All the Good Stuff – Work Progress

MODELLING

In the beginning all objects were rather random and created simply to provide obstacles for the balls and links to transport the force from A to B. As things went on I tried to make them more and more hamster based to go with the original idea of this being the inside workings of a hamster brain, for example little hamster-toy tubes and dominos with related pictures on them.

Unfortunately the objects in the scene still are very random and jumbled together, which makes everything lose a bit of its appeal. If there was more time it would have been worth spending more planning on the actual set up.

For the actual modelling the maya lessons in class provided me with all the necessary knowledge.
The Hamster wheel was created by modelling ¼ of it and then mirroring it to all sides:

 

I tried to model the slide out of different bits, but had to realise it was impossible to get the side bits alligned with the main body. After a few tries I decided to form it all out of one bit, and luckily I was still able to easily assign different materials to different parts.

failed attempt to form it out of several bits

formed out of one bit.

end bit of the carrot, formed of a revolved curve

The most difficult was probably the hamster character itself. In the beginning I tried modelling it out of a sphere because I wanted an organic feel to it, which was the completely wrong approach.
I tried again working from a block, as my tutor had told me, and working on only one side which could then be mirrored for better symmetry. But again I modelled with far too many polygons in hope to get a more organic feeling while achieving the opposite. I like the detailed snout in this version, however it was definitely not practical.

After this failed attempt I decided to keep the hamster simple and stylised, cute instead of realistic. It should just add some live and maybe a form of comic relief to the animation.
With that in mind it became much easier to create a simple, efficient design that could be easily animated.

Once I had created the shape I tried rigging it (putting in the bones which could later be moved to animate the whole thing) but without skin weights the model would deform all over the place:

I painted the weights in, which I had to redo a couple of times before I realised how to use this tool.

After skin weights (and basic texturing) with controll-blocks for the feet and body:

In the final hamster there are still some little glitches, but they are hidden from the used camera angles, so not a problem for the actual animation.

TEXTURES

I tried to create my own textures for some of the metal bits and the wood of the easel, and even though it was a very useful exercise to create personal textures I don’t think it adds much to the actual animation. What proved really useful were UV maps, with which I placed the pictures on the dominos and flags, as well as attempting to texture the hamster. But no matter how I tried to break up the hamster’s UV map and sew the bits together, it always became a mess and I found it impossible to properly paint it for this animation.

Hamster UV

My texture for the easel and all the furniture of the outside room, taken in my accomodation and colour corrected in photoshop:

Two metal textures, the first from Mayaeng:

The second one taken in an elevator:                                                     …and colour corrected:

  

The sky outside the window, put on a plane a bit outside of the room-box and lit by a point light to seem bright enough:

The saw-dust of the hamster cage and the bump map applied:

  

I found this picture through google image search, but unfortunately couldn’t find it again to quote my source. The bump map is simply a greyscale version of the original, slightly tweaked through the bumpmap settings in maya.

All self-drawn textures on canvas and domino:

ANIMATING

The actual animation was rather simple as it was mostly solid objects interacting with each other. Especially the balls going down the slide and falling into the holes of the last tube was a really good exercise for timing and spacing and a lot of fun to do. It also got me very comfortable with the maya graph editor.

The hamster model turned out to be very easy to animate, especially while running in the wheel, because the spokes define exactly where the feet had to be when. Also a big thanks to all the people who put an inexhaustible amount of slow-motion footage of their hamster pets on YouTube! 🙂

graph for hamster walk

CAMERAS

The obvious disadvantage of settling on cameras last is the danger of animating parts that will not actually show up in the later animation, and sure enough I’ve spent the longest time animating two small pellets to roll down a big slide. In the final animation there is barely time for them to be noticed.

I decided on the final camera angles mostly through trial and error, and it took me a while to get a feeling for setting them up. In total I found animating the cameras more difficult than all of the other animation combined. Because camera and focus point are moved individually I would create a lot of unorganic little twitches when either camera or focus point would move backwards for a tiny moment. By now I am quite quick at noticing and fixing these little problems.

LIGHTING

I found http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?vid=6844 this tutorial, which explains the different lighting types in maya. After that I found it easier to set up the lighting for my different scenes, even though it was still a challenge to balance out the light that streams in from the window while not over-lighting the entire room.

For the scene inside the hamster I originally wanted to create a film-noir like setting with extreme shadows and highlithgts. Especially the spokes of the wheel provided the perfect prop to cast the typical long, striped shadows.
However it was difficult to create these shadows and keep the lighting limited to the central ring with bits of the objects disappearing into the shadows around them.

In the end I dropped the idea of the wheel casting specific shadows to keep the symmetry of the shot and enable for one circle of light in the middle.

During the process of animating I realised that the beginning and end of the animation were far too sudden. I discovered that I could add on negative frame-numbers to the beginning of my animation, so make the beginning smoother. However, the negative numbers were a problem for After Effects. In the end I rendered the negative number frames, played them backwards into After Effects and had them followed by the normal animation, which worked well.

SOUND

The sound was half self-made and mixed in Ableton, half taken from free sound sample websites.

sound of the spoon dropping

sound of the hamster rustling

ableton set-up

• May 21, 2012
• Introduction to Digital
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