a little over my head

I just recently finished a test for some Zhuang pole flair. It's short- less than a second- and it took far too long to finish. Now I pen this down to one factor which I overlooked and one more addition to some study, and that's the pole hand positions. I spent a long long time getting the fingers to wrap correctly around the pole from various angles, but unfortunately it still doesn't look quite right.


Now call me picky, but I'm determined to make this look as correct as possible, so I'm adding 'close up pole grasping' to my list of things to practice drawing before I get onto the fight itself.

This was partially referenced though, as the original footage was shot directly front on. So on my side, I don't think I fared too badly with the actual animation itself.

 I may have to increase the amount of doubled up frames and compensate with a mild steadycam (not Bourne Identity steadycam, that's just ridiculous, and will completely hide the majority of my animation) to help save time and effort. Regardless, it's not a bad first attempt at this sort of thing on my account.

shading problem sorted!

It was incredibly simple, and unfortunately won't replace the lost hair from frustrated tugging. The many problems arose when trying to make the lights project the shadows as cross hatching. Toon shading wasn't as powerful as expected, and the texturing of the shadow itself was too fiddly to comprehend repeating, not to mention that it would just be another element to move, AND the texture itself required a ridiculously high resolution.

among more problems.

While drawing a diagram of an explanation to a group member, I suddenly came across a totally obvious and horribly easy solution. Realizing the light source itself (namely the sun) didn't move, why not just texture the crosshatching normally instead of doing something that will look out of place against the characters who aren't effected by Maya lighting?

So Gentlemen! I bring you:

BRIDGE

 

Excuse the poor GIF quality. This was simply to test the look and how it feels when it goes on forever and ever. I think the effect worked quite good, but it certainly is missing distance fog and clouds down below (if I was to make shot looking down, you'd see a cut off) to give the effect of it being utterly huge.

So that is my personal victory for a little bit. It's time to concentrate on the storyboard and characters for a little while. Speaking of which... 

 Here's Hao plodding along as he does. Isn't he cute?

Isn't he cute? Hao normally walks like this. He hasn't a care in the world, and rightly so. He's a 6 dot, basically means he wins at everything kung-fu. I was asking one of the Games students about voice acting for me, and he brought a mentionable thing to my attention.

The Chinese actually have two forms of their language. Cantonese and Manderin. The more commonly spoken one is Cantonese, thus it's good to specify that when asking for voice actors. So far I'm thinking of giving him a cute and high pitched voice, maybe voiced by a girl to get the right tone. It is certainly something I must look into early to avoid heavy delays and too much animation change.

Out.

problems arising

Ok, I've looked around and it seems that there isn't an obvious, easy and third party program free technique to put 3D into After Effects. That's dashed my plans to make a seamless connection between 3D and the animated characters, meaning that once I've animated the characters, I'm going to have to animate the background in tandem with the character's animation, so it'll pretty much rely on guess work and luck.

Which is an utter pain in the ass really.

regardless, I'll be making my final character designs and testing making a cross hatch shader in Maya some time before Christmas. If that works out, I'll have a wonderful addition to the overall art style.

I intend to achieve this by using the toon functions tri-colour shading. As far as I have found, the toon shaders actually use colours to show light intensity. When I tried to put a texture underneath, I ended up putting the texture on the shade colour only. Theoretically, this would mean that if I created a gif of cross hatching with a transparent background, that should show up instead of the usual shadows.

Experiment time begins...