How it's looking so far...

Because Elle is awesome, it looks like this.

That is all.

first meeting.

so, we discussed the many extra parts that come of our new found team, many of which will hopefully be tackled in rough drafts by Monday. Once set, we'll be able to crack right on with the actual work.

The first and main point was the clouds. We've set the final hue to a washed out pink, discreet and only placed on the sky. The clouds and other elements will remain greyscale, and will be transitioned when the camera pans using a quick fade to a blurred animated swipe and fade to the next BG picture.

As for the old shot of Zhuang flying and landing, we spotted a problem where the background isn't moving right to left, but diagonally up. We've decided to make a copy and paste wallpaper that follows this example:

Hopefully it will work, so that will be tested before the next meeting on Monday.

The cel shading elements and slightly translucent overlays to show shadows was tested and now we know it's only on one layer, it'll be easy to trace over.

When all is said and done, there may still be reductions to the length of the entire animation, so I'll whip up a quick story board to make an alternate, shorter animation over the weekend. I'll also be getting my research element out of the way as well.

Team member!

I've now gained a helper to do the time consuming work of colouring and background art.


This has a huge amount of benefits, namely:

* 2x the hands, meaning that the reductions I've had to enforce to finish on the deadline may not be the case any more

* I can get reference easier with her being the camera person.

* Dedicated colour schemer means the possibility of cel shading to make it look more professional.

* The BG will look INFINITELY better than it does now.

* A constant and quick second opinion on my work means I won't sit there and um and arr about things.

* The company will do me good and keep me awake and perky while I work.

* Elle will learn along with me, as I'll teach her a few things as I go.

We will have our first session next Monday. It's shaving it close, but we'll be tanked up on junk food and vigor. I just know it's now going to become something special...

spinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

So I now almost ALMOST have a complete start of fight sequence. I've now officially found a move that makes Zhuang fly, and my God it's a cracker.

Once I've made a wee combo to push Hao towards the screen and preps him for the big move, I can then add actual lines to the entire scene and colour it, then throw it into Maya, make the magic and then bam, awesome.

I might enlist help to colour actually... It's very time consuming. First things first though, make this great.

FIGHTFIGHTFIGHT

Ok, so far I'm pretty happy. The final final move is a bit of a problem though. The angles are hurting my mind, and I'm stuck as to what to make Hao do to re-switch back into his place to lead up to the big old skyward smash.

My many attempts ended in positions that made me want to hack apart the entire scene again, so I'm now going to attempt to make Hao spin round all Michael Jackson like, landing a turning kick into Zhuang's left side, ducking Zhuang's attempt to hook kick him back and then switching scene to have Hao scoot forward into an awesome uppercut thing.

Closer to the final look

Need to sort out the clouds, final colours due to GIF compression.

that last post progress

Excellent... Just needs sky, masks, dust and rendering...

I placed the 2D animation inside an image plane in Maya and used it as a reference. This is probably one of the harder angles I'll be doing, thus I'm quite lucky it worked when I drew the frames with only a vague idea of the distance and angles. I now know the method works and that the two sit well together.

Originally I thought I would need to reduce the framerate of the 3D part to match up to the not quite as smooth 2D parts, but after this, I believe that the 3D part actually lends itself to the 2D part, giving the illusion that the 2D element has far more frames than it does.

This has solidified my faith in this project completely.

SWEEEEEEEEET

more progress Char animation

while I wait on some reference opportunities, I work on the reason why I'm going to love my final product so very much.

AWESOME ANGLES

epic posture is epic.

character animation process

this is my character animation progress so far. The first set is a few shots of Hao's expressions and reactions to Zhuang's random crap and excuses and such. The first is the initial 'oh hey there', the next is after Zhuang refuses to let him past, so Hao offers to move aside. The third is Hao responding to Zhuang's "you'll push me off" with a "what do we do then?"

As for the fight animation, this is a simple loop of the first 2 strikes. From then on it's a left hook kick from Zhuang and then 2 quick punches, both blocked, and then countered by Hao with a shove to a big ol' special punch. I might add more moves as I consult the friends.

Problems encountered so far are limited to the bridge now. I need to find a way to render off the PNG's, while allowing for progressive transparency. I'll be trying several plain white floors that represents clouds, and have various degrees of translucency between each plane. Creating a cloud cylinder, rather than a sphere will stop the weird sucking in at the top, and since they're high in the sky, it's easy enough to stop the clouds halfway up and add the sky coloured roof, making all of the cylinder immune to lighting effects like the bridge.

woot.

Zhuang - a change

I have made the final decision on one of the characters. It's a simple one, but will re-write the entire fight essentially. After alot of practice and fiddling in Flash, I've found it's somewhat difficult to make the staff work for me. Using the line tool will result in making it look very disconnected from the rest of the scene and characters, and not using the line tool results in a mess when the staff is static.

It's also a bit of a pain to erase and draw in the staff on a third layer as well if I want to not have to erase lines from inside the character. The simple solution is to change the weapon before I get too into the choreography. At first I thought sword... then I looked at the huge lunk that is Zhuang, then thought...

Tonfa.

Being nice and intimate will allow for more awesome bats and close contact stuff, and they're nice and easy to draw in comparison to a big ass staff. I never thought what is essentially a rectangle would give me this much problem. Traditionally animating this, the staff drawing would have the convenience of a ruler, and flash unfortunately does not.

But yes, Tonfa. I think they suit him rather well. As does the lack of jacket...

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...

After the pitch.

After the chat, it seems that there's only really one interesting element of it all. The fight itself. Everything else is pretty much secondary, but when push comes to shove, if it doesn't look as good as it's animated, it'll kinda fall through.

I'm a little worried that may be the case, but a few things brought to my attention have given me both hope and direction.

1. Jackson has informed me that there is a way to simply place a Maya object in After Effects. This will effectively allow me to seamlessly work with the characters and bridge at the same time, making the animation process easier and quicker too.
2. Justin is totally up for some Choreography and acting. He wields a staff just like Zhuang does, has a similar build (legs that are almost needlessly long) and he is easy to get a hold of, since he randomly appears at my house whenever he feels like it.
3. Justin also knows a few Chinese guys for voice acting, so looking for talent has a few new options rather than posting it up in Uni.

So here is my new to-do list:

• Re-do the character sheets for both characters, since the bow leggedness has become less apparent, and Zhuang has changed completely.
• Make tests to recreate a canvas look.
• Re-do the bridge to make it more artsy, and experiment with placing said bridge into After Effects.
• Get the storyboard finalized, especially the choreography and key elements of the fight scene.  Since the bridge may become thinner, heavy planning is required.
• Script it.
• Create a document that looks into fight Choreography, and its evolution.

I plan to spend Monday evening and Tuesday day filming some choreography and making a start with animating towards the final week of Christmas (since the next few weeks will be focused upon my seminar and visual effects), hopefully making sure the fight itself is finished towards the end of weeks 13 and 14.

Really, I'm not making anything truly ground breaking or original, but I never fancied myself an artist. I prefer to be an entertainer...

OOOOoooooooooooohhhhhh stuff

Okay, as added in my presentation, I have a few ideas for the overall look of the damn thing. Of course, I'm already working on alternate ways of rendering the background and sky, rather than the mahooooooosive sphere in Maya which pretty much messes with the resolution of the picture. This is mostly making a 'fog' effect, which may hide the length of the bridge, but in return will probably discard the need for said massive sphere, as the background can be added and moved in after effects.

The canvas effect will essentially be masked over in Final Cut (or After Effects, whichever is easiest) and the characters are flash animated separately from the background and bridge.

Pitch Tiem :D

Ok, I've worked enough on the main meat of it all, so it's time to make it all coherent enough to reference for my pitch.

Concept: Honor, spirit, and friendship arising from fierce battle

Reason: To put all my strengths into a finished piece, thus creating a fluid and high quality animation that could pave the way for later development on a grander scale. It will also bring out my strongest animation ability, while allowing me to touch up my weaker aspects.

Outcome: An exciting, hyper-kinetic animation with a nice twist as apposed to 'two warriors fight to the death', which blends a stylized 3D environment with traditional animation, allowing for real life movie techniques such as motion blur and complex camera movement.

Method: Environment will be rendered in Maya, using custom textures to make it seem hand drawn (as apposed to the system-heavy toon functions), characters and other elements will be animated in flash, then exported as GIF files. Both elements will be brought together in After Effects, where the hand drawn part will be fused with the 3D and tweaked with various effects and motion tracking. The final edit will be in Final Cut Pro.

References: Vast amounts of martial arts films, friends and freerunners that can be used for reference and second opinions.

Characters:

 

Basic Story: Hao, a mild mannered martial artist is crossing the Hong bridge when he notices Zhuang walking the opposite direction. They meet, and stop a fair distance apart, and Hao looks at Zhuang's spear, held upon his back and taking up the full length of the bridge. Zhuang looks up, aloof and somewhat irritated, and Hao politely asks to pass by, which Zhu responds to with an uppity 'no'. Hao tries to negotiate how he'd get past, but Zhu makes many excuses as to why Hao cannot pass, then orders Hao to go back on himself. Hao kindly refuses, then Zhu puffs up and threatens him. Hao tries to walk by, but is attacked. He decides there is no choice but to fight, and they do, spectacularly. Both men are as fierce and as talented as the other, but Hao manages to switch past Zhu. Zhu lunges, but Hao signals him to stop. He looks over his shoulder and realizes that they had passed. With that, Hao bows and thanks Zhu for the good fight, which is met with hearty laughter and equal respect. Both men turn and continue their journeys.

Time: 2 minutes approx.

-------------

Now I just have to scan in the character sheets and finish the storyboard, then make a few micro animations, as well as test textures. Long week ahead.

Tuesday 23rd - 2:50pm

More Thoughts

So I started thinking about the execution. I'll have to heavily storyboard the project, since I've started to think that maybe masks and tracking would be a better option rather than putting the 2D into Maya. Not just because it is very system heavy, but Maya has a nasty thing where you must project the image onto a shape, which means that fixing the shape to a camera can make the movement of the characters difficult.

With this in mind, it may be best to just animate the characters with a rough BG and then move the 3D model camera around according to the storyboard to make it fit the characters. Thank Christ I have a second screen to reference from now...

 

Here are some quick sketch ideas for the background and environment. I'll probably go for a painted background and filter all the final video onto a white parchment style texture to make everything seem like a painting. It will be minimal colours since my focus is on the animation itself, so if I have time towards the end, I'll add light dashes of colour to the scene to give it a tad more depth. Otherwise, it will be very black and white.

I'm starting to become very excited with this project now. I'm quite willing to say that this may very well be my best work yet...

More References

Here are some bridges. These are as you see them, but a good starting point as to how I want the bridge itself to look. It may be leaning more towards looking like the far right picture, but at the angle of the far left.

This is a test for placing 2D in 3D and This is a camera angle test. These tests were made with Flash and Maya and basically prove I can put the 2D element in a 3D element. My next test will revisit an old animation of a couple of guys flying through the air shooting at eachother, and will allow me to make some crazy camera motion.

References

I think the best part about this project is the fact that I have literally limitless reference material. Type in 'Kung Fu' when you visit Youtube and you are awarded with every cheesy fight known to man, amateur and otherwise.

Best of all however, I have my friends and myself. There's a certain beauty to being able to perform something your drawings can perform, and you get a better feel for the motion when you do it yourself. As for my friends, they can certainly make this a personal experience, as well as provide leverage to ask their teachers and other friends to help.

This here is an intense little choreographed fight that is one of the bases of my animation. Pretty much any of the linked videos that relate to the Chinese Olympics are utterly spectacular and perfect for this. However, I'd only reference them to the point of motion, since my two characters are essentially trying to kill one another.

As for camera angles, a good reference would be some of the later anime that has been released, where the animators realize that sticking the character in front of sparkly lines in the background doesn't cut it any more. Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell 2, Full Metal Alchemist, Tekkonkinkreet... They all take the movie style steady cam approach to their fight scenes that gives them much more punch. Granted that in traditional kung-fu movies, the cameras were too heavy to hold, thus were fixed and smoother, this however is taking the easy route. I can't take the easy route if I don't want this to look like something one of the Newgrounds kids made...

Which brings me back to how I'll reference it. For some parts, I'll need my own epic footage. This will allow me to create said steady cam effects since all I'll really have access to is a steady cam. It's up to my pen hand to recreate a home martial arts movie into an art piece.

New Project

So, I'm scrapping Feral. After numerous attempts to make it something special and personal, it lost substance. Something that demanded narrative had no narrative, or rather, it had narrative, but it was too big for a small animation.

So I'm going in a new direction. Something small and with a simple, clean narrative. This will still contain hyper-kinetic martial arts. I won't ever escape the fact that I really want to show off my animation ability. In the long run, the stories will be given to me by someone who is, frankly, much better at it than I am. My personal projects are to remain personal. This however, is something to showcase my ability more so than a powerful literate piece.

Simple characters laid out in a simple plot involving a bridge, martial arts and the concept of honor. I can assure you the style used before this was more detailed visually, but when push comes to shove, you can have the prettiest looking visuals, but it still loses out to simple, beautifully animated designs.

The general idea is that two guys, meet on a bridge going opposite ways, but their pride denies the other passage past them. So they end up fighting, awesomely, but end up stopping the fight when they realize that they passed eachother in the fray and are on the right side of the bridge for their journey. There's a brief pause, then they bow and leave. I might add other elements, like a smile that shows these two enemies becoming friends through respect, maybe cheeky little comedy elements at the end where one makes a gesture at the other behind his back... Stuff like that.

In all though, this idea seems more manageable and more solid, and maybe more fun to work with. Now to propose the damn thing...