Creative Development Video

The video that I will be handing in is finally alive, It's a quick stress test just to make sure Henry works and a 360 turntable in order to see what the new skin shaders are going to look like live.

Here it is:

Henry, Version 2.0

So this is Henry version 2.0, I have gotten a pretty good grasp of Specular skin shading now so he's looking much better than before.

Test Test Test.

Luckily with the hair turned of every render is only 30 seconds long.

Subsurface Shading

Here's a freaky test render of Henry with Subsurface shading on. Looks terrible but it's coming along

Stress Test

Henrys stress test render is complete. I made this in order to test Henrys rigging, weighting and controls. The animation is not clean and does has several flaws but does the job nicely in this instance.

Henrys newest look

Henry now has new eyes, bigger glasses and a shorter fringe. Looking good :)

Andrew Whitehurst to the rescue

After a few hours of painstaking render time I got a suprise E-mail from Andrew saying that he had read my "Drama" post and that I should look into Batch render scripts, He gave me a few really useful links and really helped me alot whilst I struggled to comprehend the code. Eventually feeling defeated I managed to get a free script from creativecrash.com called Shiv Render Tool working and it is now chippping away at my render queue without any input from me (and it seems to be rendering slightly faster..).

So THANKYOU ANDREW, for even letting me know this is do-able and I promise I will learn to script and get this working properly with layers in time for the render rush in March.

DRAMA

Well last night at roughly 1:30am I discovered for the first time that Maya 2011 doesn't like to batch render, I went onto their official forums only to find that this is a big on going issue that is still to be remedied within 2011. So, this means that I have no other option than to sit and manually render every frame into an image sequence, so I sit here after 5 hours sleep venting into my blog whilst another render is churned out.

Luckily for this test I'm not using Ambient occlusion or Z depth passes so I only have to manually render 300 images but this is going to be a huge issue when it comes to create 2 minutes of animation with 7-8 passes instead of the 12 seconds of single pass render I have now.

I tried to bring all of my scene information into Maya 2010 only to find that I have used too much of the new skinning and weighting tools from 2011 so we'll have to see what I come up with. Maybe with some help from autodesk I'll get this fixed shortly but at the moment it's looking like I am going to need a lot more time than first imagined for rendering come March.

First Playblast

This is the first playblast of my animation, I've playblasted it in wireframe so that I can see any weighting issues on Henry whilst he moves. There are a few and hopefully I shall have these sorted shorty, I will also increase the size of the glasses, raise his fringe a little and add an extra glossy layer to his eyeballs as per Andrews feedback before I render this out.



First Close Up:

Second Close Up:

Overall look:

Henry no like ball.

Walk Cycle

At the moment I am animating a short animation test to show to my tutors for feedback on where I should go from there. In the animation test I plan on Henry Walking over to a table, Interacting with an object on the table and then getting quite aggressive with it.

I plan on doing this because it will really show any imperfections within the weight map on Henry, also it will be fun as he'll act totally opposite to this in the final project.

Anyway here's his first walk cycle playblast:

Andrew Whitehurst

I asked nicely whether Andrew Whitehurst http://www.andrew-whitehurst.net/index.html (A CG Supervisor at Double Negative) could take a look at this picture and give me some feedback.

Feedback:

Hi Matthew,

I like this a lot. I have a few notes of things that I think will help a bit and of course feel to ignore anything you don't agree with.

1) I'd be tempted to make his spectacles a little bigger, that way you'll be able to see more of his eyes which would enable you to get more emotion and performance out of them. The fact that you have a fringe of hair covering one of the eyebrows also makes it harder for you to sell facial expressions as we can only see the other eyebrow. If you love the hair-do then keep it but I do think it'll make your animation job harder.

2) Skin shading. If you can afford the render-time hit getting some sub-surface scattering happening on the skin will help bring him to life and make him feel less plasticy. You could also add some subtle bump to get a sense of pores and perhaps make him a tiny bit more shiny, especially on the greaier areas of the face like the nose and forehead.

3) Eyes. I really think you should add another outer sphere to your eye-balls and shade it with some transparent, highly specular/reflective material. Eyes without glinting highlights can seem very dead - adding an outer reflective surface will really help here. It also helps the eyes feel wet which is closer to reality.

Here's a "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" image that shows what I mean on all the notes above:

http://files.g4tv.com/rimg_606x0/ImageDb3/158143_l/060309.jpg

So, Once my animation test is complete I shall try as hard as I can to get as much of this done as possible before Rendering has to start.

Shave and a haircut problems

Shave and a haircut is a really nice plugin I've been using for my hair, but it also comes with problems. In the cpu light renderer that comes with the plugin there is an option to allow hair to be seen in reflections and refractions but you can't seen mine in either. This means that for both I will either have to use layers or convert to geometry for certain sections of my renders, heavily increasing render times per frame.

So i will continue to trawl through fx forums hoping that someone has an answer and maybe I'll get lucky.

No Refraction:

No Reflection:

Facial Rigging

Henry's Facial rig is finally done, there's still no interface for it but it's useable, he also has eyebrows so it no loonge rlooks like he accidentyl shaved them off and his hair is looking pretty good now.

Examplidge.

Expression Controls

So Henry's Expression controls are comign along nicely, I just need to set up an interface for it, althought this isn't totally needed and I can start animating ready for a play blast and render.

These are all the different possible expressions.

Mouth Animations

Henrys mouth blend shapes have been set up, Now I just need to finish off the brow controls. I have also played with the hair, I'm still not entirely happy with it but it's looking pretty good.

Henry gets hair

Sooo, I've been putting it off for a while as... In my opinion, creating nice hair is pretty daunting prospect. So after literally 10's of tests with semi-realistic hair and plasticy action man hair I think I have settled on Realisticish hair. This will need a little mor styling in the fringe and I may make it a little darker but I'm pretty happy with it so far.

An Example of Henry with action man style hair.

Rigging Tests

I'm starting to carry out my first rigging and controller tests on Henrys body ready for animating.