Animating Time-lapse (opinions needed)

Today's we were animating scenery. We set up controls in the Church scene so this animation could be done quickly and smoothly without loosing our place while keying in animation.

We do need some advice however on the matter of how to show time passing. In order to show the time-laps between scenes we want the sun to rotate off screen then back on, suggesting the next day. We've now added in the element of clouds, moon and stars to further show this rotation. Please watch the following variations and offer an opinion on which best shows the time-lapse.

Things to note:
-A large amount of the textures in our scene have transparency maps plugged in, this means that sometimes geometry is visible through other geometry or visibility flicks on and off in this view port mode. Please ignore this as it's doesn't effect the actual render.

Test 1 - With a night sky colour plane rotating in...

Test 2 - The  light dimming...

Test 3 - Combination of the two...

Final Textures and Models

Polydoodle have been working hard this week smoothing out edges of the Scenes and Characters ready for the off. Today marks to start of the animation's first pass, the block through with Benjamin so look out for playblasts of the process. In the mean time here are some renders of the completed Scenes and Benjamin in his final texture.

EXT Parlor

EXT and INT Graveyard + Church

Benjamin Turnaround

Barnabas Rigging Turnaround

Barnabas now has a completed body rig and the first layer of his texturing. Time for the character to come to life in the face then the story can start taking shape.

Skinning Barnabas

This week Barnabas has been coming to life as he's taken through the skinning and rigging process. Here are a couple of play-blasts from the skinning process and an render of him in his first pose!

Skinning Torso Test


Skinning Leg Test

Benjamin Texturing

This week has been all about bringing our 3D models to life. The past few weeks we have been experimenting with textures. Alan suggested in our last tutorial that we need to find a way to match the characters with the sketchy, papery feel of the environments. It worked for Paddington, in a live environment, but it might be hard to read in a 3D world.

Firstly we needed to find a texture that would match the hand drawn environments so we thought that a texture made from something else psychical would work best. We used pencils, pens, chalk and pastels and mixed the mediums together to create Benjamin's texture. We were using Benjamin because he is the most colourful. We made some sample patches on large thick paper so we would also benefit from the paper's texture. Then we scanned them in and then cut them up to in Photoshop to place over the UV map. Finally we posed Benji in an environment to see how the two played off each other...

Pencil

Pastel and Chalk

Pastel and Chalk on Black Paper

Benji's UV Map

Close-up

Full Body

Benjamin in Scene

Animation Tests

The Team experimented last week with how we intend to animate the 2D portion of our animation. We feel most confident with hand-drawn animation so we wanted to run a few tests to see if we could use live footage as a reference for the animation. Rather than rotoscope the whole footage we wanted to (like Paddington) use as little drawings as possible to convey action. The video shows walk cycles and head turn... we found that the amount of frames used depends on the speed and complexity of the movement. For example - Walk Cycle 1 we found worked best by taking every 8 frames from the original footage and making each of those frames last 8 frames.
 

Benjamin Hair and Skin

A double bill of updates on our progress here at Polydoodle Pictures.

Firstly we wanted our 3D characters to have a natural looking skin... not realistic but just the appearance that they are alive and to avoid the plastic look that sometimes comes with flat colour. The texture apply in this book it a temporary texture to imply the final colour. By exporting the skin texture, it has been applied to the other finished characters too.

Benjamin’s Skin

The team have also been working on the hair for Benjamin as we felt it just didn't feel real. We received feedback from some peers that it seemed too 'anime' thus taking away from our desire to give our animation a British feel. We tried a few methods before coming to a good final result.

Benjamin’s Hair

The next task it to finish Benjamin's texture test to find what texture will work in our environments.