Ravine: Animation Sequence

Final Animation: Playblast Preview

   A preview animation is underway. For now here is a screenshot of what has been developed so far.

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.

Narrative - Fish Scales

After receiving the file from mark, I implemented the scales onto the fish character I had skinned. Working with the scales as they grow/shrink for the animation will be somewhat slow as each scale will have to be altered individually . It is quite quick work to alter each scale though so it shouldn't be too bad. I think this fish is looking really good so far and I look forward to seeing it textured.

 

Narrative - Skinned Fish Character

After many issues and restarts, the fish character is now completely skinned and setup with the basic controls. If necessary, I may add more controls for the fins and tail. Overall, I am very happy with the outcome here.

 

Character Setup 

Character Setup (moved joints and mouth control)

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.

Narrative - Fish Skinning Progress

The fish character is steadily progressing and the skinning is working out so far. The basic movement of the mouth and tail have been done but small tweaks and cleanups will likely need to be made.

 

Fish Mouth Movement

 

Fish Tail Movement

Narrative - Rigging the Fish Character

 Basic Rig Setup

 Applied to Model

 Adding more Joints for Flexibility

Final Rig Setup

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: Further Refined Soundscape

   Some further work has been made on the soundscape for the animation, with the principal elements modified being the sound of water as it interacts with the character. As well as some refining of a few other sounds and the way the music is used within the sequence.

Fish Modelling

Began modelling the Fish. Workflow is high-poly to low-poly then rigging and such can be done.