Friday 14 December 2012

Final animation for the bank scene

Finally rendered and shown in widescreen, a very simple bank scene. The bonus is the animating flag because I thought the scene was boring with just a foot moving so needed something to liven it up and also to possibly add a bit of drama, as the flag stops blowing when the character's foot hits the ground, as possible foreshadowing.


Fleeing scene, final animation and changes.


The final video of the escape scene is up, I've changed the grass texture to just black and ended up playing with the lighting to create silhouettes rather than having blue silhouettes. Firstly, the grass texture wasn't that great and in someways detracted from the visual appeal of the scene. By playing with the light I was able to better convey the time of day, in a low light with silhouettes only to make out what is happening gives a much better impression that the scene is happening at Dusk. 

I also added actual animation to the fleeing characters, I animated their movement in flash and then exported as a JPEG image sequence which was placed frame by frame into Cinema4D as materials. Then very much in the same way as everything else, it was then animated after the movement tween was put in so that they were animating and moving at the same time.
 
 



Final artwork in the bank scene



I replaced the artwork which was a placeholder with the final artwork.

Thursday 13 December 2012

Background construction

I began remaking my scenes by creating backgrounds. While the majority of assets are 2D and drawn in photoshop, I felt that adding in a 3D hill would give it a better sense of depth and add something a little bit different from an entirely paper thin scene.
The sky is a photoshop painted background, the lighting is added in over the top, however the light source was also added to the background texture under the hill as a base and all lights in Cinema4D were laid on afterwards. Some extra lighting had to be added round the front, which can make the light sources for the audience, however the character would come up as completely black and I want a blue colour to them.
The characters were added as a single plain which was textured with the drawing and the appropriate alpha applied. I then used the timeline to block in the positions I wanted the characters to move across to travel to the other side of the hill. Since they had to go over, I then went in and further adjusted them to make it look better aesthetically.





The second scene I created required much more construction and was layered up a lot more like a stop motion set would, although all of the objects inhabiting this set are 2D planes,  no three-dimensional objects are used in this scene.


I started with the plane which became the pavement and layered some placeholder art in for the city backdrop which I'll change once I've created a more detailed version. The sky is the same as the previous scene, but it's been angled upwards so the light appears in the sky, rather than setting into the horizon. It also helps that the sky is going to be obscured by buildings and characters so the audience hopefully won't notice, but it does save me time on creating assets.




A stand-in for the bank has been constructed and a character foot was created to step into frame.
Then it was changed to resemble the shot in the storyboard, which makes the set look a little more convincing when viewed from this angle because the layered assets give it a sense of depth, particularly the plane which is being used as a floor.




Thinking the scene needed something extra, I've added cars. It makes sense that there would be cars in the area anyway, but also that the mobsters who are robbing the bank in the cartoon would arrive using cars.
It adds to make the scene look a lot more inhabited and a little more believable, but also aids in driving the plot.

Wednesday 12 December 2012

2D animation in Cinema4D

After starting from scratch, I decided to go with the approach of making my characters out of 2D images and then animating them in very much the same way I make animation on something like Flash.
I started off by doing some tests with the technique of animating textures in Cinema 4D.
I drew a character in photoshop which a motion in sequence that I could use to create an animated texture in Cinema 4D.
I saved the image as a Jpg for the file size, because many different assets on the screen at once will increase the overall file size of the Cinema 4D document.

Since .jpg doesn't have a built-in Alpha channel like a .png file, I have to create the alpha channel myself as a separate jpg which can then be loaded into Cinema4D to define which areas of the texture are transparent and which are opaque.

In the case of these alpha channels, they are loaded into the transparency settings when you are creating the frame in Cinema4D, sometimes they have to be inverted to get the right effect

      When loaded into Cinema4D, the different frames of animation are created as materials which can be dragged onto an object to create movement by using the object's own timeline within Cinema4D to swap out materials, this is very similar to creating key-frames in a 2D animation program.

The materials are then used within the object's timeline, to insert a keyframe you must click the red dot above before inserting a new material. When you are done, you should have an animating character.


Intro to cutout in Cinema4D

In college, the task I've been assigned is to create cutout animation in Cinema4D. The majority of what I'm making is comprised of 2D assets shot in a 3D perspective, I tried rigging a character before but I really didn't feel like it was working for me.

Initally I constructed the model based around the different bodyparts that would move, and while it might be easier than drawing individual frames, I'm very much a 2D animator so was a lot more comfortable with creating individual frames as textures and animating that.

The initial character and background didn't really have any of the visual charm I was looking for in my animation, because I'm very much a fan of hand-drawn pieces so I wanted to bring some of the quirkiness of 2D drawings to my 3D work.
This led to me scrapping the character and the background I had already made and restarting from scratch to make sets and characters which worked more for me.















Welcome!

Welcome to the blog, it's basically a place where I post nicey nice things I'm doing in regards to animation, drawing and other arty stuff.