Miro Board Link:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKHnfj0=/?share_link_id=371325218573

This week I have finalised the compositing stage.

For the first shot to add an introduction effect I have duplicated the trees for the background and positioned them in the foreground to give and impression of depth and animated them so that the more the camera pan closer to the character the trees would go out of the frame.

For the skeleton fish scene I had already added a fisheye effect in maya although I wanted to accentuate this effect even more so I have created a black solid layer with a mask set on subtract and feathered the edges to make the boarders even darker.

As I mentioned last week the depth map I have rendered was not working well since the gradient look very similar in the background and the foreground. So I have created a black solid layer and applied to it a gradient map to select the area affected by the blur. On top of it I have created an adjustment layer with a camera blur effect applied to it and the black solid layer selected as mask.

compositing with sounds

After I have composited all the different shots I have added sounds to them based on the animatic.

This week I have also made the intro in 3D since I have thought that the 2D version of it was not fitting with the style of the entire animation. I have used the fishing rod model from the animation and created a 3D text and parent it to the bait.

In order to make the animation more visually interesting I have added some 2D graphics:

some depression lines

comic text which I took inspiration from the deadpool video game showcasing the time and indicate the time spent waiting.

Moreover I have added some stars animation when he wakes up after he felt trying to catch the fish.

for some of the most crucial transitions in the animation I have created a comic slide transition to highlight the actions showcased in the scenes.

Miro Board Link:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKHnfj0=/?share_link_id=371325218573

Once I had rendered the animation I started the compositing stage both in Nuke and in After Effects. Both had this colour issues with the beauty layers of the render layers.

The problem was related to the beauty and alpha channel that I had previously rendered separately. In After effects I have positioned the different layers in the following way to make it work: the physical sky ate the bottom followed by the beauty from the master layer and the alpha channel from the master layer. the beauty mode should be set to alpha matte in order for the alpha to mask the black background and show the physical sky beneath.

the picture here showcases the nuke viewport in this case the merge node was acting as screen mode so the opacity of the layers above would appear with a lower opacity. However if I first merged the alpha channel and the beauty layer from the the master layer first and after create an additional merge node connecting those two with the physical sky, they would appear normal.

This week I also created the intro for the short animation. I first created the illustrations and text using illustrator so that they would be vector drawing and the quality world be high, and after I have imported the different assets in after effects to animate them accordingly to the animatic.

In order to add a depth to the scene especially for the trees in the back ground I have done a research looking for a way to render a depth map in maya. One way of doing it is to ad the Z render pass in the render settings. Once the image is rendered it can be imported in after effects although it would first appear as completely white. Once an exposure and levels effects are applied to it it would show a greyscale of the rendered image with the darker values being those in the foreground and the lighter values behind those in the far back.

This is the depth map from the first scene. Although, as you can see, the difference of foreground and background is not that evident so once I have linked it to the beauty layer effect “camera blur” in after effect it would all appear as blurred in the same way and the foreground and the background would not be differentiated.

water reflection

Unfortunately the water in some shots I had previously rendered appeared with a weird reflection especially when the waves faced directly the sun which came across as unnatural. At first I thought that the physical sky might have caused it although I compared the scenes where this did not happen and the values for the physical sky were the the same. The difference was is the water shade and specifically the colour and the IOR values so I have set all the scenes with this problem using the following settings.

color correction

Once all the rendering were ready I started to composite each shot. Other than the alpha channel the beauty of the master layers I also overlaid the AO layer to it which gave a nice shadow effect to the items in the scene. to the beauty I have applied a hue and saturation and exposure effect to the ao a gamma effect.

clouds

While compositing I felt that the sky was a bit “empty” and that adding some clouds would add some depth as well to it. So I looked for some clouds obj on turbosquid By VARRRG and I found these which are a bit stylised and fit with with the overall style of the animation.

Miro Board Link:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKHnfj0=/?share_link_id=371325218573

While experimenting with the character textures I thought I could apply to him a toon shader which would fit much better with the overall tone of the short film given the whole story a comic vibe. I have first followed this video:

I selected all the different parts of the model and created a toon shader for each of them and is the result:

Although, since I am using arnold to render this type of shader is not compatible to it and resulted to a matte texture with no edges at all:

I looked more into it and found out that there is an aitoonshader which is compatible with arnold:

I have added a base colour with a ramp setting for the shading of each texture

The edges also appeared more subtle which were less overwhelming compared to the first toon shader

I had to set the filters to contours in order for the edges to appear

when working on the original file I was using a skydome as a light. However in the animation scenes there is a physical sky which is simulating an early morning light, so there is not much light in the scene which made the shadows of the different aitoown shadows the only thing to be seen.

I tried to edit the physical sky setting which made some improvements:

I also applied the toon shader for the other props present in the animation:

Light developments

these are the physical sky setting that I have used in order to make the lighter parts of the aitoonshader appear as well:

Animation

In the meantime I also carried on the animation process and this following videos shows the progress I have made on a specific scene where I worked on the timing and spacing of the animation to make it more believable and natural as possible:

Miro Board Link:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKHnfj0=/?share_link_id=371325218573

This week I have worked on a walk animation for the fisherman. Even though he won’t walk during the animation I thought that creating one would give me a better idea of how to frame and identify his personality which will have a big impact on the overall animation. In the walk I also added some props such as the fishing rod and the bucket where he supposedly puts the fishes (when he manages to catch any). I consider the fishing rod as the secondary character for this animation, as a sidekick even, aiding the protagonist as they work to achieve a goal (catch any fish), overcome an antagonist (an apparent big fish difficult to catch), or undergo necessary internal development. The mood I tried to achieve for him is grumpy but comic, funny and laughable at the same time since he is quite small and even his clothes are a bit over size for him. I would like fro the audience to emphasise with him and his struggles to a catch a fish.

I have playblast a the animation from side, front and 3/4 point of view which I will edit together for the final process video for the project.

Texturing

In the different rendered frames I have created in Maya so far I have noticed that the texture especially for the clothes of the character seems to be pixelated so I am planning onto edit the texture in substance painter to get a better result as well as increasing the sampling in the camera settings.

Animation

For the overall animation process I am noticing that the timing is one of the biggest issues I am encounting throughout the process: since animation is a time-based medium, developing a good sense of timing is very important to creating good animation. Timing is what gives meaning to the motion. The speed at which things happen affect the perception of the scene and give it mood.

Timing has a huge role to play in how your animation will look like. If your timing is really fast or slow, too linear or too long, the overall animation will end up looking unrealistic. Timing is dependent on speed and you can interpret someone’s current state with it. Which is why in the future for the animation I will try to record myself and use it as a reference.