My next task to complete was the jury room. If you remember, this room was meant to originally contain still puppets in a jury, with a judge puppet in a mechanical fortune teller box that would decide the girls fate. Due to time constraints, the jury was axed and just the judge remained. I had started building the judge and his belongings, as seen below, but it was becoming obvious that this idea was not going to work as time was pressing, and even when the model was finished, Dan would still have to skin and rig it.
Myself and Dan C had a discussion and decided on a new room idea, axing anything to do with a judge all together. Instead, this room would have a rocky cavern on either end, with a foggy floor, and at the sides nothing but blackness, a no-mans land, with an echoing voice asking them the question that would determine their fate.
To construct the design of the room I built 8 rocks and used a tutorial from the following website to create a texture completly frrom scratch:
The tutorials on this site are easy to follow and simple to adapt into your own designs. I reccomend them!
I positioned the rocks, using the camera angles Dan C had already set keys for, allowing me to know the space the camera would be viewing, so I could frame the scene effectivly. Once I was happy with the poisioning of the rocks, doors, and 'love or hate' lights that I had built, I attempted to make fog for the scene.
I had never made fog before, so I researched some tutorials online. The one I used was:
After a few tests, I realised fog wasn't what I was after at all. It was just so static. I decided that smoke would be the way to go. Dan C showed me the basics of how to make smoke and other effects using dynamics and particles in After Effects and how to animate them. I had never used After Effects before so he gave me a run through of the key features. I picked it up pretty quick, as it was very similer to Photoshop, which was good! Armed with the basics, I then created the following smoke tests which made it into the final cut of our film (but more about compositing later :P
By the time the hair was to be created, myself and Jake were slightly ahead of Dan R, so it was our job to see if our plan to create hair would be successful. As I’ve already written about in a previous post, we had decided that the way foreword with the hair was to use a combination of Zbrush, Photoshop and Mudbox. The plan was to build the volume of the hair up in Zbush, bump on the chunky strands of hair and apply basic texture in Mudbox and then clean it all up in Photoshop.
We had used Zbrush once in a previous project a year ago, where we had taught ourselves the programme. It was difficult software to learn and I was worried that I wouldn’t remember how to use it. Luckily it seems that after struggling to learn a programme, its difficult to forget it. Creating the hairstyle in Zbrush was interesting, as I kept creating a massive milk maid hairstyle for some reason!
Once I had got a hairstyle that I felt I would be able to work with, I took the subdivisions right down in zbrush to keep the model low poly and exported the model to Maya. I soon realised however, that our devised plan would need some work. Bumping on the creases in Mudbox didn't look as effective as I'd hoped and making the design look presentable was taking myself and Jake on our different models, more time than I felt comfortable with. Time was slipping and we needed a way to make the hair look good, fast.
After watching two episodes of '24' with Dan C for an inspirational break, as creating the hair was beginning to stress me out, I came up with the idea to paint the highlights on in Mudbox and then use that texture map to create a bump map in Photoshop. Together we created a rough test to see if this was feisable. The plan worked, allowing our group a method to create chunky hair, in a much faster way.
When creating the bunchy, I constructed the shape in Maya, Mudboxed it as I had done with the top of her hair and brought it into Photoshop, only to find that the save button wouldn’t work! I had never even considered this as a possibility of happening, but nothing would save! I searched online for help, and found that this had happened to other people, but their various methods of fixing the problem wouldn’t work for me. I dragged poor Jake over and made him reinstall Photoshop for me, but to no avail. Nothing would save. In a last attempt I searched online again and found a blog entry where there was another method of fixing this problem. This time it worked! All I had to do was to uncheck a simple button. Haha.. ahhh. These projects wouldn’t be the same without these sorts of things happening.
With the bunchy and the top of her hair complete, I created a hairband and a headband and moved onto creating the fringe.
Wow, if I thought I had come across stress so far, it was nothing compared to her fringe!
I created her fringe the same way in which I had created the rest of the hair. However, this did not produce the effect I was looking for as it was so blunt with no choppy strands of hair at the bottom that it looked stuck on.
Dan C suggested creating an alpha map. This turned out to be rather tricky to get looking right, and so I produced lots of undesired results some which can be seen below :)
Finally, after a long night, I got the fringe looking how I wanted it to :D yay!
It wasn't only me who had had trouble with the hair. Jake had spent a long time working on his too. The images that Jake sent me to look over were good, but not completely what I was imagining in my head. Please see Jakes blog to view some of his hair tests. I felt the bunchys appeared too puffy and the hair on the back of her neck to be too long. I told Jake how I felt, and he was realy great at trying to get the hair, more to my vision.
An image Jake sent me of the hair looking alot more to shape, and a really quick digram I drew on the left to help:
The hair still looked a little too bulky from the side view, so I made a few alterations.
Just like I had struggled with the alphaed fringe, so had Jake. The tests that he had shown me, indicated that he was having trouble getting the alpha to shape the fringe out of an Elvis sideburn shape and the textures for her hair were not as flowing as I would like. Jake took my amendment requests really well, especially as I know I am a bit of a perfectionist, but time was ticking and I needed Jake to begin work on the grass in the graveyard. I assigned Jake to begin work on the graveyard grass and retextured Kittys hair myself, and built a new fringe, also using Lee's hairbands to keep continuity between the models.
Jake original hair and alpha map challenges:
My retextured hair and new fringe:
The above images show the hair very dark. With light reflecting off of the specular map (here the bump was used again) the hair can be seen to have more tone in the final film :)This can already be seen if you click on the image to enlarge.
This was another model that was going to be seen clearly by the camera, so it was once again important for the model to look good close up.
I began by constructing the windmill. I built a standard rectangular plank and began trying to construct slats up the side of the windmill. However this was taking rather longer than I had expected it to and wasn’t looking that good. I wasn’t sure if the overall effect was going to be impressive and didn’t want to waste a lot of time on something I only hoped would look good in the end. To solve this problem a little faster I used the duplicate special tool. I began by using the tool to create many planks heading straight up then positioned them on the model. Then by moving the pivot point of the planks to the centre of the windmill I used the tool to duplicate the whole row around the windmill base model in one go. I could then see the overall effect.
Aside from looking like a massive Darlek, I liked the overall effect. However, there were clear flaws in the design- most definitely the planks of wood. Being exactly the same and not particularly stylised they made the model look bland and unrealistic. To resolve this issue I created 4 different stylised planks of wood and then duplicated them and mirrored them to create 8 planks of wood in total.
These planks came in extremely handly thoughout the making of this film. You can find them in the cave sequence on the track, and on Dan R’s stalls. I then used the same technique as before, using the duplicate special tool to create 8 separate windmill bodies. I proceeded by taking away planks off of each windmill in such a pattern that when I brought the windmill bodies together the planks fitted into place to create a solid windmill.
For the top slats of the windmill dome and the bottom ones surrounding the ride, I used a pattern of planks again but didn’t bother creating 8 separate models and instead applied them manually. I worked in this method this time as the dome and the bottom slats were much smaller models than the whole windmill and this way would be the most time efficient.
The roof, floor and wall panels were all made with separate objects as opposed to big block shapes with extruded indents. I had found with the construction of the carts that if a model is going to be clearly in shot, unless done really well, it is more effective to create the objects as they would be in real life. To save time, the ride is not panelled all the way around where the camera will not see and parts of my old proxy model can still be found in the scene.
I added fairy lights to the sails to complete them. I planned to extrude a polygon down a curve to create the wire, but drawing the wire itself was rather frustrating, trying to manoeuvre the points on the correct position of the sail. Just as I was starting to get irritated, I heard a quiet voice behind me say, ‘Why don’t you make the model live?’ Not knowing what he was talking about, Dan C showed me how to make an object live in order for you to draw straight onto it. Thanks Dan :) I used this method to create wires around the rest of the sails and the posts.
To make the lightbulbs, I made one and then converted it into a paint brush and then proceeded to paint lightbulbs onto the verts of the wire. I researched the following tutorial that instructed me on how to do this:
As the holidays were coming to a close, I didn’t want to spend much time on the creating of the bunting. However, when just adding a triangle to rope, I could see the effect was very flat. To solve this problem I created a cloth deformer, setting a key when I felt the bunting looked most realistic. This was a quick method of creating an object that looked as though it were actually dangling from rope, instead of trying to model this in manually.
Notice the rope that has broken and fallen to the floor. I included this as I felt the ride was looking too symmetrical. This was also the reason I added a ladder going up one side of the windmill, to help break this symmetrical appearance.
