After Effects 13th March

Today, we decided to create some titles for the film Titanic. We decided to create an animated sequence. The first thing we needed to do was create the things we wanted to animate. We made the Titanic by tracing around a photo of the ship using shape layers. We made some sea by creating a solid and adding a “wave warp” effect to it. We tweaked the settings so it looked like it was moving to the right. We added ramp effects to both the sky and the sea to give it more depth. We then animated the ship moving along the surface of the water.

The next seen we wanted to create was the ship hitting the iceberg. We created an iceberg using the shape tool. We wanted it to seem like it was night, so we added an adjustment layer over the sea. We then changed the ramp on the background to a darker blue. We set up a mask to slide between the day and night, and had the ship dissapear behind this mask.

Once the mask had completed its slide, we animated the ship to come back in from the other side of the screen. We reversed the ship composition so it was moving the other way. We simple animated the ship crashing into the iceberg.

Next we wanted to make some smoke that would come out of the ships funnels. We did this using a particle simulator called “particle playground”. We used a Cannon emitter to disperse the particles and set them to white. We also changed the gravity for to pull the particles to the left as it was moving with the ship. We then added a blur and colorama effect to the particles to make it look more like smoke.

We then added some simple titles to the animation. The first, were animated to swim in the water across the screen. We did this with some simple keyframing. The next was on the ship itself, which was done by simply parenting it to the ships composition.

The cinematography title was also attached to the ship, but when it hit the iceberg it slides off. We did this by animating its position and adding an echo effect to the text to give the effect of it sliding off the boat.

After Effects 9th March 2008 pt 2

Today we looked at the “per character 3D” feature of After Effects CS3. We wanted to create a page of numbers falling down through a 3D space. CS3 has a new function that enables the use of animating each text character in 3D.

Firstly, we created a page of numbers from 0-9 using the standard cut and paste tool. We then added an animator function to the text to make the numbers change randomly. We did this by adding a “character offset” animator to the layer. We set it to “ramp up” and switched the random order button on. Once we had done this, we switched on the “percharacter 3D” button. This enables the z-position parameter. We keyframed this from -1500 to 0 over a few seconds. This had the effect of the numbers falling from 3D down to 2D.

We then took a picture of Ahmed and took out the background in after effects. We took this image and turned it into a Luma matte for the “numbers” layer This gave the impression of the numbers falling into the shape of Ahmed’s head. We then created a new solid and applied a Ramp effect to it. This added some colour to the animation. Here is the result.

After Effects 9th March 2008

Today we looked at 2 techniques. The first was for creating animated backgrounds using “fractals”. The purpose was to create a simple, yet interesting animated background that could be used for title sequences, credits, web design, of just as an interesting texture in an animation.

Here is the first fractal we created, we played around with the setting until we got one we liked. We also animated the evolution, to create movement within the fractal.

We then created another fractal with different settings, we wanted something with lines, this is what we came up with. We used the vertical scale option to create this effect.

We then overlaid the two fractals and applied a color burn to the top one. This gave us this effect.

We then created a new solid and applied a ramp effect to it. This gave it a gradient fill. We then Precomposed the 2 fractals, and placed our solid above it. We then applied a multiply effect to the transfer option and it gave us this effect.

We weren’t completely happy with the animation, so we precomped what we had and duplaicated it. We then applied a luma key to the top composition to get rid of the black and rotated it 90 degrees. This gave another layer of the fractal we had just created. Here is the final result.

Web Design 12th March 2008

I made this site for Oman

http://mediaweb.aib.ac.uk/overseas/alriyami/

Thursday 6th March 2008

Today we wanted to create a new view out of a window by replacing the original view with one that we had created. So, the first thing to do was to shoot a small piece of footage to use in the tutorial. We shot this in the training room. The view outside the window was quite bright so it would be easy to matte. This is the footage we shot.

The first thing we had to do was to create a mask for the footage. It wasn’t just a still image, so we had to make sure that we were masked out well when we walked across the window. First of all, we created an alpha matte using after effects. This was just a black box drawn around the shape of the window. We could have done this using a mask within after effects, but found it easier to do it this way. The idea was to create our own alpha channel that we could apply to the layer itself. When we had imported the alpha channel for the window, we only had to worry about the area of the footage where we walked across the window. We used a variety of effects to create a black and white silhouetted image of us walking across the window. We used levels, blurs, an thresholds to create this effects. Here is the extracted matte we pulled from the footage.

We placed this image over the original footage and set it as an Luma matte to make the window transparent.

The next thing to do was create the background to put into the footage. We decided to create a futuristic landscape with skyscrapers poking out of clouds. The first thing we did was find a suitable image of a skyscraper and cut around them using the mask tool. We ten separated the buildings onto separate layers so we had individual control of them. Next we got a picture of a sky and placed it behind the buildings. We then found a picture of some clouds and keyed out the blue from the sky so we could overlay them onto the building. Next we used the “tritone” effect on the sky, buildings and clouds to give everything an orange/golden colour. We thought this worked well with the futuristic elements of the image. We tried out various other effects such as brightness and contrasts on the whole composition to make it look darker and more stylistic.

Next we added some fractal noise and some CC Rain over the composition to simulate some simple weather effects. Here is the finished result.

We then simply added the background we’d created to the footage. We scaled it and positioned it so it looked realistic. We also added the same tritone effect to the original footage.

We realised that the matte we’d created wasnt quite right, so we added a matte choker to trim away the edge of the matte. For an extra, we decided to apply a small zoom and rotation to the composition using a simple camera and by making the layers 3D. Here is our final result.

Maya

We started our Maya training by having a brief introduction to 3D graphics (animation) then we moved on to have look at the Maya interface, menus, modules and the user interface in general. Having understood the basic principles of navigating the interface, and also the 3d space, we dived directly into the first task: 3d modeling.

Modeling:

We designed a storyboard, and also some basic character design for it, based on these we started modeling the characters of the story: a bird, a snake, and later we will produce the scenery using Mayas paint effects features.

The Bird:

To learn how to model in 3d we started modeling this character using polygons. We used all the basic tools : extrusion, pulling vertices, etc,etc, following Ahmed original character design sketches. We went over the process several times and tried different solutions for the “problems” that arose along the way. The characters have quite a cartoon appearance which in general make them fairly simple to model but still has enough complexity to make it interesting as an exercise.

The Snake:

A much simpler model, it benefited from the used blend og NURBS and Polygons modeling.

Rigging:

After having finished the model, (or agreeing that we should move on…) we started learning about Rigging (or setting a bone structure for the model). we learned the different kinds of kinematics in 3d animation ( Forward kinematics, Inverse kinematics) and considered by animators as one of the most technicals fields of 3d animation, this is not an accurate perception. while Rigging has certain principles that need to be followed in a given order, these are fairly simple and once you know them they can be replicated and adapted to the characteristics of a given character ie: a quadruped, simply has two more legs than a human, that from the point of view of Rigging means two more sets of bones connected somehow to the Root of the Rig, and a few more IK-handles. Riggs can be very complex or over complex unnecessarily and this tends to make it an intimidating subject to learn at first.

We made a simple Rig for the main body and Inverse Kinematic handles for the legs, the wings we agreed would be easier to animate using Forward Kinematics ( keyframing the rotation of the bone they are parented to), the wings could also be animated either with Setdrivenkeys ( internally deriving or tranfering their movement from another animated attribute in the character), or using an expression or script (this requires scripting-programming knowledge).

We rigged the snake character in the same way, but we used a Spline IK-handle to animate the waving movements characteristic of the snake.

Test Animation:

To test the rig we made a simple animation of the bird “running for his life” with a 360 camera rotating around it , we also used a 4 point lighting, and used basic principles of rendering.

Skinning:

After the bones structure and Ikhandles are in place, we “blend” this rig woth the “mesh” or model, as the intention is that the rig will deform the model, producing the movement we want (animation).

Skinning is pretty straight forward automatized process in Maya, what is quite demanding is the process known as “Painting Weights” whichmeans editing the way each bone in the rig deforms the mesh or model (each vertex) , this process involves assigning different weights to different vertices by “painting” to them the ammount of influence of every neighbouring bone.
As this is a very important topic and quite a “dark art” to master we gave it several trial runs.

Animatic:

From the storyboard, we made an animatic, to explore timing issues for the final animation, we used simple solid models as “stand-in” for the characters and scenery, this allowed us find out not only timing issues but also consistency in the cinematography layout for the animation (shot angles, shot transitions,etc,etc.)

After Effects 3rd March

Today we looked at the title sequence from “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” We decided to recreate the paper plane animation that was at the beginning of the sequence. We did this by firstly creating a composition of a 3D paper plane. We did this by creating masked solid layers that were she shape of each fold of paper. We then lined them up to create a 3D replica of a paper plane. One We then attatched all the sides with a Null object so they could be easily animated.

We then took that composition and animated it in a 3D space to make it look like it was flying. We had to spend some time getting the keyframes right so we it looked natural. It still need a bit more work.

We then wanted to add the dotted line trail behing the plane. We did this using a stroke effect and drawing a mask that followed the planes journey.

To make it work as a title sequence, we then added some very simple text to the animation. We first pre-composed what we had done so far and enabled the time remapping. We there then able to simple add a freeze frame. We then key framed the position and scale parameters of the pre-composed animation to give the impression of a zoom in. We added some text to it, and parented these text layers to the plane composition. This made the text stcik to the plane and follow it when it was animated. We then key framed the text to fade in as it came closer.