2012 Showreel

Joseph Henson Character Animation Reel from Joseph Henson on Vimeo.

Final film!

Overall I am really pleased with our final film. Everyone put their all into it and this really paid off. As I'm an animator, I was so pleased with the amount of character animation in this project, but as it is an environment project I feel we could have shown off the environment just a little bit more. The main point of focus is the character, and it should have been the environment I think, even thought I do feel the animation carries the narrative so well. Either way, I am really happy with the level of animation, level of detail in the environment with modeling, lighting and rendering. Well done guys!

Scene three renders

Scene two renders

Scene one renders

In the one below, I did the touch flying up animation

Editing Underway!

Not much else for me to do now really apart from finish this blog and give feedback on the final edit when it's done. Time to give a big sigh of relief that its all done in time and now I can finally relax!

More deadlines! Ahhhhh!

Christmas and New year and all that lot hasn't been the best time for getting work done! Gotta pick up my pace a bit now to get the last of these shots animated for rendering and editing!

Third scene animation

Here is my part of the animation for the third scene. It is the shot where he is confused at what just happened to him, and he check his torch is still wokring by hitting it on his hand.

First off I filmed myself doing roughly what i wanted my character to do so I could see how he moves etc.

Now i have the basic idea i can reference this video and block out my animation for this shot.

Here is the playblast of my animation:



I'm pretty pleased with how this shot came out. Only took me around an hour to get done. I like the secondary animation on his other hand under the torch as he hits it on it, it moves away. The video reference really helped me with this one.

Lighting second scene

Scene two was getting lit by three of us, so we couldn't do a GREAT deal of lighting each for this scene, but here we go. First Nick put in some lights to give the whole scene some light all over it. Next I wanted to light up the statue becase for my animation shots, the character is up close to the statue and knocks it over, so it has to be seen well!

First I added an area light into the scene

This is what it looks like now:

This is far too bright! So I played around with the intensity settings and ray trace to get the right kind of glow I wanted for the scene.

Here is what the final one looks like:

Re-animated shot

I am so much happier with this shot now. It just works much more and I'm pleased with the secondary animation in his arms as he turns around.

Finished shot

A few people had some problems with this shot because it didn't link in with the next shot nick had animated etc. He dives into the pole and lands behind the statue and in the next shot he is standing up in front of the statue again. No problem, i will just reanimate it to make it fit better. To be honest, as I was animating I wasn't sure if I was happy with it anyway so this was good that I got the chance to change it!

Scene two animation underway

This scene will be really fun to animate. Ive got two shots in this scene but the second is the main show. Its where the statue falls down so it has to be right. Here is my first one, hes standing there in awe of the statue. Ive done subtle movement in his body and hands so hes not stiff. Even the slightest of movements count!



Here is the main statue falling over scene. As we were going to have it shatter, we came across loads of problems with that one, so we decided to have him push it over. I have got him diving into the stick holding it up, and then it crashing to the ground. This took me a while to get the weight right but I'm really happy with it now and when the sounds are all in it will look even better!

Lighting first scene!

Dave did most of the lighting in the first scene, but when i put my animation in, i could see some problems with how it wa slit. The character was really dark as he walked past the door way and looked in. To solve this problem, i put an area light in the doorway so light him up a little bit so all my animation wasn't a waste of time! Here is the before and after:

UV and texture of the gallery

Now as the animation is finished for the gallery scene, we can all start UVing and texturing the gallery. We have each done a part of it, and my areas were the walls, floor and corridor.

First, i had the UV layout which Maik had unwrapped and got to work in Photoshop to make the textures. This is my first time Uving so we all helped each other out to understand the basic principle of what we are actually doing and trying to achieve.

This is the UV unwrap i was given so texture. This is for the main gallery walls and floor. To start, I created a PSD network of Maya to paint my textures in in Photoshop.

I then made up a pattern in photoshop i had to tile so create the wall paper. I wanted to go with Green, but from my photographs from the V&A galleries, i saw that they used deep reds and purples which really made the gold frames stand out. As we want to have huge gold frames, I thought red would be my best bet.

This is the pattern which was made and i tiled this over the wall. Here is the finished texture on the walls. It took me some time to match them up, but as it will be at night tome, the lights will be very dim in there so you wouldnt be able to nice anyway - but im a perfectionist!

Next was the floor. I searched for a wooden floor image which i could tile to create a whole rooms worth of flooring. I found this:

This is too light for what we had in mind, so i darkened it in Photoshop and then tiled it over the unwrap of the floor. This is what its all looking like now:

Now for the corridor! I want to keep the same flooring as the main gallery so it runs through nicely. I was thinking a figgerent colour and pattern for the wall in the corridor so it breaks it up a bit. Here is what i decided on:

Okay I'm happy with all these now! Now to update the PSD network in Maya so i can see my textures in the rooms.

I changed the reflective setting of the Blinn for the floor so its nice and shiney and we can get some cool refections of lights and stuff in the final renders. This is what it looks like now:

Gallery Scene completed!

Me and nick have been working so hard to keep to he deadlines and have now finished the gallery scene at the start of the film. I wanted this scene to be perfect, because it has to be clear whats going on as it is setting up the story. The shots and animation are vital in these scenes, as well as all the other scenes but we don't want people getting lost or confused at the start of the film!

Anyway, here is a play blast of my first section. I did the start, Nick did the end of the gallery scene so that we could make it flow, then all we had to do was patch up my last scene with his first one and were were good to go!

First part of the film!

Torch Scene!

Took me about an hour to get this looking good. I'm happy with the weight of the torch.

Update playblast

Almost done for this scene now, just some last alterations such as the knees popping out but then I can start thinking about the render!

Quick progress playblast

Bit of reference footage I filmed of myself to get the main poses in first.



Okay so this is the first shot of our film that I'm working on. It's a bit jumpy in places but that's just YouTube, not my animation. I've still got things to sort out with it but its getting there.

Animatic!

Malachi worked really fast to get this done so here is our animatic! It gives me and Nick loads to work from to complete the animation and make it much tighter for the final film.

Finished Room

Models!

Maik and Dave have been cracking on with models and have more completed everything for the art gallery. Here are a few examples and links to their blogs:

Maik: http://maikphamquang.tumblr.com/
Dave: http://shufflefishstudios.tumblr.com/

Animation tests

After getting everything ready for modeling and the story done, now me and Nick can start doing some animation tests for the different scenes in the film. Here's my first test, it's a walk cycle because we'll need the character to walk around in the gallery so I thought I'd get my practice in and try to get the basics down in time for when I start to animate in the scene for real! This took me around 5 hours - not bad considering my first 3D walk cycle in first year animation last year took me the whole term.

What rig to use

We have to choose as rig to use, one that is free and we are able to work with easily. from past experience, I have some I really dont like working with, and some I find really easy and simple. As me and Nick will be doing the majority fo the character animation on our film, we chose a top 5 rigs, and then had to get it down to one.

MooM
Both V3 and V4 are nice looking rigs if you turn off the crazy front teeth, but I think we need something with more detail in the face. Also, when I last used V4, i got a lot of popping on the hips and legs when I moved them in certain ways, so I don't want to risk anything going wrong with the rig this time round!

Norman:
This rig is a Pixar rig which is used in their classes. Nick has used it quite a bit and said he likes it so this one is a possibility.

Max:
Max is very similar to Norman but i don't really like it as far as looks and detail goes.

Morpheus:
Morpheus is a newer rig. It does exactly what its names says. You can morph it into any type of character you like, male, female, small, tall, old, young. You can change every aspect of it, from eye colour to facial hair and hand size to nose. It's a nice looking rig but its quite complex as far as controls go, and we don't have all the time in the world to animate this film so I don't think its very practical if we use this rig for this.

Goon:
Recently I bought a book called 'How to cheat in maya 2010'.

 

It's basically tools and tips for a maya animator and how to get your animations looking spot on. I'm finding it really useful because it explains things in depth, even if it can go quite fast at some points. With it, you get a free rig called Goon. Goon is used in the book as the rig for all the tutorials and techniques. Its really easy to use and simple. It looks nice, and has a detailed face too. It's similar to Norman and Max but I prefer Goon over these two.

After some discussion with Nick and our group, we have come to the conclusion that we will indeed be using Goon for our film. Yay!

Thinking about lighting

These are some examples I photographed of lighting. The top one is pretty much spot on to what we want out gallery to be like.

Scene Arctitecture

Today we all went to the V&A gallery in London to try and get a better idea of the layout of gallery rooms and lighting. I took a whole bunch of photos, even though I probably wasn't allowed to in some areas of the gallery!

I like the lighting in the photograph above. The colour of the walls are good too, and the spot lights on each painting are nice touch too. Have to keep this in mind for our film.

These (above) are some very 'classical' gallery setups. By this I mean then are quite old looking, like large picture frames and swirly decor. It is very dark in these rooms with deep colours on the walls. The art in these types of rooms are very old.

Glass cabinets would be a nice touch too, maybe in front of some paintings or around some vase's or sculptures.

Whereas these (above) are much more modern in how they look, like light coloured walls and less detail in the room. everything is inline and neat. The art work in these rooms are modern and mostly photographs rather than paintings.

I took some photos of the more detailed areas in the rooms, such as the coving, barriers, benches, doors etc. These are all things we need to look at closely when designing and modeling them:

The white and dark colour on the walls works really well here and gives it a nice clean edge finish. We want our gallery to be nice and clean too so this is worth bearing in mind for when we come to texture.

Gold frames are a must in our painting. These fancy ones are exactly what i had in mind. Modeling references!

Bench ideas maybe? Might be a little simple as we are getting marked on the environment and level of modeling.

Nice touch would be to have a stand of writing about the paintings.

Door textures - dark wood, thats if we decide to have doors on our gallery...

This is what i was talking about earlier, having some glass in there around a vase or something. This would be such a cool little feature to our gallery!

We went into a certain room, and everything was perfect for what we had in mind for our film. We used a panorama camera to capture the whole room as one image so we could take it home and look at it in more detail. (click image to enlarge it)

Then later on in the gallery visit, we found another room where the lighting was more what we wanted in our film because it is set at night, after the gallery has shut. Here is another panoramic photograph of the second room. (click image to enlarge it)