Fighting In School

Only so much freedom may be assigned to a student before they begin to completely fall off track. First Quarter, we, the students, were assigned to create an animation that was done originally and to our own taste. This was not limited to any one certain style. We were granted the opportunity to explore anything we had wanted to. For me, I had chosen to sculpt and model my very own city 3 dimensionally. 

Again, only so much freedom may be offered to a student. For the second project of the semester, we were given the opportunity to work with stop-motion. (Stop Motion -noun -A cinematographic technique whereby the camera is repeatedly stopped and started, for example to give animated figures the impression of movement).

The students had been herded into groups that shared similar ideas and concepts. I had initially come up with an idea revolving around chess. The idea was that the chess pieces would battle and display the progression of war. However, the popular consensus in my group was more of a free-running theme. I decided that ultimately, this idea was more fun and easier than mine.

Then we (my group and I) began to storyboard. Before there is any storyboarding, an idea must be processed and toyed around with. The plan was to allow a fight scene between two characters over something menial and follow the lines of a floor. We had thought of many places to shoot including several hallways, outside and even a theater. Eventually, though, we elected to do it in our school's smallest gymnasium because there was scarcely any traffic through there.

Storyboarding didn't take very long as we saw exactly what we wanted to do when we walked through the Gymnasium and took a few reference shots. Our storyboard wasn't quite a storyboard, though. It had merely been a sketch of the basketball court with a bunch of arrows that would direct our path. On the actual storyboard, though, we sketched out the live action that preceded the stop-motion.
 As for the quarrel that initiates the fight sequence, the cause had been debated. A few ideas had been tossed around, but everybody's favorite had been that the fight had been sparked by a character not sharing his bubble wrap with the other character.

Once we were storyboarded, we collected all of our gear (tripod, camera, crane for aerial shots, and the bubble wrap) and headed towards the gymnasium. To our dismay, we soon discovered that the gym would to be available during 7th hour because that's where cheerleading practiced. If that wasn't enough, we later found out that the weightlifting class typically inhabited the gym during 6th hour. That left us with the conclusion that it would be now impossible to do our video as we had storyboarded it.

We didn't have enough time to lose any. With two of our group members traveling to New York for a week, we had to start shooting immediately. Eventually, we decided to use a hallway as it had some differentiating tile colors that we deemed acceptable. 

We got right to work. My friend Travis and I were the actors with Sam positioning us. Ian worked the camera while Noah typically took care of our stuff. Spencer assisted Ian when he was with us (which was in 7th hour). We finished shooting in roughly 3-4 days of actual shooting. Immediately afterward, Ian and Travis traveled onto New York. For several days following that, Spencer and Sam both had missed school, as well. I was on my own.

Altogether my role didn't call for me to help too much in the editing process, Sam had asked the group to clean up a few pictures that had a tripod leg in the shots. With everybody gone, I took it upon myself to edit them. It took me about 2 hours in total because Photoshop is slow. Below are a few examples.

This was the original picture. As you can see, the tripod leg is VERY visible in the bottom of the photo as well as another foot of the tripod just left of it. These took about two minutes to clean up each, but there were over 60 to fix.

As you can see, I cleaned up the tripod leg along with most of their shadows. 

However, this wasn't the worst framed to deal with.

This was a real difficult frame to deal with because I had to fix both the tripod legs as well as Sam's legs. I endured through it, though, after about ten minutes, and finally cleaned up the frame to look fine. The only unfortunate result was a little black speck where the tripod leg was. I couldn't find a way to get rid of it cleanly, so I left it there in the hopes that nobody would notice if it went by at 12 fps.

I'm under the impression that the main goal of this project was to practice working with other people on animations because in the real world, riding solo and doing projects alone requires a lot more effort and time, so the more people helping you, the faster and more efficiently it will get done. In hindsight, I wish my group and I had checked to make sure the gymnasium would've been open every day or near every day rather than cling to the hope that it would be vacant for us. To make this lesson applicable to the real world, make sure everything can be guaranteed before diving into something headfirst. 

To have never worked together before, my group and I really clicked and we really fell into place. The roles of the project were split up quite evenly and the work distribution was crafted just about perfectly. If I were to do this project again (which I will be doing next year), I think my group hit the nail on the head with distribution of work. Everything was organized and everybody understood their role.

As for what I'm taking away from this project in general, I feel it's dire that one must storyboard and have a developed idea before starting a project. Some smaller projects it may be okay to jump into, but when it comes to big assignments, such as the last two I've done this year, storyboarding is vital. 

Overall, this was a fun project and a nice break away from the 3D world of animation. I would do this again if I had the right software at home to do so. All in all, to the left is the finished project below...or so we thought. 

After unveiling the previous video to the rest of our class, it was brought to our attention that a few holes existed in our project. One such hole was that there was no explanation as to how we ended up on the floor despite just being on the bench in a hallway. We took it upon ourselves to fill that unexplained gap by going back to the hallway that we shot in and shot a few more clips. We added a few seconds to show that we were thrown onto the floor in a running motion after we had pulled each other to the ground forcefully while throwing the Bubble Wrap ahead of us. 
As well as it turned out, it was a very slow, painful process because my colleague and I kept forgetting to bring from home what we needed; I kept forgetting, along with Travis, the clothes we wore during the scene. Eventually, though, we managed to finally bring what we needed and got the shooting done in a day. Editing would take several days more including the credits. Ian worked out all of the kinks on the credits as Sam would continue to make sure the editing ran smoothly. To the right is the true final result.

Check out other great blogs by my groupmates:

Ian Gash

Sam Howell

Travis Howell

Spencer Lindsey

Noah Stafford

Quarter I Project - Overall

Creating an entire city from scratch was not as easy as I thought it might be. I didn't expect it to be easy, by any means, but I didn't anticipate how much work would go into everything once the city was sculpted.

Conception

The purpose behind the animation was to initially take a major city (i.e. Detroit or St. Louis or Milwaukee etc.) and find a way to make it unique. That plan fell through soon enough as I realized how hard it was to take an entire city and build it up. It didn't take long to just take several buildings from cities and other small, generic details from other cities and build them up into one city. A few buildings I modeled, for example, was the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center from Detroit, Freedom Tower from New York, and Willis Tower from Chicago.

Planning

I didn't do a ton of planning. I think this is where my plan fell apart from the building. I just laid down the streets and started sculpting immediately.

Creation

Creation of such a big project was definitely overwhelming. I decided to start at the very center of the city and work my way outwards. I began with the GM Building from Detroit to serve as the city's tallest building and centerpiece. Simply creating most of the buildings took roughly a month (including texturing). Then I had to worry about lights and settings. I deemed a mountain bowl would be suitable for the city. In reality, building a city in the middle of a mountain depression would be a very bad idea, but this is animation, where anything is possible. After that, I took another week and a half adjusting lights. The final few days I spent attempting to render everything out. Maya is not very receptive when it comes to rendering projects with a lot of frames, as you can see below.

Self-Critique

Rendering was not a dear friend to me. At first, I had a plan to let a camera run through most of the city to see almost every detail. That worked for about three days before I started to mess with its home key. When I set the home aside from the middle of the camera to the middle of the city (to get a 360 shot of it), I thought by setting keyframes, the axis would be unaffected. I was very wrong. When I tampered with the home axis of the camera, it inflicted devastation across the entire project. Instead of going back and trying to save the dying horse, I did the quick thing and added a new camera that moved slower and had much less detailing. It works so I can turn something in and still meet my deadline (don't get me wrong, it's still good camerawork), but it's not exactly what I had anticipated. Then the rendering process turned out to be very slow. On top of a slow render, I returned to school from my absence in which I left my project to render, I found that only about 1,150 frames had rendered. This is under a fourth of my entire project. I thought I'd try again to render everything out in Maya. Maya wasn't on the same page; Maya and its renderers would act like they were going to work, but in reality, they simply quit working, as shown above. In general, I never got to self-critique my final result because there was no final result. This also goes for the class-critique.

If I were to do this project again, I would definitely account for everything in my timetable. I would've rearranged a couple deadlines and moved different deadlines to different days etc. I didn't even think about how long the camerawork would be and how long it would take to render at all. That was merely poor planning on my part.

Upon next quarter, maybe, I'll be able to redo the last portion of it as I saved some 86 different files in different times in case something like this happened.

Overall, it was a great introduction to true, free-willed animation. I can't wait to do this over the next 7 quarters and hopefully in college, too.

Quarter I Project - Fifth Deadline

My last deadline was sort of absorbed by my fourth. With time on my hands, I knew I had only a little bit to do. What wasn't anticipated, though, how time-consuming these little menial acts could be. What I needed to do was get the lights to work. Then I had to create some artificial light via sun/moon respectively. Then I had to time the streetlights to go on and off depending on how the sun acted.

I decided I was going to start with the streetlights. At least, the base principle of them. Sooner than later I realized how bad of an idea it was. At first, I programmed only one light with keyframes to turn on at frame 600. 

I didn't know how my sun was going to get there in only 600 frames. Another thing I didn't account for was how keyframes aren't duplicated like an object. I had to sit down for roughly 90 minutes and make sure every streetlight had the exact same keyframes and intensity etc. 

 It took me the entire duration before I realized I had been setting the keyframes wrong. When working solely with objects, one only has to click "s" on the keyboard to set a keyframe. This does not apply for textures and intensity and all of the little details within. Rather, I had to go back again and set keyframes for every light by right-clicking the "intensity" icon (shown in the first picture) and click "set key" (shown below).

Once I had finally finished the streetlights, it was time for the moon and Sun. The moon was easy: all I had to do was set a very soft, but noticeable, white light to give a realistic sense of how we see at night and set it constantly. It was also nice because the directional light I used was stationary.

The sun was not so forgiving of work. At first, I had made it a 24 hour simulation, or a full rotation around the project. The dilemma that lies within this idea was there would be very little time for actual light to be shown on the city. Maybe 2/5 of the project would happen in the sunlight. So I started the sun right above the "x" and "z" axes. Then I made it finish after 7200 frames on the exact opposite side of my map. Once that was done, I made a new directional light that I paired with the sun so no matter where the sun went, the directional light followed its cue. 

I was finally almost done with my project. I had to do only two more things: create a camera path and a sky. The sky seemed tricky enough as it was and I need a camera path first. So I decided to start from frame one on the highway and make my way through my city. We'll see how it goes.

Quarter I Project - Fourth Deadline

The fourth deadline I had assigned myself was to have all of the small details finished. Being proactive, I finished this last week. This gave me the time to try to get a running start on my next deadline, texturing. This is technically my fifth deadline, but I remind myself to add some smaller details to the buildings as I go.
Think hard. Almost every major city has a sports team. Baltimore has the Orioles and Ravens, Kansas City has the Chiefs, Sporting and the Royals, Pittsburgh has the Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers, Detroit has the Tigers, Red Wings, Lions and Pistons, etc. Every city promotes their team(s) somehow. I decided to add a sports team into the mix despite not having room enough for a stadium. I began promoting the Cayuga Aces.
That sort of brings me to the name of the city: Cayuga. Cayuga is Shawnee for "starting place." I thought this was fitting because this was my starting point in attempting to make a career out of animating.
Anyway, this was the sign that I designed:

The colors weren't too hard to fit. I just though gold and silver sort of coincided nicely, and it would break from the stereotypical "red and black" color scheme of playing cards.

With Cayuga as the name of the city, every Bus Station needs a sort of introduction and a "welcome." In Photoshop, I made a banner that I later incorporated into a "welcome" sign that I threw on the Bus Station. You'll notice also that the building is textured with a custom brick texture. It's not perfect, but it saves me from distortion. Later, I will bump map everything to give it the realistic grooves. If you can't see the bricks, here's another picture that's just a little zoomed in on another building:

I also just noticed that the only texture on the patios was "Lambert1," the default texture. So to save me from some trouble, I just clicked on the patios and added the texture I added to the Crayola Building. After all, a lot of buildings in the same city are made by the same company who uses the same materials, anyway:

As you can see, it's a bit grainy, which all realistic concrete is.                                 One more major building left untextured was the parking garage, which, actually, is two different buildings. I just created its own texture and put that on all of the walls and sides then took all of the levels (where the cars' wheels would actually be) and applied the street texture from earlier. Once I'd done that, I took the street hashes and duplicated them until I had a few applicable parking spaces. Once that was done, that was the major texturing portion.

One thing that proved to be a challenge was the scenery. When an image was rendered out, there would be black on the outside of the city. I needed something to fill it out. The simplest solution (in my opinion), was to close off the city with a mountain range. Of course, if this were real life, it'd be a terrible idea to build a city in the bowl of a mountain range because of flooding issues. However, this is only an animation for a project. The first part of the project resulted in this:

I needed a way to get into the city, though, for effect. So I added a bit of a "highway" in the outskirts of the inner range. This is shown below. After that, I had to make a tunnel through the mountains instead of lowering them altogether. It seems a little tough at first, but all I had to do was difference the road (made a little thicker) and the mountain. Then all I had to do was take the edges from inside the mountains and connect the vertices on them to make a tunnel.

The little box around the city is where the highway is.

I figured because I actually had enough space, I could actually model a rough sketch of the baseball stadium for the team I'd promoted, the "Aces." When it was all sculpted out and textured, this was the result:

Quarter I Project - Third Deadline

The third deadline I needed to meet was Friday, September 19th. My goal was to have the little things  (i.e. streetlights, stoplights, trash cans etc.) and to have the streets textured. I wasn't sure how at all I was going to go about the street texture for now. Instead, I jumped in with the stoplights.


This is the only stoplight I made. I wasn't going for too much; all I did was create a cylindrical prism, then move the back vertices upwards to give it the slant. After that, I took the Polygon Pipe tool and added it to the rectangle. I scaled the thickness down to almost none. once I did that, I added a sphere and scaled it to fit inside. This would be the actual light. Then I duplicated the sphere and polygon pipe twice more to make the other two lights. I made a metallic shader for the pockets and gave the lights each their own color shader with Blinn.

Designing the actual stoplight was only the beginning. Upon completion of this, I had to smooth out the actual pole the stoplight was to be mounted on. It was rough seeing as none of it was connected. A few connected vertices later, I had a fairly smooth transition from one section to another:

The next thing I had to do was add stoplights to all of the intersections. This didn't take too long; all I had to do for this was to duplicate the stoplight/pole and place it at the different intersections. This was the final result:

Not bad, but something else was missing. The primary goal of this deadline was to have the streets textured. This included the yellow hashes (like the ones in the second picture) and the crosswalks. I initially thought the easiest way to do this was to make a photoshop version and save it as a photo then map it. I spent an entire day making it on Photoshop only to realize this was not the right way. I started from scratch. I made three cubes. From these three cubes, I made everything else on the streets.
The first cube I made was the long white line of the crosswalk. I could easily duplicate that, and did. The second cube I made was the short lines inside of the crosswalk which were then duplicated. With both the long lines and short lines together, I combined them to make them one object. I put those at all of the intersections and grouped them once they were all laid out.
The third cube I made was the yellow hash mark which was duplicated a few hundred times and, like the crosswalks, was grouped. Then I assigned both the crosswalks and hashes their own layers respectively. The final result was this:

Combined with the stoplights, this is what the final result was without the buildings.

I'm still missing a few things: streetlights and other little things like trash cans.
The next assignment I gave myself was to make streetlights. No city is complete without them. To do this, all I did was take the pole from the stoplights and shorten them a bit. After that, I attached a cube to the end of them and messed with the vertices along with the edges and added a sphere to that to be the actual bulb. I didn't put the light sources in them yet because I'm going to save that for the texturing deadline. Once I did that, I followed similar steps as I did with the stoplights: I duplicated over and over and put the streetlights where they seemed fit. At least one per each stretch of road. This was the final result:

Again, it's merely a work in progress. Soon, there will be sources of lights flowing from each one individually, but until then, they make good placeholders.


Another thing you find every so often in every city is a community trash can. The design of these trash cans is fairly simple: it's typically a cylindrical body with a spherical lid with a hole in it. This was very easy to create; all I did to build the trash can was model a cylinder, duplicate it, scale it down, then difference it out. This gave my a cylindrical, hollow body to work with. Once I did that, I modeled a sphere and deleted the bottom half of it. I deleted a few faces to make the opening, selected a few edges, then extruded them to make a believable opening. The picture above is the final result.

After everything had been settled, I met my deadline. The picture below was a rendered picture of my project through the first three deadlines.

Quarter I Project - Second Deadline

My second deadline was set to be Friday, September 12th. What I had wanted to accomplish was the completion of all buildings. This didn't exactly include texturing, but I figured it'd be worth my time to texture the buildings as I went and adjust as I need to for my actual texturing deadline which is October 6th. However, it'd be silly to save everything until the day before the deadline; the more I do now, the easier it will be on me in the future.

The first thing I did was apply the easiest textures: the brick buildings. I made all of the apartment buildings and basic city complexes (like laundromats and restaurants) to be made of bricks to give it that "classic city" look. Every city in America has those buildings that you can tell have been around for a long while, and this is how a city can display its past and tradition.

You can see that I've also put a transparent texture on the Detroit Marrriott building and the replica of Freedom Tower in New York. This was as a little trickier than I had thought it would be, but all in all, it was quite simple once broken down. All I had to do was duplicate the building and scale it down slightly. Once I'd done this, I gave the duplicate a white texture and scaled it to match the height of the original. The original building was then given a blue/white texture and the opacity was set high, but not all the way. Every glass building can be seen.
Then I decided to continue on with my Triangle Building (below).

It's alright, but I figured the top floor with the pillars could use some glass panels to give it the "ultimate board room" feel. So I started off with an ordinary polygonal cube and started messing with the vertices a bit:

Not very flashy, but it made a good placeholder. I tampered with it a bit more and got it to fit perfectly. Once this was complete, I threw the same glass shader I had used on the Detroit Marriott (GM building) and gave it the finished look.

Voila!
I decided I wasn't finished with it. I wanted to perfect the "board room" idea I had. So I went back in and added a table and a few chairs:



Needless to say, I'm not done with what I had anticipated. I went back today and took a good look at one of my other buildings.

 This building looks a little plain and I wasn't sure how exactly I wanted to go about it. The first thing I chose to do was make the pipe at the top into a smokestack. I had screwed up in an earlier step, so whenever I tried to difference it or take the vertices, it ended up like the picture right there ->.
This obviously wasn't how I had expected it to work at all.



I decided to delete the building and start over. Instead of the tricky cylindrical buildings, I made it a simple rectangular building. Once I had my base, I simply duplicated it, scaled it down, and positioned it above the original. I was set on the smokestacks. I decided the best look for a square-shaped building was dual smokestacks, so I created two cylinders. I then duplicated and scaled down again to boolean>difference them to get the open shape I had hoped for in the beginning. Once I had done that, I took the windows from another building and put them on the factory. The image to the left was the final result. For now, it's only a rough texture, but it sure is a start.

A few things are textured already, but most are only works in progress. Of course, the texturing deadline isn't until October 6th, but again, I don't want it all to fall on me in October. I somehow managed to meet my deadline today to have all of the buildings completely done (save texturing). The final result is this:

 
 My next deadline is September 19th where I plan to have the streets textured and smaller city details like streetlights and trash cans started.

Quarter I Project - First Deadline

My first deadline to meet for the quarter project was Friday, August 29th. To make the final due date, I figured I would have to have my city laid out in the most basic of forms.
First off, I needed to start fresh. I didn't want to jump into anything and freehand an entire project, so I took a street layout texture and put it on top of a plane.

After I had this town, I wanted to layout the actual planes that I would use as the roads so I wouldn't have to continually reference the picture above.

Of course, I didn't follow the map completely, but I needed a closed city and I don't want roads going nowhere. It still needs to be cleaned up a bit, but it's a good start.

Once I flattened everything out and lined all the streets up to look nice, I decided I could work on the very basics of all the buildings. It was a little overwhelming, but I felt I needed to start somewhere. Like I previously said, I wanted to model a few buildings after real buildings, so I started with what would be my tallest skyscraper: The Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center's main building. Below is a side by side of what I started with in comparison.

Of course, the building I'm modeling is the one in the center on the left. Of course, it needs work, but it's only a start.
After that was done (roughly), I wanted to roughly edit the other buildings to meet my first deadline. So I jumped in with some work:

This is looking like a really good skyline, so I'll throw in the towel as far as skyscrapers are involved. Every city, however, needs a few scenic buildings that aren't skyscrapers. For example, a couple barbecue joints or small HQ offices. Every city has them; it's up to the tourist to spot the best buildings in the city.

I added a few smaller buildings (stuff like bus stops, laundromats etc.) to fill out the city a bit. The below pictures are a couple different angles of my city. You'll notice a few buildings/objects are textured, but this, I assure you, is only because I wanted to distinguish a couple buildings and make sure the lighting was going to work correctly. With a city full of gray, a few objects in color give the eye a break.