Conclusion

When me and Ash first started off the project we knew that the outcome of the final scene would be pretty good, considering we are both modellers. Our fisrt idea we had we had story wise was about two rich hollwood neigbours who constanly get into rediculous arguments over small things. Now going back to it comparing the fih project to our very first idea the work load was much more also considering that the rave on air deadline was quite near. After disscussing with Jared he mentioned the amount of work that would be needed for the neighbours project, such as modeling two females characters , the environment rigging and animation also some elements of fluid simulation. In the end we decided to go with a storyline involving two fishes, this was suggested buy Jared and in the end turnd out very well. Working with Ash was one of the best parts of the whole project, we bounced ideas off each other which really helped us out, and when ever i would hit a brick wall Ash was always there to back me up when i needed help. Overall the project as a whole was a success, even though we encounterd some problem we always managed to overcome this. Looking back at the production schedule, it really did help us out on managing our time and workflow. In the end i very happy with the final outcome of the movie, the only thing i would change would be to include the water simulation from realflow seeing as i know how to overcome the problem of the huge fish tank

Production schedules

The production scehdule really helped me organise my time and build up over due work. The first production schedule we did was a rough estimated dates of when we would of liked to have finnished some of the sub units. Production scehdule 2 was more accurate in terms of dates but some dates may have changed during the process of production scehdule 3 and 4, due to some of the problems we had such as realflow and rendering.

Stupid mistake

as you may from reading the previous post, i was not able to add in the fluid simulation from realflow into my scene due to the fish tankk scale being to big. And even if managed to somehow fill up the tank with water, the render time would of been mindblowing, and to make it worse there is no realflow maya plugin installed on the uni computer so i wouldnt of been able to use the render farm at all, all the renders would of have been done at home. While talking to mehmet he ased why the water didnt drop on to the table after the tank blow up, i told him bout the situation involving realflow and how the tank fish tank was to big. He told me i would of still been able to fill up the tank with fluid but all i would of have to do was to scaled dwon the fish tank and scale down the the live action footage aswel. I could not beleive how simple the solution was and why i hadnt thoought of it before. But im still happy with the fianl fluid i have in the scene from maya 3D fluid container. And plus i learned something new and i would always apply it to future projects.

After effects final render

Today was more or less aboout us compositing the scene in after effects, as the renders had been completed in the morning we cracked on with compositing as soon as we came into uni. As we had no sound we went to rent out the sound hard drive from the laoan store to see what kind of sound effects would be suitable for our scene. The ones we managed to find were several burping sound effects and childs laughter.

Sketches i forgot about

Rendering

Yesturday me and Ash stayed at uni till about 9 trying to sort of the renders out, for some reason we had some trouble when using the render far. As we had included the fluid into our scene we knew the render time wsa going to doube, but i didnt know it would increase quite alot resulting in one frame taking 11 mins to render out. At this point i kind of paniked worrrying about not having the renders done in time. But what we did was to render each section layers which really helped alot, as the fluid and fish tank were stationary through out the scene we only had to render them once which saved us alot of time. The only full renders we had to do was the actual animation of both the fishes and also when the glass shaters. In the end we decided to send the renderd to maya batch render, and suprisingly it only took a day for it to render out all out scene. We have also left a render out on the render farm, this version will be of high quality and should be done ny Monday

Water simulation sorted

At first i was planning on having the water simulation done in Realflow but due to the fish tank scale being to big it was impossible to fill the tnk up with realistic water. Ashley was planning on finding a way to simulate the presence of water by configuring the lighting settings.As it was nearing the deadline i test out several different ways in which i could produce some sort of liquid in the fish tank, it wont have to be to realistic but as long as it represented the liquid form. In the end i managed to produce a liquid like effecet by using a 3D fluid container, it produced gas like form but i played around with some of the settings such as density and pressure to produce a liquid effect

Problem with water simulation

After i came back from rave on air i imported the tank scene into realflow ready for the water simulation process. I had about three attemps at filling up the fish tank, and all three came up unsuccessful. I set the resoltuion at a high setting to simulate the water more realsitcly, this increases the simulation time abit but not to much to push us off schedule. After leaving the simulation process on for about 21 hours with max particle set at 1000000. The water only coverd a third portion of the fish tank and that was at max particle set at 1000000, which in realflow is an excessive amount of water particles in a scene. I tried several times to solve the issue of the water particle only filling up a small section of the fish tank but every attempt to fix it would increase the time wasted on solving the problems as i would have to wait for each test to simulate. After several tests i found out the cause of the problem was that the scene file with the fish tank was huge. The actual fish tank itself exceeded the original size as we had planned for, we only found out the true extent of the size of the fish tank when it was imported into realflow. The alternative for us would be to use the dynamic system on Maya, the Maya version im using at home is 2009 and is abel to use the Ndynamics option which is a new feature in Maya 2009. Ive had a word with Ash and he said if worse comes to worse hell try to simulate the water with lighting which i think is really clever.

Progress so far

At the moment everything seems like it’s going according to the schedule, we have had few minor errors but not that troublesome for us to not move forward. The last few weeks were rather chaotic as we tried to reach the deadline for rave on air which was unsuccessful. Well at this stage we have finished the modelling, rigging and animating, all that is left to do is to fill the fish tank up with water which im doing at home. The majority of my time this week was mostly focused on completing the DVD showreel for Dan and setting up the emrald lab. The other half the time spent on the contextual study essay, i know it should have been done by now but ive been caught up in quite a few deadlines it resulted in me neglecting one subject for another

Animation test 2

this is the animation test 2, which has the bubbel shader Ash imported in

Animation sequence 1

real and cartoon bubble simulation

compositing and maya fish refrence

Here are some videos used for refrence when compositing our maya scene into live action

Animation test

Filming complete

Ok Wednesday was the day me and Ash had schedule was the day we would start filming our live action footage, we could not start animating our fishes unless we had the filming done so filming was our main objective. I had already planned from before that i would bring in my HD camcorder to use to film our footage but at the last min i found out that once the footage was recoreded i would need Sony Vegas programe to convert the footage to quicktime format which the uni does not have. On the day of filming we thought we might aswell ask the laon shop for any cameras that are available to rent, they said the latest we would be able to recieve a camera would be next week Tuesday. That would definetly be a no no as Rave on air is set for May 29th and filming few days before the deadline would be impossible. We tried asking everyone we knew if they had a camera or could bring one in the next day, Sam and Stuart said that they may have one lying around at home somewhere but wasnt a garantee. After finding Jared and letting him no about our situation he hooked us up with a camera from the loan shop which was very good of him. And after that the whole day was spent on filming and uploading the footage up on the hard drive.

Rigging complete

OK i managed to get the rig done smoothly in the end, i roughly spent two days on the rig as its not part of what i am familiar with. Searching on the internet for examples for some fish rigs was unsuccessful as most of the tutorials covered human rigging. The problem i encountered earlier was the distortion with the side fins when rotating the main back fins. I found out this was caused when i started the first joint from where the mouth was, for some reason this was the reason for the distortion of the other parts of the fish’s body. Through trial and error i came across a solution which was to start the joint from half way of the fish’s belly, this seemed to clear the distortions that would be caused by rotating the back fins. And secondly i really didn’t have to paint any weights which was good to hear. I was going to use squash and stretch deformers to imitate the breath in and out motion, instead i thought it would be more convenient if i would produce this motion using blend shapes. Before i started on the rigging procedure i went and did abit of research on previous fish rigs hoping it would give me a clear understanding of where to start. I found a particularly good fish rig done by an individual on YouTube, i went ahead and messaged the person for some advice. This is what he had to say

"With the fish, rig it normally, use splineIK for the tail, blend shapes for the mouth and rig the fins simply but use blend shapes for any curving fin poses. On another rig, use dynamic spline IK for the tail, referencing your splines from the other rig. That way you get some nice ripples when you need to".

I showed this to Ash also but in the end i didnt really use it as i really didnt understand the procedure in making the similar motion. In the end here is a picture of the final rig structure i used for my fish

Bubble bomb test 1

Seeing as we were going to use bubbles to in the scene, ash found a soapy bubble shader which can be applied to any model.

Finding Nemo fish tank scene

Nemo escaping the fish tank

Final high poly fish textured

This is the completed verison of the fish i will be suing in the scene. this is high poly well not that high

Fish refrence

Here are some pictures of verious fishes such as the tropical fish to the common gold fish, these are late refrence pictures which i should of posted up time ago. Better late then never eh

Progress so far

Today i decided to take the day off from uni and continue working at home on the project. So far its looking good as completing the animation for 29th May become more doable. Yesturday me and Ash completed texturing the fishes which was good, but the only problwm that we have is that uni is currently using Maya 8.5 and the one im using at home is Maya 2009. Thier has been a few issue of our work not loading up currectly on the uni computer and the reason was of the two different Maya software versions. Like on Wednesday i textured the fish at home and brang it in the next day to show Ash but the file would not open up. The first thing i did was go straight on to google to try and find a solution becuase most of my work was done at home and i did not want to start all over again just to have it working on the uni computers. Ok for any one not knowing how to get your Maya 2009 scene file working on either Maya 2008 or 8.5 just follow these steps

• When your in Maya 2009 and you want to save your work make two copis one as a .MB (this will be your personal copy to use at home). The second copy should be saved as a .MA.
• Take the Maya .MA file to a computer which has Maya 8.5 or 2008
• Do not open up your file, right click on the your scene file and chosen open with word editor or notepad
• Once your there all you have to do is change where ever it has the words Maya 2009 to Maya 8.5
• Once done save file and close, you should now be able to open up your scene file on a Maya 8.5 version

Ok now back to our progress, well yesturday me ad ash gave our self an object to complete. We aimed at having the the rigging and blenshapes completed before Monday, we were having Monday a day for us to start filming and at the same time start animating this week coming.

Prolem with the pain effects

Seeing as we were going to have a fish and in our scene we wanted to make it as real looking as possible, Ashlee want ahead and looked at verious different pain effects which was useful when creating the under water like environment. When Ash brought in the next day i was very pleased with the results and how it fitted in with the fish tank plus ash placed the wind dynamics with one of the bushy looking thing which gave soft smooth movment like what you would see in an actual aquarium. But with all good things a problem always lurks round the corner, the actual file of the pain effect came a total of 200mg which kind of got me worried. I renderd about 50 frames on maya software which took about 2 mins which was ok, but right from the get go i knew we were going for photorealsitic look and inorder for us to achieve this we were going to have use maya mental ray. I went and had a go at rendering the scene under MR and the result came back quite badly, the first problem that arised was that rendering one frame took roughly 10 min and the second problem was that when rendering a single frame the screen was prompted with the famous c++ error.

I didnt want t give up hope just yet so i went home and tried to render a single frame hoping for a better result. The result came up even worse with rendering one frame took more then 30 mins, the reason for this was becuase i had placed photorealistic lighting settings such as GI and FG and not to mention a HDRI. And the worst part about it was i hadnt even imported the fluid from realflow which would increase the rendering time 10 folds. The only decision i had to come to was to not have the paint effects, i notified Ash about is but i would rather talk to him in person.

Explode test 2 including fluid

This is a second test done with the shatter effect but this time i have incorperated the realflow fluid into the fish tank. This test was done just to see what the impact of the exploding fish tank would have on the liquid.

Explode test 1

For our final scene me and ash decided on having the fish tank shatter as a result of the bomb like bubble. I have already had a go at maya shatter which works perfectly for what we are trying to achive, but the only problem with this method was that in order for the sahtter to take place we would need to add gravity to the tank and drop it to create a shatter collision. Researching more into this method i came across away round the problem, buy placing particles inside the the actual object i was able to get an explode effect which send the shards from the object flying. Here is a quick test i done

Treasure chest

Here is the treasure chest i produced, just needs to be tesxtured and then its ready to place in the fish tank

Reference

Here is a quick video used for refrence when animating the fish

Fish animation test 1

Blend shape test 1

Today i had a go at blend shapes for the fish through 0the help of verious tutorials on the internet. Last term i had a look at several other groups producing blend shapes for thier model. It seemed rather hard to produce a blend shape but when i came across a tutorial to help me out it was easy to do as 1 2 3. Below is a quick test of a very basic blend shape of the mouth opening and closing

Test Render

well today i stayed at home so i could try out some new techniques with realflow and maya, i first started off with working with blend shapes for the fish i modelled it was only a test but it look good so far. I then had ago on realflow estimating the amount of water we would actually use for the tank its self. Rendering out of realflow took around 7 hours which weren’t to bad as i continued modelling props in maya. For our theme we were having the fishes done with a cartoon style to it but with everything outside the tank would have to be photo real. That why i test out final gather and global-illumination with maya, also used a bit of caustics effect. Below is a rough test how it would look

Making of the fish

Fish test rig 1

This was done to simulate a quick test of how a rigged fish would turn out, i had just used joint tool for the rig but no deformers as of yet. For a quick first test i would say it looks pretty good, the only problem with this rig test was that the movement of the back fins would influence the actuall body of the fish. When viewing several video of fishes swimming the back fin does not apply a lot of influence to the body movement. This is something i would have to look into and see how i can over come this

Barrel model

Ship wheel

Fish tank reference

Storyboards

Story update

It was time for me and ash to gather together and discuss our project brief with Jared. As we told Jared about our storyline he asked us if 6 weeks would be enough to finish the whole project plus an early submission for Rave on air. To be honest even i had doubts about whether we would to complete this ambitious project before deadline, like always i had already started modelling the female character successfully and all i needed to model was the head. Speaking with Jared he suggested we turn our story into a set advert probably advertising dog food. Earlier that day me and Ash decided on altering the story from the bickering neighbours to a espionage theme. Ashlee came up with the idea and i really like so we were set on having this for our story. We did not really have to change much the female character was going to stay the same, it was only the environment that was going to change. For the espionage theme we had the story of a female spy breaking into a mansion to retrieve something of importance to her, we tried to go with theme resembling mission impossible.

The only problem we had with the story was that it really did not make any sense to the viewers, thats why Jared gave us advice on changing the whole piece to a 30 seconds animation advert. Towards the end of the meeting me and ashley still had no idea story wise for the advert. Thats when again Jared gave us a brilliant idea of having a 30 second animation based on two fishes in a fish tank.




TBC

Production schedule

Production schedule 1

Rough concept

Brainstorming

Ok so for this terms project i have decided to work with my good friend Ashlee, he is also focusing on becoming a game environment modeller. As we sat down for the first time as a team we began to pitch in possible ideas for our storyline. The first idea that was pitched in was about two celebrity neighbours who do not get along with each other. The idea became quite interesting while discussing it but we needed to add a story of why the neighbours dislike each other. One of the reasons we came up with was to have both neighbours whom were females were to argue about a particular boy which they both had a crush on, even though it sounds so cheesy we knew it would work because of the humerous side of it.

CVA 205 Project breif

For this brief you will be required to work upon 30 second animation pieces to either broadcast on Rave On Air, or used in the associated animation exhibtion at the end of term.

You have the choice of working towards one of the following outputs:

1. An advert or promotion of the that Level 2 Product Design students have been working on.

2. A character based animation piece to take advantage of the Musion setup that will be in place for Rave On Air.

3. An Animation piece of your own design.

4. Additionally, there may be the possibility to produce animated content for CCB students if their programmes require it, this will depend upon demand, and will subject to negotiation with your tutor.


You will be free to work in whatever way you choose, so long as it meets the following stipulation:

A 30 second running time
(if you are working towards option 2) It promoted the value of the brand chosen by the Product students.
It meets the formatting requirements for ROA