Blitz Games Studios (Leamington Spa, UK) is looking for a Concept Artist to come in and work at the studio for a period of two and a half months. The concept work required is for an imaginative, magical & mystical video game. The art style is painterly, stylised and caricatured. We are offering excellent working conditions and a competitive pay rate.
The kind of work required: • Landscape concepts • Character concepts • Special Effect Concepts
• Key Art • Thumbnail sketches • Grey Block Paint over’s • Key Art/Grey Block Paint over’s • Breakdown of features/props into additional orthographic or detail views
The right candidate should have: • Good communication skills • A positive attitude • Ability to take feedback and work iteratively • Industry experience • A proven track record of reliability and flexibility
If you are interested in this role please email me at: oclarke@blitzgamesstudios.com
The original brief outlined in a meeting of fellow Animators at work was to create a four second animation based on the theme "hunted". Okay, so I bent/broke the rules a little. My piece is eight seconds long however I felt it had to be eight seconds long. I've really enjoyed putting this one together. As always, I am learning much about many aspects of animation and rendering. Including a little more of how much I have yet to learn!
During the course of making the animation I found a series of jpeg backgrounds from Disneys "The Sorcerers Apprentice". These strongly inspired the backgrounds that you see in the final animation. I love the subtle noise, the texture from the paint, the minimalist shapes and volumes, the dramatic and moody lighting that suggests magic and mystery. I've tried to bring some of that into my final render. For comparison you can find a link to the Disney backgrounds at the bottom of this post.
Using vertex lighting I created a colour pass and rendered it using a Hardware renderer. I then split the scene into several layers, created an ambient occlusion render and combined it all together in post. Here is the final animation looped a few times:
and if you're interested, here is how it progressed through a series of quick videos of progress stitched together towards the final animation:
I'm quite pleased with how its turned out, the project has served it's purpose which was to improve my animation skills and teach me something about creating an appealing render. Looking to the future I feel I should develop finesse with colour temperature, composition, atmospheric perspective and texture in the timing of animation. I feel I also should look at further developing my skills with poses and weight. I've shown it to a few fellow animators and they've given me some constructive feedback to work on. Poor guys, they must be sick of me asking for feedback by now!
Thanks to everyone that gave me feedback and advice on it! Special thanks must go to Al Barber, Darren Watford, Richard Blackley, Stephen Sloper and Aron Durkin.
It's time for a new project now. I've found a picture by Eyvind Earle that I want to model and bring to life in a short animation. Its not going to be anything fancy, i've just got a real itch to have a go at it. Here's the pic:
Since my last post ive been working away on my rendering skills. Ok, im trying to Animate better not Render better however I'm learning a lot and having fun, so sue me. Please open up the images in separate tabs to flick through them, the differences are subtle and yet they are there and they are important to the final render.
The image below is an update on the concept from the last post. I showed the concept in my last post to TheDaz* and he said "you've for the principles but you've gone a bit batshit with them". So below is an update, a more conservative, balanced take. I've focused on using atmospheric perspective to create depth, strong highlights to define form and mood and colour temperature to create believable colour. As TheDaz* says, I think I've got the principles. Now I need to practice with them so I can develop finesse and convincing subtlety.
Below is my first render from of the scene based on the concept above. Initially I started trying to texture everything but it was taking so long and it wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to based on the concept above. So I turned to vertex painting and hardware rendering, I will compile and treat the image in post with added noise, bloom and a shadow pass. This way is a LOT faster, easier to tweak and frankly, more fun.
In a paint program I’ve added a slight noise. I’ve also duplicated the image, blurred it, laid over the top and set it to lighten mode to give it a softer atmosphere.
I’ve still got to do an ambient occlusion pass so that the stairs have proper shadows which I will place over the top in multiply mode, again, in post. Then I’ve got to change the character textures so that they complement the mood and lighting of the scene, create a light rig for them and render separately with an alpha channel. I will also create an ambient occlusion pass for the characters so that they have convincing self shadowing.
I showed the render above to TheDaz* and he came back with the image below. He's implemented colour temperature more effectively around the main wall light. He's also added more atmospheric perspective and a bounce light that fills in the area around the stairs, column and opposite wall slightly.
Hopefully by next post I will have a new playblast of the animation in the lit environment with characters also lit. I may even have the colour pass of the render ready.
*What are you looking here for? TheDaz* always has a star next to his name. At my company he's like TheStig of art and his time and advice is very much appreciated.
this is a quick post to say I've uploaded a new pass to youTube which can be seen here. In this pass I've implemented feedback from colleagues and friends. There are many small changes however the main changes are the foot sliding as he recovers from the roll. Plus a new final pose for the henchman at the end of the scene which is meant to make the hero look trap in the corner of the screen.
I've also performed another pass on the background concept to give it more depth and to draw the eye to the area where the hero will emerge into the scene.
I will now be focusing on getting the background ready to be modelled and lit. till next post!
I've been pretty busy on the short Hunted animation I've been working on in my spare time.
I've got to the point where im looking at what the background environment should look like, below is how it currently looks. It's just a rough mock-up made of a few planes.
I took the image above and painted over it in Photoshop. My composition, texture and colour is nowhere near as strong as those images above however I do love to try. Hopefully with a few iterations I can get a bit nearer the quality shown in Disney's backgrounds. As it is I like the idea of using moody midnight blues to convey the mood. I think the overall composition could do with some work to make it more interesting. I should also look at using colour to help describe the volumes in the scene. I'm going to look at a few books of old castles to see if I can find items to punctuate the scene with. Maybe those books will point towards the colour scheme I should use too.
Animation Passes
Following on from last weeks post with the first blockout of the overall movement. Here is the next pass which gives some idea of how I want the character to move during the animation:
Here's an update, I had an idea that there should be an antagonist right at the end to end the scene with a question. What happens to the main character when confronted by a chap with a sword.
And here is the latest pass with all the animation blocked out. The next phase is to ask as many people as possible for critical feedback before moving onto polishing the animation. Hopefully there arent too many fundamental errors that require fixing. The further I go into an animation the more time it takes to change it fundamentally.
That's it for now, my next tasks are to set up a basic face rig for the main character and carry on working out what the background should look like.
It's time to start a new animation. My last animation clocked in at 30 seconds long which, as I learnt, was far too long. To enable me to create, make mistakes and learn faster this animation project will be much shorter. Hopefully I can move onto another project more rapidly and speed up the learning experience.
My primary aim is to create a short four second action animation around the theme "Hunted". The animation should be to a very high quality, ideally Gobelins quality. My secondary aim is to improve my ability to put texture in the timing of my animations. My third aim is to create an animation in the style of Gobelins. If you've never seen a gobelins animation, here's a link: http://www.gobelins.fr/galerie/animation/
So far I have some rough pose sketches (read very rough), see below, im trying to capture the feeling of legging it from something with some extreme posing.
I tried creating a few sketches for some backgrounds, frankly, they were a bit rubbish. But that's not to say they were a waste. They showed me what I didnt want to see and gave me an idea of what I did want see. I sat down with Maya and played with basic geometry until I saw what I wanted to see. The bonus is that when I come to do paintovers of the geometry I wont have to work out the perspective and can get on with being creative.
With regards to animating the piece, I'm taking a different approach to blocking out this time by using stepped keys in Maya. It creates the feeling of stepping between the frames and shows no inbetweens. I've avoided it in the past as I felt it was difficult to get a sense of timing. However I've been practising with the technique and found it to be a quick way of feeling how an animation will turn out in terms of timing.
I've started a public wave to keep track of feedback, click the link below to take you straight to it. HUNTED ANIMATION WAVE
To go off topic for a moment. Im sad that Google have decided not to continue with Wave. I certainly find it useful, I hope the features of Wave make their way into other internet applications.
Below is the first block out of the timing that I'm almost happy with. Next post I will update with a more broken down animation using some of the poses above.
Below is my evaluation of how the animation I recently created went. Also, here is a link to my YouTube channel if you want to see the videos that show the progress including the final piece: www.youtube.com/user/BarryBland
Here's the video embedded again:
Overall this evaluation comes across as negative however this is deliberate. I've learned the most from what went wrong. It doesnt mean i hate myself or anything...I do apologise for the lack of pictures in this post. I'll try and get more pics for the next post...
So lets get started!
The Short Version The short version of the evaluation is this: I should have created a shorter piece of animation to enable me to focus my time on quality. I should have done even more planning and created an even tighter structure for the animation in terms of workflow and idea creation.
My big take away is that there should have been much more texture in the timing to make the animation more appealing and interesting.
Biting Off More Than I Could Chew My first classic mistake was simply being too ambitious with what I wanted to achieve. A thirty second dialogue between too characters was far too long to allow me to focus on creating a very high quality piece of character animation.
Im all for running before you can walk as I believe in doing so I will learn a lot more quickly. However the piece I decided to undertake took far too long to teach me valuable lessons because it was simply too big. I could have learnt the same lessons by working on a ten second clip, saved myself a lot of time and probably ended up with a better result.
Research, Reference and Planning As always, this part of creating the animation should have had much more time put into it. I should also have submitted the planning to colleagues much earlier for feedback. This would have provided the animation with much more structure and have identified the structural weak points in the animation, of which there are many in the final render. With more structure it may have stifled some of the creativity however it would have dramatically sped up the creation, iteration and feedback process and in the long run created a better animation. Research wise, as well as filming myself, I should have referred to a film, animated or otherwise, for a similar scene. With that I could have identified the strengths and weaknesses of the scene more and focused on maximising the impact.
Texture in Timing Near the end of creating the animation I had the clip below forwarded to me:
Part three of the video above is particulary relevant and useful. Two animators at Pixar explain their take on Timing and Spacing in animation.
In particular the section on "Texture in timing" was particularly useful. Texture in the timing means that the animation plays out like a piece of music. There are quiet parts and loud parts, crescendos and lulls. By applying this to animation it helps to create interesting moments and life in the animation. From watching the third clip that I realised all my animation was too flat and even in the timing, this killed the life in the animation. From then on I went through and tried to speed some movements, slow down others and add interesting inbetweens in terms of timing to fix the issue. However it was already too late to fix. I should have planned with texture in the timing in my mind from the beginning.
note: I think the habit of creating even pacing comes from working the games industry. In a game cycle animations have to progress with an even timing otherwise they glitch and grate on the eye as you watch the same cycle multiple times. Character animation however is radically different in respect to timing.
Texture in the timing is an area I really want to practice and improve on in my next animation.
Arcs I remember seeing Brad Bird banging on about arcs, arcs this, arcs that. I also remember Keith Lango describing all animation as 2D shapes on the screen, how to make them interesting and how to transition effectively between them. Arcs are critical to fluid appealing movement that appeals to audience. With the arcs in place overlapping movements, overshooting movements and variation in the timing can be applied making interesting appealing animation. I spent a lot of time trying to get the arcs right not just on the arms but on the tip of the nose and (admittedly) on the sides of the mouth.
To create arcs on the tip of the nose I used a trajectory script called: cMotionTrailUI.mel
I believe it was originally created by the legendary Cameron Fielding for Maya 7. The script is a real godsend when it comes to implementing arcs into an animation properly.
I applied a trajectory curve to a simple polygon sphere that was constrained by the rigs head controller. With that I could see what trajactorys the nose was following and add arcs. Overall it dramatically helped improve the flow of the heads of the characters in the animation. Once again, with better planning in the animation i could have made better use of arcs to make the movement more appealing. A colleague made an interesting observation, to paraphrase them [the hands move perfectly, the heads feel floaty]. When I they pointed that out I agreed and slapped my forehead thinking "how could I have missed that!" After thinking about it I believe that the heads feel floaty for the following reasons:
The shape of the head is large and rectangular meaning the overall movement becomes exagerated and hard to counter act on the body. The counter action of the body agains the head movement should have been better. The overshooting of the head movement should have been more polished.
I did try to scale the heads down around the jaw area but by that point I would have had to do some serious re-engineering of the rig and blend shapes. I didnt want to spend the time doing as I felt I could progress better by getting the animation to a near finished state and moving onto another piece. (apologies for the horrific amount of name dropping in this paragraph)
IK/FK The rig I used to create the animations is getting on a bit now, in particular i had problems switching from Inverse Kinematics where I would pose the arm by controlling the hand, to Forward Kinematics where the arm joints are controlled individually to pose the arm. My rig does have an IK to FK switch that can be animated however I found that the arm would click unconvincingly when switching between the modes. In the end I simply used IK all the time. Unfortunately with FK it is much easier to create smooth appealing arcs with the limbs. In future I would set up a proper FK/IK switch or simply plan the animation better to be aware of when I would use FK and IK. To remedy the situation I used a maya script to create trajectorys. By being able to see the trajectory I could smooth out the arc and create more or less the same effect. As above, I still need to practice implementing and polishing arcs in an animation.
Rendering Rendering, what a time suck. To be honest this is another area I did not plan properly, tried to cut corners and ended up spending much more time on it then I should have. In future I will use backburner to render between multiple machines. Learn more about the rendering features in the latest Maya, many of these have leapt beyond Maya 7 and could save me a lot of time and fiddling, not to mention frustration. With all that in mind im not too disappointed with the final piece however im really looking forward to getting started on the next one with the lessons I've learnt from above.
