Monday, 20 September 2010
Thursday, 6 May 2010
Sounds
For the sounds, I needed 2 separate voices to do the script, some banging and crashing of bricks and maybe some ambiance sounds of a construction site. Firstly, I used this script below for the scene:
Workmate: Brucey Boy! You’ve done it wrong
Bruce: Get off my case, its none of your business chuck
Workmate: You’ve put a black bloody brick in that wall
Bruce: Ill show you bricks son
Bruce: Come here
Workmate: [smashes to floor] uh
Bruce: I’m Hungry
For this, I recorded both parts using a normal accent for the Workmate and my attempt at a Scottish accent for Bruce, OK so the accent's not that great, but I slowed it down in premiere pro as well to give more definition to the difference between the two.
Secondly for the noises, I knew that because Lego bricks are made form plastic it would be good to have some plastic crashing together being recorded, but even better, because I have two kids, they have some 'Mega Blocks' which are similar to Lego, just much bigger and could create a similar sound to what i would like. So I recorded various sounds of me falling into them and crashing them together until I had enough to work with. I collated all the sounds together in Premiere Pro and decided it needed some background noise to fill in the silences. So I used two sound clips of construction sites from this website: 'http://www.freesfx.co.uk/sfx/construction' and added them to the scene.
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Animation
Animation
Animating the scene was both fun and challenging, coming across obstacles all the time that needed to be conquered, it taught me a wealth of knowledge that one day I hope may come in useful for future projects I may do. To start with I tried animating the eyes with little success, using the lookat constraint and a point target to get the eyes to move when you move the target didn't seem to be working, every time I moved the target, the eye moved but in the animation sequence it had no effect
After trying for some time to beat this problem with no success, I moved onto something else. I placed a 'Free' camera on scene because using a target camera seemed to make more problems with the camera not actually following its supposed target and staying in a fixed position, at least with a free camera I could move it to where I wanted. I also drew a wavy line as a path for the camera to follow:
I then duplicated the wavy line and turned the duplicate 90 degrees
and added the lines as a path constraint for the camera to follow, this is performed by selecting the camera, choosing - Animation-Constraints-Path Constaint as pictured below:
As the idea was to have the second person through the eyes of the camera I placed a second 'Free' camera on scene right in front of Bruce and again gave it a path to follow. This path curves down toward the ground as Bruce is going to punch him to the floor
The 'Morpher' was then used to animate and change the shape of the mouth on the face by changing the values for each separate morph.
Background
To create the background, I used a large plane
and added a diffuse map of a sky onto it:
Turned it vertical and added a bend modifier to it so that it looks realistic within the scene
Thankfully after searching some forums and asking some friends, I discovered the answer to the problem I'd been having on getting not only the Morph modifier to work, but also the eyebrows and eyeballs to move as well, because at one point, I thought I was going to only be able to have his mouth moving at the most. The problem was that the skin modifier needed to be at the top of the stack, I had the morpher stack above the 'Skin' meaning any changes within the skin edit the morph in an unusual way as well. The eyebrows kept reverting back to their original position every time I tried to move them as well, this was because they had a skin modifier as well, which actually all it neede3d was a link between it and the bone to ensure that it moved with Bruce. The same goes for the eyeball and eventually, all the attributes of Bruce's face were editable making for a much nicer final animation. The only last major problem I had was trying to get the walk cycle sorted, I found this one of the most difficult sequences to do using bones, after hours of trying at a time, I gave it my best try and averted the camera mostly away from the legs which was a shame. I did manage to get Bruce to kick a brick though!
Adjusting the stack so that 'Morpher' is underneath 'Skin'
Linking the eyeball to the bone
Rotating the Iris on Autokey so that it looks like the eye is moving, the same method was applied to the eyebrows as well.
After watching a rendered sequence of the first scene, when Bruce threw the brick in the air, you could see through the underside of it because of the normals, So I simply cloned the brick and flipped the normals on the cloned brick meaning both sides were solid.
And before rendering the final sequence on both of the omni lights I made sure to press the cast shadows tick box is on to make sure the scene lighting is set as a realistic daytime moment.
In total there were 4 cameras used and each clip was imported into Adobe premiere pro for editing. I felt that the colours needed enhancing so I added an RGB Curve editor in Adobe Premiere pro to bring the colour out a bit better, in this screenshot, you can see the before and after (before being on the right hand side) and how much the colour is brought out just by using that filter.
Animating the scene was both fun and challenging, coming across obstacles all the time that needed to be conquered, it taught me a wealth of knowledge that one day I hope may come in useful for future projects I may do. To start with I tried animating the eyes with little success, using the lookat constraint and a point target to get the eyes to move when you move the target didn't seem to be working, every time I moved the target, the eye moved but in the animation sequence it had no effect
After trying for some time to beat this problem with no success, I moved onto something else. I placed a 'Free' camera on scene because using a target camera seemed to make more problems with the camera not actually following its supposed target and staying in a fixed position, at least with a free camera I could move it to where I wanted. I also drew a wavy line as a path for the camera to follow:
I then duplicated the wavy line and turned the duplicate 90 degrees
and added the lines as a path constraint for the camera to follow, this is performed by selecting the camera, choosing - Animation-Constraints-Path Constaint as pictured below:
As the idea was to have the second person through the eyes of the camera I placed a second 'Free' camera on scene right in front of Bruce and again gave it a path to follow. This path curves down toward the ground as Bruce is going to punch him to the floor
The 'Morpher' was then used to animate and change the shape of the mouth on the face by changing the values for each separate morph.
Background
To create the background, I used a large plane
and added a diffuse map of a sky onto it:
Turned it vertical and added a bend modifier to it so that it looks realistic within the scene
Thankfully after searching some forums and asking some friends, I discovered the answer to the problem I'd been having on getting not only the Morph modifier to work, but also the eyebrows and eyeballs to move as well, because at one point, I thought I was going to only be able to have his mouth moving at the most. The problem was that the skin modifier needed to be at the top of the stack, I had the morpher stack above the 'Skin' meaning any changes within the skin edit the morph in an unusual way as well. The eyebrows kept reverting back to their original position every time I tried to move them as well, this was because they had a skin modifier as well, which actually all it neede3d was a link between it and the bone to ensure that it moved with Bruce. The same goes for the eyeball and eventually, all the attributes of Bruce's face were editable making for a much nicer final animation. The only last major problem I had was trying to get the walk cycle sorted, I found this one of the most difficult sequences to do using bones, after hours of trying at a time, I gave it my best try and averted the camera mostly away from the legs which was a shame. I did manage to get Bruce to kick a brick though!
Adjusting the stack so that 'Morpher' is underneath 'Skin'
Linking the eyeball to the bone
Rotating the Iris on Autokey so that it looks like the eye is moving, the same method was applied to the eyebrows as well.
After watching a rendered sequence of the first scene, when Bruce threw the brick in the air, you could see through the underside of it because of the normals, So I simply cloned the brick and flipped the normals on the cloned brick meaning both sides were solid.
And before rendering the final sequence on both of the omni lights I made sure to press the cast shadows tick box is on to make sure the scene lighting is set as a realistic daytime moment.
In total there were 4 cameras used and each clip was imported into Adobe premiere pro for editing. I felt that the colours needed enhancing so I added an RGB Curve editor in Adobe Premiere pro to bring the colour out a bit better, in this screenshot, you can see the before and after (before being on the right hand side) and how much the colour is brought out just by using that filter.
Friday, 30 April 2010
The Scene
Building of the scene
Ok so I wanted this to be looking nice but fairly basic because the emphasis is on Bruce and his emotions, not so much the scene, so I've left the environment to the bare minimum needed really and created a kind of half built brick wall which Bruce the Builder is in the middle of building, this consisted of using the cloned Lego bricks and aligning them together to form this shape, much like in real Lego:
As you can see, the Omni light reflects nicely off of the bricks.
I put a pile of bricks in front of Bruce for him to be building with:
Bruce is now all set to be animated, so on with 'Autokey' to get Bruce ready for being moved around:
I added these eyelids to the angry face but I'm not sure if its too late at this stage as was having trouble trying to get the main face to morph into this shape but will keep trying until the very end
The overall angry look I wanted to go for, whether this is completely possible or not, we'll see
After some work, I found out that I could only modify one thing at a time to morph, and as all the feature in the head are separate, it meant doing them all separately. Meaning cloning 5 or 6 heads just to edit the smile, so here we are below editing the mouth on the head cylinder:
As you can see all the mouths are different
I added the Morpher modifier to the head
and in doing that I can add each head as a Morph object for the original head to reference to when the frequencies are changed:
A couple of the morphs applied to experiment to see if they work.
Eyes
Here the eyes need a target to follow so they have something to look at, I used a helper-Point which is basically a nothing that you can click on, just a target and used a 'Lookat' constraint for the eyes to focus on.
Applying both of the eyes to look at the target so that when it is moved, the eyes move too:
Realsing that two targets would be a better to move each eye independently, I created another point helper and assigned the other eye onto that one:
Ok so I wanted this to be looking nice but fairly basic because the emphasis is on Bruce and his emotions, not so much the scene, so I've left the environment to the bare minimum needed really and created a kind of half built brick wall which Bruce the Builder is in the middle of building, this consisted of using the cloned Lego bricks and aligning them together to form this shape, much like in real Lego:
As you can see, the Omni light reflects nicely off of the bricks.
I put a pile of bricks in front of Bruce for him to be building with:
Bruce is now all set to be animated, so on with 'Autokey' to get Bruce ready for being moved around:
I added these eyelids to the angry face but I'm not sure if its too late at this stage as was having trouble trying to get the main face to morph into this shape but will keep trying until the very end
The overall angry look I wanted to go for, whether this is completely possible or not, we'll see
After some work, I found out that I could only modify one thing at a time to morph, and as all the feature in the head are separate, it meant doing them all separately. Meaning cloning 5 or 6 heads just to edit the smile, so here we are below editing the mouth on the head cylinder:
As you can see all the mouths are different
I added the Morpher modifier to the head
and in doing that I can add each head as a Morph object for the original head to reference to when the frequencies are changed:
A couple of the morphs applied to experiment to see if they work.
Eyes
Here the eyes need a target to follow so they have something to look at, I used a helper-Point which is basically a nothing that you can click on, just a target and used a 'Lookat' constraint for the eyes to focus on.
Applying both of the eyes to look at the target so that when it is moved, the eyes move too:
Realsing that two targets would be a better to move each eye independently, I created another point helper and assigned the other eye onto that one:
The Hand
Creation of the Hand
Creating the hand was relatively easy, Lego men have hands like a clamp that don't move, obviously I do want to move Bruce's hands so I had to be able to figure out where to put bones in them but I still kept the basic shape of how the hand should be but a little squarer, I started off by creating a box and selecting the inner polygons as shown below to delete them:
I deleted these polygons and bridged the existing ones to cover the gaps:
I used the extrude tool for the end of each finger separately, looking back at this, I should have made the fingers longer:
Applied this method to all the fingers
added a cylinder to the end of the arm and put the hand in its place ready to be used by the symmetry and be placed on the other side
This was Lego man Bruce as he now stands
getting ready to inject anger into his character, I adjusted the eyebrows into a menacing looking state
and also had a happy face, it shows you the difference from just moving the eyebrows what an impact the face can have in looks:
Bones
Next came time for the bones, I started from the hips upwards towards the head, then I branched off towards the arms, then I link up the hips down towards the toes on one side:
Using the Bone Editing tools, I created a Bone Mirror to imitate the other side much like a Symmetry modifier
But the problem was I didn't create all of the foot bones, so had to go back and redo all of the feet bones and add the Bone Mirror again
Now for a screenshot with the bones in place
Here is a little add in that I wanted to show because if I get enough time I will add this in, but I followed a tutorial to make a bulging bicep when the arm moves, I thought this would be a nice touch:
Lego Board
To create the Lego board, I used a simple Green plane to start with and created a cylinder and made sure that the cylinder was no bigger than the inside of the foot:
With the CYlinder, I now used the array tool to create lots of them and make sure they were spaced the exact same distance apart from each other, this task took up quite a bit of processing power on the older dual core computers at University which almost made them crash. The Quad core Macs managed it with ease however.
Now with all the Cylinders selected, I added a material ID with the Lego logo to add a bit more realism
Onto realising at this point that when I did the Bone Mirror, I hadn't included in the finger bones, so back to that we go then:
Adding the Bone Mirror again:
I discover I needed to add an extra bone in the foot to be able to move it correctly so I added another one each side:
Mirrored it again and then selected the whole body and added a 'skin' modifier to it, the selection box below is me choosing the bones to fit within the skin modifier. This means that all of the bones selected will affect whatever is deemed to be 'skin', therefore in this case, it is the Legoman (Bruce):
Now came to set up a Y rotation link for all the fingers and thumb to enable them to move in the correct mannger, so this meant right clicking on the start of the link at the bottom of the wrist and selecting Transform-Rotation-Y Rotation
The same was done for the other side
Now the horrible terroritory that comes with bones is envelopes, and if they're done wrongly, it can provide very unsightly results and really takes some time to define which bone controls what parts of the body and to my dismay, I discover that having a bone and two other bodyparts close together is probably one of the more costly mistakes.
Thankfully here I had altered most of the envelopes that were attatching to the body, as you can see here there is a small patch of red on the body, this means that the bone in the arm would pull that part of the body when it was moved. As you can see in the next picture, it was worse than imagined, all the vertices (envelopes) are red on the body part underneath the arm:
This was bad because it meant either a lot of time consuming work to un-select them all to try and move the arm away because they were all so tightly together or to do my best to start this part again, So unfortunately, I chose to start again and detach the arm so that I could start again:
Used my best efforts to make the arm straight
Slowly attached the arm back on using the vertex weld function
Adjusted the bones and used the bone mirror again to mirror image the new shape with his arms out as they should've been in the first place:
Had to apply the skin modifier again as had to delete it when deleting the arm from the model and applied all the bones again:
Lego Brick
To make the Lego brick, a very Low poly box was made with the same size cylinders from the floor, added to the top, 6 of them in total:
I added the rest using the array feature to have them set out nice and correctly
and then added two cylinders to the inside just to add that final touch
I then deleted the polygons from the cylinders where the parts came through to the underside in an attempt to keep it looking realistic should a camera catch the underneath of one of the bricks.
I then used the clone tool to create a fair few more bricks:
A lot of time was then spent on trying to sort out the envelopes on the rest of the skin and bones:
This was a very time consuming process and 100 screen shots could have easily been taken but the general idea is, there was a lot of fiddly bits to messed around with until it got right.
Creating the hand was relatively easy, Lego men have hands like a clamp that don't move, obviously I do want to move Bruce's hands so I had to be able to figure out where to put bones in them but I still kept the basic shape of how the hand should be but a little squarer, I started off by creating a box and selecting the inner polygons as shown below to delete them:
I deleted these polygons and bridged the existing ones to cover the gaps:
I used the extrude tool for the end of each finger separately, looking back at this, I should have made the fingers longer:
Applied this method to all the fingers
added a cylinder to the end of the arm and put the hand in its place ready to be used by the symmetry and be placed on the other side
This was Lego man Bruce as he now stands
getting ready to inject anger into his character, I adjusted the eyebrows into a menacing looking state
and also had a happy face, it shows you the difference from just moving the eyebrows what an impact the face can have in looks:
Bones
Next came time for the bones, I started from the hips upwards towards the head, then I branched off towards the arms, then I link up the hips down towards the toes on one side:
Using the Bone Editing tools, I created a Bone Mirror to imitate the other side much like a Symmetry modifier
But the problem was I didn't create all of the foot bones, so had to go back and redo all of the feet bones and add the Bone Mirror again
Now for a screenshot with the bones in place
Here is a little add in that I wanted to show because if I get enough time I will add this in, but I followed a tutorial to make a bulging bicep when the arm moves, I thought this would be a nice touch:
Lego Board
To create the Lego board, I used a simple Green plane to start with and created a cylinder and made sure that the cylinder was no bigger than the inside of the foot:
With the CYlinder, I now used the array tool to create lots of them and make sure they were spaced the exact same distance apart from each other, this task took up quite a bit of processing power on the older dual core computers at University which almost made them crash. The Quad core Macs managed it with ease however.
Now with all the Cylinders selected, I added a material ID with the Lego logo to add a bit more realism
Onto realising at this point that when I did the Bone Mirror, I hadn't included in the finger bones, so back to that we go then:
Adding the Bone Mirror again:
I discover I needed to add an extra bone in the foot to be able to move it correctly so I added another one each side:
Mirrored it again and then selected the whole body and added a 'skin' modifier to it, the selection box below is me choosing the bones to fit within the skin modifier. This means that all of the bones selected will affect whatever is deemed to be 'skin', therefore in this case, it is the Legoman (Bruce):
Now came to set up a Y rotation link for all the fingers and thumb to enable them to move in the correct mannger, so this meant right clicking on the start of the link at the bottom of the wrist and selecting Transform-Rotation-Y Rotation
The same was done for the other side
Now the horrible terroritory that comes with bones is envelopes, and if they're done wrongly, it can provide very unsightly results and really takes some time to define which bone controls what parts of the body and to my dismay, I discover that having a bone and two other bodyparts close together is probably one of the more costly mistakes.
Thankfully here I had altered most of the envelopes that were attatching to the body, as you can see here there is a small patch of red on the body, this means that the bone in the arm would pull that part of the body when it was moved. As you can see in the next picture, it was worse than imagined, all the vertices (envelopes) are red on the body part underneath the arm:
This was bad because it meant either a lot of time consuming work to un-select them all to try and move the arm away because they were all so tightly together or to do my best to start this part again, So unfortunately, I chose to start again and detach the arm so that I could start again:
Used my best efforts to make the arm straight
Slowly attached the arm back on using the vertex weld function
Adjusted the bones and used the bone mirror again to mirror image the new shape with his arms out as they should've been in the first place:
Had to apply the skin modifier again as had to delete it when deleting the arm from the model and applied all the bones again:
Lego Brick
To make the Lego brick, a very Low poly box was made with the same size cylinders from the floor, added to the top, 6 of them in total:
I added the rest using the array feature to have them set out nice and correctly
and then added two cylinders to the inside just to add that final touch
I then deleted the polygons from the cylinders where the parts came through to the underside in an attempt to keep it looking realistic should a camera catch the underneath of one of the bricks.
I then used the clone tool to create a fair few more bricks:
A lot of time was then spent on trying to sort out the envelopes on the rest of the skin and bones:
This was a very time consuming process and 100 screen shots could have easily been taken but the general idea is, there was a lot of fiddly bits to messed around with until it got right.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)