not much to report in terms of progress updates - most of my time over the last week has been spent refining the background and getting my model sheets up to scratch.  They are now all finished and ready for our second submission, but I will post them here too as proof of progress:

TURNAROUND - BIG CREATURE

POSE SHEET - BIG CREATURE

And bonus progress on my mattepainted background!  

I've run this past the tutors, who are happy with it in its current form.  After the team talked about how to progress the shots in the spirit world, I'm sure I'll have more work, creating the close up parts of the scene.

While I was working on this, I did entertain the thought of using this Nebula Painter for the background.   The app allows you to create your own nebula and save the image, which could easily be layered into the rest of the composition.  I might try it out and post the results here, as well as discuss whether it might be an alternative to giving Hamish even more work with the way things currently are.

CINEMATIC :: 06/05/16 - Background updates

Since last term I have had a lot of feedback from the tutors for improving the background that I have created.  Initially it looked very flat and it was hard to get a feel for the composition due to the lack of any nebula-esque backdrops.  I have added a temporary backdrop that i found through a quick google search, and the last few weeks as well as the holidays have been me playing around with and updating the way the background looks.

The last piece of feedback that I got in term 1 was that I needed to correct the islands for atmospheric perspective, as well as add some more natural looking grass/texture to the islands.  I was also told that the islands looked quite washed out in comparison to the background, so I might want to work on the saturation and values in order to create a more naturalistic looking piece.

This is where I was at by the end of term 1 - the background definitely helps the composition, but it is still hard to get a sense of space since the objects still look quite flat:

Over the holidays I added a texture to the closer areas, and once I returned to class for term 2, Keat suggested i make the closer islands appear as though they were more in shadow in order to enhance the depth further and help to place focus on the central tree.

Here is what the background looks like currently:

Shadows have been added, as well as an overlay/add layer to most of the islands.  The further ones are more washed out which handles the atmospheric aspect quite well.  The closer islands are more texturized as well, giving them softer edges.

Our feedback today suggested that i tweak the tree so that its colors stand out from the islands around it, and soften its edges so that the silhouette is less sharp.  I also need to add a blur to the islands closer to the back, so that they appear more out of focus, further highlighting the central tree.  I may add some texture to the middle layer of islands as well.

I've also been working on the model pack for the large creature and have the roughs and poses for it sketched up.  I still need 3/4 clean views but I should have those done in a reasonable amount of time.

CINEMATIC :: 07/04/16 - Mattepainting Updates

Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on the mattepainted background for our animation.  Admittedly I've struggled a lot with it composition-wise and have been neglecting to update my blog about it - so here's where I'm at currently.

Last week I refined the concept sketch of the spiritual world, removing a lot of aspects of the floating islands in order to create a stronger and simpler composition.  This was the final sketch that I got out

It ended up being a really dense, naturalistic landscape with a lot of trees and foliage, with one central floating island.  The group seemed ok with it and I started messing around with colors and brush types/shading technique

In the end, this was as far as I got with it, as Tea came up with a much nicer composition based on my sketch and Hamish's test images.  I was told that we were going to add the phone in through use of 3D, and my task for the rest of that weekend and up to this point was to refine Tea's sketch into our final mattepainted background.

Currently there is no background and I'm still debating on whether I need to deepen the lighting/shadows on the islands, but I'll work on that over the weekend.  All of these islands are on separate layers and having a background set up this way means that Jo and Tea can start adding their creatures into the scene!

I do still need to add pipes under the tree for when the Spirit world turns dark, but the rest of the island changes can be done in post production, as far as I understand.  At least the basic setup is done now so that I can play around with lighting and composition effects.  I'm still not sure if I will be doing a background or if Hamish is going to quickly generate one, but for now, it is safe to say that the background plates are more or less done!

I'll probably be helping with animation after this, assuming that I don't need to put too much more into the mattepainting.