Production Interactive: Environment concepts

Are these even thumbnails now

Production Interactive: Steampunk...?;;;;;;

I don't even know if this is what we were supposed to do OTL

Production Interactive : Hypertext

Tome

Weapon

Cursed weapon

Animation Update - 2D

Most people within the team participated within the 2D animation. I was passed shot 5 "Spread the Love" from a team mate to animate. 

Animation without the background and sound

I first created roughs for the animation and tried to capture a sense of uncertainty leading towards desperation within the character through the use of slight anticipation when his eyes lingered on the left, then using follow through action when they returned to their original position. I also wrote accents for the dialogue to guide my mouth movements along with the audio to sync them up as close as possible. The forced smile was liked by many team mates as they thought it emphasized the emotion of the character well.

However, a lecturer pointed out that the animation wasn't consistent with the other shots Jonathan and Michelle had produced. Their mouth movements were a lot snappier, while mine involved too much movement. Thanks to our head of 2D Jonathan, he was able to give advice which was removing some of the inbetweens to give it a sharper movement.

Later, I was told by Jerwin that he had updated the 3D animation for Butter within this shot. This meant I would have to redo the shift of the facial expressions. I was able to use my old rough as a template for getting the expression correct.

Mapping out the placement of the expressions. It was quite choppy and jumped all over the place, something I would fix later by the use of guidelines which would help cementing the positioning. I had also used the clean up version from the original rough.

While doing so, I was updated by Jerwin again that he had tweaked the animation for shot 5 a little. Luckily, it wasn't too big of a change, and I was able to reuse the animations I had already been producing. 

I was able to position the face to have a smoother transition alongside the 3D animation, and soon began adding roughs for the arms that Jerwin would clean up later. I wanted a shift within the arm to go around the collar of his wrapper shirt, as well as let it include anticipation which would emphasize a defeated arm fall that was made to look more natural through follow through of the arm's swing as it slowed to a halt. 

In exchange for Jerwin doing the cleanup for the arms, I took the shots he helped with and composited them for him.

Animation Update - 3D part 3

Part 3...(shot 6)

Just from the dialogue itself, I knew this would be the hardest out of the shots I had to animate.

"But you can't churn me down! I'm high end creamy blend!"

Butter was at his limit and his desperation is the most strong in this shot. However, the original pose had him lying on his side: I had to make him flip onto his front to look towards Michelle.

Initially, I didn't really know how I would achieve this without it looking so...clunky with the fact that:
1- Butter didn't have limbs at the moment
2- Butter was a 4-sided block. Him rolling could look rather clunky if not careful.

I decided to try the initial idea of making him roll onto his side, even if it didn't look natural to me.

During the beginning stage however, a lecturer overheard my little problem. He offered the idea:
"What about making Butter jump?"

I thought that this could act a lot of character to Butter's personality and also exaggerate how desperate he was: he was willing to actually get up and MOVE on his plate.

After thanking the lecturer for the idea, I tried to come up with an animation for this action. However, once again, I was having trouble imagining how he would push himself off the plate with his arms that didn't even exist yet.

This was what I had ended up with after many alterations (which I forgot to record OTL). I wasn't too happy with how out of time everything looked, from the push to the time spent in the air. There wasn't enough emphasis to show the force of his faceplant, and the follow-through action of his hair flicking upwards was a bit slow also. One idea I had regarding timing that I discussed with Michelle Zhen was that I could have him falling over when he says "churn me DOWN" and have him flick his head up in "I'm HIGH end" for emphasis on the dialogue for clear communication.

Despite this, I was actually beginning to get frustrated at this point that I had forgotten to even ask my group members about the idea in the first place. A few people thought it looked a tad overdone with the Butter suddenly projecting himself into the air - even I started to think that as I kept looking at the animation. Also, when people talk while jumping, their voices jump along with them. The audio we had didn't include this, meaning it already looked out of place with the audio, despite it suiting the dialogue. 

I decided to redo the entire shot entirely and change him to just roll himself over onto his front. Jerwin gave me advice that blocking in the movement made things a lot easier. He helped me block out the entire animation which included arcs within the movement for more accurate flow. After doing so, I tried to get the start of the animation done.

Rough front half of the entire shot

By this time, I had actually spend way too much time on trying to get the animation done, and the 2D animators needed the 3D quickly. As much as I had wanted to help the team with the animation, I wasn't producing desirable animations at a pace quick enough which was holding Jonathan back also. Jerwin ended up looking at what I had, and informed me that he liked the idea of the movement for Butter. He then offered to finish off shot 6 while using the animation above as a guide to making the shot how I wanted. While he was doing so, I would be able to help out with the 2D animating that seemed to be having a few troubles with the first few shots.

Animation Update - 3D part 2

Part 2! (shot 5)

While making shot 4, I was also making the animation for shot 5.
The dialogue was "Spread the love" and this would be the part where Butter was starting to lose hope. Jonathan told me that he would slowly drop his left arm from the previous shot in shock, meaning I didn't need to involve too much movement. I thought it would be nice to at least have Butter move in the sense that he's pleading Michelle Zhen with his eyes by directing his head towards her.

Rough animation

I had already found a problem: Butter's screen placement was on the left while Michelle was on the right - Butter looking towards the left wouldn't make sense. 
I soon changed the animation to look as so. The way he directed his eyes made a lot more sense, and I thought the ease into the head turn emphasized his desperation and shock. 

Animation Update - 3D part 1

...Well I certainly took my time to update my blog during the animation process -.-;;;
Prepare for a massive update on the animation process OTL

We first started off by counting how many shots of Butter we had and decided to split half of the shots to Jerwin, and the other half for me to animate. I was given shots 4, 5, and 6 which included the lines:

"Hmph, well I AM the cream of the crop."
"S-Spread the love!"
"But you can't churn me down! I'm high end creamy blend!"

Before doing that however, we needed to check how Butter fit on the plate inside the fridge.

Butter seemed to fit fine, we would just have to adjust the lighting and camera angles
accordingly to each shot

After doing so, I began making rough animations for the shots. The first being the cream of the crop shot.

I wanted his head to tilt downwards at the beginning to emphasize his smirk. Afterwards, he would tilt his head up in a rather...."greasy" fashion. The timing would have to be altered to fit later also.

However, after checking with the head of 2D Jonathan, he gave me feedback that Butter lost his sturdiness as he "jiggled" around. Also, I was actually a bit late in giving this to him, as he had split the 2D animation between different members too. This meant that it was up to Jerwin and I to provide them with 3D animations quickly in order for them to work on them. I honestly wasn't too confident with my 3D skills initially, and I was actually finding it more difficult to animate Butter compared to a character with no limbs because of the fact that he had a solid form, and I also had to imagine how his body would move if he DID have limbs within the 3D aspect of the animation.

I referred back to the animatic Jonathan had provided, along with the expression sheets the members doing 2D animation had discussed to create a pose that would further fit the face that Jonathan had already started animating without a body. (Sorry Jonathan! T_T)

It still included the smirk and included a head tilt backwards which Butter would then whip his head forward with his changed extreme expression. This shot would've looked a lot better if I had included follow-through action for his head to maybe tilt back slightly again at the end to look more smooth and natural, as he looks quite stiff when he returns.

I thought this animation was capturing Butter's extreme personality quite well personally. However, I still hadn't learned the lesson of communicating with the 2D animators: I had made my animation different to what Jonathan had already drawn out.

On this day (3/06) there was a feedback session with other lecturers and we had to prepare an animatic for it. So I quickly remade a rough animation of this shot to fit Jonathan's animation.

After fixing the animation, it fit perfectly with his animation

This was the basic animation I quickly made for that shot. However, with the addition of the expressions and the quick zoom in, Jonathan and I thought that the shot looked perfect just as is. The emphasis is supposed to be on Butter's extreme expressions, so having too much body movement could distract the audience. Also, I later realised that the sudden head whip forward along with the fast zoom could be a bit of an over-emphasis which could overload the audience.