Joe Caleno's Blog

  Reflective Statement  The Major project has been my favourite out of the three stages. I feel like I had much better time management. I didn’t feel rushed at any point, and I think that is because I had everything planned out and I knew what I had to get done by a certain point. I set myself personal deadlines on the way and made sure I stuck by them so I could complete everything I needed to complete in time. It was really satisfying seeing all the work I completed over the three stages come together as one big project.    I have learnt a lot of new skills during the Major project. Skills that I will take further. I am now much more confident in Maya and animating as a whole.     I am happy with the outcome of the project. I am pleased with my animation, and it has turned out better than I thought it would.   I am looking forward to taking things further with animation. 

Link to Art Of:   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pn9v5b75hPCQkzh5q2CUVlPDmTSyCVXR/view?usp=share_link

Link to the animation: https://youtu.be/PvEfvMuvvg4

 Today, I finished editing the final animation in Premier Pro. I found the editing process to be really fun. It made me realise how important editing is, and how it can transform the work into something that looks professional and well put together. I didn't have any problems with editing, since Premier Pro is a program that I use a lot and know well. I used quite a few effects, effects that I haven't used before. I used cross fade a few times, to smoothly blend scenes together. I didn't like the cold, hard cuts between scenes as they made the animation feel disjointed at times. The cross fade helps make the animation flow smoothly and therefore is easier to watch. A lot of films have a high contrast filter on them to bring out the colours of the animation. I wanted to do the same since Dekilios is quite a richly coloured planet. It was important that the pink plants, purple crystals, blue skies stood out, as they are all important characterises of the planet. This also hel...

 So far, I have animated six of my scenes. Four of these are scenes show The Wonder flying, the last of them, shows it landing on Dekilios. There is a big difference between the animation I am doing now and my most recent Pre-Viz. The ship now moves realistically and fluently. The ship also has a lot more movement, it often tilts and turns as it flies. I have also concentrated on making the ship look like it has some weight. When it turns, it has to tilt itself in a direction. It doesn't just dart around like it did before.  I have also improved the camera angles and camera movement. They are less disorientating and smoother.  The other two scenes, are the static shots of Dekilios. These haven't changed much since Pre-Viz.   The rendering process was quite a long and boring job. At first, I wanted to render on the computers at uni. When I went in, I imported one of my scenes over to a uni computer and realised that my textures hadn’t transferred over. This meant...

  I had a few problems with rigging their jaws. I had errors popping up, telling me that I couldn't skin the jaw because of skin clusters. There was also problems with painting the jaw's weights. No weights could be painted on the jaw. I spoke to Kim and we managed to work out what the problems were and fixed them.  Their jaws now work as they should. 

  Before, the terminal screen was a green screen. However, I changed this and made a screen using Substance. I made a “connected screen” for when the brothers are speaking to Admiral Wakataha. Then, I made an “error screen” for when they are getting close to Dekilios and they lose signal. To animate the screen, I put the two on top of one another. When it was time for a screen change, I keyed the top screen to move down and the one below it to move up. They then swapped around. I also made a third screen. This screen was a black screen which was for when the screen flashes. I think that this is a great way to animate changing screens. It is simple but effective. 

The Starmap is a spherical map which shows the surroundings of where the ship is. The 360 map moves when the ship moves.  Before, today, the inside of the ship had a green screen looking windscreen. I didn't like it. I wanted to show where the ship was without using a transparent screen so I decided on this. It also provides light to the inside of the ship. When The Wonder is in space, the Starmap glows.  When it has landed, the Starmap turns off.

  I have now populated the space scene with stars. I created stars by increasing the emission of spheres which I dotted around the scene. I looked at photos of space for reference, because I wanted to get the brightness of the stars and also the distance between them correct. I am happy with how they look. They make the scene look realistic.  I also worked on the lighting. I wanted one side of Dekilios to be well lit, and the other side of it, in darkness, because this would show the scale of the planet. Anexion appears much brighter than Zern. It is quite hard to see Zern and this is how I want it. I want it to look sinister.

                      The Basin The Bloodlake The Trench The Cave I imported all of the environment objects over to my scenes and placed them. My scenes look much closer to their final look now. They feel much more alive and believable. 

 Next, I am going to get my scenes ready for animation. All of the main textures are already imported over and plugged in. However, I still need to import some assets over to certain scenes. These assets are mostly environment objects like rocks and plants that will populate the scenes. I will also need to double check that the textures have been plugged in with the Arnold Standard Surface and not with a Maya material. The renderer I am using is the Arnold renderer and so if I was to try and render a model that was textured using a Maya surface, it will not render correctly.  I will also need to double check that the scale of objects are correct since I have changed my models quite a bit since pre-viz.

  I used to the auto rig feature for the monster. I had a few problems with moving his legs however after playing around with it for a while I managed to fix them. His legs were not bending at the knee. At first I thought that this was a skinning issue but it wasn't. It turned out to be a problem with the controls. I decided to use a different set of controls in his lower leg rather than his upper leg.  I then decided to test out the rig by putting him in different positions. Movement:  I have taken some time to think about how the monster would move. The Dekilios Monster is big with a large amounts of fat and so isn't very fast. He stomps and lumbers and sways side to side, shifting his weight as he walks. He keeps his head down when walking as he often uses his trunk to blow things out of his way. When he does run, he can only do so for a short amount of time . 

Yobi rig test render I decided to use the auto rig feature in Maya. I had a few problems with their spines, the movement was very unnatural however, after changing some settings around and redoing some of the joints, the rigs worked how I wanted them to. I rigged the hands separately and joined them onto the auto rig. It is very important that his hands work correctly since some of the animation consists of them pressing buttons and using their hands.  Yobi's movement: Yobi is the energetic one out of the two. He moves fairly fast and can sometimes be frantic. His eyes are nearly always wide open and awake looking.  Sangu movement: Sangu has a very heroic stature. He stands upright and bold. A lot of his moments are very heavy handed. He moves slower than Yobi. 

  In Mudbox, the model was up to level 6. It had a lot of detail and looked exactly how I wanted it to look. It now had a lot of faces and so I needed to make a displacement map to transfer the model back over to Maya. When exporting the displacement map, it kept hanging on either 79% or 98%. I tried exporting it many times, but each time it got stuck. I looked it up, and some people said it could be the version of Mudbox. I uninstalled 2023 and installed 2020. However, when I tried exporting the map, it got stuck again. I then began removing programs I didn't use to free up some space on my computer. That also did not work. I then deleted layers off of my model to see if there was a mesh issue. This also didn't change anything. I then decided to lower the image size. I was able to export the lower quality map. In Maya, after plugging all of the textures in, it turned out better than I thought it would. 

 In the render I am fairly happy with the outcome of Sangu. I enjoyed remodelling his head. Whilst remodelling, I realised how far I have come. This version of Sangu looks a lot better than the previous version. The topology is much neater and easier to work with and I found that I ran into less problems. My favourite part of the whole process was texturing his face. I find it really satisfying working on the details. You can turn a basic matte model into something that looks realistic in such a short amount of time. 

  Texturing Sangu's head was a lot of fun. He was easy to work with since the topology was much neater than it was before. Sangu's face colour varies quite a bit. He is older than Yobi and so his skin has gone through more. He has very leathery skin, like Yobi does. Only his looks much thicker.  I also focused on his horns. His horns are larger than Yobi's and also slightly weathered.  When sculpting his face I also needed to make sure his face was much bulkier than Yobi's. His is the muscular and more manly brother and that is made apparent in his facial structure. His face is robust and bigger than Yobi's. 

Sangu rendered before face texturing  

 Rendered In the viewport In the render I decided to go for a slightly different design when I textured Yobi's body. I thought that the plain orange suit would be too simple and boring. I am happy with the outcome. The dark colour accents make the suit look much more interesting.

  Rendered Progress Texturing Yobi was a lot of fun. I really enjoy using Mudbox. I feel like it is an easy program to use and you can get a lot of work done very quickly. It was really satisfying watching a grey, texture less model, turn into something that looks realistic and characterful. I used a wide range of textures and colours. I didn’t want to just paint him brown. I wanted his skin to look life-like and have a lot of depth to it. It was also important that his skin looked leathery and thick, as that is a distinctive feature of a Tutoan. For things like bumps and scratches I used a displacement map. This allowed me to work with a very high amount of faces in Mudbox and then when it was time to move it over to Maya, the map with the details can be applied to the basic mesh. This lets you get the same level of detail with a low poly mesh.

 Like Yobi's Pre-Viz model, I had some problems when trying to texture The Dekilios Monster. I decided to remodel him using the Quad Draw tool. I also added some new details and changed his design a little bit. I scrapped his claw hands and swapped them out for suckers. The monster is one giant air bag that hoovers up everything in it's path. His is also now covered in vents that filter out air he doesn't use so he doesn't inhale too much and explode. He also has holes on his neck he breathes out of.