Table of Contents

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Introduction and Purpose

Applications Used

Steps Taken

Project Summary

Thanks

A Bite to Remember

Student Project | Spring 2019

This is an individual project for my third-year animation studio. This project was intended to cover all parts of the animation pipeline to provide students with a general knowledge of the process. The deliverables for this project were to develop a concept for a thirty second animated short. As part of this project I had to:

• Develop an idea/concept for the short.

• Create a thirty second animatic, or animated storyboard.

• Create original concept art and a style for the short.

• Model a main character (full body model), a secondary character, props, and a set.

• Surface all models.

• Rig, or provide a “skeleton”, for the main character and secondary character model.

• Build the layout and set up lighting for the scene.

• Use the rig created to animate the short in Autodesk Maya. For this studio we did not render the full shorts due to time constraints of the semester as this was an individual project. The only rendered deliverable is the poster for the short.

• Render and composite the poster for the short.

For this project I used the student versions of:

• Autodesk Maya

• Pixar’s Renderman

• Substance Painter

• Adobe After Effects

• Adobe Illustrator

• Adobe Photoshop

Idea Conceptualization

My animated short is called A Bite to Remember and it’s about a vampire who has a night out on the town. The main character, the Vampyre, ends up having one too many Bloody Marys and gets cut off by the bartender who tries to take the Vampyre’s drink away. The Vampyre, not being done with his night out, struggles to take the drink back from the bartender and ends up grabbing the bartender’s arm and having a drink from there. Then the Vampyre is happy, turns into a bat and heads home.

I originally wanted the short to be in black and white with selective color. The only color would be the red of the Vampyre’s eyes, the drinks, and the bartender’s…arm. However as the semester progressed I decided to make the short colorized to detract away from the blood so it wasn’t distracting from the plot (if I were to ever render the entire short).

Storyboarding

At the time I made this animatic, I hadn’t decided on the title yet or finalized my props.

Modeling

This is my most detailed character model I’ve ever made. As I am not a strong rigging artist, I tend to create characters that don’t have very detailed faces and I don’t typically make lanky characters. It’s easier to hide mistakes if a character isn’t intended to move very much or if the character is more squat in stature. The cape is also a seperate model from the character just for ease of creating textures, rigging, and animation.

Surfacing and Textures

This was my favorite part of the whole semester. I absolutely love using SubstancePainter to create textures. Overall I’m very happy with my character textures. I do wish that I had spent more time on the props and set textures though. Especially the blood, but it’s very difficult to make convincing liquid materials without using effects or simulations, which I wasn’t able to do for this project due to scope and time limitations.

Rigging

This was by far the most difficult aspect of this entire project. Before this semester, I had only created a character rig once before and I had never created a facial rig before. There were many times when my rig broke (basically separated from my character model) or Maya crashed and I had to start over. But I did finish it and it came out quite well. My facial rig does have some problems, namely on the eyelids of my character model, there is quite a bit of UV stretching.

Layout

I also enjoyed layout, sometimes called set dressing. Especially after rigging, this was a very enjoyable step. I enjoyed placing all of my models together to create my set and plugging in the shaders.

Animation

For this project we used keyframe animation, meaning I set my character rig in different positions at different frames and animated the character manually instead of using spline or motion capture techniques. For this project I did animate the whole short but I didn’t render it. I did use my rig to “animate” a pose for the short poster that was rendered as my final deliverable for the project.

Lighting

Lighting is what enables you to see anything you’ve created in a 3D modeling software when you render it. For this project I used one large spotlight, three key lights, two background lights, and small spotlights to simulate candles. This image is a test render of my lighting set up with very low resolution passes. For this project I used Pixar’s Renderman to create my renders.

Rendering

After many iterations of tweaking layout, cameras, and lighting, I performed my final renders in EXR format. If I were to render the entire short, I would have rendered every frame. I was working in 30 frames per second so that would have been 900 stills that I would then composite together in Adobe After Effects or another video editing software. Each frame would’ve also had over 2,000 passes for resolution. Thankfully, for this project I only needed to render one frame for a still image.

Compositing

Compositing was the last step of the process. This is where everything came together. I composited my poster using Photoshop and Illustrator. Since I was only rendering a single still image, I was able to use Photoshop to easily mask some of my mistakes with my character model, like around the shirt buttons. If I were rendering the entire short, I would need to fix these textures.

This studio was very challenging for me for many reasons. Firstly, while I did study animation and design, I do not consider myself to be a strong artist so I struggled to develop concept art that reflected my vision for my character model. I also do not enjoy rigging. Especially faces. Those two steps were by far my least favorite of the process. I did gain a new interest in lighting, rendering, and compositing though.

However, this studio was also extremely rewarding. By the end of the semester I felt much more comfortable with the concepts I mentioned struggling with. In a typical animation studio, individuals specialize in a different aspect of the pipeline such as character modeling or rigging. It’s not very common for one person to create an entire short from beginning to end. By my third year of school, I had already began focusing solely on shading, surfacing, and texturing. So to complete every step on my own was very difficult and required me to ask my peers who specialized in other areas for help. In turn, my studio all began teaching each other how to complete different processes. From that experience we all began to understand the challenges of each step in the animation pipeline. This helped me become a more understanding project partner because I had an idea of setbacks that can occur for different artists.

Thank you to all of my professors, teaching assistants, and studio peers for sharing their knowledge about character modeling, rigging, layout, and lighting.

Special thanks to Kelly Copeland, who patiently taught me how to set up a complex facial rig.