This is a compilations of the various media tests that I have researched before starting my project. Please understand that all of these examples are from tutorials and workbooks, and therefore they are not entirely original work. However, it is through the reconstruction of these tutorials that I will learn the techniques and knowledge that I need to complete my project from a practical standpoint.
Each video has narration. I try to make them as quick as possible to demo my understanding of what I learned through the tutorial and what that video will aid in the future. However for anything I did not mention in the media tests/experiments in the video, I have annotated in this post.
Cloth tests:
First of all, I watched a video that helped me understand the basics of cloth. I was unable to use Cloth 101, a gnomon workshop DVD as it detailed a system of cloth that no longer exists in maya today. Therefore, not having any other information available from the library, I sought out tutorials on youtube.
What is interesting to note of Maya's ncloth, is that is a system dedicated to using 4-sided regular polygon shapes to simulate cloth. It has all the bells and whistles of the classic cloth system, but does NOT work with nurb or sub-divisional shapes in Maya.
Here are the tests:
It is important to learn cloth, as I have planned the use of it in my final asset. I hope to carry out more specific examples in my media tests, more akin to something I'll be doing, but for now I'll just get to grips with the basics.
Maya's native ncloth system does not seem too difficult to understand and carry out, so I hope it will be one of the easier aspects of the artefact's creation and from doing these tests I'm not so worried about the final.
Rigging Tests:
Rigging is essentially putting strings on the puppet that is the 3D model. It is essential to get the character to move, but can be quite technically involved, sometimes even incorporating maths techniques like vector maths and such.
Rigging is the one of the core skills of technical artists. While there is much more to technical art than rigging, TAs are often referred to as rigging artists instead. There is some confusion to the role, and today is expands beyond just rigging. However, a lot of complex rigging techniques are used in some of the biggest films today. Some of the techniques below, however, are very standard and are some of the most basic rigging skills a TA can have.
Currently, the third test does not have audio, as the recording messed up half way through. In short, it is just me going over an IK/FK switch, where there are 3 sets of leg joints (in this case). One we can control, one that is set with IK(inverse kinemetics) and FK (forward kinemetics). There are some orient constraints set to an attribute on the FK/IK switch that allows the animator to interpolate between the two. This is useful because it allows more flexibility when animating, as the animator is not restricted to only one method of animation.
Hair/Fur Tests:
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Update To the Rescue
Right, so now that Christmas and New Year are safely out of the way, I can address my neglect of this blog. This does NOT mean I have neglected my project, but that I have been working on it in the meantime between Christmas and now. So let's break it down and clear up the backlog. I will hope to record the iterative process in which I've been approaching the work.
The Overall Project Changes and Structure
New title:
Technical Art: Investigating the Bridge Between Artists and Programmers.
Abstract:
Since the last post, the proposed project has changed and been refined - for the better. The project is now looking at the sole role of the technical artist, and how to evaluate it.
1. Conducting a literature review on the area which will let me definite my judgement criteria. These judgement criteria need to be established early on to allow myself to evaluate work. Because technical art is a new field between field, I have devised my own method of evaluated based on research which should help solidify the role and the work created by a technical artist.
2. Evaluate pieces of existing work with criteria. Although I have originally wrote up a method of selecting pieces of work, and conducting an interview of a specific piece to help develop my criteria, I am currently revamping this part of the project - as I'm not convinced my current method will give me solid findings. At the meeting tomorrow with my supervisor I will discuss this and hopefully have a clearer idea by submission on Friday. Because this does not reflect on the context of my studies, the proposal for AG1087A will most likely not be affected.
3. Conduct media tests that will inform the final assets produced for 4.0 These will also be evaluated with the criteria, and this process might also be modified due to the changes ongoing. As planned though, this is when I will be applying the three key proposed skills to my own work for the first time. This will allow a deeper insight into the criteria and project for me, and also help inform my final assets and the changes that must be made to make the art pieces more suitable.
4. The final assets proposed will be produced with all prior knowledge being utilised to create the final artefact for the project. This will also be tested against my criteria, which by this point should be a solid and final set that will allow anyone to evaluate work within technical art. The dissertation will be written alongside this.
There has been a great struggle for me to keep this project arts based. My personal thoughts on the role of the technical artist are that though they are artistically creative and capable of communicating and using the skills that an artist may do, they have the logical mind and ability to create pieces of work that work with the artists in mind. I created a thread on tech-artists.org detailing my research - hoping to get some feedback on my project and the idea it presented. It opened my mind to a lot of things, like the scope within technical art - not only the roles but the individuals too. Just as technical art is between art and programming, there are subsections of technical art that are between the hyper-technical TA and the artsy TA. This also proves that it is large enough to be considered its own discipline, considering the scope and the wealth of knowledge it takes to be a TA.
Ultimately, this project must be arts based, and the final assets I will produce will follow the character creation pipeline from conception to finish.
The thread is here for anyone interested: http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2196
Here is an appropriate place to put all the documentation that has been written regarding the subject throughout this time. As I've been spending a major part of my time getting the proposed project right, there are quite a few pieces to upload. If you are interested in my project at this point, it is worth reading through these for a more detailed breakdown of the project. I've tried my best to summarise it above, as well as posting the current abstract to help get across the updated proposed project. No doubt it will change again.
Proposal for AG1064A
Project Map
Learning Contract for AG1064A
Gantt Chart for AG1064A
One thing to note is that I am quite behind on my project plan, due to the order in which things have been done and the changes made. This uploaded Gantt chart and proposal reflect my project as of 12/12/2011.
As this is a retrospective post, these things will have to be taken into consideration.
This is the proposal for AG1084A. Please note that this is prove to change until submission on Friday 13th January 2012.
Proposal for AG1087A
Pre-production
Since the last post, things have kicked into pre-production. I'll start off with posting a progression of sketches and research since.
The Creature:
Creature research development
Aside from using reference from real-life animals, I drew inspiration from many creature artists too. I wanted many qualities to been seen in my creature, such as strength, innocence, compassion, hardiness, etc... from here on, I continue to develop my creature through sketches. It must have a mystical quality. As a lot of the creatures that I can envision have horns/antlers, etc - I hope to incorporate that in my designs. Here are some of the developing sketches.
As part of my media tests, I was going to take a concept that could utilise a lot of the techniques I wanted to implement into my pipeline. Because of this, I selected one of the creatures, and decided to develop its head further.
For this, I used sculptris, a free 3D sculpting package from the makers of Zbrush. It's an excellent tool, as it allows for the quick development of concepts in 3D space, without the worry of having to build a base mesh or worry about the topology. Because it uses tessellation, you can add detail constantly to the model, and also reduce it at will - making it perfectly versatile for realising some concepts in 3D.
Here is one of the first concepts: please excuse the quality as it was my first time using the tool:
Then I concepted another sketch:
The Character
Here is the beginnings on the base mesh, with attention to edge flow. While creating this base mesh, I learnt a lot about accommodating for the movement of the character, something that is vital to the TA's process when it comes to rigging. I thought about the flexibility his face must have to accommodate his expressions. However, although I had initially proposed to make a base mesh, this did not make sense entirely in the flow of the pipeline. Because I still had to sculpt the head, creating the flow on the face is not the best mesh to sculpt on, as an equally spaced out mesh with square quads is the best sculpting mesh. I also found it difficult to get a sense of character developing them this way and found progress too slow. As all my development had been entirely 2D so far, I did not 100% understand the shape and depth of the face. Therefore I abandoned this endeavour, and decided to sculpt the character first, to get a true understanding of what I wanted them to look like.
Above is the next step, in which I took the character into Sculptris to sculpt the head out. You can see the progress from sculpts 1- 10 here. I'll breakdown the process you can can understand why I did this.
From heads 1-4, was a general sculpt as I felt out the human form digitally. You will notice that the reference I used make this character look Caucasian at first, which was a lot easier to reference as I worked out the face. The idea here was to block out the silhouette and get the proportions of the face correct before moving on. This part took the greatest amount of time as it was the most important part of the process. Reference was used the stuff above, until I thought the character looked human enough.
Heads 5-6 was when I decided to sculpt the character I had in mind. Now that I had a rough base that was based on reference, I was able to sculpt out my character without having to worry much about proportions and such anymore. Instantly, I rounded the head, make the cheekbones more prominent, rounded the nose off and pushed it up the face and pulled out the ears. I also changed the eyes to accommodate an eyeball.
Heads 7-8 was just more refining of the sculpt. I put sub-objects in as eyeballs so that I could shape the sockets. As you can see in 7, my character does not have the "single lid" or epicanthal fold that many Asian cultures have. In head 8, I changed the sculpt to recognise this.
Between heads 9-10 was just more refinement of the shape of the head, the eye sand neck. Although not much changes can be seen, this was the tweaking stage where I made sure the head looked good from all angles, as well as the detailing of the ear.
I finished it at a stage where I felt my character was recognisable enough and I had learnt what I wanted and did not want in my character. I wanted them to look round-faced and boyish, but also solemn and calm. Through this exercise, I managed to flesh out what I wanted in a much more intuitive way than through sketching. The following picture and video are just for the final sculpt. This is not the final asset, but is very close to what I want for my character design. Currently I just have to flesh out the clothing and accessories they might have, as well as add any details in the face.
The Overall Project Changes and Structure
New title:
Technical Art: Investigating the Bridge Between Artists and Programmers.
Abstract:
What is a technical artist and why are they important? This proposal hopes to explore the ill-defined role of the technical artist, a relatively new interdisciplinary job that straddles the two drastically different disciplines within the creative industries (artist and programmer) and marries them to create a specific skill set as artist-technologist.Initially the research context will be reviewed to explore the nature and extent of skill gap between the two disciplines of artist and programmer, and how this gap is currently being bridged. In particular key artistic skills that should be part of the technical artist's repertoire will be identified and used to establish criteria that can be used to examine and judge existing work.The proposer will then develop media tests and analyse them against these criteria defined to define weaknesses and strengths. The judgement criteria will be refined as necessary.The next stage will be the creation of an artefact. This artefact will contain all the key skills - detailing the artist and programmer's workflow through the creation of characters suitable for a production piece. This artefact will then be judged against the criteria.The final stage will be dissertation, which will critically evaluate the effectiveness of judgement criteria, and how these facilitated the development of project and the final artefact.
Since the last post, the proposed project has changed and been refined - for the better. The project is now looking at the sole role of the technical artist, and how to evaluate it.
1. Conducting a literature review on the area which will let me definite my judgement criteria. These judgement criteria need to be established early on to allow myself to evaluate work. Because technical art is a new field between field, I have devised my own method of evaluated based on research which should help solidify the role and the work created by a technical artist.
2. Evaluate pieces of existing work with criteria. Although I have originally wrote up a method of selecting pieces of work, and conducting an interview of a specific piece to help develop my criteria, I am currently revamping this part of the project - as I'm not convinced my current method will give me solid findings. At the meeting tomorrow with my supervisor I will discuss this and hopefully have a clearer idea by submission on Friday. Because this does not reflect on the context of my studies, the proposal for AG1087A will most likely not be affected.
3. Conduct media tests that will inform the final assets produced for 4.0 These will also be evaluated with the criteria, and this process might also be modified due to the changes ongoing. As planned though, this is when I will be applying the three key proposed skills to my own work for the first time. This will allow a deeper insight into the criteria and project for me, and also help inform my final assets and the changes that must be made to make the art pieces more suitable.
4. The final assets proposed will be produced with all prior knowledge being utilised to create the final artefact for the project. This will also be tested against my criteria, which by this point should be a solid and final set that will allow anyone to evaluate work within technical art. The dissertation will be written alongside this.
There has been a great struggle for me to keep this project arts based. My personal thoughts on the role of the technical artist are that though they are artistically creative and capable of communicating and using the skills that an artist may do, they have the logical mind and ability to create pieces of work that work with the artists in mind. I created a thread on tech-artists.org detailing my research - hoping to get some feedback on my project and the idea it presented. It opened my mind to a lot of things, like the scope within technical art - not only the roles but the individuals too. Just as technical art is between art and programming, there are subsections of technical art that are between the hyper-technical TA and the artsy TA. This also proves that it is large enough to be considered its own discipline, considering the scope and the wealth of knowledge it takes to be a TA.
Ultimately, this project must be arts based, and the final assets I will produce will follow the character creation pipeline from conception to finish.
The thread is here for anyone interested: http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2196
Here is an appropriate place to put all the documentation that has been written regarding the subject throughout this time. As I've been spending a major part of my time getting the proposed project right, there are quite a few pieces to upload. If you are interested in my project at this point, it is worth reading through these for a more detailed breakdown of the project. I've tried my best to summarise it above, as well as posting the current abstract to help get across the updated proposed project. No doubt it will change again.
Proposal for AG1064A
Project Map
Learning Contract for AG1064A
Gantt Chart for AG1064A
One thing to note is that I am quite behind on my project plan, due to the order in which things have been done and the changes made. This uploaded Gantt chart and proposal reflect my project as of 12/12/2011.
As this is a retrospective post, these things will have to be taken into consideration.
This is the proposal for AG1084A. Please note that this is prove to change until submission on Friday 13th January 2012.
Proposal for AG1087A
Pre-production
Since the last post, things have kicked into pre-production. I'll start off with posting a progression of sketches and research since.
The Creature:
Creature research development
Aside from using reference from real-life animals, I drew inspiration from many creature artists too. I wanted many qualities to been seen in my creature, such as strength, innocence, compassion, hardiness, etc... from here on, I continue to develop my creature through sketches. It must have a mystical quality. As a lot of the creatures that I can envision have horns/antlers, etc - I hope to incorporate that in my designs. Here are some of the developing sketches.
As part of my media tests, I was going to take a concept that could utilise a lot of the techniques I wanted to implement into my pipeline. Because of this, I selected one of the creatures, and decided to develop its head further.
For this, I used sculptris, a free 3D sculpting package from the makers of Zbrush. It's an excellent tool, as it allows for the quick development of concepts in 3D space, without the worry of having to build a base mesh or worry about the topology. Because it uses tessellation, you can add detail constantly to the model, and also reduce it at will - making it perfectly versatile for realising some concepts in 3D.
Here is one of the first concepts: please excuse the quality as it was my first time using the tool:
Then I concepted another sketch:
Here is also a video of the model, to give more of an idea of the shape and silhouette.
This mannequin was then taken into retopology and painting packed 3DCoat. As part of the pipeline, the current model (which has 200,000 tris), it utterly unusable for animation. This is because of the wireframe, as seen here.
This does not have any edge flow, and even if reduced is still too high for animation. So a retopology was needed. Here is the finished and retopologised mesh. It is import to compliment the contours of the face, and also to acknowledge what and where parts might be animated - and which way they will be moved.
Now I need to add the detail, such as the eye sockets, nostrils, inner mouth and horns before I can move on to use it on my media tests. This is the stage I am currently at.
While this creature is being developed alongside the media tests, the character is being developed too.
First of all, it was decided that the character would be of either Siberian or Mongolian descent, due to the climate of the characters - a frozen tundra-land. Though the world these characters inhabit is entirely fictional, to achieve believability, they must be grounded in reality somewhat. This lead to some research into these cultures. Mood boards for the character were posted previously to set the tone for them.
I had already decided they were going to be a nomad male. The age range was still being explored when I posted the original mood boards and drawings. I hoped to expand on this a little more through sketches. While sketching, I referred to some more research. This is posted below.
An extensive, somewhat scientific guide was put together by artist cedarseed, linked here:
This was invaluable for getting the ethic qualities of my character correct and allowed me to achieve this realism a little more and informed my character creation process
Here is also a gallery of other inspiration. In it are a few pictures dedicated to edge flow in the character's face, something I used when creating the beginning of my base mesh below. I'll speak of this a little later.
It was around this time of sketching, that I realised I wanted my character to look relatively young. I also wanted to make sure he was part of the world I had created in my head, so he is not 100% human but is still human enough to create a human character rig. Because of the cold climate he is meant to live in, I re-evaluated my initial sketches, as his clothes were too light here and did not reflect his climate, which is as much of his character as his design - as it is something that links him and the creature together. Because he is a trader/hunter, I also gave him furs and luggage - something he would need for his travels. I hope to expand upon this more in further drawings.
Here is the beginnings on the base mesh, with attention to edge flow. While creating this base mesh, I learnt a lot about accommodating for the movement of the character, something that is vital to the TA's process when it comes to rigging. I thought about the flexibility his face must have to accommodate his expressions. However, although I had initially proposed to make a base mesh, this did not make sense entirely in the flow of the pipeline. Because I still had to sculpt the head, creating the flow on the face is not the best mesh to sculpt on, as an equally spaced out mesh with square quads is the best sculpting mesh. I also found it difficult to get a sense of character developing them this way and found progress too slow. As all my development had been entirely 2D so far, I did not 100% understand the shape and depth of the face. Therefore I abandoned this endeavour, and decided to sculpt the character first, to get a true understanding of what I wanted them to look like.
Above is the next step, in which I took the character into Sculptris to sculpt the head out. You can see the progress from sculpts 1- 10 here. I'll breakdown the process you can can understand why I did this.
From heads 1-4, was a general sculpt as I felt out the human form digitally. You will notice that the reference I used make this character look Caucasian at first, which was a lot easier to reference as I worked out the face. The idea here was to block out the silhouette and get the proportions of the face correct before moving on. This part took the greatest amount of time as it was the most important part of the process. Reference was used the stuff above, until I thought the character looked human enough.
Heads 5-6 was when I decided to sculpt the character I had in mind. Now that I had a rough base that was based on reference, I was able to sculpt out my character without having to worry much about proportions and such anymore. Instantly, I rounded the head, make the cheekbones more prominent, rounded the nose off and pushed it up the face and pulled out the ears. I also changed the eyes to accommodate an eyeball.
Heads 7-8 was just more refining of the sculpt. I put sub-objects in as eyeballs so that I could shape the sockets. As you can see in 7, my character does not have the "single lid" or epicanthal fold that many Asian cultures have. In head 8, I changed the sculpt to recognise this.
Between heads 9-10 was just more refinement of the shape of the head, the eye sand neck. Although not much changes can be seen, this was the tweaking stage where I made sure the head looked good from all angles, as well as the detailing of the ear.
I finished it at a stage where I felt my character was recognisable enough and I had learnt what I wanted and did not want in my character. I wanted them to look round-faced and boyish, but also solemn and calm. Through this exercise, I managed to flesh out what I wanted in a much more intuitive way than through sketching. The following picture and video are just for the final sculpt. This is not the final asset, but is very close to what I want for my character design. Currently I just have to flesh out the clothing and accessories they might have, as well as add any details in the face.
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