Visual effects planning and production
I have chosen to do my animation inside as I think it would
be easier to recreate the light. I tried to take a video outside however when
it came to tracking it there were so many errors. I did a few test shots from
my room and they all seemed to track properly. Also I found the lighting to be
really good.
My first idea was to have a paper crane fly through footage
of my bedroom. The idea was to animate the cranes wings flapping, and then
attach the crane onto a motion path that would make it appear to fly around my
room. I found a free model of a crane
online and opened it up in Maya. I rigged it and added controllers so that it
was ready to animate, however when I moved the wings they would deform and I
couldn’t undo this:
Even after I closed the program and tried to do it again the
problem kept occurring. I tried to attach the model onto a motion path anyway
but it kept coming up with errors. When I finally managed to get it to work the
model was deformed and I decided that I couldn’t use it.
I did try putting the crane into the scene anyway to see how
it might look, however I had problems with the lighting shadows. I wanted to
make it fly quite close to the walls so that you could see the shadows to make
it look more realistic; however I realised that I would have to recreate the
walls in Maya and I thought that texturing them properly might be quite
difficult.
While doing this test I also realised that crane that I was
using was very small, compared to the scene, so it wouldn’t really stand out as
much as I would want it. I did notice this when I was doing my story boarding,
as I used the 3D model of my room that I previously made to give me an idea of
what it might look like, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me that it
might be like this when I added the live footage. After this I realised that it would probably
be best if I changed my idea. I liked the lighting of my room in the footage that
I shot so I wanted to keep the idea quite similar to what I already had.
The second Idea I had, although I haven’t storyboarded it,
was to replace the crane with a non-deforming paper aeroplane I wanted to
extend my live footage, and have someone pretend to throw it from the top of
the stairs. It was then meant to gradually make its way down and back into my
room and out the door. Although there wasn’t really a story behind it, in a way
I wanted it to represent freedom, this was also the reason why I had the idea
for the paper crane, although I think this representation would have worked a
lot better with the paper crane.
After deciding on an idea, I found a decent model online so
I put it into Maya and added a more “paper” texture. From there it was easy to attach to a motion
path as I have worked with them in one of my previous projects. After the model was attached to the path, I
tried to make the motion path more curved and looped in places, when I play
blasted the animation the paper aeroplane did follow the path but it didn’t
look natural. When it was going around a curve or loop it was very jittery. I
tried to improve this buy extending the motion path end frame thinking that
this was maybe caused buy there being not enough time for it to go smoothly,
however it didn’t really make any difference.
After doing the test with the paper planes, I decided to try
again with a deforming mesh. I created another story idea of a butterfly which
sat of a piece of paper, and then flew off around the room to eventually go out
the door. I found a really nice model of a butterfly online but it wasn’t
rigged. After putting it in Maya and
setting up a bone structure I had great difficulty with the weighting. This was
because there were so many little bits of detail that I would miss and also
some of the mesh wasn’t visible. When I used the weight tool and selected an
area of the mesh to flood with a value of 0, it wouldn’t work. I never had any
trouble with this in the past and when I looked online for a solution I
couldn’t find one. After leaving the document for a while I came back to it and
the tool eventually worked using the same method that didn’t work before.
Next step was to make sure everything deformed properly and
I did a quick test to see how the wings would work. The problems with this idea
started when I tried to add it to the camera scene. Even though I added
controllers and a master controller that worked perfectly before, when I tried
to move or scale the model, the mesh and the bones would become detached and the
whole model started to deform in a weird way that I couldn’t undo. I tried to animate the butterfly flapping its
wings and then making all of the parts connect again however when I tried to attach
it to a master controller again nothing worked.
I really liked this idea so I wanted to go back and try again to make it
work. Although this time around I didn’t
have any trouble with the weight tool, the mesh would still detach itself or
deform when I attached it to a master controller.
The final idea I had was completely different to all the
previous ones. I decided that I wasn’t completely happy with the live footage
and none of the other ideas I had worked so far that used it. This time I
wanted to make a tattoo that drew itself onto someone’s arm.
I got this idea from one of my housemates who is a tattoo
artist and I found some really nice designs in his portfolio. Before I
committed to this idea I wanted to explore the different way that I could
create this. In some of my previous motion graphics work I had worked with
splines and tracers. This was using cinema 4D so the first thing I did was find
some tutorials online about how to recreate this in Maya.
The easiest way to do this was to create a spline path, then
add an object that will be traced. I used a NURBS sphere. Then I had to select
the path and tracer object and go to Surfaces > Extrude. In the extrude
settings, I had to change the orientation and output geometry to make it work
properly, as I found that if I didn’t change the output geometry to polygons,
the extrude trace would not stick to the path properly. This would then create a Sub Curve input that
would allow me to change the scale for animation.
After deciding to do this method the next step was to take the tattoo design and draw
over it with the spline paths. Once that
was done I started to add the extrude effect to each different spline path.
This took quite a bit of time as there were so many. I finished tracing all the paths and then
unfortunately when I went to save the document Maya crashed and I lost all of
my work, so I had to recreate all of the splines and extrude objects again.
Once I had finished this and play blasted it I really like how it looked. I
wasn’t sure on how long the animation was going to be yet because I had not
filmed my footage yet, so I only did it between 1 and 200 frames.
The next step was to film the live footage. Originally I
wanted a pan around of someone’s arm, but when I filmed several different
versions of this the camera movement were very shaky. Also when I tried to put
my animation in with the footage it wouldn’t stick to a point properly and
moved around the whole scene. I did have
trouble tracking some of the clips too. Every time it would solve for camera it
stuck on 66% and even when I left it for hours it wouldn’t do anything. After
this lot of footage being too shaky, I decided to put the camera on a tripod
and use the zoom. This worked a lot better and the tracking worked.
Before I added the animation onto this I wanted to finish it
off but adding the text to it. I wanted to do this using the same method as the
other part of the animation; however it wouldn’t work properly because of the
more sharp angles of the text. I thought I could get around this by dividing
each different letter into several different paths, but this method would have
taken me much too long. From this I went
online again and found a tutorial on how to create NURBS text. I thought that
if I did it this way it would be easier to trace, however it didn’t work
either. When the extrude effect would follow the path, it would get to a
certain point and then deform beyond recognition. I originally wanted the text to draw itself
as well as the other tattoo elements, but I decided that it would be easier for
me to convert the text into polygons and then animate it to fade in/out. I have
done this before using cinema 4d and display tags but with Maya I could find a
way to animate the visibility of an object so I decided to create a texture and
animate the transparency on that. It was
a shame that I had to use a different text to the original idea, however I did
try to match it as well as I could.
When I was animating the texture I set the transparency to 100
on frame 1 and 0 on frame 200. After this I could still see a white outline of
the text even when it was meant to be invisible. But I thought it was just
being used in the viewport as an object outline or guide, so I didn’t change it.
I wanted to attach the animations to master controllers to
make them easier to move around. With all of my previous models this wouldn’t
work. I selected the extrude shapes and combined them into one object I then
attached this to a NURBS curve and it worked. The animation still worked and I
could easily move the object and scale it properly. Originally when I made the extrude
objects into one, I also added the text, and although it did attach properly
the texture that was attached to the text wouldn’t work properly. From this I
decided to create one controller for the object and a separate one for the
text. Both of them worked without a problem.
After this I imported the tracked footage file into the
scene. This time it was easy to put my animation into place as the controller
worked. I attached it to a point on the arm,
however when I played the animation it wouldn’t stick to it. I couldn’t work
out what I did wrong at this point but the animation would move around onto of
the video and it looked awful.
I went back into match mover and masked out the arm to get
rid of some of the unnecessary points and added a constraint to the camera. I
realised that because the camera was static, match mover couldn’t differentiate
between points that were close, and points that were further away. After the
camera was set up as a nodal pan the final file was a lot cleaner and worked
much better. I put this file into a separate Maya document and tried attaching
a simple cube polygon to one of the points. Unlike the previous attempt, this
object stuck to the point and worked well.
This is what the final animation looks like:
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