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Thursday, October 16, 2008
DIS3904 | DIGITAL IMAGING STUDIO
MAJOR SELF DIRECTED PROJECT OPTION
Aims:
My aims for this assignment are to create a 30 – 40 second animation for my company logo, The Pixel Market. I hope to use a combination of 3D elements and 2D elements to produce a nice clean, smooth motion graphic piece. The theme of the animation is to create 3D “squares” which grow and move around the piece. The idea is that they are the colours of the logo and they are what make the logo.
The motion graphic animation would be mostly used for in house demonstrations or intros for showreels.
The programs I will be using to create this piece will be Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects and Audacity (Sound). I will output the end product in .mov and .flv formats.
Reference Material - Flower Maschine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-wZUqj3Oek
Week 10
After consultation with the other members of The Pixel Market we have decided to choose The Chemical Brothers – Midnight Madness as the music to play along to the animation.
Midnight Madness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoaeEAdDv-c
Some initial Production Tests
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/test3_2Mb.mov
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/playblast_2Mb.mov
Week11
The Pixel Market team and I decided to change the track for the animation due to us using the new song in our in-house showreel. We will incorporate this final growth animation into that reel.
After some more production tests trying to figure out the best way of creating the animation I have stumbled on a few problems. It doesn’t seem to be as easy as first thought due to Maya not being set up for this type of animation.
Production Test with New Song
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeBetter2_2Mb.mov
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeTest_2Mb.mov
I've tried just normal nurbs surface extruding along a path, however the shape of the cube changes and it distorts instead of just being the one size and rotation following the path. See below
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/surfaceExtrude1.jpg
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/surfaceExtrude2.jpg
I've tried making a path with a CV curve and then adding a nurbs circle (shaped like a square) to the curve via the motion path option. Then I create the animated sweep. However this is what happens. It adds twists in the extruded path. See below.
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath1.jpg
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath2.jpg
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath3.jpg
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath4.jpg
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath5.jpg
Here is another example of the animated sweep not working. The motion path seems to work initally however you can see that it gets random rotation values from somewhere when you attatch the motion path. So then when you use the animated sweep it it looks weird. If it wasn't for those random rotation values being added into the path it would be fine.
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/example.jpg
A view of the paths and the attached Nurbs Shapes
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/example02.jpg
Week12
Another whole week was devoted to trying to find an easy way of animating the growing cubes. I have found out that Maya is just not set up to animate this sort of thing which is frustrating as it almost works. I posted threads on digitaltutors.com and thearea.com asking for help but the only answers I got was that it is just something in Maya that they should fix.
I have decided to animate the cubes in a more manual way however it is very time consuming and I will have to limit my overall animation to all that I can do.
As you can see this seems to work.
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeAnimation2_2Mb.mov
Week13 – Part 1
The manual way of creating the animation is very time consuming but with a few days totally devoted to creating the piece I have come up with some work I can present.
It seems to be going nicely.
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeTest2_2Mb.mov
Week13 – Part2
Well after a complete stuff up by me I have had to restart from scratch all of the animation that I had done. I was almost to post production stage when I realized that, the way that I had been animating the piece wasn’t letting me go back to make changes. I had been accidently deleting the history of the animations so I couldn’t make any changes. I only realized this when, of course, I needed to make changes. I came to the conclusion that it would be easier to start over than try and edit the animations.
Animation before I restarted
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeTest_9_2Mb.mov
Once I animated all the cubes again this is what I came up with.
Initial Production Test
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/pixelAnimation_2Mb.mov
Once I finished animating the cubes I played around with the camera work. I couldn’t decide if I wanted one long flowing animation or an animation that is cut up with different angles.
Here is the animation with different camera angles.
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/pixelAnimation7_2Mb.mov
After seeing how they looked side by side I decided that the long flowing animation worked better. This is what the final animation looks like. I added some fades and blurs and other post production effects to make it look more polished.
http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/pixelAnimation9_2Mb.mov
Conclusion
Whilst I am happy with the end product I know there is so much more I could have done with the animation. It was setback after setback and I ended up basically doing the whole assignment in 1 week. There were a lot of little things I wanted to add to the animation including a smaller 2-5 second animated logo that could be used either separately or inclusive of the main animation. Maybe that could be a future project.
However, given the problems I faced with this assignment and the altered timeframe I had to work with, I am happy with the end result of my animation.
