Work in progress #1, Thoughts and comments

By Tiina Pyykkö, AD:

This is a scene from the beginning of the story, in which Marilyn approaches her new home in a pickup truck. In the background you can see the farmyard, but also the rest of the world created for “Homecoming”: 3D-field around the farm and trees at the edges of the field. Behind 3D-models lies a painting (made by digital artist Sini Pakarinen) that gives a rather realistic illusion of hills far away in the horizon, sky and clouds. The clouds appear to be moving, but they stay still on the painting – only the camera is moving.

The colours of the farm and rest of the world are pretty much what I wanted, but for some reason the colours on Marilyn sitting near to camera look horrific, like there would be a whole lot of grey used on her textures. My guess is that, due to paleness of Marilyn’s skin and hair, the green light reflecting from the back of the pickup truck mix up with colours on Marilyn and this makes her look at least nauseous, if not absolutely a corpse. By changing the colour of the car for example into brown and making Marilyn’s own colours a bit stronger she will probably look alive and charming again. Also, in this clip our cinematographer hasn’t finished the lightning yet and I believe there is no light aimed directly to Marilyn, so after fixing the textures and lights the clip will surely look quite different from this raw version.

So what this clip teaches me about designing characters for 3D-animation? It’s not enough that character’s colours look good on the model sheet, for they will be in interaction with reflections from many different objects during the animation, for example as common object as green grass. White and light yellow look so cute on a character, but they probably make the person adjusting the lamps on scene to pull his hair off. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use light colours, I just think it’s important to be aware that it’s difficult to keep light colours pure without burning them through with too much light on the scene. Even better if you have time to test your charchter in different surroundings before the actual animating begins to make sure its colours really fit in.

By Hannu Koivuranta, Lighting Lead & Director of Photography:

This is also done, but needs some minor tweaking. The shadows are too strong inside the car and it just doesn’t look real. Marilyn is also a very difficult character to light, since the topography of her face is very 3-dimensional and the shader of her hair has not been fixed (it emits too much light).

This video is an early draft of the shot. The background is not in its right place. The farm is supposed to reveal itself from the right side of the image, behind the car. It would then be in sync with Marilyn peeking through the board and the road wouldn’t pass the car as it does in the end.

The background layer is also out of place – it is accidentally moving, which should not be the case.

On top of all this, the final camera movement is missing. We were going for a hand-held look to emphasize Marilyn’s experience of arrival to the strange new farm.

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Understanding the workflow

Our lighting lead/director of photography planned this diagram first on a chalkboard and then with VUE. There are two main points why diagrams like this are important:

1) Making the folder structure clear to everybody. The first row in the diagram explains the names of the folders and who’s job it is to transfer files in and out of there. As we’ve told, we are using Dropbox and it gets easily messed up if there is no plans how to name the files and folders.

2) Making the workflow clear to everybody. Even the crewmembers with  “minor” roles need to know what’s about to happen. Also different deadlines are easy to set when you can visualize the path of he project.

This kind of diagram SHOULD have been done from the beginning of the project, but better now than never. It would be wise to print  the whole diagram on a huge piece of paper and hang it somewhere so that everybody could see it every day. (You could even have little name-tags that would indicate the person working on a certain stage.)

The day after this was done, we found out that the composing can be done with blender. So we deleted the “After Effects”-stage, because it’s better/faster to do the job with the same programm. The point here is: make your diagrams easy to correct, because there will be corrections!

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2 Problems solved, 98 to go.

We had our first “problem solving” -meetings the past week. We sure did tackle some of the major problems but the reality is that every time we sit down together, a bunch of new problems occur.

One of the causes for our problems is that there still wasn’t enough pre-planning. The modelling, rigging and texturing were all made following a “to do” -list. That was great! But the problem was that we never did any real decisions concerning how to name the files, where to save them, what to do when you update a file but you dont want to delete the previous one, and so on…This was all done in a sort-of-orderly fashion and the result was folders full of files that where sort of organized. And with a group of 14, it really cant be sort of organized.

In the picture there’s Tiina, Markus, Juho and Jussi and on the screen there is the list of all of our problems. When ever somebody solves something, we mark down the date and the name of the person who solved the problems. (This way we can ask the person directly if there’s still something wrong.)

We were wondering how to produce clouds. First we planned that they would be just 2D images but then Hannu found this cloud generator at Blendernation.com! It turned out to be simple, good looking and easy to use.

So we’ll definitely be using that! It’s a shame that everything isn’t so easy 😀

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