Kiwianna Reflection

So, I have completed my personal project - Kiwianna and I decided it was a good time to reflect on my project, how I got on with it and what I could have done differently or better. Although my project is now complete, I do feel that some things could have been done better.

Some of the shots that I had, probably could have been more interesting, for example I could have had full body shots of the characters running through the gate or walking into the gate at the old man's house or I could have had some better environments and backgrounds. The short amount of time that I gave myself to work on my project restricted what I could do with it. Also because of the time I restricted myself to, I never put the sound in my project until all of the animation was done which was a bad move because it made the sound difficult to place. There is a reason that animators animate to the sound!

The large amount of characters was a little bit huge in general because that was eight seperate characters to create, rig and animate which is time consuming. I would not get rid of any of them though because each character brings something unique and familiar into the mix. I may choose to change the colour pallet of the backgrounds a little bit to more pastel sort of colours to make the characters stand out more against the backgrounds.

If I could have done things differently I would have given myself heaps more time to do the animation and I would have definitely put the sound in first. I don't think that I would have changed much else about my animation and I did really enjoy creating this project so I guess the next question is..... what is the future of Kiwianna????

I am hoping to work on it a little bit further and put a proposal together for funding. I would like to turn this into an actual web series because I think it's important for New Zealand children to have something that is from their own country and that they can relate to, instead of all the crap that they are watching on television and online. I am interested to see what I can do with Kiwianna and what the future holds for it!

Crowd Simulation

Our last assignment for our advanced animation paper was crowd simulation. We were to create a crowd simulation using the piece of software called Massive. Unfortunately, Massive has not been working on our computers at course this semester, so we have been unable to actually use the software. However, I have managed to research three different pieces of crowd simulation software.

GOLAEM

Screenshot of Nike advertisement: Dare to be Brasilian - crowd simulation done using Golaem.

Golaem is a piece of software that can be fully integrated into Autodesk Maya. This piece of software allows the user to be able to automatically place couples and groups of virtual people. It also allows users to paint crowds on with the density of the crowd being controlled by the paint colour. If the user wishes to create a certain formation for an army or other similar crowd, then geometry shapes or creating a unique shape can be created to get the correct formation required. The parameters of the crowd can be edited at any time while still keeping any customization and connections previously completed. Golaem uses a node based editor and also allows the user to simulate explosions, attraction and repulsion forces on physicalized characters. Golaem avoids filling up hard drives and networks with duplicated data. It uses a reference character and a small simulation cache to recreate every variation which is a highly efficient method to render huge crowd simulations. Golaem offers a 30 day trial of its software. The trial includes full functional software, a 30 day free node-locked license, unlimited rendering, sample scenes, character pack reviews and e-mail support. A three month rental license for Golaem is $1980.00 USD and a permanent rental license costs $6599.00 USD. It costs $1115.00 USD for support and yearly upgrades. To get an educational license a user needs to contact the company who own Golaem.

MASSIVE

Screenshot from the film Hugo - crowd simulation done in Massive.

Massive is a simulation and visualisation software system for generating realistic crowds. It was originally developed for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. Agents can be created and can have lots of variation built into them. Massive's system is designed for running these agents and with the interaction of these agents in a crowd situation, it creates an interaction/simulation that is highly realistic. Some of the studios that use Massive are Pixar, Sony Pictures Imageworks, ImageMovers Digital, Rhythm & Hues, Digital Domain, Framestore CFC and The Mill. these studios have adopted Massive to fulfill the creative needs of their feature length films. Some of the films that Massive have been used on are World War Z, John Carter, The Lord of the Rings and Hugo. Massive offers four different products for the software. The first one is called Massive Prime and is the premium package for Massive. It costs $16000.00 USD and comes complete with the first year's upgrade and support. The second is called Massive Jet and costs $6000.00 USD including the first year's upgrade and support. The next package is called Massive for Maya and as the title may suggest, it is for integrating with Maya. This particular package costs $3500.00 USD and also includes the first year's upgrade and support. The final package that is offered is called Massive Ready to Run Agents and costs between $1500.00 USD to $2500.00 USD. This package has pre-built characters who are already rigged and have cloth simulation, textures and other animation pre-loaded so that the characters are literally just ready to run.

MIARMY

Screenshot from Miarmy website.

Miarmy is a piece of software that is a plug-in for Maya. Miarmy has a fully functional animation engine which offers easy placement of characters for crowd simulation. Many different studios use Miarmy to simulate crowds, some of these are Real Digital, IM Animation, Fantastic Motion and Axis. There over 35 feature length films that have used or are using Miarmy and a majority of them appear to be Japanese films. Miarmy offers a three month rental priced at $1950.00 USD which includes support for the rental period. A permanent license costs $2650.00 USD and also includes one year of support and upgrades. There is also an option to get a company key for Miarmy which provides one unlimited license to be able to put it on many computers. The price also includes one year of support and upgrades.

Scene created using Miarmy from Miarmy website.

Kiwi Made

I have managed to succesfully complete the animation of the characters for each shot (including lip syncing and blinks), sorting the sound effects, music and voices for the episode and also rendering it out to a complete animation!

Screenshot of title sequence for Kiwianna.

I ended up getting my daughter, Gabby and one of her friends, Taylor to voice the characters Pipi and Tuibelle. I made sure that they used their normal every day voices, so that they definitely sounded authentically "Kiwi". My voice actor for Fernell was unavailable at the last minute, so I voiced that character and Steven Moseley was the voice for Terrence (the old man). I recorded the sound with the help of one of my course mates Seth James. We recorded a few takes and then I picked the take of each character that I liked best to use. I put these pieces of dialogue into my Premiere Pro project and matched them up to the shots that they belonged with, then exported the audio sequence out just for that shot. This enabled me to import the audio into my Toonboom scene to lip sync the characters.

Once the lip syncing was complete, I added blinks to the characters which was not a huge job. I needed to get the timing right and not put too many blinks in otherwise the characters look like that is all they are doing the entire time.

I used online websites with free sound effects and SIT's sound effects library to find the effects I was looking for. Putting in the sound effects after the animation was done, gave me quite a few issues. It was very difficult trying to match the sound effects with the action and I know why we should always do the sound first - to make our lives easier!!!!! I found a cool piece of music to use for the title sequence and the credits on a free music website and then all that was left to do was make the title sequence and put some credits on the end.

Glitched out animation.

My render time for my complete animation was only a few minutes because 2D does not take anywhere near as long as 3D animation to render. Once it rendered I played it through and to my disappointment something had gone when the sound had rendered out. Pieces of dialogue were playing in the wrong place. I checked my Premiere Pro project and there was nothing there that shouldn't have been there, so in the end I deleted out the shots that were having issues and imported those shots again, put them back into the workspace and this fixed the problem. My class mates got to have a good laugh at the glitch in my animation, so watch it and you might see why!

Scenes of Kiwianna

Each shot needed to have all of the assets required for the shot to work. I made a file for each one by exporting my animatic out, which created a file that was all ready for me to use for each shot needed. I put each shot's rendered 3D background in, the characters and any assets needed for the shot and last of all I put the sky in. I picked a few different skies that were roughly the same colour, so that I could have a realistically looking sky in each shot that the sky was seen in.

Screenshot of shot 002 with characters, sky and background in Toonboom Harmony.

The gang walking to go fishing.

Old man Thompson yelling at the young ones.

The animation is the next thing that needs done, followed by the lip syncing and blinks put into the timeline. The only things left to do then are to render each shot out, edit together the first episode using Adobe Premiere Pro and putting sound effects and music into the project. I am doing the sound last because I started to run out of time, so rather than put the sound on my animatic, I decided to leave it until last. This is not the way that animations are created as animators are meant to animate to the sound rather than the other way around. I may have problems doing it this way around as I may have trouble matching the sound to the actions easily. I guess, I am going to find out one way or another!

Assets & Cells

I have made assets and cell replacements for my characters. The cell replacements are for the blink cycles and mouth shapes for lip syncing. All of the characters needed top blink to help them not to look creepy. Each character has an already completely open eye as a default, so I created a half open eye and a closed eye for each character. The blink cycles were made up from these different cells. One blink cycle starts with an open eye, changes to a half open eye, to a closed eye, back to a half open eye and ends with a fully open eye.

Screenshot of different eye stages for blink.

There are only four characters that have dialogue that I need to lip sync, so I only have to draw mouth shapes for those particular characters. When you lip sync, you have to do what is called a dope sheet. This means you need to scrub through the dialogue and work out what the major word sounds are and work out how many frames those sounds are heard over - putting this information into the dope sheet as a reference. The next step is to put each mouth shape that is required into the right frames. If you animate every single little word sound it looks as though the character is furiously moving their mouth and less like they are actually talking so only animating the major word sounds stops this from happening.

There were only a couple of assets that I needed to create. I created fishing rods, a walking stick for Terrence and a dumbell for Wendy. These were created as character props.

Screen shot of Terrence with his walking stick.

 The next things to get done are to put each shot together by putting everything required for each shot into the same file. The library system in Toonboom Harmony makes this job a whole lot easier.

Character Views

My animated characters are being created as 2D characters. As I needed them in different views, I had to draw and rig each character in these different views. By different views I mean, a side view, a front view, a front three quarter view, a back view and a back three quarter view. I also needed to create blinks for each character in each view and create different mouth shapes to be able to lip sync the characters with their dialogue. Drawing and rigging all eight characters in each view was going to take me a long time, so I decided to go through my animatic and work out what characters were seen in which particular view and then only draw and rig what was needed.

Screenshot of Pipi in different views in Toonboom Harmony.

I drew each character as a whole and coloured them accordingly. When colouring each character, I created a pallet for the particular character and named each colour as to what it was used for on the character. As I drew each character, I cut each part of the character's bodies and put them onto seperate layers. I extended the line work and colour on each part so the when the character moved there were no breaks in their limbs/bodies. Then I moved each layer's pivot point to the place where I wanted the particular body part to move, for example on the top of the lower arm where the elbow would bend is where the pivot point for that body part was placed.

Screenshot of pivot point on Pipi's shoulder.

Once the character was rigged, I made blinks and mouth shapes for it. The blinks are made by cell replacement which is when you make different pictures of each stage of the blink and then make keyframes using each blink stage to make a complete blink cycle. The mouth shapes are also made as seperate pictures and then theses cells are keyframed into the animation timeline where they are needed to complete the lip syncing of the dialogue. I also only created mouth shapes for the characters that actually spoke and needed to be lip synced.

The final stage of sorting out the characters is to put them into a character library. The library system in Toonboom has the advantage of being able to be imported into any other Toonboom scene to be used. This means that no matter who the animator is or what the scene is that these characters or any assets using the library system will be consistent (or the same) in any scene. I used the library system for all of my characters to keep the consistency of my characters the same over all the shots in my animation. The pallets that I created for each character can also be imported into any scene just like the characters can.

As soon as all the character libraries are created, then it will be time to set up each scene and start animating!

3D Backgrounds

For Kiwianna, I decided to have 3D backgrounds for all of my shots. I used Maya to model the backgrounds. I wanted all the backgrounds to have a bit of a 2D look about them. I started off by modelling Pipi's house and garage (interior and exterior), complete with fences, driveway, footpath, mailbox and lawns. I textured everything with lamberts as I was intending on using the vector renderer in Maya which has an option that you can add in outlines to give it a more cartoony, 2D look. To make this happen each piece has to be a seperate plane so that the outline will automatically put itself around the edges that you want outlined.

Pipi's house and garage modelled in Maya and textured with lamberts.

The next scene I modelled was Terrence's (the old man) house with a front white picket fence, footpath and back fence using Maya. I also textured each plane with lamberts just like the previous scene.

Terrence's house modelled and textured with lamberts in Maya.

The last thing I modelled in Maya was a scene with a road works sign, road cone and "closed for maintenance" sign that are blocking a pathway. These were all textured just like the previous two scenes.

Road works, road cone and "closed for maintenance" sign modelled and textured with lamberts in Maya.

I modelled each scene and textured them all in the same way. Then I moved the camera to the appropriate place in scene to match the shot that I had drawn into my storyboards/animatic. Once I had the correct composition, I rendered the scene using Maya Vector renderer. Maya Vector render only uses point lights for lighting anything in the scene. Also if the ambience of the lamberts was a darker shade, it would show up as a dark shaded colour in the render. I had to change some of the ambience settings on some of the lamberts to make them show in the render, especially the darker colours. I also had to put point lights in to help lighten up parts of the scene. Once the scene was the way I wanted it, I saved each render as a targa and then imported these scenes into the correct Toon Boom Harmony scenes.

The next thing to do is to put the correct characters into each scene and position them into the right place in the appropriate background/scene. 

Kiwianimatic

For my personal project, I have decided to make the first episode for the web series. I decided to make this episode about meeting the characters and briefly getting to know each character's personality. The first thing I needed to get done was to write the script for the episode. I re-wrote the  script approximately 5 times because I was unhappy with the way the story read. I felt there was too much dialogue and not enough action to start off with and then after one re-write I had too much action and nearly no dialogue. It took me five times of re-writing the script to get it to the place I finally wanted it. I drew the storyboards and then put them into an animatic to try and get the timing right and to see if the script needed tweaking. Animatics are also created to see how the story works visually.

                                                                      Kiwianna episode one animatic.

After putting together the animatic, I had the timing of each shot sorted out. I was able to tweak the story dialogue and action to make the episode make sense and to get everything across to the audience that I wanted to. I was a little bit behind when I made this animatic so it didn't have any sound on it which an animatic is meant to have so that you are able to animate to the sound rather than putting the sound on last. The next step in this project is to draw all the characters, rig them and add cell replacements for mouth shapes, emotions and blinks.                           

Rotoscoping - Reteroscerpering

The animators have been busy working on the post production of Bones of Essimer. It has been edited down into a trailer because there was heaps of CG to composite into the whole cinematic. We have been compositing all the CG elements into each shot which involves keying the green screen out, camera tracking, sky replacements, compositing 3D buildings and background scenery into each shot, lighting the CG to match the live action footage, putting in atmospherics like dust and smoke and rotoscoping. Each animator was given a specific job to get done on each shot, so we worked like a chain and the piece of compositing software that we have been using is NukeX 8.0.

I was given the job of rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is when you use the rotoscoping tool to make a mat to take stuff out that does not need to be in the scene or that needs to be moved in the scene. After you have put your mat around the object, you have to go through the shot frame by frame to move the roto mat if need be. I rotoscoped nearly every shot and fixed the rotscoping in the two shots that somebody else did. I also removed all of the tracking markers in the shots that had tracking markers in them using the rotoscope tool. Rotoscoping is not difficvult but is a very time consuming job.

Screenshot of one of the Bones of Essimer shots.

I have also been working on the concept art book for Bones of Essimer. However, it has been put on hold for the last couple of weeks, while I have been working on my personal project. I will be getting back to working on this next week. The cover page and the first few pages are complete and look really slick. I can not wait to finish this and share the finished product with everyone!

Bones of Essimer has been a really interesting experience and this project made me realise that I want a career as a Producer. I intend on going back to SIT next year to study the Graduate Diploma of Film to upskill and gain experience on the film side. This also means that I will be participating in the collaborative film and animation project again next year. I look forward to working with a different group of people with new ideas and challenges.