Here is the final thing

Compositing

Color changing animation in After effect for the wheel



The shadow can not be rendered because the grass is not in the same layer with the music machine.

Compositing! As this is the last week of this project, I have been working in the college most of the time from 10am-8pm. It feels good when I see the work getting closer to the end. BUT, even more stressful when it comes to teamwork. I have waited for Leonard's promise until the last day, then I had to redo his airchair modeling (took me 5min) and do the texturing myself. The worst thing is, when sombody is so far behind at this point, he now finally want to catch up and start to ask me to give him 'things' to do. Like in the final stage everything is rendering in renderfarm, (btw, I spend 2 days on Render farm with Alex to finally get it working prefectly), he came to me and ask for a copy of the 'renderfarm'. I tried to explain to him what render farm is and the reason why I can not 'share' my job with him at this stage, but he kept saying 'yeahbut....'. Then later on since he hasn't got anything to do, he just kept giving me his 'suggestions'. I listened with patience, and tried harder and harder to be more patient. Then finally, everything is finished without a major break down of teamwork.

I'm sorry if my word offenced anybody, but it is true at the end there is a real tension in the team that I don't want to see. This is due to two main reasons.
1. the pressure from the work itself, espeically when it come closer to the deadline. Everyone get stress, it is important to learn how to fight or live with it.
2. the lack of understanding of teamworking: what if people know exactlly what their job is during the whole production pipeline... it would help the workflow, make the communication less argument and.. most importantly, gain an understanding of the work from the group's point of view instead of just their own.
And again...I meant no offence at all!

Back to the work...so compositing went pretty smoothly except from the grass problem still exsit. To add shading on the background, the easiest way to fix it i think is to rerender all the machine as in one scene. Because we are running out of time, we decided just to leave it and keep it dark.

It is worth mention the size of all the clips inported into after effect is around 10 GB. It made after effect run slow hence slowed down the compositing process big time. Must say if I knew this, I would have changed the layer design, reduce the size...maybe decided to render everything as a whole.

The background music is added. Credit goes to Paul, he found a lovely HUGE collection of sound track from LRC. I also suggested to use 'Canon D' for the music machine, it would create a sence of 'Legendary' and quite feeling the same time, suitable for our empty midnight funfair. I composed those two with the video in Premiere and also added the title and the end credit.

rendering

I have CUT the project into pieces as I have planed for rendering. It's a bit tricky how the layers can be rejoined. The grass can be a problem as it must be the bottom layer, but the same time it has to carry all the shadings. I cut the grass into two, foreground and background as the foreground need to carry the shadow cast from the gate, the first thing you see in the movie.

Global Lighting and Rendering Layers

I'm trying to create a global lighting in the big scene. Hopefully without interfering, all the layers can apply the global lighting. But again...this has to be done with discussion of the team.

At this point, I'm thinking about how this project can be rendered out. It won't work just in one piece, there are few reasons...
1 Teamwork problem: This few weeks we really had some terrible teamworking. Mainly just because people not turning up and not doing work. This caused a delay in modeling and texturing for some machines. But I can not wait for it to death, it is time to move on.
2.Data transfer: NEXT TIME i do a project...I WILL make sure that everything is in one project folder, so if one scene is transfered from one PC to another it won't lost texturing on it. and yeah for this project, the reason why it cant be done in one piece is because I'm not be able to import all the machines together with texturings on, they just in chaos.
3.Lighting: My plan is to animate all the light in After Effect. So everything has to be done in different layers.
4.Size: some of the machine is just way too big. It crashs my laptop servel times when trying to load them together even without texturing.

SO basically the number of layers can be counted as...

1. Gate
2. Front Tent
3. Music Machine
4. Bottle
5. Minigame
6. Arcadia
7. Spinride
8. Air Chair
9. Tower
10. Wheel (including 7 layers)
11. Back Tents
12. Funhouse

Some of the elements can be combined...like the front tent and the gate. etc.

All the layers will be filmed by one camera and a global lighting(moonlight). So they can be combined with no 'scare' in After effect.

The button

Just got the button's model from Paul. and...as usually the hypergragh is in chaos. need to clean up before this can be inported.


My main job here is to positioning the model and add lighting. The lighting design comes from my storyboard.

The Wheel's animation develpment

The wheel is the main part of animation work of this project. I have been starting to think about how it cound be done weeks ago and came with a solution by just animate 50 frames of the animation and repeat. The wheel would turn 20 degree then instantly go back to the starting piont where it looks exactly the same,so it would tricks your eye so you get the feeling that it's acturally turning 360 degree.

The whole point of this...is to make sure that all cariages always point down by gravity while the frame moves. I can rotate them one by one but that's not a 'production way' to do it. I was looking for a more efficient way so that's why i developed the 20 degree solution.



The disadvantage of this is that if i want to make it loop in the film, I will need to repeat the clip but not the movement. So there is a compositing problem.


Rob came to college yesterday and helped me soloving this problem. Basically I resetted all the cariages' raletion in the hypergragh, instead group them as a whole then rotate them seperatly with the frame, this time I tried to use the Set Driven Key tool. So now when the frame moves whatever degree, all cariages will rotate indepently to counter the frame's movement. For example if the frame moves 180, cariages move -180. The result works perfectly.

Music machine animation and lighting

This is my work for the music machine. I recieved the model from Leonard few days ago and..the textures didn't come up prefectly at first, so i have to fix them in UV mapping.
The animation is fit to the camera with right timing.
As this machine isn't in the original plan, it only has 2 sec's shot in the movie. So I didn't pay too much time on it.


This is the lighting I did for it. I also added BMP map on the red texturing.

Shading of the moonlight.

shading effect added. I created a point light behind the wall just to cast shadow.

Texturing can be a nightmare

HEY! I just found the most boring job in Maya ...selecting endless faces to texturing...
I'm sure there is a quicker and clever way to do this, I'm thinking about changing the model. BUT, I can't do that because this is Leonard's model and currently we have some bad communication. I might end up just create another model for this one.

Anyway, this is what I have done.


This is the most enjoyable part of texturing.

Final Animatic

This is the final animatic, with the final camera, timing and all machines in the right position. Now it's time to finish off the texturing and lighting.

Moonlight applied.

Lighting and shading work fine. This is exactly what i'm looking for from the storyboard.

New look of the funfair!

I applied the new tent and tower to the scene. It suddenly...just looks ...AHA.......err..I dont know the word..but yeah! much better.


Here is the final texture for the tent. Did it in photoshop. And, again credit to my research.

The tower&tent development

It took me somt time to make the UV mapping right for this model. I encountered a problem where the texture/image kept duplicate itself into infinity. I asked several around 4-5 people to help me with it and it still doesn't work, until Anja from the CVA 3rd year helped me out. Basically she deleted the Maya referance folder and created a defult one...

anyway, so this is the result:


I painted the texutre in photoshop. The patten at the bottom is traced from one of the image from my research.

This is the develpment of the top bit.

This is the first try. As you can see, I'm looking for the most simple texture... It worked, but not as good....
So i made another texture that is designed to suit the top. Work out prefectly.


Also, through the development of the tower I learned how to use BMP map to improve texture.

I applied BMP map to one of my tent. Here's the result:

Overall view Snapshot

This will be redone because the hypergragh hasn't been work on yet.

Lighting test

After we discused about how the lighting is going to work out,etheir to use lightbulbs/create light tools in maya or just glow up the material, this is the result.

Well...Found a better way to fix Hypergragh

Al my flatmate helped me out on this one. So basically what happen is the combine polygon tool would smash everything into one 'polySurface'. Then for texturing I have to separate them by using the 'separate polygon' tool. EASY
(I did learn this 2 years ago...but my god, i hate maya)

Hypergraph Clean up

Before:

Now:

As I started to put finished models into my base, I encountered a problem with the hypergraph which i didn't realised when in the modeling stage. The solution is simple but rather...painful and boring. A huge waste time!
So next time when I model I'll try to keep the hypergragh tidy through out the way.
This is Paul's Arcadia, same...have to fix it before import.

Texturing/ Photoshop+Illustrator

This is a patten from my research. I tried to live trace it on Illustrator and colored it in Photoshop. This will be used as the texture on the tents.
More patten will be work on by the end of tomorrow.

No time on research development BUT!

I haven't forgotten the research development I should do/redo for the reflective commentry. I said im gonna to do this and some other things after the 5th week's assessment but...

RIGHT! Let me do a plan here cos many things have changed.

Basically I've got 2 weeks for the Funfair project and 1 week for the presentation for Dan Dali. (And some PPD sh*t in a week but it doesnt take long)

By this weekend the presentation has to be finished, and the targets for the funfair project are:
Finish Modeling - at this stage I will RUSH on the quality
Animation 1/2- Mainly lighting animation and secondary animation(mechanical movements)
Finish Lighting
Textruing 1/2

Next week's targets would be:
Finish camera work
Animation 2/2
Texturing 2/2

SO, very heavy stuff here, may drive me mad. I've never done such crazy plan BUT! I'll try push myself to the limit and see how it goes. Really looking forward to this.

The time i've still have got left this week is...Tuesday afternoon and night(well if i successfully get the council tax thing done by that morning). Wed Thu nights. Friday afternoon and night. So there are apx. 15 hours avalible for me before the weekend. Initial plan is to spend 5 hours on presentation and the rest on funfair project. I would do the presentation first and if it takes more than 5 hours, id leave it to the weekend.

nCloth Tryout

So this is for the surrounding objects/buildings in the funfair. They are used as background so they do not need to be as detailed as the main buildings.


*You will get some lovely video links after you finish watching this clip. e.g. Maya nCloth dance. LOL I LOVE YOUTUBE

Tutorials on moodle

It's better to be late than never. I just decided to learn and improve my camera skill by going through this lovely tutorial.
http://learn.rave.ac.uk/moodle/file.php?file=/46/CVA_Alex/MovingYourCamera.pdf

At the same time I'm also looking at Texturing and Lighting. Hope i can have a good use of them for next week.

Develop modeling funfair wheel

This is the funfair wheel I develped after Paul's orignal model. As you can see the size is increased many times from the order one,so i'll need to change the camara angle to see the top of this thing.

CVA06 Funfair Project Animatic 2

Okay. Basicaly this is a followup of my 2D animatic storyboard. There was a time delay due to the modeling problem of the team but I think we're catching up. This week's target is to get all the modeling done. And we will looking into texturing and animation next week.

Okie...now the camera is done and the building blocks are there. The next step is to add some lighting as for this week's target. I'm still waiting for the models to hand over to me, so far i only got the wheel from paul which also need to be developed. I'm expecting paul to give me the shop-thing as iv seen him modeling it last week hope he finished it already.

Original Idea

On the first week we discused about the project briefly. Because Pual and me didn't come up with anything in mind so we were pretty much just listening to Leonard. He was inspaired by one of the Disney's ad and it was about a girl being amazed in a funfair.

The second week we came with our own ideas and plans. Mine was a room that can zoom into another space, for example...our classroom(studio2) which is the first internal evrionment I want to have. It's going to be detailed. The camera moves from the doorway all the way pans to the positaion in front of TV. Zoom into a little crack on the wall under the TV where it is pitch black inside. Then it would evantually zoom to another space. The idea inspired from the zooming scene in The Matrix/Man in black





The different is my idea is to zoom in instead of zoom out.
(i'm going to post the drawings later)

But anyway, it didn't went far because the group didn't like it.

Pual's idea was a factory with a lot of mechanical movements inside. I thought it was good, it was indeed very suitable for this project and worth a try. But in the end we kept the funfair idea just to make everyone happy.

I've also done the funfair idea's storyboard on the 2nd week.

30OCT Thursday assessment

Last Thursday I have been marked as a 'fail' on reflection&personal contribution to the group. I think it's quite fair, so no more discussion. I'm going to redo all those stuff and put them on here. That would include..:
Research and reflective commentary
Personal/Group Idea development
Storyboard development

5th week

So this week I'm going to further develop the storyboard which it will be done on Maya this time. I'm still doing with all the blocks because no one has yet gaven me their concept works.
I'm a little disappointed by those never-come-true-promises but hey, life goes on. I'm changing my personal scheduel already just to make sure I could finish this project in the worst case scenario.

Research Development and Storyboard

I have done the storyboard same time while I'm doing my concept design. Because I feel while i'm doing or developing my research, a storyboard starts to generate in my mind already, so I'm just putting them down.




This is a concept design for the airchair. I really like this machine and want to make it the 'main' element in the film.

I have also found some nice patten which would come in handy when doing the texturing.

More image is available on my Flickr! IT IS PART OF MY BLOG, so do check it out, THANKS!

Research

First of all, all my research and storyboard images can be found in my Flickr.
Here is the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mli29/

The main credit goes to google and deviantart.com as I found most of the pictures from it.

I also found a book from LRC about funfair. In it there are some very detail enginering drawings that would definally help with modeling.



The reason I love to find pictures from deviantart.com is that...it's more artistic and gives me so much inspiration. For example this airchair's coloring. It gives me a sence of movment just because of its camera angle.


And lighting....