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1) Concepts and stuff! Exterior: Susan suggested I take a look at hummingbird stands, and Nasya suggested I consider more lights, which really helped a lot (particularly the following photos) Interior: I've added branches to the floor surrounding the platform, but not quite done drawing yet so those aren't included. The following is what I came up with; depending on feedback I think I'll be either going with the one in the middle, or the one on the right (albeit replacing the string lights with strobe lights) Props: I asked Andy to continue modelling general bar items, the following of which is what he sent me. I also asked Andy to send me some examples of his art so I could figure out an art style that he can get used to for the posters. I made a sample, plus a list of parody albums/celebrities for him to get creative with:
I also did as suggested and photoshopped a photo of Francesco in a bird suit. The best thing I could come up with was the Taylor Swift 1989 thing... 3) Animation: I wanted to get rid of all the parts still in thumbnail and update the parts I didn't get to yet, so the dance battle section from last week hasn't been touched, but the rest is new! Also, two versions.
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This week was a bit of a mixture of everything. 1. I asked Andy to start making props for the bar-- drinks, bar snacks, etc., but as if they were for birds. I drew an example of some cocktails to get him started What he sent: 2. I also needed to get design/concept art done in order to pass it off to my helpers, which I didn't *quite* manage to get done between animating and texturing, but the interior design is, for the most part, finalized. I also tried to get the exterior down so I can animate the opening: As part of decorations, I need posters/vinyl covers of some birdy musicians, which I won't be able to draw all myself. Thus, I asked some people who might be interested in drawing something for me, and so far I have Deanna, Julia, and Scarlet. For the exterior, I looked for inspiration in disco clubs, bird houses, tree houses, and bird feeders. I also figured out a general palette-ish, and want to maintain a square outer appearance to match the interior design. (Also honestly I want to keep it as a bird house because it's like a pun on the music genre house haha...) 3. Texture + render; to be fair the only reason I did this this week was because I needed to for another class, but it ended up helping me get some problem out early on. I went back to try and find some proper tutorials, and I found these two to be the most helpful: https://vimeo.com/217465073 https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/pegasus-xgen-maya-1510 Based on the info, I first used xgen to create a single feather and exported as an archive so I can generate it across the surface. I attempted this two times-- this worked fine, however it either could not or would not render-- every time I did so either Maya would crash or I got an error message-- something bout points versus vectors. I googled it and got nothing, so proper feathers were abandoned. Screenshot of first attempt sans second description (second attempt the file won't open...): Test render using regular xgen fur (tried to mimic feather shape + forgot to turn off gamma, my bad): 4. Finally, animation: This week I tried to focus on finishing/roughing out the short shots-- mainly the dance battle as I'd been having trouble with it this whole time. This week:
My plan this week was to blast through as much animation as I could, both to get in more practice by forcing myself to re-animate each week, and to make my life easier later on. However, it turned out more as a testament to my own lack of practice. In terms of planning, I reached out to Stacey, Chao, and Andy to see what they wanted/could do, so I could plan the rest of my production.
Stacey: animation, anything else I need help with Chao: anything but texturing For Andy, I thought I'd use the set/props as a way to teach and get him started, then have him do the rest. Ironically, texturing was the one thing I wanted help with, so I decided to flip things around a bit-- I'll have Stacey + Chao take care of the mob characters (modeling, rigging, animation-- everything), and split work on simulations, so that I can focus on animation and texture. Got nCloth to work! I tried two things
I had to change the parenting of some joints to get it to look right, but playblast of nCloth when I got it to work: Rigging: I wasn't careful rigging the first round (I think I may have been too tired) so my skeletons were all messed up; some parts didn't have enough joints, joints were parented to the wrong ones, some joints were doubled, etc. Collectively, I probably rigged about 18 "models"... I have two models left to rig, one half-rigged and one I literally just forgot about (woops), but otherwise I'm very happy with how the rig moves and it's pretty easy to animate! Weighting is half-finished; I need to weight the feathers, beak, and some legs, but most other things are weighted already. I managed to do half my layout and combined things between the first and second thumbnails. Set is stand-in. It's unfinished due to time, but I also happened to find that I need to do some animation tests before I can really figure out how to design the dance battle and ending sequence. Plan for next week:
Last week's plan was to go in and finish all my rigging (and layout if I could get help) However, I had four models left to do so I decided to do those first. Those were the Carola's Parotia, and the three main ladies. Other things I did (modeling-wise)
1) The pre-made bird rig: I didn't really like how the controls worked + it's designed for a realistic bird, so that was scrapped 2) My own custom skeleton + Advanced Skeleton build: That was horrible-- it gave me so many controls I didn't even know where to start to clean it up. I watched this video to see if it showed how to clean it up but it looks like it just got rid of all the circles automatically? Who knows In retrospect this was kind of dumb, but I did a wing skeleton + ncloth simulation test AFTER I built a full skeleton..which I really should have done in reverse because: observations
Simulation-wise, I put ncloth on the five remaining feathers and used the first and fifth to test out different dynamics + constraint points. None of them really worked, thus obervations. These are the tutorials I watched for the ncloth simulation-- bat wings but closer to what I needed since all the other tutorials had realistic feather layers (also both videos are essentially the same thing, just one actually explains it) I also did some research on dance scenes. I used this video as a point of reference and departed from there-- I found that the ones in the second half (Footloose, Saturday Night Fever, etc.) were good because they focused on individual choreography) I really wanted to replicate that sort of cheesy, exaggeration of the 70s and 80s so I searched primarily for disco battles and solos (since most scenes are large choreographed crowds, which isn't really what I'm going for) Some notes:
I also found that music dance videos were very helpful For next week!
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April 2018
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