Tuesday 11 July 2017

Seriously?



Seriously? is my new short animation. Working in my favorite theme sci-fi it's set on a giant alien spaceship and shows the interaction of two of the inhabitants. There is love in the air....and on the floor and in your face. I asked my daughter for an idea for a short, she gave me nothing for hours saying she was thinking and then came up with a two sentence idea and Seriously? was the result.

Why so serious? ......BECAUSE!


My first job was to build a new character, My little green man #1. I wanted to do something cartoony and cute with appeal and simplicity. It took me a couple of tries as my first version was ugly, I like to sculpt my characters with lots of detail but it turned out that less was more. Simple rounded shapes made the character look cuter.
That's what I call UV mapping SERIOUSLY!
Surface of the model laid out for painting
Maya base mesh to Zbrush sculpt to render
Maya base model to Zbrush to texture test



That's a serious pose there....
Serious pose done in Maya rendered with 3Delight

My next job was to create an animatic. An animatic is a very rough version of the film where you can see the intended actions and camera shots but animation is very basic, just enough to show what happens.



So once you have your animatic it's basically a case of refining until you have your final animation version. You can see that while I was animating I had a placeholder background. I put the final version of the background in after the animation was done. Next I will show you an early version of the animation.



In that version you can see the animation is quite rough, some of the last shots look very different in the final version. There is no sound, the sound was worked on by my good friend Rafa Tomás Velázquez who was my house mate in Dublin. He is a talented guy and you can see more of his work over at Farmode .

Once I had finished the animation the last step was rendering I used 3Delight for the final render but I also tried Mental Ray and Renderman.


Seriously rendered with Renderman
Renderman as used by Pixar........not really working for me :(

Seriously rendered with mental Ray
Mental Ray looked very nice but .....wasn't free :(

Seriously Title
3Delight saves the day 


Rendering was a headache, I set up all my lights with and did all my tests with 3Delight, it kept crashing on me but I thought it should be all right when I rendered a full sequence a batch render........it wasn't. This lead me to try the other two, Mental Ray is what I have most experience with but at first it wasn't running. After poking around on the internet I found a solution and got it working and it looked great...........but I didn't realize you had to pay if you want it to batch render. You can render stills but to render a sequence you have to buy it. 

Renderman to the rescue! Pixar use it it must be amazing!...........WADDAYA MEAN IT TAKES 10 MINUTES TO RENDER A FRAME!!! Erm....yeah so seems my laptop is not Pixar ready, I could only get very ugly results with my background in Renderman. Back to the drawing board. Luckily in picking through my scene so many times to set it up for the different rendering programs I discovered my camera was corrupt. This was what was causing 3Delight to crash and after that everything went smoothly.

It would be great if people could share this post and the film, I would love Seriously? to get a big audience.

Be seeing you! Seriously!
Be seeing you!

15 comments:

  1. This website was... how do I say it? Relevant!!

    Finally I've found something that helped me. Thanks a lot!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello! I've been reading your website for a while now and finally got the courage to go ahead
    and give you a shout out from Huffman Texas! Just wanted to mention keep up the good job!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, I'm currently working on a TV show in the UK so haven't had much time for new posts unfortunately.

      Delete
  3. This design is steller! You definitely know how to keep a reader entertained.
    Between your wit and your videos, I was almost moved to
    start my own blog (well, almost...HaHa!) Great job.

    I really enjoyed what you had to say, and more than that,
    how you presented it. Too cool!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hello! Would you mind if I share your blog with
    my zynga group? There's a lot of folks that I think would really
    appreciate your content. Please let me know.
    Thank you

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have no problem with people sharing links to my blog.

      Delete
  5. Hmm it looks like your blog ate my first comment (it was
    extremely long) so I guess I'll just sum it up what I submitted and
    say, I'm thoroughly enjoying your blog. I too am an aspiring blog
    writer but I'm still new to everything. Do you have any recommendations for
    newbie blog writers? I'd really appreciate it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Depends what you are trying to achieve, what's your goal?

      Delete
  6. I think this is one of the most vital information for me.

    And i am glad reading your article. But should remark on some general things, The web site style is wonderful, the articles is really excellent :
    D. Good job, cheers

    ReplyDelete
  7. Everything is very open with a very clear clarification of the challenges.
    It was really informative. Your site is useful. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  8. I could not refrain from commenting. Well written!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Wow, superb weblog format! How long have you been running a blog for?
    you made running a blog look easy. The full look of your website is magnificent, let alone
    the content material!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Thanks very interesting blog!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Very nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to mention that I've really loved browsing your weblog posts.
    In any case I will be subscribing for your rss
    feed and I hope you write again soon!

    ReplyDelete

Comments welcome, this is a dofollow blog.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...