Before adding flashing lights to the moon shot, I tested the opaque colours on the dance shot to see what would work with the background and Lilith's colours. I assumed that green wouldn't work well with the red as they are complementary colours, so I had tried a pink, to differ slightly from all the red - a blue because we had used that in other shots, and yellow as the last primary colour. The yellow didn't look very appealing, the opacity and dark vignette underlayer making it look sickly. I think the green ended up being quite clear.
I then made these colours all brighter in the moon shot.
WWW - The colours are good. All the shots timed so that every shot could start on pink and end on green (or infinite in the case of the dance shot). The animation looks like it's in a dark setting thanks to the vignette
EBI - The vignette required a large brush and looks a little blurry, I feel a bit rushed for time to figure out anything better. This was done in photoshop. I tried to make the vignette effect in Harmony first but the opacity made the shading look like rings in a session of dark-light-dark-light instead of fading - so it didn't work.
[Edit 5/1/2020:THE PHOTO FRAMES, I quickly added them before he completely finished editing. In the concept art they were a lot higher up on the wall so I left them off, but they ended up being quite low down on the burp shot. We figured it would be easier to add them in to the dance shot than remove them from the burp which is made up of many files.)
This was a shot that I added in to the short film during the storyboarding process - as it separated Lilith drinking at the end the first flashback and the beginning of the second (we didn't have anything separating the two) We also had no way for the audience to know that the party was being held late at night before seeing the clock at the end.
Ayesha was supposed to both draw the background and animate this shot but I took it from her to help her work load.
I didn't have a lot of time to put tonnes of thought in to what I was doing, so I mostly took inspiration from my previous mood boards for the wedding. I mostly tried to look for creepy houses with square windows, because most spooky themed houses have very sharp pointed arched windows - but I needed a big square(ish) one to zoom in to the window. I also needed the building to be quite wide to keep the window in the centre of the screen, but I needed the roof to be thin so you could clearly see the moon and the sky - so these small extra layers on top of the house with small windows really helped give me that space whilst maintaining a normal house structure.
I started out planning the drawing on my phone in a 1920x3240 canvas. I didn't want this to be too long but I did want to have zoom to zoom out if necessary.
I didn't plan for there to be a floor, pretending there was a little more house beyond the canvas I had originally designed. The reason this changed was the keyframing ended up creating a zoom out in the middle of the pan and emphasised the zooming in to the window. I thought this looked a lot better and so I moved the house's position a little bit and decided to go with that as it looked more dynamic and twisted - like a shot from Nightmare Before Christmas or a playful horror shot with speed. We planned for more fun shots like that in the storyboarding, but to simplify production in the stop motion and to make animation easier, I felt none of our shots were as fun - so I kept the dynamic zoom out and back in. The camera showed the bottom of the house, though, so instead of extending the house, I decided to add a floor - which also made more sense looking back at the original design and its perspective.
After a few attempts, I think I got the speed just right and ended up with an interesting, quirky zoom.
The framing ended up quite good, whilst still maintaining a structure that looks like a house
I think the colours ended up sticking to the theme in the wedding where the red and blue worked well together - sticking to tinting the browns and greys slightly pink/red.
I learnt how to shade using masking, which I usually don't do even for art outside of uni (even though I block shade, I just colour everything in)
EBI-
I wish I had a little more time to thumbnail test this background a little more instead of going straight for it - because I found that fun with the wedding.
It might have looked better with a second light source like a street light at the front - and also a fence or something to add to the bottom exterior.
This is a shot that Naomi had animated but I finished. This was mostly me fixing up her linework because the lines were very sketched and there were quite a few random white lines in the middle of the black ones that were stuck out. I also had the job of adding in a background and the table, as well as adding the same lighting effects that I put on the Sandy head turn using photoshop.
I did alter Naomi's work a little. One was changing the clock colour to red to match the theme - just by taking her colours in Harmony and moving the hue sliders all in to the same position in the red - this changed all of the colouring in her work. I also changed the direction of the light source on her three toned clock shading to match my head turn lighting angle - (as if there was a crack of light coming from a far away door.)
Another thing I did was make all of the numbers vanish when the numbers came to change instead of a steady flash, which made it more clear to a viewer what had happened, as now it's not a blink and you miss it moment.
Naomi gave this to me today and I had it done quite quickly so we were able to have a whole shot fully rendered and take off from our work load. It also meant Naomi was still online to give me feedback on the final shot, which she liked.
The lighting matched the head turn shot perfectly and the use of the multiplier on the shadows in photoshop made it so the numbers were still bright in all the black - which was perfect for the final shot and made a nice glow.
EBI -
I wasn't quite able to smooth out all of the linework and some of the shadows don't have the bumpy texture because it turned very pixilated - but I tried to add a less smooth edge to them in the photoshop light edit just with a colour drop and the brush.
There was a little miscommunication in the group during our main group Act, Act 3, the burp shot. I think this was mostly because of people being unable to attend a group call and others having to remember and pass on information accordingly.
But the main mishap that occurred was that Naomi had spent some time separately doing a version of the diary being set on fire and turning to ashes just as I had posted the finishing shot.
Hers showed the diary catching on fire and then the book suddenly puffing in to ashes. Mine showed the papers blackening and crinkling up in the fire before turning in to an ash pile.
I liked Naomi's fire a lot and the movement was well thought out, but we had a problem where I couldn't change the weight of her line work or the style, so it didn't match the rest of the animation. It also wasn't in time with the burp, though I had timed my burp to Naomi's original animatic. I made the fire burp stretch over the diary so that it looked legible for it to burn, as it does in the animatic. But because the fire stretched so far, it made it difficult to see al of Naomi's hard work.
How I fixed it
Though I couldn't change the linework, I was able to delete it and keep the colours. This meant that I was able to overlay Naomi's flames on top of my crumpled diary. This gave my diary a little more of a purpose and more finality to the diary being completely ruined.
So that you could see some of the amazing flame flickers that Naomi has done, I decided to make the flames grow and then fade away. This was a little hard because Naomi's flame had a square base, and this meant a LOT of manipulation on each individual frame - especially because Naomi's were made up of so many tiny points instead of smooth lines. I think in the end this gave the diary a nice glow, incorporated both of our efforts and also used the opaque effect I've used to light every other 2D scene in the short film to add more texture.
WWW - The diary physically setting on fire was accurate to the material as well as the crumple. The effect looked better. Both people's works were included.
EBI - Everyone needs a little more communication. I should have gradually posted what I was doing on the group chat and Naomi should have said she was starting a part of the shot whilst I had said was working on it. But so far, this shot has worked out well for a team effort and it works better than before.
We had previous discussions as a group where I first designed this idea for the living room during a group call.
I designed it like this mostly because I decided for work flow to have the opening shot done with, so the kitchen table was mostly based off of how it looked in the story board. In the final, this was changed to stool seating without backs so that all of the characters could fit in a tighter frame like people wanted. I think the main thing we wanted Ayesha to keep was the photographs on the walls.
26/12/20
Ayesha's Concept art
In the end, we had a group discussion about adding a chair arm next to the sofa so that Sandy could walk behind it to hide the walk cycle legs as she came in shot to scream "that was my diary!"
Me and Ayesha also had a creative talk about adding a doorway to the concept art - as it won't be visible in any shot but makes sense in the context of a house. But the wall pan shot had already been finished and the wall obstructs the pan but luckily in the context of the shots in the movie - no person watching would know.
She also ended up using the striped wallpaper I made for the main intro shot - but the alternative zoomed out version to maintain clean linework.
Today I discussed workload with Ayesha because she has just over a week to go and has four final backgrounds, her sketch layer, and the art book to do. So today I told her I would take two of the backgrounds off her hands which are the dance shot and the bottle throw shot. These were easy for me to copy in her style as I could just draw over this concept art but in Harmony. And they don't need shading because of the flashing lights and dark lighting over layers I'm adding to the final scenes.
Today I got the dance shot background done.
WWW - It was consistent to Ayesha's style, looked good colour wise and the talk we had about making the couch dark grey to match the colour scheme but still look lighter than the shadow characters really worked. [Note: It looked good in every colour variant of the flashing lights in the end too. ]
EBI - The perspective on the wooden floor panels was off and that was harder for me to calculate in Harmony but I think the vignette lighting helped to hide it.
(I added shading to Lilith in the bottle throw shot today as well)
Placing the little creature worked out in the end, as his head shaped stayed consistent with the perspective and he stayed in frame whilst jumping. I also got to add the cool bend on the couch cushions to make one of our backgrounds a little more interactive, which was fun to do. I think this shot has good rule of thirds, especially when the lighting effects were added afterwards, as the dark vignette helped to highlight Lilith the most without making anyone completely central or on a straight line.
27/12/20
Today I added the background to the throwing shot. This was luckily mostly a copy and paste job but I spent a lot of time trying to get it in to the right position - changing the line weight slightly to match the more zoomed in position - and changing out the striped wallpaper for the zoomed in alternate I had made so the linework didn't blur. I also had to make sure there were the same amount of stripes in the shot and they were the same distance. I'm glad I noticed the detail.
EBI - I think that the main issue we had with both of these shots was that even though both had the same bumpy line weight and texture as the rest of the backgrounds- because they were done in Harmony, it's not as visible in the final render as the pixels merge together a little bit. But as the creative director and lead animator - I thought it wasn't so noticeable in the final shot behind the vignette and the line size consistency is more worth the risk.
This was our only fully collaborative scene on the project. In others, I did go in and fix the line work. But this was the only scene where we each animated a role before I altered things.
This mostly started off with Naomi's animatic of the bottle being raised to the mouth and a rough outline of where the fire burp needs to go and how long it will last.
Using this, I started on the outlining process which took me a few days.
WWW - This was my first time using someone else's interpretation of a shot and trying to make it how they saw it. I think I did a good job replicating the attitude in the actions and the relaxed nature.
EBI - As a team, I found that I did take over the shot slightly. I added a few extra actions, mostly to make sure the shot made sense (such as adding in Lilith sitting up, so that I could aim the head down, as in the animatic the head was tilted up and the burp went down) I think I should have communicated more with my team about these alterations because the shot is one of the largest.
Another action I added in was Lilith's reaction to annoying Sandy, as this wasn't planned in the sketch layer.
I was most worried about doing the fire burp. It was one of the few actions in the whole animation that I didn't really want to do, but it was easiest in the group flow that I took it. As I drew the initial burp in my Lilith mood board using a reference of Homer - I decided to look at Matt Groening. Bender from Futurama has a different fire burp style to Homer - but I liked all the curves in this version that matched the swirls in my character designs. I also prefer the two tones of fire to the quadruple tone in the previous design. I kept the idea of the inner mouth glowing and fading with the fire.
I think I did well at this - I angled it at the diary well, and also managed to show the fire flickers and make them move with each other. I wasn't sure how to shrink the flames - I was going to make the flames go back towards the mouth, which would have gone against the flickering movements. I'm glad I checked this reference.
22-24/12/20
After spending a few days on the shot, I worked on colouring Lilith and adding shading the moment Ayesha had posted the concept art with a light reference.
27/12/20
There was a small mix up with the fire, as I was given the task of animating the fire burp, which I did along with my line work once I had Naomi's line work. But Naomi then sent me a version of the book lighting on fire after I had animated it.
I thought that her version of the book burning was a lot better than my own - but due to us both working at the same time - the burp itself ended up covering most of the flames she had made. Also the flames didn't match the shape of my book and the lightweight refused to change size.
With all these thought in mind, I decided to make Naomi's fire an overlay on top of my own burning diary by lowering the opacity. I also deleted the line work layer so that it was just the colours so we didn't have the weight issue. By doing this we stopped the burp and the fire from the diary merging in to an orange blob.
The opaque flames made it look similar to the lighting style in over shots which made Naomi's fire slightly more consistent without me needing to change the style.
During creative talks with Ayesha about the living room, we mostly talked about colouring and how it would work the best in this shot. The design as mostly a combination of all of the storyboard designs. With the colours, I mentioned keeping the sofa in a greyscale so that it works well with all of the flashing disco colours that will be overlaid - and keeping it dark grey but not black so that it doesn't look darker than the shadow people.
Third dancer
The main idea for this character was to make them look like the person in the storyboards, just turning them in to a different creature than a demon. I realised that the dance in the storyboard I had made seemed a little off. Doing a 'whoop whoop' with your arms whilst swinging your hips could easily turn in to a difficult action to do and time well. Like the challenge of rubbing your belly and patting your head. One of Charlie's main ideas for Sandy was to make her a modern day trendy teenager - so I decided to turn the dance in to a tik tok style dance.
WWW- I think the dance was simple and easy for me to get done in the time frame, I think it looks smooth, and the dance is legible.
EBI - I didn't think too hard about the height of the character and it eventually made it difficult to frame the three characters and keep the head sizes the same.
As this project has progressed, I've found that my role in the group has been very centred due to the character designing role that I took to.
As the character designer, my team were worried that the styles wouldn't be consistent, so quite late on in the project, I was appointed Lead 2D Animator.
I think that in this role, I have been very on top of knowing what shots need to be done; who is doing what and making sure people understand what they need to do for when. I also think I have been okay at my creative directions. My issue being a leader is that I struggle to tell people to move quicker and tend just to self complain - which is why I didn't choose a role in the first place.
Despite this, as the creative team goes (myself and Ayesha), I've found that we have been able to clearly discuss what needs to be done between us, and have good creative discussions to help each other. Such as, me taking over her wedding background, and relying on her creative input to replicate her style. Or me sketching out her background for her to help plan the concept art - and discussing how to merge different people's ideas of the huge living room set up for the 2D so that it will work for everyone's needs.
I think my role has mostly been reassuring the team that we are doing okay - whether that has been taking other people's work loads to put them at ease, or just tell people they're doing a good job.
To fix the consistency problem, we decided that I would take a lot of the shots that involved people, and Naomi and Ayesha would take the shots of the clock, bottle smash, and the moon. We also decided that as Act 3 Part 1 is storyboarded all in one shot, that we would split the scene between the three of us. Ayesha will animate Sandy; Naomi will animate Lilith burping, and I will do the burp and line work over everyone's work and colour. This may be a lot of work for me - especially with 2 weeks left - but I seem to have a lot done so far.
My next moves are to either start rushing Ayesha's background design or help her with it - I think I might do the latter, being her roommate, I know a little more in to her situation and I think she needs support more than pressure. I'm glad that my central role right now kind of helps me understand people's situations so that I know not to push too hard.
My main worry for the project is that I might be taking a lot of my work in to my own account and not really putting it through other people in my rush. But with so much work, I don't feel like I have a lot of time to edit. I do keep people up to date when I've posted things using our discord - but I don't push for a response - and if I get one then I try to fix or keep what they like. I do keep what I'm doing very loyal to what I wrote in the storyboards; what we said in discussions and what is in the shot list. I just need to focus on maintaining the character's personalities and styles.
WWW- I like the actions a lot. I don't usually think about things like breathing when I've animated previously, so I think this was a much better call than leaving the character staring motionless. The breathing shows more frustration.
I initially had the characters eyes narrowing as the head turned but I think the eyes visibly narrowing at the end shows she's angry and also trying to adjust to the light of the clock.
EBI- I think maybe animating the hair frizzes so they ping out like in an animated slapstick would be funny - but as the humour in our animation is mostly focused at the end with the head explosion; focusing on gore humour and not slapstick - I think it would be best to leave them stationary.
WWW- I'm glad i was able to show lighting on Sandy's face. I think the overall motion is quite good.
EBI- I did the eye lid line on another layer. That meant that I couldn't fill in eye lid over the eye and edit it if I wanted to. I tried copying the eye on to the same layer, but the line texture altered the line work - making the line work look different on different frames.
Next time, I will keep different body parts on separate layers.
What's next? :
The lighting right now looks very harsh and bright - so I plan to take this in to photoshop and add the red glow of the clock and alter the brightness with an overlay. This will keep the darkness consistent with the opening shot.
WWW- I like the timing of the clock light pulse, and I also think I managed to find an okay level of colour and opacity on the rim lighting in the dark setting.
EBI- Putting the lighting in photoshop did decrease the quality (or it seemed to when I was colouring it, but the video quality seems okay).
I don't usually make reference videos but after using rotoscoping a lot in 501, I thought this would be a good way to test what i preached about the usefulness of rotoscoping. I wasn't extremely confident taking this action movement - but I think being able to act with a little animation made it easier to imagine the shot - even if i didn't use the entire video as a reference.
Maybe next time, i will hold something I can actually throw instead of a glass cup - to get better weight and force in the movement.
WWW- I think during animation, I realised I chose very useful frames for me to use when animating. I usually animate straight ahead, so for my first attempt at keyframing, I think this went quite well.
WWW- I think I managed to have better body movement - which is an improvement from last year when my animation was completely head turns and small facial gestures. I like the eye transition between normal and drunk/angry using the eye colour fade. I also think my style has remained consistent, which I was worried about starting animating.
EBI- I'm very used to how layer effects work on photoshop and autodesk sketchbook - so I started filling in the bottle with the intention of using an effect - only to release all I could really do on Harmony was add an opaque layer of colour.
I still need to add a shading layer, but I am waiting for the background layer so that I have the right light source.
Actors don't get enough credit for motion capture. Even as we start using it more - the only reason an actor gets a lot of credit is if they are famous or if their face is integrated in to the character or visible in one way. We can solve this by giving more credit where due - especially on the posters and trailers and final movie credit scenes (on the centre slide).
There are many creative methods to create a movie with motion capture. From edited processed acting that we all know, to holographic real time and to puppets, even if some are outdated technologies that cannot be used - the methods could still be replicated.
Though rotoscoping is frowned upon, it is the basis of everything we do in motion capture - as an exoskeleton would read an actor's movements just as an artist would draw over frames of a video.
We will lose lots of creative inspiration the more we integrate motion capture in to our work flow - as it will slowly replace lots more of the human production team.
INSOMNIAC
GAMES (2020). Spider-Man: Miles Morales. [DVD] Playstation5. California:
Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Manchester
Animation Festival (2020)
[Making It Manchester]. Manchester (on zoom livestream). 18th November - 30th
November 2020.
Menache, A. (2011) Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation. Second edition. United States: Elsevier, Inc.
Neo
Gamer - The Video Game Archive (2020) 'Behind the Scenes - Marvel's Avengers
Game [Making of]' Youtube, 4 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhMdf0OvsFs (Accessed: 6 December 2020)
Rare Finds. (2015) 'Rare Finds:
Well, Are You Coming? 30 years Of The Polar Express' Biblio Blog,
November 20. Available at: https://www.biblio.com/blog/2015/11/5427/# (Accessed: 27 November 2020).
Motion capture has been able to solve a lot of issues and even save entire productions, and therefore can definitely help increase work flow and save time management.
Even when the large motion capture work environment isn't available - we as animators have been able to prove during Covid 19 that we can create great work using Maya, even with a stripped amount of technology. But by doing this, we brought smaller parts of the animation company forward and relied more on them.
Using motion capture allows people with very little experience to get jobs in the animation field. This is good for the people who want to learn on the job. But this can be bad for people currently in the working environment - who have to teach these people with no skills. It also removes jobs for more qualified people who are searching for jobs.
·Avengers: End Game (2019). Directed by J. Russo, A. Russo [Film]. United States: Walt
Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
The Avengers
(2012). Directed by J. Whedon [Film]. United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion
Pictures.
The Incredible Hulk (2008). Directed by L. Leterrier [Film]. United States: Universal
Pictures.
trueblue26
(2008) 'The Incredible Hulk: Making of the Monster' Youtube, 16 October.
Available at: https://youtu.be/HWPJO3e2NoI (Accessed: 5 October 2020)
In the earlier stages of motion capture, models were often unrealistic and animated because of the low polygon count on the models. This made for some very high saturations in the final piece but also made lighting a lot easier than realism
As realism started to rise, sometimes trying to make realistic anatomy can create an over detailed character. Sometimes it's best to use real life as a reference and create something semi unrealistic - which is what i tired to do in my practical.
Even in a company with so much advancement in the area of motion capture - Marvel rushed to release Marvel's Avengers and had a lot of trouble maintaining the renders of their costumes and figures. This causes a large file and a lot of patch updates which aren't in the user's best interest. Even people with lots of experience can mess up easily because of how complex the technology is.
[Figure 85] Neo Gamer - The Video Game Archive (2020) 'Behind the Scenes - Marvel's Avengers Game [Making of]' Youtube, 4 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhMdf0OvsFs(accessed 6 December 2020)
In my introduction, I planned to write the remainder of my essay answering the four questions:
Does Motion Capture restrict creative liberties?
Is using motion capture unfaithful to animation?
Does using motion capture improve the production environment?
How has motion capture advanced?
As I decided to write my essay using my book report poster format - I planned by splitting my key research in to the four questions[Figure 87]; ultimately merging the first two together in one.
The aim for my practical response was to reflect how the modern industries have started to develop their characters in to 3D. As mocap actors are often hidden, it is becoming more evident that the characters who receive a large response are the ones where reality is more integrated with the actor themselves. Whether that is through their voice, or beginning to weave their facial features in to the character themselves. For this project, I took great inspiration for how Marvel went about making the Hulk in Avengers: End Game - first making a 3D model of Mark Ruffalo's face, and then using that as a foundation to stretch and manipulate the head, maintain Mark's eye structure to show how Bruce is a part of the Hulk (and giving the actor more recognition in the process. This was shown in the case of Avatar during the earlier stages of character motion capture evolution - where 'none of the actors on Avatar was nominated for an Oscar' despite their amazing performances, and the movie itself doing so well. The actors were disregarded for the sake of technology taking the credit).
As I have never made a head in Maya before to this level of detail, I thought that trying to model a face without a human model like this would be almost impossible. Especially as the older Hulk models had lip sync for roars and minor speech, I can see how Marvel slowly began to understand the advantages of this technology with every version of the Hulk that they made - and understanding the amount of realism needed to make their character look good. The 2003 Hulk was too cartoony with little anatomy. The 2008 had too much anatomic realism to the point it looked 'stringy', as you could see every vein and muscle twitch and shine, 'it's just a generic character. It doesn't resemble Edward Norton at all.'. And then the later MCU began to integrate the actor and understand the right amount of pores and other human flaws that could be visible through using human rendering and lighting. This helped me to design a character, as before I even made up a creature, I knew that having reference and inspiration was important. Even if the 2003 Hulk used actors for the body movement and 2008 took facial reference for expressions - I would still find it hard to create a face without basing the eyes off of the ones they captured. In fact, I think it would be harder. So I knew I was going to take the 2012 Mark Ruffalo approach.. I also knew keeping it smoother in areas with a lot of texture such as scales were a bad way to go, as they would be overpowering like the veins.
I found production quite difficult, especially in the current circumstances. I'm still quite new to Maya, and even using a computer - so this practical definitely taught me a lot about computer capacity, and what causes crashes in Maya, and how far you can push the system. Because of these crashes, I didn't have very good time management - but knowing my computer's history even in just our other 503 topic, I should have made myself more time to counter anything that happened. Because of this, I also think I could have made this better by adding a little more texture and spending more time figuring out how to do the spikes.
What I think went well was that this year, I had a clear plan for my practical response that related to something that happened in the industry, and I definitely think that I met my personal criteria of having a creative response with a purpose - showing how the newer more integrated technologies have gone about developing CGI characters and how using human reference (in my case rotoscoping) can support that a lot. This shows that even the earliest form of motion capture that people didn't put faith in , rotoscoping, because it was 'considered cheating' - is very useful in modern day animation software. I'm also happy that I finished a head that used a lot of the features of both my reptile design and my own human head.
If I had more time, I would have explored the harsh textures vs the smooth textures to show why marvel failed in their earlier stages instead of trusting the process and only showing how it worked.
Avengers: End Game (2019). Directed by J. Russo, A. Russo [Film]. United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
The Avengers (2012). Directed by J. Whedon [Film]. United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
Menache, A. (2011) Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation. Second edition. United States: Elsevier, Inc.
[Figure 80]
This has been my thought process during my practical responses- starting with the research, mostly in to the Hulk, the mocap behind it and its evolution through the progression of motion capture. I used the growth of this character to determine how I made my face sculpture. Using the idea of Mark Ruffalo having a 360 degree face scan to create his face model - I started to take photographs of myself until I had a good side profile and front view that lined up. Once I had this, I decided the best way to conclude my Hulk research was to turn my head in to a creature, like how Bruce Banner turns in to the Hulk. Now I had to decide on a visual style for my designs - so I looked back at The Polar Express, and how they initially tried to paint over the skin of all of the actors on set of the film, and how this failed. Looking at their style that has a very smooth painted feel - almost airbrushed, with lots of harsh shadows and exposure. I decided to carry this through to the design of my essay posters too, mixing it with the minimalism poster I made for my book research.
I used their style to paint myself, and then paint myself as a creature. As rotoscoping is about using reference, i ultimately decided that having a reference for the creature as well as my face was the best way to go. So the closest creature i personally knew to a legendary myth, was Harry the Bearded Dragon. Using what I learnt in our animism lessons at the start of the project, I humanised Harry using my own face shape - keeping the eyes the same like the Hulk, but also making some features more animated to save time consumption. After a few Maya crashes, I finally finished both faces, and decided against making lip sync for the project - as both models were closed mouthed anyway, and the polygons begun struggling and overlapping during the modelling process - so I think moving that many vertexes would have destroyed the model or crashed my very slow computer.
[Figure 81]
[Figure 82]
This is a final representation of what I think describes my practical process throughout this topic.
To fix my main issue from Day 8 [Figure 60], my first order of business was to smooth the face and not the forehead or back of the head. This is the area that I had selected for the smooth.
[Figure 64]
Throughout this whole ordeal with the reptilian face, it was difficult to use the previous images to build the face shape, as the jaw was a lot wider, and the amount of vertexes and edges completely covered the image. So when I finally switched to a front view, I figured out that the eyes looked unnaturally shrunken.
[Figure 65]
I scaled them to this size, but I found that at this size, it didn't look too fight in the perspective view. As they were too high up to look normal at that size.
[Figure 66]
[Figure 67]
Following the 8th day, where I decided keeping the spikes to keep the model real to the drawing, and using an animated look on the wavy mouth. I have decided to make the eyes very large like the drawing. This made the face look presentable in both angles. Whilst I was looking at the drawing, I decided to alter the jaw shape slightly. For most of the basic shapes in my model, I looked at the linework drawing as reference to the body features. I noticed that some of my shadows in my coloured version ended up flattening the nose, thinning the cheek bones, and bringing in the jaw so the face is longer and less square (like mine). As I think the coloured version looked more like me (and my human model), I made these alterations. I am glad that I flattened the nose, as I didn't realise how human it looked until I got rid of the centre bulge. I also think that the bumps add for a scaled texture to make the creature seem more reptilian.
Doing the videos [Figures 78-79], I had trouble with the polygons of the triangles. Because they were so thin, they kept catching dark under shadows, so I made them all thicker. Though this got rid of a lot pf dark triangles, the 360 degree lighting from the skydome meant that, as the turnaround happened, the light caught different triangles, so there was always one blackened out.
