Locksmith Animation

Set up by Sarah Smith, former creative director at Aardman and with backing from Elisabeth Murdoch and Double Negative, Locksmith Animation will be the first CG feature animation studio within the UK. This is some really exciting news, especially for someone like me who wants to one day work in feature animation. The majority of CG animation comes from the US and it will be good to see how a new studio will fare up against the more established studios within the industry. Being an extension of DNeg there will no doubt be highly skilled and experienced artists working together. This is a studio to keep an eye out for in the coming months and years and hopefully one day I can apply for an animation position. It can be somewhat difficult obtaining a visa for overseas jobs, so by having a feature film division set up in the UK it makes it more accessible (maybe not easier, as the standard will probably be very high but it gives me another opportunity to reach my goal of working in feature animation one day).

The majority of animation that is being produced in the UK tends to be for television and commercials, whilst this is great, it's even better to see that we are trying to expand further and make a name for ourselves.

New Business Cards

Last year I made some business cards for when I started going to conferences and networking events. As I am now drawing to the end of my time at university I thought it would be best to get these updated and to create something a bit more professional as I am beginning to enter the industry. Below are some of the designs I came up with. The first was what I started with before moving onto something a bit different as I felt it wasn't very eye catching and very plain. I got some advice from a friend who is a graphic designer about font and colour as this was something I was not sure about. He suggested that a deep red would work well for my name and to keep the font the same as my title card on my showreel to ensure continuity. I adjusted the font colour to a dark grey as I felt that black was too bold for what I wanted to achieve, I wanted something that was easy on the eye and looked good in terms of design.

My final design is shown below with both front and back. I'm really happy with what I've designed and will be getting these printed soon using MOO. I've chosen to go with MOO as their quality of printing is to a high standard and I've been impressed with the outcome of other people's business cards who have used them as well.

Front

Back

Claw Marks - After Effects

I was advised to try and put some claw marks down the tree as my dragon slides down. To me the easiest way to try and do this was in After Effects, as here I would be able to paint onto the video layer and know exactly where the dragon was travelling. There was a way to do it in Maya by animating a texture, but it was too hard to figure out where the dragon would be contacting the tree using a flat 2d texture. Within After Effects there is a paint tool, much like Photoshop you are also able to paint on layers and adjust these. The video below is what I created using the paint tool. It looks okay at the beginning, however I think because the dragon curves down and around the tree, the 'claw marks' end up looking out of place a bit. It would have worked better if they were broken up and weren't in one long line, but as he is sliding down the whole of the tree, it wouldn't make sense if the claw marks started and stopped at certain points. The other issue I had was the dragon and other objects passing behind the paint layers, I tried masking out the tree and changing the layer positions but this didn't seem to work. Right now I don't have the time to try and figure this out, but I'm going to look into it a bit more and try and create a better effect for the end of year show.

Music Collaboration

As my animation has no dialogue, music would be playing a big part in conveying emotion and helping the whole short feel connected. I decided to send an email out to Leeds College of Music to see if anyone would be interested in composing for my animation. I got a lot of responses but decided to go with Josh Broughton after hearing what he had created previously. In order to make sure that he was the best choice for me, I gave him part of my animatic so that I could get a feeling for his ideas and what he could bring to my animation. I wanted something that would emphasise the emotions and actions of the character, along the lines of Looney Tunes. Ideally the music and sound design would have been created once the whole animation was completed, however Josh was producing the music for my animation as part of his module too, and his deadline came much sooner than mine. Because of this I sent him my animatic and he did the majority of the composing to that. Once I had started blocking out the animation I sent it along to him so he would have the complete timings. I tried to keep my animation as close to the animatic as possible in terms of timing. I did't want Josh to have to re-do the music or change it drastically. I found that this was somewhat of a hinderance as there were some shots that I felt needed extending, yet I couldn't do this due to the music being nearly complete. This wasn't either of our faults, just the timing for our deadlines clashed.

As Josh's deadline was the beginning of May I wanted to make sure that I gave him the complete animation all smoothed out so that it wasn't just in the blocking stage. I also managed to give him some rendered shots too as I was ahead of schedule. This benefited me a lot as rendering took me a lot longer than I had originally planned, so finishing my animation earlier because of Josh's deadline allowed me to start rendering sooner.

http://joshbroughton.com/

Smoke - After Effects

There are a couple of shots in my animation where my dragon takes off with a jetpack and soars through the sky. I knew I wanted to have a smoke effect in these shots, especially when it goes wrong as this will be more of a visual cue. I tried to use particle emitters in Maya however I couldn't get a good result and I knew that it would also increase the render time by a significant amount. Instead I decided to use After Effects and I made use of Trapcode Particular to create a smoke effect. First of all I created a black solid layer and used the preset smoke within tapcode to apply onto the solid. This already had a preset animation but I deleted this and animated it so that it would follow the jetpack. I also adjusted different settings such as the opacity and lifespan of the particles.

When it came to the jetpack failing, I wanted the smoke to turn black and for flames to emerge. To get this effect, I animated the colour of the smoke to turn a dark grey/black and then on top of this I added a flame preset. Again I adjusted certain attributes and animated it how I wanted. There were a few things that weren't to my liking, when the flame first emerged there was a black smog at the bottom. This didn't seem very appealing or natural to me so I erased this out within After Effects. I've never used this before and it came in quite handy, you can also use the clone stamp tool, the same as you would in Photoshop. I was able to create a more desired effect this way and in a quicker time too. I'm quite happy with how this has turned out, I would have liked to have spent more time on this and explore different techniques, but for now it does a decent job. I may come back to it at another time and see if I can improve on it anymore.

Rendering

When it came to rendering I made sure that the quality was set to production. This made it take longer to render but I think the results were worth it. I only rendered out a master layer and an occlusion pass as I already set up my lights, I didn't think the shadows would need much more adjustment when it came to post production. Below you can see the different passes and the outcome of when combined. The occlusion pass creates self shadowing which produces a more realistic effect, adding more depth to the shot. To create an occlusion pass, you need to select all the objects in your scene and create a new render layer, then under the attributes you can create an occlusion preset. The preset itself will always need adjusting depending on your shot. The more samples you have, the less grainy the pass will be, however this will also increase render time. I pushed mine from 16 to 128 as I wanted the best possible outcome. I'm quite happy with how it's turned out so far, from here I will be compositing the shots in After Effects and possibly colour grading them.

I noticed that with the renders, the ground texture was somewhat lost in some shots. When up close to the camera, the normal map was not visible. I'm not sure if this was because of the physical sun and sky causing this or if the ground plane was too close to the camera, or if depth of field was affecting it in some way. I didn't adjust any of the original settings so this is something I may come back to and look at in more depth to see if I can figure out the cause of this.

Occlusion Pass

Master Layer

Master and Occlusion Pass

Backgrounds

As my shots for my animation were to be rendered out as an alpha, I needed to create some backgrounds and sky in order to fill this in. I didn't want the backgrounds to be too realistic, it needed to be stylistically consistent with my animation, so I decided to digitally paint them. Below you can see what I produced. When it came to creating the mountains, I had some real issue with this as digital painting is not my forte. To save time and to get a really good result, Lija agreed to help me out. She's done a great job with this in such a short amount of time. The last image shows both images put together with my animation. I gave Lija some reference images when painting the mountains and the overall colour scheme I was looking for however in order for it to fit properly into the scene I needed to adjust the colours and layer filter once I was in After Effects.

Light Linking

As mentioned before when it came to lighting I used something called light linking. This is where you can attach lights to specific objects in your scene, rather than having it affect the whole scene. Much like the connection editor, you can use light centric, under light linking to select your light and connect the objects in which it will affect. I used this for when my light setup still had things in shadow. The apple tree was a prime example, as the dragon would climb up it the leaves and golden apple were under shadow. I wanted it to be more obvious and it needed to be clear to the audience what was happening. By creating another directional light and connecting it to the leaves and apple, it ensured that these were visible whilst not affecting the dragon or the rest of the scene.

Rigid Bodies

There is a scene in my animation where lots of apples fall down onto my dragons head. I thought that the easiest way to do this would be using rigid bodies as this would automate the falling and create a natural look. Selecting the apple, and creating an active rigid body, this would allow the object to move once a gravity field was applied to it. In order to stop it from passing through the floor I had to make sure that my ground plane had a passive rigid body. There were a few issues that I came across which ultimately led to me not using rigid bodies, instead I key-framed each individual apple.

The first issue I came across was that the apple, once it hit the floor it would roll continuously and not stop. I needed the apples to hit the floor, bounce and roll to a stop. Normally in order to stop the rolling the static and dynamic friction needed to be changed, a value of 0 allows the rigid body to move, yet a value of 1 stops movement.. Even though I changed the values to 1, it didn't seem to work and the rolling carried on. The other issue that occurred was that the apples needed to hit the dragon on the head. I thought that creating a passive rigid body on the dragon would work, however it wouldn't allow me to do this. I'm not sure if this was because my dragon was a referenced file, and any changes would have needed to be applied to the original file. I didn't have the time to spend too much time trying to figure out the issues, instead I went ahead with keyframing each apple. This way allowed me to have more control over each apple and the rate in which they fell and where they fell. It took longer but I think the result turned out okay and believable, which is the main thing.

Lighting

With previous projects, the lighting has been somewhat of a problem to set up. Lighting itself is a separate role within industry and honestly I only knew the bare basics. Because I wanted to achieve a good overall lighting I decided to follow a tutorial that Animation Mentor produced on their blog (found HERE). Previously I had just been using directional lights for outdoor shots, creating a key light and back light. Whilst this worked to some extent, I always had issue with the shadows either being too grainy or too harsh. When creating a directional light, raytrace shadows are the default setting. The more you increase the shadow rays, the longer the render will take, however it will soften the shadows and not create such a harsh outline. As you can see below, without adjusting the shadow rays, the shadows themselves are very dark and harsh. They become too obvious and detract the eye from the character.

The tutorial that I followed made use of creating a physical sun and sky within Mental Ray in Maya. It's a quick way to create a more realistic and nice effect for your scene, however it does need some adjusting. Using physical sun and sky can sometimes create a washed out effect, textures and colours will loose their vibrancy and appear somewhat flat. To counteract this, the node that is created from sun and sky 'mia_exposure-simple' needs to be edited. The gamma attribute is mainly responsible, so dropping this down to 1 will normally fix the washed out look. I followed the majority of the tutorial and it produced a really nice render. I had never really tried adjusting the colour of the lights before and by doing this it creates more of a realistic look. There is never just one colour in a scene. The tutorial also talked about light linking the eyes, however I didn't feel this was very necessary, yet I have used it in another part of my animation which I will talk about later. I made sure that once my lights were set up correctly in one scene, I exported these out to which I could them import into my next scene and have exactly the same setup. Previously I never did this and the lighting changed a fair bit between shots and I found it quite noticeable. The lights still need some adjustment in some shots, depend on where the camera was facing but the main setup was the same.

Directional Light

Directional with Physical Sun & Sky

Animation Process

As mentioned before, as there were some issues with my rig, I had to keep this in mind when it came to animating and know what my limits were. In some places I wouldn't be able to push the emotion as far as I would have liked, but I still needed to get the right feeling and emotion across to the audience. My animation workflow for this project has been the same as before, blocking out the main poses before adding in the breakdowns then taking these into spline. When using spline tangents, I normally go for auto-tangent as this ensures that the curves do not overshoot and that you are able to hold certain positions. This has worked fine for me in the past, however sometimes I have noticed the movements can be quite snappy and not flow as well as I would have liked. Last week I did some other work for another project and this was using the actual spline tangents. I found that the flow of movements appeared more natural and allowed me to achieve a smooth transition between motions. I would love to have tried this on my dragon animation, however I didn't have the time and by the time I worked on this other project, the majority of the animation was already complete. I didn't want to try it out and then for the animation to look inconsistent with the rest.

Ideally I would have loved to have more time before I got to the animation stage of my project in order to properly plan out all of my acting choices for my dragon. I feel that I missed out on this due to my tight schedule. In order to have everything completed on time and to start rendering, I needed to be animating 150 frames per day, every day. I have tried my best to get across the emotion that my dragon is feeling but in places, it's not as exaggerated as I had originally anticipated. I think after this project, I might go back and spend more time working on his performance and getting a better animation out of him. Even though I'm not completely happy with what I have been able to achieve, I am glad that I have managed to get it all done on time as rendering is taking a lot longer than I originally thought. I also wanted to get the animation completed so that it could be passed along to Josh Broughton, the composer who is doing my music, as he too had a deadline to meet.