Week_01_Notes & Essay

This week I still focusing on the textures and models of our scene.

I did a further research on the color key in our scene and find some useful references:

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Firstly, I remade the floor texture this week because the old texture, which is made based on real textures, has less useful details and the color is not good enough for the scene. Therefore, I used Substance Designer to make a simple wooden floor texture. The details in this texture is simplified, which looks more like a cartoon style floor. It seems that the color of it needs to be adjusted, which will be finished next week.

I also find a better water pot reference for our scene, which has a more colorful and untraditional outward. I modeled the pot, textured it and did a simple rig.

Since our character need to break something inside the kitchen, I added some bottles and plates into our scene. The color of these bottles still need to be adjusted and I will finish it next week.

In next week we will start to add lights into the scene and keep refining our textures, shaders and models. We will test the environment and process to figure out a proper method for our further rendering works.

This week I discussed our project with classmates in other teams. We talked about the purpose of our project and our schedule, and finally focus on discussing about the technical topics. We exchanged several ideas with other classmates. I also saw the development of their projects and their recent achievement.

I discussed with Yaozhang, who is recently making some cinematic compositing works in his team. He shared us with his ideas of the whole project and the things that he is focusing on. I think his project is quite interesting because he has a great chance to combine real life shooting and his software techniques together to develop something quite cinematic and realistic, which is quite challenging and practical. We also talked about the technical problems in both of our project and some personal experience of software usage.

I also have a chat with other classmates and learned their working pipeline and what software they are using in their project, which gave me a lot of inspirations. I also realize that each team works pretty well and has clear schedules for the project. I saw their passion to the project, which motivated me to work harder. There is still several weeks for us to develop our project, I’ ll work harder and try to acheieve a better result after this discussion.

This week I focus on the textures of our scene and start to test rendering. Wanxuan did the setting of our models so I can texture these models based on her scene.

Since our main scenes are a livingroom and a kitchen, I firstly did a research on Pinterest to find some color reference for our scene. I then find some reference like these:

After compared with different kinds of references, I finally decided to color the kitchen with white, black and light warm green, which can keep a balance between realistic style and cartoon style. The livingroom is designed to be colored with blue, orange and warm brown, which increases the contrast of image.

I made textures in Substance Painter, which is a handy software for me. I mostly focus on texturing the corners of each object and adding some lines and drops to simulate some kind of hand drawing effects. I also added some fake light and shadows on textures to make it looks more three dimentional.

After making textures I turned to maya to add shaders to models and adjust their light and shadows. Here is the initial effect of two scenes:

The kitchen looks complicated enough but its wooden floor may need to be replaced by some other kind of floor like ceramic floor or something else. The livingroom has a lot of things, but it still looks empty, we are trying to change the settings and adding models to fix this.

One of the most struggling things in this process is the UVs. There are tones of UVs to be unfolded. What’s more, the models of the scene has a lot of problems like bad topology, overlapping points and faces, which added some difficulties to unfolding UVs. Anyway, the problem has been solved manually, which took me a lot of time.

The next step is polishing our textures and keep testing rendering. Also, I think the livingroom seems a little bit empty and we will add more models to fix this problem in next week.

This week Zhenzhong made the character model based on Wanxuan’s sketch and I focusing on character rigging. After I received the model, I finished the character rig by myself.

The character rig is a full handmade rig, which takes me several days to finish. It is a full character rig which covers both body rig and the facial rig. The main body is an ik/fk system which covers ik and fk spine with a basic squash & stretch system, and ik/fk system for limbs. I also made a 360 degree foot controler so that animator can make tiptoe or heel animation much easier. It is pity that I don’t have time to make the squash & stretch system for character’s limbs, which can give animator the opportunity to do some cartoon style animation.

The character rig also has facial system, which covers eyebrow controlers, cheek controlers, jaw controlers, lip controlers and ik/fk eye controlers. I used a blended mode of skeleton based and blendshape based rig system to finish this character rig. Honestly, building the structure of this rig doesn’t takes much time. Instead, painting skin weight and making blendshapes take most of the time because both of them determines the flexibility of this rig.

After I finished the rig I also take some time to check the bugs in this system. I adjust the blendshapes, the skin weight for serval times, which takes a lot of time to finish. The rig also has problem when the main controler scaled. I then find out that the problem comes from the squash and stretch spine system because of the wrong data that transfered within the node editor. I adjust several nodes and fixed the problem.

I also tried to add some sub controlers to the clothes to avoid the crossing between models. However the sub controlers’ shape doesn’t scale when I scale the whole model. I used serveral methods to fix this problem but failed. I will do a further research on this to try to solve this bug. What’s more, I think the cheek control can be improved to be more flexible, but I may not have time to develop it deeper because I need to focus on texturing in further process, which is also a tough work.

Next week Ziyin may start to make the layout and animation. Therefore, me and Zhenzhong will then focusing on texturing and rendering. We will try several techniques to achieve the rendering result that we want in maya. I think we can finish all the textures before the animation finished so that we may save a lot of time for rendering and lighting.

Rigging:

This week I rigged our robot model and the newspaper, which can be used for layout and animation.

Robot

The robot has ik&fk arms and global Ctrl, which is suitable to animate different kind of animations. A space switching attribute is created to allow the arm to follow the world space or the robot itself. I also create SDK groups to let animator make robot’s fingers grab animations by using attributes, which is much faster than animating with finger controlers.

I asked my teammate to test this rig and it works correctly. Recently the elbow is a weighted skin, which may be replaced by a rigid elbow component later.

Newspaper

I also did a newspaper rig, which can be folded and open. Each corner of the newspaper can be bended individually and a single page can be turned by using ik controls on it, which fits the requirement of our animation. I also create two controlers on both sides of the newspaper so that animator can animate a folding animation by adding constains to the controler and character’s ik arm controler. However, this rig is still not flexible enough since the skin weight has some little problems. I will keep testing it to make sure it can be used safely in our project.

The rig can still be improved basing on the requirements of animators. I may update this rig in the next week.

The next step is to model and rig our character. We will need to rig a full body character, which has body controls and face control so that it can fit the requirement of performance animation.

Texture test:

I also did a texturing test this week for our project to make sure the graphic result can be achieved in later process. We did some research first and finally decided to render some kind of style like this:

We want to represent the feeling of the lines, spot and the light in reference.This reference is made by using 3D and hand drawing, but it can still be achieved totally in 3D by editing models can textures.

I changed the texture of coffee maker in substance painter to test the result. The final render is made in arnold:

I used some nodes in arnold lights and rough masks to simulate the light in reference, which is quite closed. The spots on textures can be achieved easily in SP by using some masks. Recent problem is that the shadow is still quite “3D” and the graphic is not flat enough. I will make a new test next week to test more textures and try to achieve a better result.