Name: Yuriy Kozlov id: ykozlov License: CS65a Project A Animation: "Hat Adventures: episode #38" Song: "Les Yeux Fermé" by Red Nebula Copyright © 2007 Yuriy Kozlov (music by Red Nebula © 2006) Copyleft: this work of art is free, you can redistribute it and/or modify it according to terms of the Free Art license. You will find a specimen of this license on the site Copyleft Attitude http://artlibre.org as well as on other sites. Synopsis: The character is a construction hat with legs, inspired by the toys given out by the Brandeis Department of Residence Lif during room selection. I had several ideas of how to animate it, depending on the music I found to use, so this is an episode in a theoretical series of animations about this character. In this episode, Hat is moping about being dumped. He walks down the street in the rain. When he gets home, he looks out the window and remembers him and his girlfriend (a pink construction hat) walking down the street happily together. Then he looks at a picture of them on the beach and remembers that scene. Finally he looks out the window again and remembers girl hat walking away. Methods: Character: The character is inspired by the toys given out by the Brandeis Department of Residence Life during room selection. It is a construction hat with legs. I started with a sphere. I took all the vertices in the bottom half and set their position to 0 to get a flat bottom. I cut it in half and used a mirror modifier until I was done creating the mesh. I created a cylinder for the legs and extruded it several times. I cut out a circle in the sphere where the leg meets it and merged the vertices so that the leg is connected. I extruded the leg further resizinng as I went to make the foot. The details in the hat and the feet were made by selecting faces, subdividing if needed, and extruding them. A subsurface modifier was used to make the model smooth. The materials are simple colors adjusted for specularity. There are three materials, one for the head, one for legs, and one for the feet. Rigging: The armature consists of a bone for the head, a master bone, and a dozen bones for each leg. The legs are made to be flexible like the toy. Picture on the wall: The picture on the wall uses a video texture. The video is the scene from project B. In that scene, I keyframed the camera at various positions around the characters. I rendered that animation, and used it as the texure for the picture in this one. The Bench, Beach, Water, Grass, Clouds, Sun, and Sign below are all from project B. The lighting and world from that scene is not covered here. Bench: The bench was made from a cube elongated and duplicated 3 times. The boards have a wood texture on them. The legs of the bench are made from a bezier curve extruded and beveled. They have a cloud texture applied to normals and color to get the metallic effect. Beach: The beach, which is under the entire landscape, is a plane subdivided and formed to the slope of a beach. It has three stucci textures on it to create the sand grains and bigger bumps. Water: The water was initially copied from the beach shape, and faces were added to create the top. The material is a dark blue, with ray mirror and transparency. There is a cloud texture applied to the water to get waves. In addition, there is an extra plane right under the water with the same material. Both are somewhat transparent, and the mixing of the materials adds to the water effect. Grass: The grass is made using particles by this tutorial: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=68269 Clouds: Clouds were made using particles and halos with the help of this tutorial: http://www.cogfilms.com/CQTs-5.html They were made thin and long unlike the puffy clouds in the tutorial. Also, static particles were used rather than going to a particular frame to get it to look right. Sun: The sun is a sphere with a bright material with shaders on it. There is a sun lamp in front of it to provide the actual light. There are different color spot lights around the sun to add extra color to the sun, the clouds, and the water. Sign: The no tresspassing sign was made with a simple bezier curve, extruded and beveled and a plane. The post has the metal texture from the bench on it and the sign has an image texture made using Krita, and a clouds texture to make it look old. This sign was added solely to fulfill the requirement of the assignment to include image textures. Sky/world: The world uses "real" and "blend" to get a gradient sky. Stars are enabled. There is a clouds texture with an gray color mapped to hori and blend.. There is no ambient light. There is a mist with a starting distance about half way down the street and depth through the other half, so the houses in the back can be barely seen. Desk Lamp: The lamp started out as a sphere. I moved and scaled the rings to make a vertical lamp shape. I moved the top tip of the sphere down to make the opening of the lamp. Then I created a simple armature for the lamp to ease positioning. It has a black material on the outside, and a white material on the faces on the inner part. There is a subsurface modifier applied to the desk lamp and it is set smooth. There is another translucent sphere in the lamp for the bulb, and there is a lamp in front of that sphere. The lamp is high energy and low distance. The bulb and lamp are parented to the top bone. Desk: The desk is a box. I used the knife to cut extra faces and extruded them to make legs. I used the wood material from the bench on the desk. Stool: I made a cylinder for the top of the stool. I deleted half the cylinder and used the mirror modifier. I cut two faces in the bottom using the knife tool and extruded them to make legs. I applied the same wood material from the desk and the bench, and a subsurface modifier. House: The house is a box. I subdivided it to get faces for the window. I deleted the window faces. I used the knife to add narrow faces around the window and extruded those. Then I went to the inside and made new faces where the extrusions were made and extruded again, to the inside of the house. I then extruded edges to make the glass faces, and used a similar process as for the outside window frame for the inner window frame. The material on the window frame is white with the metal texture I made earlier for the bench applied to normals. The glass is transparent. The inner wall of the house is a simple yellowish material with low hardness. The outer wall I made by duplicating all the faces of the house except the window and scaling them up a little. Then I applied a wood texture and adjusted the map input axis so that the siding would be horizontal. The material is red, with the texture mapped to a darker color and normals. I duplicated this house many times to make the other houses, and made roofs from a plane. Street: The street started out as a plane. I subdivided it, then used the knife and extrude tools to cut out the sidewalk and curb. The curb has a simple gray material applied to it. The street and sidewalk were meant to look like wet cobblestone. For this I used a v_____ texture mapped to normals and color without RGB. Lamppost: The lamppost is a cylinder, extruded up, with the extrusions at the top going to the side so that it hangs over the street. There is a (deformed) translucent sphere in the lamppost, similar to the one for the lightbulb in the desklamp. There is a high energy, low distance lamp parented to it to light up the bulb, and another spot lamp to provide the actual light from the lamppost. The spotlight has a low intensity halo. The lamppost was duplicated 4 times and put on different places down the street. Lighting: The lighting in this scene comes from the lampposts (4 lampposts, 8 lamps) and the desk lamp (1 lamp). The lamps are used both to light up the scene and as parts of the objects they are parented to. When the camera zooms in on the picture, I moved the desk lamp to use its light to light up the video. Rain: To make the rain, I followed the rain tutorial [5]. Anything that rain would drop on, has particle deflection enabled. While working, I put the rain in a separate layer because the deflections take a long time to recalculate every time the rain is edited. I ended up with a problem that the original rain effect worked for a couple hundred frames, but for 5000, there were many less drops at any given time. I put the number of particles up to the maximum 100000, but there still may be not enough drops. I didn't use motion blur as suggested in the tutorial because that would take many times longer to render. Animation: Most of the animation consists of the character walking down the street. This was done by first creating a walkcycle using the tutorials [2],[4]. Then I made a path where I wanted the character to walk, and followed the tutorial [4] to make him walk along it at the right pace. There are two walk cycles: the sad walk with the head leaning down, and the happy walk with the head looking up. Other actions used were the character getting up on the chair, and looking out of the window, up at the picture, and just up when walking down the street. These actions were inserted in the NLA to combine with the walking actions, using blendin and blendout. The camera has it's own IPO to move it around through out the scene. The camera doesn't follow anything, all the positioning is done manually. Credits (the ones in the animation): Each set of credits is a plane that, for most of the movie, is out of view of the camera. It is parented to the camera to keep it in front of it or out of view as the camera moves. When the credit is shown, it is rotated into view and keyframed. There is a shadeless, untraceable material used on the planes so that they are always lit up when in view and don't get in the way of lighting. There is an image texture on the planes containing the credits. The image is just some text on a black background made using Krita. Credits: All the models and materials in this project are original work by Yuriy Kozlov. The song used is "Les Yeux Fermé" by Red Nebula. It is distributed under the "Art Libre" [7] license and was found here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/2594/ Bibliography: [1] Grass tutorial: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=68269 [2] Introduction to character animation: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation used as a reference for rigging. [3] Clouds tutorial: http://www.cogfilms.com/CQTs-5.html [4] Walkcycle on a path tutorial: http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~sorin/online-docs/blender/html/x6045.html [5] Rain tutorial: http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/dotclear/index.php/2004/12/24/4-blender-faire-pleuvoir---making-rain [6] Free/Libre music source: http://www.jamendo.com [7] Licence Art Libre http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/ [8] Blender IRC support #blender on irc.freenode.net Problems: For some problems from the beach scene, see the README for Project B. I didn't realize I only needed to do 30-60 seconds of the animation. Oops. Also, it's a little over 3 minutes because of the length of the song. I forgot I needed to use shape keys, as they weren't needed for this character. As mentioned above, I had some problems with the rain effect: I ended up with a problem that the original rain effect worked for a couple hundred frames, but for 5000, there were many less drops at any given time. I put the number of particles up to the maximum 100000, but there are still far from enough drops. Because of this, the rain ended up looking more like snow if anything. I didn't use motion blur as suggested in the tutorial because that would take many times longer to render. Also, while working, I had to put the rain in a separate layer because the deflections take a long time to recalculate every time the rain is edited. The calculation time for large numbers of particles is another performance problem I've been running into, in addition to rendering time for raytracing. Raytracing/lighting problems, as usual: At first I thought I'd leave myself a few days for the animation to render with raytracing, but that didn't happen, so I had to give in and adjust parts of the animation for rendering without it. First, I had to change the translucent materials to ztransp (I forgot the lightbulb). Then I had to move the camera in some frames because I originally positioned it to account for refraction when looking through the window. Without raytracing, the characters appeared in different places on the screen sometimes because of the lack of refraction. A problem I ran into with raytracing is that mist is not visible through a ray-transparent object. This works fine with ztransp however. Overall, the result without raytracing isn't too bad, but some materials just don't look right, or are different from how they looked in my test renders. I didn't quite work out having the characters fade in and out, to create the effect that they are imagined, and so that they don't remain on the scene afterwards. There are some other glitches in the final rendering. In one place I decreased the length of the camera lens, so the credits came into view. At the end, the girl hat's feet have no opacity. At times, the hat intersects the desk. In the beach scene, one hat's legs are swinging too fast, and the other hat isn't moving at all. This scene needs a little more work. TODO: - Add a water effect to the ground using a plugin to make the rain look more real. - Vary the camera lens length. - Make sure all the characters disappear after there screentime is over. - Improve syncing to the music. - Render with raytracing - Improve positioning/scaling of the first credits - Improve timing of the second credits - Improve the movement in the beach scene.