Getting started: Inspiration and Storyboard

At the beginning of the project I tried to make a Mind Map first to find ideas and directions for the project. After that I had some general ideas and some initial key words for my project: children, colour, dolls, dream. Then based on these I came up with, I looked for some storyboards and pictures to search for further inspiration.

With some ideas in mind, I drew up three shots to try and tell a coherent story.

Animatic

Based on the previous three shots drafts, I thought about the placement of the camera and the structure of the story, drawing the storyboard and creating the animatic, which tells the story of a little girl in bed looking at a storybook with a picture of a doll that comes to life and has magic. However, in the night, her doll comes to life and cover her with a quilt. I wanted the story to be easy and sweet, so I opted for a more cartoonish design when considering the modelling.

Exercise: modelling

During the course we practised modelling at different levels of complexity, which I found useful as it contained some very useful modelling techniques.

Modeling

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I searched for some illustrations of the house for reference and drew some drafts. Being a cabin in the woods, it should be made mostly of wood. I wanted it to look more stylized, so designed an irregular chimney on the house. While looking for inspiration I found the effect of cutting out layers of paper interesting and wanted to use the clouds and the moon as flat models, like cut-out pieces of paper, to give the overall effect a more child style.

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I tried a few methods and found some difficulty in creating the curves, my tutor Sam showed me a very useful method of using Adobe Illustrator to draw the curves and import them into Maya, after which I made more drafts to add details to the model.

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In order to add details to the model, I have created tiles for the roof. I found that when copying all the tiles and passing the attributes (UVs), I tended to have problems with the UVs can’t layout. Considering that I wanted to make textures for the different tiles, in the future I will make UVs before copying, which might solve the problem.

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As I needed two scenes for my shots, I also looked for references to the interior set-up. I designed the furniture for the room in a child’s style, adding some decorative items such as books and a sofa.

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Exercise: Animation and Rigging

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In the process of learning Rigging and animating with Bullet, I gained a deeper knowledge of animation in Maya, although problems arose in the process of using Bullet, which was solved in time by adjusting the values. Here I felt very rewarding and they laid some foundation for the animation part.

Texturing

I wanted the house to have more color with a warmer overall color palette so I drew the house and tried to give it a more comfortable look with different colors.

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In fact, I made almost all of the textures using the Substance Painter. I sorted the different models and cropped the UVs to reduce the number of pages of textures needed as much as possible. In the process, I created edge smears for many of the materials to hopefully make them look more realistic in the render.

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It took me quite a while to cut the UVs and create the textures in Substance Painter, it was easy to find errors in the UVs when importing the models into the software, so I was constantly going back and forth between the two software programs to modify the UVs. When I first created the textures for the books, I put all their UVs together. Later I decided that this was too time-consuming and inefficient, so I singled out some of the books and drew and pasted the materials(https://www.textures.com/) in Photoshop and utilized them several times.

I created the rough terrain undulations in ZBrush and finally painted the effect I wanted in Substance Painter using different materials and mask overlays, which gave me satisfaction.

For the final part of the scene, to give the ground a richer look, I downloaded the model of the tree on TurboSquid(https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/blender-carrot-crystal-oak-tree-3d-model-1189852#) and imported it into the scene, giving it new textures.

Lighting

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As I wanted the outside of the house to be at night, I tried different lights to achieve the night effect but without being too dark. I used a night skydome light and turned the intensity down. To have a moonlight effect I set a parallel light and a darker area light in front of the house, also in front of the moon, and turned the light to light blue and light purple to make the light appear to be shining from the front. I set up the glow for the moon and the street light bulb, adjusted for a more appropriate brightness, and then set up two Area lights next to the clouds to blend in with the lights next to them.

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As it is night outside, the light coming in from the outside of the room should not be too strong. At first, I used skydome light as the main light source, but it was too bright and after replacing HDRI I reduced the intensity of the skydome. Considering the interior lighting, I switched to using area light for the main lighting, which can leave a more pronounced shadow in the room.

Animation

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I was looking for a rig to animate and finally downloaded a dog character from Lots of Freebies, Douglas the Corgi(https://brandonschaal.gumroad.com/l/Douglas), which I thought was cute and a good fit for my scene. After downloading it, I tried some simple poses and downloaded the AnimSchool Picker(https://www.animschool.com/pickerInfo.aspx), unfortunately, when I imported the character into the scene the Picker would not open and the computer would crash.

I hadn’t done any animation on dogs, so I watched some videos and movements of dogs and recorded them as a reference for the animation.

As my character changed to a dog, some changes needed to be made to the storyboard. Based on the three previous shots, I altered the plot of the story: the puppy was playing with the ball in bed and it fell, but the puppy was sleepy and didn’t pick it up. Miraculously, the ball rolled back on its own and returned to the sleeping puppy.

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With the storyboard ready to go, I reworked the camera movements and started animating the ball. There are two types of trajectories for the ball, falling off the bed and rolling on a flat surface. For the falling animation, I drew the trajectory of the bouncing ball for reference. To better adjust the movement of the ball I turned on the display of the trajectory and adjusted the animation with the Graph Editor. Considering the texture of the ball, it also needs to be rotated during movement.

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According to the reference, I adjusted the sitting position in shot 2 and the lying position in shot 3. I had some trouble in adjusting the lying position, the dog’s hind legs twisted easily at the joint with the body. This took me some time to make it look as natural as possible. I designed small movements for the dog’s ears and body so that they didn’t look too stiff in the animation. The wagging of the tail also helps to make the movements look more realistic.

Rendering

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For rendering efficiency, I usually turn down the test resolution when viewing the render. Sometimes the material viewed in Maya will not be quite the same as the rendered one, especially when opening the project on a different computer, and the render needs to be checked often. After doing all the work, I used the school’s Renderfarm to render my project and although I encountered a few errors, I was able to fix most of them by resubmitting once I became familiar with the rendering process.

Reflection

In this 3D project, I went through a complete 3D animation production process. From pre-production to the final output, this has allowed me to become more familiar with 3D animation production and to discover the parts that interest me more. In the same way, it is also challenging. As problems keep arising, I am used to searching for solutions on the internet myself, which will allow me to become more familiar with such difficulties as I solve them. For the texture part, I spent a lot of time creating different looks for almost all the models. Looking at it now, I don’t need to spend so much time doing this, some of the less important items can be replaced with a simpler material and a good result can be achieved. The large number of materials also causes resource problems. Too many files cause Maya to become less efficient on my computer, and likewise more software problems. I think I need to learn how to save resources and be more efficient afterwards. There was also the issue of timetabling, although we created a schedule before the project started, I found that I didn’t follow it properly. Stretching out one part of the time only takes time away from other parts, and I need to improve my time management. Another idea is about the production order, if there are another 3D animation project, I would like to put the animation and characters before the texturing, so that the movements can be adjusted better to reduce lagging and to allow more time. Overall, I have gained a lot from this project and I am more than satisfied with the final result of the scene. I like modelling and texturing the scene and the characters but I will also try to improve other parts in my future studies.

Final Output

Shot 1

Shot 2

Shot 3

‘Final Outcomes’ Reel:

Music and sounds

Reference website:

freesound: https://freesound.org/browse/

uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/browse/music/easygoing

aigei: https://www.aigei.com/