Ruby: Sky mattes & Textures

Sky matte paintings!

Annnnnd some environment textures and I did the eyes of the fox and giraffe.

  

Ruby: Fox Animation

Did character animation for the fox! This was the blocking stage, I had some trouble getting the sort of movement I wanted without having much reference (we were going for a sort of loping bounce, so I went by run cycles and standing jumps).



This is the final animation, I was a bit limited in what I could get but I felt this was as good as I could get it at this time.

Katie: Colour transitions

To make the colour transformations in the houses we will render out the grey and coloured textures for each object by transferring the simple and coloured UVs as needed. I will use the matte render pass of each house and a ramp node to make a nice gradient transition between the two UV sets. I've done a test using a playblast and this method works well. It's not perfect but seeing as each house is only seen for a few seconds at a time it works for our project.

Katie: Animated environment

To animate the scene I filled the street with instances of each house type then animated each house type using blend shapes. Blending each object separately instead of as one mesh gave me a much higher level of control, so that I could animate different parts of each house at different times.

I used blend shapes to animate the street and fences as well, so that each section moved at the same time as each house. For the lampposts and post boxes I simply keyframed each object so that they moved with the ground.

I staggered the animation so that the transformation followed the camera. My aim was to create constant motion and energy so that nothing in the scene is ever completely still.

Ruby: Camera Animation

This is an earlier version of the camera animation, it's got the basic movement but is very jittery in parts and was incredibly hard to point and control via both the channel box and the graph editor.

This is the latest version we've been using. After I attached the camera to a motion trail it was much easier to translate and rotate without the graph editor freaking out a bit. Moving the timing around still took a long time and it will probably need to be edited some yet but until all the assets are moving and imported we'll be going off this.

Arianna: Texturing and Rigging touch ups

 In the last month, I have modeled, rigged and textured the robot, which was a fun distraction from Poppy. I have also animated him, so that he goes around in circles behind Poppy. Here's what he looks like:

I then create a balloon rig, so that we could animate it and instance, so as to fill up the sky, which would otherwise look very empty in comparison to the crazy houses and smoke. Initially, I used nHair for the string, but I was worried that it may have made the scene too heavy. So I scrapped the hair system, and I gave the string a simple Ik spline. I also textured the balloons using Ruby's swatches.

This is what the final scene should look like, in terms of balloon placement.

 

I have made four original rigs, with slightly different animations as well as visibility, which have been instanced to fill up the scene at different times. As the animation proceeds, more balloons appear. 

 

Creating the background

Took me a while to figure out the best way of rendering out a mid ground / background for our scene. I took the main file with the houses where they will be placed in the final animation, duplicated the ground as a placeholder for where they were initially and placed a camera roughly where the camera in the main scene will be. I locked the camera down other than the rotate y so that I could spin it around 360 degrees. The file was quite laggy and so it took me awhile to get it to cooperate, but I either duplicated certain houses and kbjects in the scene or moved them around so that from the camera the mid ground looked fairly full. I had to set up each render separately rather than get it all placed in one go because the scene didn't seem to like too many copies. I made sure to overlap the camera slightly each time and set keys so that I could keep track of this. I created the lights how they'll be in the intial part of the scene and set up all the shaders and textures. I had some troubles with this as there was already some shaders applied when it was passed to me and it caused errors somehow. When the rendered out I then stitched them together in Photoshop as a cylindrical map and then in the final scene I will create a nurbs cylinder that matches the height of the panoramic and apply the projection by merely applying it as a texture to the shader. There will then be a dome over the whole scene with the sky texture on it.