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...