Squint - Production

The End

2007-08-04T09:47:00.000Z

...until I have time to do some of my own personal work :)
Here is the link to the finished film http://www.raftas2007.co.uk/films/film_5.html
Hope you enjoy it ^__^

Monster Kid and the sun

2007-07-03T10:30:00.001Z

In this shot Monster Kid scoops the Sun from the sky after becoming bored with breaking with the city. It soon becomes too hot for Monster Kid to hold and later drops it. I added a heat haze to the Sun and animated the glow towards the end of this clip to show it getting hotter. The planets and stars were modelled, textured and rendered in Maya before being animated in Flash by Jim.

Monster Kid and the sun from Matt Beale and Vimeo.

Monster Kid goes to town

2007-07-03T10:23:00.000Z

Things are starting to come together now, with only a few shots left. This shot is perhaps one of best we have visually, where Monster Kid takes a building from the city. I never thought we could pull this shot off well, but I'm very happy with the way the city turned out, especially the little cars.

Some backgrounds (WIP)

2007-06-22T13:40:00.000Z

Monster Kid with added backgrounds (WIP) from Matt Beale on Vimeo

Monster Mumma

2007-06-20T22:06:00.001Z

Monster Mumma from Matt Beale on Vimeo

The show must go on

2007-06-16T14:24:00.000Z

Yesterday was our last official day at college :( The film was handed in in its unfinished state but me and Jim, like all the other groups are determined to complete the film within the 2 extra weeks we have.

I really am going to miss going to Ravensbourne, walking through the college corridors and up that ramp into the 2nd year studio. It's pretty much been my home for the last 3 years! All is not lost; I've made some good friends, had loads of laughs and learnt so much. I can only hope that we all try and keep in touch.

Tractor Time!

2007-06-14T12:50:00.000Z

Today I comped the field background with Jim's new animation of Monster Kid playing around with a tractor. I had to reposition some of the hills, the rocks and bushes on the left to accomodate the animation and give a sense of distance. I also had to make the curve of the field smoother, where the hills meet the field.

I added motion blur to this animation which bumped up the render time considerably. The animation will still need to be re-rendered as Jim needs to add some animation tweaks and I need to add daisies to the hill and a rock texture.

Monster Kid Tractor Time from Matt Beale on Vimeo

Achooo...

2007-06-13T23:53:00.000Z

The last few day's have involved serial sneezing and blood shot eye's because of the dreaded hayfever! I've been rendering out the animation that Jim has done so far, (which is nearing the 30 sec mark) and playing around with the overall look of the film in After Effects. Some people think rendering is an easy job, like watching paint dry. It is mainly, but it also requires quite a bit of organization, responsibility and trust. So there Kennett!

It's clear that we're never going to have the film finished and rendered by Friday (we're not alone here!), so we'll have to bolt together the rendered stuff with some of the old blockout. The rendered shots we have are looking promising..if only there was more; but I guess we haven't done too bad for a 2 man team.

Luckily we have 2 extra weeks in which to finish off the film, play some Frisbee and up the eye candy ready for the degree show.

The latest comp

2007-06-11T23:12:00.000Z

The latest comp from Matt Beale on Vimeo

Cured of the black blobs?

2007-06-10T14:23:00.000Z

I don't seem to be coming across the horrible black blobs on my frames anymore. This is strange, the only thing I've done different is save the renders out as TGA's instead of TIFF's. I keep you posted

Sulky Monster Kid Z-depth test render

2007-06-10T12:48:00.000Z

Here's a little test render of Z-depth, allowing us to play around with the depth of field . Rendering out a Depth Channel is a simple case of ticking the Depth Channel box in the Maya render global settings. However, this is Maya and nothing is ever this simple! Maya exports the Depth Channel as separate IFF files.. which Adobe After Effects (and I suspect every other programme except Maya) cannot read! Handy as this is.. I have had to re-save out each render image (by hand) as RLA files, which AE likes. I'm not looking forward to the hundreds of frames coming my way.

To get the depth of field channel working in AE I had to multiply the RLA files with the TGA renders and then play around with the Compound Blur effect.

The Z-depth renders look like this:

and is multiplied with the TGA images that look like this:

Tweak the brightness/contrast/compound blur and a few others things and...

Hopefully you can see that Monster Kids head is more in focus than his colouring book, toy car and the daisies in the background.

Monster Kid sulking from Matt Beale on Vimeo

Tractor pluck scene

2007-06-06T12:25:00.000Z

This is a render of the field environment. Monster Kid will pluck the tractor that's in the distance and later on spin around with it. All kids love tractors! I've deformed some of the hay bails to make them less perfect and cylindrical and put a simple texture on the trailer. I had to lower the resolution of Rags textures for this environment to 512 x 512 as they were way too big for flat shades of colour.

I've also had a go at lighting the scene, but will obviously need to enter the same light and render settings as the other scenes for continuity.

The grass colour is going to change and a matte painting will be placed in the background in post production.

City by night

2007-06-04T15:43:00.000Z

Today I've been placing cubes in place of the building windows and making them glow for the city night scene. I also changed the light colours to a dark blue. Trying to make the city look good at night is proving to be harder than the day version; mainly because this Final Gather malarchy tends to illuminate the faintest light.

(Above) Not enough window glow

(Above) Need to make the hills more blue

City night - day test

2007-06-03T19:39:00.000Z

More frames stored

2007-06-02T23:33:00.000Z

This test render of 280 frames took the whole of today to render! 33 of them had to be re-rendered because of the black blob artifact things. Some frames had to be re-rendered up to 5 times just because the artifact just would not shift!

I noticed with this render that the shadows underneath Monster Kids hair shift around quite a lot, which is due to me altering the Final Gather rays on the corrupt frames in an attempt to get rid of any artifacts. It's good that I'm coming across these problems sooner rather than later..but it's getting pretty late soon. To prevent the shifting shadow problem I will just have to alter the final gather rays less aggressively and find a good figure that doesn't produce as many artifacts.

A bout of the plague

2007-06-02T15:16:00.000Z

After doing a few test renders of Jim's animations, I've been plagued by these annoying black spots that appear on some frames. After doing some research, I've discovered that they're known as Final Gather artifacts. They also crop up in global lighting too. Anyways, I think I've now solved the problem by increasing or decreasing the amount of Final Gather rays and the Filter size in the Render settings. This however seems a bit like a lottery at the moment! There doesn't seem to be a clear method to preventing them, just re-render after re-render, testing to see if they appear; which is very annoying as each frame takes 2 minutes to render.

Examples of this plague:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

2007-06-01T16:40:00.000Z

Stomping test render

2007-05-31T20:08:00.000Z

This is a little test render of Jim's stomping animation so far. The animation here is still in progress and you'll notice that Monster Kid steps through one of the toy soldiers. The soldiers won't be in this shot..they would of been flicked at Monster Mum beforehand. The scene is also missing the tree and the matte painting background, both of which should make the scene more lively.

Nevertheless the look of the film has improved a lot lately. We've decided to scrap the idea of using several passes, instead opting for a Final Gather, plasticine look. This will hopefully save us lots of time and many a headache.

This render of 140 frames took 10 minutes per frame at college and 3 minutes per frame on my home computer! This is by far the heaviest scene we have in the film, with both characters and a mega polygon tree. The sooner we render this scene out the better!

2007-05-29T16:43:00.000Z

City motorway

2007-05-25T11:57:00.000Z

I've added a motorway to the city. Later on when Jim has animated monster kid grabbing city buildings from the scene, I will animate cars going up and down the roads. As well as the cars, there will also be helicopters and of course the monorail running around the city.

Texturing Monster Mum

2007-05-24T15:02:00.000Z

2007-05-24T14:59:00.000Z

2007-05-21T13:45:00.000Z

The texturing of the city is now complete and Jim is happy with the building colours, though I still need to texture the monorail train (go-faster stripes). I added more telegraph poles to the scene, going off into the countryside (above). I'll also add some pylons in the distance later.

2007-05-18T13:53:00.000Z

Back to the city

2007-05-14T17:18:00.000Z

Here is a colour test for the city. I rendered out a vector image of the scene with outlines and colour filled the individual buildings in Photoshop.

Texturing progress:

Picnic hill look dev

2007-05-13T11:59:00.000Z

Today I've been practicing compositing the layers that will be rendered out. This will be done in After Effects. So far we're having a colour, ambient occlusion, ray traced shadow, global/final gather, and a Z-depth pass. I think thats quite enough for one person to cope with!!

Colour pass

Ambient occlusion pass

Final gather pass

Raytraced shadow pass

The image above is of all the layers composited in After Effects. I adjusted the levels of all the shadow passes, the hue and saturation of the colour pass and added a Gaussian blur to the ray traced shadow layer. This is perhaps too blurry, but I'm liking the dreamy effect it produces.

I realised that I didn't have the background colour set to white. Having the background as black resulted in the shadow passes being a lot darker than they should be, particularly the final gather pass. Above is a composited image of the re-rendered passes.

(Above) Playing with the Exposure filter in After Effects

Latest picnic scene developments #02

2007-05-12T12:46:00.000Z

I added ambient occlusion to the bench and hill in the render above. The shadows around the bench are a lot better, but the colours are incredibly burnt out! I will need to experiment with rendering ambient occlusion as a separate pass and composite it in After Effects, allowing for more control over its brightness and contrast.

The latest picnic scene developments #01

2007-05-09T18:16:00.000Z

Super duper treee

2007-05-08T14:30:00.000Z

I've been adding lots of leaves and branches to the tree that sits on top of the picnic hill. This realistic method is looking far better than the simple marsh mellow look I had before. It's very fiddly and time consuming, but the time I've spent on it is finally beginning to pay off.

Rag has also retextured the bench for us:

Bush craft

2007-04-28T21:33:00.000Z

This is an attempt at creating a more realistic looking bush. The ones we have so far look like marshmallow on sticks. We also realised that the environments were looking rather lifeless and baron. To liven the scenes up and add some texture to the environments, I'm adding billions of leaves to the trees and bushes.

Below is an incomplete bald bush test:

Tree research

2007-04-28T12:56:00.000Z

Opening shot

2007-04-25T18:45:00.000Z

I started to re-model the opening shot in greater detail from the blockout version. A path will run through the fields and lead the viewer towards the hill in the distance. Lots more detail will be added to bring the scene to life, such as small buildings in the distance, hedge rows and trees. At the moment I'm gnarling up the wood that makes up the stile.

Textured bench

2007-04-25T09:38:00.000Z

A coloured bench:

Textured tractor

2007-04-24T13:53:00.000Z

Here is the newly textured tractor. Most of the tractor was UV mapped; some parts I just applied coloured Lamberts. The model will be small when in the film, so it doesn't require much detail.

The UV map:

Painting the UV map in Photoshop:

I based the colours on this fine looking tractor below:

More props

2007-04-23T17:48:00.000Z

Today I've been modeling more props for the film as shown below-

The bench that Monster Mum sits on at the top of the hill:

The tractor that Monster Kid picks up from a field. This still needs more detail adding to it and I will probably change the cabin section, making it less square:

Below is the improved tractor. More detail might be added to the wheels:

The tree that Monster Kid picks up. I'm happy with branches, but some of the foliage may change shape later on:

Monster mum blendshapes

2007-04-20T12:50:00.000Z

Here are some Monster Mum blendshapes. The mum character has fewer expressions than Monster Kid, but are just as hard to make because of the round shaped head. Trying to maintain the curve of the mouth geometry and keep it free of any lumps and bumps required lots of tweaking of the vertices.

Monster kid look development

2007-04-14T11:19:00.000Z

It's my job over the weekend to play around with the look development of Monster Kid. Jim wants everything to look like plasticine, as though you could reach in and pick the objects from the screen. I don't think we're far from this look already, and believe it's just a case of tweaking the global illumination and light settings. We're also going to look into Maya 8's sub-surface scattering options to see what effects we can come up with.

This is the standard global illumination look that we've been using so far..quite nice, but not plasticine enough!

Test #01

Global pass:

Shadow pass:

Colour pass:

Compositing the layers in After Effects:

(Above) Global layer - opacity 24%, brightness -5%, contrast -7%

Shadow layer - opacity 100%, brightness 100%, contrast -22%

Production Gannt chart

2007-04-14T11:18:00.000Z

Blockout assesment notes

2007-04-14T11:15:00.000Z

Notes from the tutors:

- Issues with the composition of the sun when the child takes it from the sky.

-How are we going to play with lighting effects when the sun is removed from the sky?

-How are we going to communicate the child's interaction with the objects he picks up. Scale and perspective issues?

-Can we reproduce the original 2D style in 3D?

-Look at 1930's and 40's agricultural posters to help with the look of the film.

Konnichi wa

2007-04-05T09:51:00.000Z

An anime Monster Kid!

More blockout

2007-04-04T22:37:00.000Z

I have passed on the scaled blockout environments to Jim. I also made a simplified version of Monster Kid allowing for easier animation of the blockout.

Texturing the city

2007-04-03T15:05:00.000Z

I've begun the glorious task of texturing the city. I'm finding that I can get away with assigning plain materials to some objects, like all of the girders and cranes. The buildings and other small details are going to be UV mapped. It's going to take quite a while!

Blockout

2007-03-29T13:23:00.000Z

Today I began making basic environments for the blockout using Jim's animatic for reference.

Bye bye Sean

2007-03-15T20:33:00.000Z

The dissertation is finally over and I can finally stop tinkling the keyboard and get back into film work. The end of term 2 is nigh, and i can't quite believe how quick this year has gone!

It's an emotional last week as Sean, the founder of the course, is leaving Ravensbourne for a new life in Lincoln with his family. He will surely be missed and the room will definitely be a lot quieter without his crazy antics. I can't thank him enough for setting up such a great course and being one of the students. I wish him all the best and will hopefully catch up with him at the degree show!

Monorail monorail monorail

2007-03-13T15:48:00.000Z

Hoorah!! I made a monorail today and played around with motion paths. I still need to figure out how to create a chain of monorail carriages that stay in line with one another. I also added loads more detail to the city but I still need to add windows to some of the buildings.

Hopefully the city will end up looking like my original concept art when textured:

The City

2007-03-12T15:22:00.001Z

I've recently been modelling the city using the UPA artwork we discovered in the 1st term. The city consists of industrial and business areas...I'm really enjoying making the industrial stuff. I still have to add detail to the buildings and add small touches such as telegraph poles and a monorail running around the city.

Monster mums new hairdo

2007-02-26T15:35:00.000Z

This is the latest hair attempt. It's based on the hair of Jim's mum! Jim is going to tweak it somemore, he's not sure about the sides.

Testing 123

2007-02-23T17:42:00.000Z

Today i made a test turntable of monster kid together with some of his toys so we can get a better idea of how the film will look. 3 passes were composited together to give this look, colour, depth map shadows, and global illumination passes. A 4th, z-depth, will be added later on so we can fiddle around with the focus of the camera. Youtube makes it look all grainy..booo

Crane

2007-02-19T15:15:00.000Z

I made a crane for the city scene

Hiccup

2007-02-18T18:20:00.000Z

Work on the film went pear-shaped last week. I think we've realized just how important concept art is for a film. We clearly don't have enough of it, as we're kinda designing and making stuff up as we go along... this is not good!

We've both bashed our heads together and decided to concentrate on making the picnic scene by the end of this term. This way, we'll have both characters rigged and textured and also be able to get the look of the film nailed. Jim is plugged into a rigging tutorial right now...aren't you Jim! yess. He's also redesigned monster mums hair for the final time...no going back now. Its a lot more simple to model and is based on the haircut of Jim's neighbour apparently..nice

Some blendshapes

2007-02-13T12:11:00.000Z

meh
sad pout
worried

smug
big smile
cry 1
cry 2 snarl aweopen smile
wonky left
recovering dizzydizzy sadopen sad

Here are some blendshape tests for monster kid. Jim hasn't finished drawing all of the expressions yet, but i've had a go at creating some. Many more to follow!!

The new look

2007-02-09T13:54:00.000Z

After a tutorial with Alex the technical man on Tuesday, me and Jim have come up with a new look for the film. We're going to use several render passes to create the look above. I think the shadows are looking a lot better now and more cutesy. On top of this, we still have to add a depth of field pass (Z-Depth) so we can alter the focus of objects as and when required.

Toy soldiers

2007-02-09T10:46:00.000Z

I've finished making some toy soldier props that Monster Kid will later flick at his mum when he becomes bored. I've made them really basic and blocky, much like Lego characters, as they're only going to be seen from a distance.

Monster mum

2007-02-05T12:56:00.000Z

This is the latest monster mum model. At the moment we're have trouble making her hair because of its curly design and difficulty modeling it in polygons. I think we're going to have to go back to the drawing board and give her a new hairdo.

Flowers

2007-02-01T11:46:00.000Z

Here are some flowers for the countryside scene

Pencils

2007-01-31T22:10:00.000Z

Jim has been texturing some of the toy props and test rendering them with the shark-eyed, Guantanamo Bay monster kid convict model. It looks like plasticine..hooray! This isn't going to be the final look of the film though, as we still have some experimenting to do with rendering.

Some toy props

2007-01-31T21:49:00.000Z

Here are a few toy props that I have made for monster kid. They include lots of toy vehicles, some chunky pencils and a colouring book. I still have a few more to make, including some toy soldiers and a tank.

Old monster kid

2007-01-31T19:38:00.000Z

Here are some pics of the old monster kid model. He's changed quite a bit recently, with changes being made to his hair and mouth. Jim has nearly finished texturing the new model.

Hello

2007-01-31T18:32:00.000Z

Blogger 2 is nice. With this new blogability I will update people on the progress of Jim Bending's film Squint (WIP). I'm making all the characters, props and environments, while Jim will texture, animate and rig everything.