Ravine: Animation Sequence

Narrative - Making Of Ravine

Reworking the environment

   With a few hours to go before the deadline there was a little discussion on the development of at least some kind of animation. This was set back however with a disagreement over the scene that had been produced. The discussion was resolved with a look into adding to an earlier environemnt model

  With two and a half hours before the deadline, creating new textures was a tall order. Instead focus was made on adding the constructed assets into the version 2 environment.

  When complete two render sets were made: The first set above are ambient occlusion passes while the set below are the objects with a default shader but illuminated with an ambient light.

 There was some discussion on how upward travel was being conveyed. In the scene presented in preview render passes with this matter was resolved with a dead end. Exploration was made using geography to imply the only way is up in an alternative direction to the use of a dead-end style barrier of rock to imply the fish could not go further.

Deadline Approaching: Wednesday Progress

  Today has proven very productive one as there has been plenty of finishing up keeping me busy. The group has just about everything to progress with a cohesive animation.

   The coral is finished. The skeleton within allows for the coral branches to be posed, which will be useful when the coral is needed to pursue and surround our fish characters. As well as room to give some perception of variance when lots of these are used.

  There was a little refinement to do with the skin weights as there was a sizable spread especially further up. This was cleaned up rather promptly as the coral has plenty of large, uniform surfaces.

  The stage after this was to set up a control network to position the coral branches, which took some experimentation to strike the right balance between amount of control and number of control nodes to use.

  Each control unit controls between three and five joints each. Where there was a split, the joints were labelled "-A and -B" in the channel box.

  It was high time that the scales had their own texture maps. A workable texture was created, kept small for rendering purposes, and a blinn shader that included a reddish specular light and an ambient occlusion node for effect.

  With many of our assets completed I looked into a few of the models I had contributed for and looked into creating occlusion sets for them. This helps give an idea of these models in their purest form with only a basic shader and a good sense of depth.

Coral and Scale Development

   Time was spent correcting the UV map for the coral. The reasoning for this was an attempt to have the shader's progression up the coral correlate better with the contours of the geometry.

  The methodology seemed straightforward: Cut apart the UV map at each split zone, modify the UVs to give a flat-on shape, straighten everything out. As can be seen in the picture below, the new strategy allows the gradient map to better follow the flow of the model.

  Using a shader gives me some freedoms, as it means we do not have to completely unfold the model in order to get the desired result and anywhere that appears non-existent (such as side-on faces) on the UV plane is not stretched to moment-ruining distortion.

  A after a tweak to the shader the quality is solid enough that it can be consideredpresentable. As well as well as a sequence showing the coral growing from a bud, a turnaround was also created to show the model as it would look in the final render.

  As well as these tasks, The strange growths to the body of our fish were added to the body. The initial plan of using a lattice as discarded. This fell flat when the eye wasn't considered in the original plan, but this was compensated for, as the manual application turned out to be rather therapeutic and progressed relatively smoothly and promptly.

  Above is a breakdown of the animation, with each line being a cluster of blendshapes.

Testing the Alien Scales

   My primary task this afternoon was to get a working system for having a set of alien scales grow from the body of Ravine's main fish characters. To do this it was suggested to use blend-shapes, which I spent the afternoon working on in order to get the transformation right.

  The core idea was to create a layer that would go within the skin. This layer would fit to the body by being wrapped around using a lattice deformer. A rough shape for the fish's body was used in palce of them odel itself for the time being. The final setup would need more precise positioning as the scales would grow from around the eyes and sweep towards the tail as they spread.

   Because blendshapes were used, the 'duplicate special' tool was used. particularly useful when duplicating large grousp of objects.

  To give the progression a natural feel the scales should ideally look like they're growing independantly. This was achieved by giving variance as to when they would start and how quickly they would stop growing.

 This is the UV map of the scale. Structurally it appears simple but detailed enough. Woudl lower-polygon versions be useful? Perhaps on more distant shots

Ravine: Environment Modelling and Mapping

   I looked into tightening up the model of the ravine. Some final tweaks merely to make things a little easier come the later stages. This included adding more crags (it was suggested that given the harshness of rock and the concept art we might be able to use an unsmoothed model), UV maps and some modification of the seabed.

  The ravine floor could be kept smoothed. The material could have been sand that was blown over the ledges by the ocean current and settled on the floor, depositing itself unevenly down below. This could also act as  rooting material for some of the plants, as sand is easier to push roots into than rock.

   The lattice deformer tool was used to give the ravine floor a rise on the ends, while an accompanying lattice deformer near the surface was used to give the sense that the split was more extreme in terms of elevation nearer the centre. This will also allow the connecting part of the floor to better sync with any ground plane extension we use

 Some of the geometry along the ledges was removed as it was giving some slightly odd shapes in the shader engine that did not feel natural. While also tweaking some of the vertex positions to smooth transitions between faces.

  Finally some workable UV maps were created. Because of the sheer scale of the model the UV maps had ot be cut up not just to fit them on the UV square but also to ease the rendering times as it will allow us to use smaller texture maps.

  Perhaps an alternative when it comes to rendering is to create two models. The seabed will be out of focus or distant so we may be able to get away with a small-ish texture map. But the ravine walls there could be two maps - high-resolution and low-resolution, each on their own separate model that we key to alternate depending on the camera distance. But this might involve more maps and more cutting up.

Ravine bed

 

left-hand wall

right-hand wall

Ledt-hand ravine floor

right-hand ravine floor