30th post on April 30th!!

It's here!! It's rendered!!!!!!! I have bigger version saved as well, and am rendering a higher quality version of this today. I'm also considering some sounds for the final version. I might want to use a version of the first 45 seconds of this and potentially use some of the parts that aren't being used to create some sounds of the peach hitting her. I want to do this rather than leave silence because I feel like silence with a few sound effects would sound a bit unnatural and out of place for the feeling I want this overall short to give off. The music I chose gives off a really dreamy feeling and adds to the girl really being pretty spaced out and daydreaming. And also I'd think that any world where peaches falling as rain does would be pretty dream-like. Even the sky (though it's only the physical sky) adds to that dreamy feeling for me. Hopefully once it's all put together you think so too!!

progress!!!!!!!!

Everything I was having issues with is fixed and all of my animation is done! Before Wednesday, I want to get the animation rendered and pick sound for it. I have a few in mind, but I need to test the waters before I make a final decision. Below is what the first frame and the last frame are going to look like in the rendered animation. I'm looking forward to the final product!!!!!!!!!

gettin work D O N E

This weekend I got most of the animation for my final done, despite the Cinema 4D license being constantly expired. I opted to just create a base texture for my peaches and then put said texture onto some rounded objects to make my peaches.

see? much better than the last one

The camera animation is exactly where I want it to be. However I'm having some issues getting the peaches to animate quite the way I want them to, especially with the emitters. I tried to make a large emitter to rain the peaches out over a large area...and I ended up with a huge peach falling on my world. Then I tried making multiple emitters. They pretty much rained down in one column, and I want them to fall all around more evenly in the space. I also had a few problems trying to get the timing right, but I'm going to credit that to exhaustion probably. Hopefully tomorrow in class I can fix these things, because if I can I'll be finished with my actual animation and only have to render.

peaches aren't peach colored at all

Today I fit my 2D girl into my 3D landscape! After some trouble trying to get her to actually move a little bit, I got her hair to move just fine. I opted to exclude the animated sky texture, as the physical sky created more interesting shadows and wasn't as distracting.

I'm also experimenting with different ways to fit the peaches into the scene. I have one animation where the peach and the girl are all in one file, and then I'm also working with doing a stand alone peach animation of it rotating as if it's falling. Above is my beginning attempt to try and figure out coloring for the peaches. I'm still working it out. The color everyone thinks peaches are is very much not that color at all.

gif grrrlllzzzzzz

This lil gif is the girl that's going to be sitting under the tree in my final. I might make the movement of her hair more fluid, and I'm planning on making her skin be transparent (for no real reason...I just think it would look really cool...)

hills n trees

All of my stationary 3D parts for my final are modeled! I opted to go for whole objects to make the leaves on the tree rather than exploded objects. It fits the aesthetic I'm going for a little better. I might edit my texture on the bark a little bit, because you can't really see any of the marks that I drew into the texture. Now I have to finish up the 2D animated parts and put them into the space.

I'm thinking I might need to do this in "scenes" to get it right, especially because I'm going to have to switch out the animations of the girl sitting under the tree. Also doing it in scenes might make some questionable parts of doing the peaches easier. I'm considering doing the peach rain as 3D objects in an emitter so they can roll down the hill and make piles when they land, but the texture will be from the coloring I do on the 2D peaches that will interact with the girl under the tree.

peaches!

Made a gif of peaches falling as a test for my final! This turned out a bit more roll-y than I wanted but I figured I'd share any way!

millions of peaches

Okay, I figured out where I'm going with my final project. It definitely does include peaches. I'm going for something a little more simple, though I couldn't resist adding in a figure (though if it proves to be too much, I could take the figure out as she's not really moving at all and the focus is on the peaches).

What I'm thinking I'm going to do is have a hill with a tree (both 3D objects) with a 2D drawn girl sitting under the tree. A peach will fall, hit her on the head, and roll down next to her. Another peach will fall, hit her on the head, and roll down. The next peach that falls will fall near her feet. Then the camera will zoom out to show peaches falling from the sky, all around her piling up.

I want to create a texture for the tree in photoshop, giving it my go to bark texture I usually draw with while still having a 3D object. My peaches will be 2D animated on planes when directly interacting with the figure and then for the rain part will most likely be peach textures on rounded objects from an emitter so they can pile up and fall all around to give depth.

Moving forward from here, between now and next week I want to get the 3D world modeled and a good chunk of the 2D animations done.

final project doubts

I'm looking at my ideas that I started working with for my final project and wondering if they're possible to achieve in the amount of time that I have. I want to do a very detailed narrative animation, involving a girl being chased by an abstract shadow monster through a creepy house of mirrors. I'm fearing that a detailed figure animation like this might not be suitable or possible for this project and I might want to water it down or go for something more abstract. I'm also wondering if I might want to change my idea completely for the sake of rendering time and sanity.

probably something with peaches

Moving forward...

My factory is finally (almost) finished rendering and I'm working now to weave it together in final cut, which I will probably have to do outside of class as I might have around 100 frames left to render by the end of class.

In order to make proper use of my time, I'm going to start doing a few more animation tests in photoshop for my final. These are going to be quick figure sketches moving around, just to get me a little more comfortable with animating (I've literally never animated anything before).

This is going to be a lot of experimentation for me but I'm really excited for it!!!

while i wait for the factory to render...

I'm starting on a new animation, combining 3D and 2D techniques. I'm planning on animating a 2D figure in a 3D space. My idea as of right now is to have someone exploring some abandoned funhouse mirrors. I spent a lot of today messing around with some tests, and using this animation

I worked with fitting it into 3D space. I also started looking for the ideal mirror texture and right now, this is the one I'm most fond of

So now I have to do some more character sketches and animation tests and work on making varied mirrors. I'm also looking into possibly putting animated textures on the mirrors to make my character's reflections a little more...creepy.

laughing into crying

I started rendering this at like.....1:00 pm yesterday....it's still going....didn't make much progress....

When I checked it at 3:00 pm yesterday it said I was at 49 frames, so I'm a little confused about why such little progress has been made and also why it says it's been rendering for 9 hours when in actuality it's been about 23....suspicious..........................

ALSO

For some reason all of the frames before frame 73 are GONE

In the sidebar it shows a small picture as if the frame was rendered but when you rewind it,  there are no frames there. Which is strange because they were there yesterday and I triple checked to make sure I had all frames selected.

I'm considering breaking up the rendering time into a few different computers but I'm a little worried about doing that because I have so many frames to render and it's hard to get past 100 frames overnight for some unknown reason...also my super reflective snow globe fly thru was over 900 frames and rendered just fine, so this is definitely strange.

Star factory!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I finally finished my model for my factory!

 It's now a star factory. I went through so much pain to get it to here, but despite some sacrifices I'm really happy with where it's heading! The only things left to do are some minor camera edits and then rendering (:

cries a lil bit

Weekend Progress

I mostly messed with some textures this weekend and rendered my first rough animation of the factory itself. I started adding in the emitter as well and I'm currently working with getting my objects to stay inside the basin. However, I'm considering slightly changing my factory. I can't seem to change the color of the clouds I made, no matter what I do and that is super problematic since I needed the clouds to be a dark purple/black/grey. I'm looking for alternatives to clouds that can give me the same effect or considering making my factory a star factory instead of a universe factory.

Actual Factory

Now that I've worked out how to make the stars, clouds, and planets, I'm moving on to actually making my first rough model of my factory in C4D. It's mostly going to be vague ugly shapes with no texture while I work through what it's going to look like. Above is my general plan for shapes that I'm looking to use.

Actual Working Stars Preview WOW

hopefully it uploads but this time it works i promise

Clouds!!!!!!!!!!

Using a pretty neat tutorial and pyroclusters, I made some clouds!! And the way that I did it they come out of the emitter so it kind of handled two things at once.

Universe Factory!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm making an animation of a factory that makes (spoiler alert) UNIVERSES!!

Basically it's going to spin the universe in a giant vat, kind of like a cotton candy machine.

First all of the dark space-y material is going to come out, then the stars, then the planets.

Sounds simple, but I have a lot of work to do!!!!!

Universe factory!!!!!!!!!

Learning some new techniques in C4D, prepping to make my factory project.

I'm making tiny universes in mine and this is my little test for the stars being poured in.

Fully Rendered Flythru

Here are some updated stills of my snow globe world for my flythru

 I took out the inside glass texture and the way the light looked with just the base texture was too cool so I opted to leave it as it.

And here's the fully rendered clip! :)

In slightly more productive news...

…my fly thru project is finally rendering! The lighting issues are fixed and it's no longer glass on the inside but it actually looks even better now than it did before. Stills and the actual fly thru video are on their way shortly!

S P A C E

Spent a lot of time the past few days learning about space and how the universe works; it's super cool! I noticed a lot of the documentaries feature 3D generated models of the universe. I ended up thinking about how cool it would be to work in little groups to try and create little universe models. I think it would be a fun way to to mess with some more features of C4D and it would be great for improving our abilities to work in a team. If I ever have extra time and anyone else wants to mess with C4D with me I think it would be a really great side project at some point!

What is lighting? We just don't know...

Okay so I've spent a lot of time adding and editing the lights on the inside of the globe, yet there's still been no change in the rendered image of the inside. I currently have 7 light sources inside the globe (2 side lights, one in the center,  and 4 from above which do not cast shadows) but the rendered image is still pitch black, from all angles. I'm unsure of what the exact problem is? Though it is inside of a sphere, the texture on the sphere is glass and you can see through it when rendered from the outside. And the outside when fully rendered looks exactly how I want it to!

But the inside is literally the whole fly thru animation, so if that doesn't work it really doesn't matter how good the outside looks. I'm going to continue to mess with the lights and hopefully get it right.

ugh.

This weekend I didn't make any noticeable progress. I focused mostly on trying to fix the lighting issue on the inside of the globe (as most other issues are less of a problem with the world I built and more of an issue with the path I mapped out). However, I couldn't get the lights to work how I wanted them to and often found myself getting frustrated and stopping. I figured it would be best to wait and get Blyth's advice before anything.

Slightly related things I did this weekend: someone showed me a piece of animation from 1957 that they claimed looked like it was 3D animation even though it was hand drawn. It did not look like 3D animation, I actually have no idea how they thought it looked like 3D animation because it looked exactly like the style being used at that time in other animated features.

Fly Thru Preview (For Real)

So after waiting like 10 years for this to render, I find that a good majority of it is unusable. First, the biggest problem is the lighting situation. Inside the sphere, there are 3 lights on the mountains. When I had rendered the inside prior to animating the path, everything looked like it was set and there were zero issues. However, once the full thing rendered for some reason the entire sequence inside the globe is completely dark. There are also some issues that I had already seen in the unrendered preview that become a little more painful to look at in the rendered version (i.e. the path going through mountains instead of around, the fact that there's an 140 frame pause before it actually moves). That said, I really really really like the end when it zooms outside of the globe. I'm really proud of the way the globe as a whole looks with its surroundings and also seeing the sky in the background move with it adds to the general effect of it. I think when I go back in to edit (apart from fixing the big issues) I'm going to hold the frames that show the whole thing for a little longer than they are here so you get an opportunity to really appreciate it.

Fly Thru Preview

Today we figured out how to actually animate our fly thrus. Above I have the maps of the path the camera took maneuvering through the inside of my globe. There are a few errors; sometimes the path takes you through mountains rather than around them and there are a lot of awkward movements happening. It also for some reason doesn't actually start moving until about 140 frames in, which for me ruins the effect I was trying to achieve of being inside of a snow globe. However once you get moving, it flows pretty well and sort of gives you the feeling of being one of those little plastic pieces of snow. 

I'll upload the preview animation when (if??) it finishes rendering.

Fly Thru Narrative

You'll start by moving around kind of erratically, sort of swirling around the top looking down on the landscape. Then you'll begin to gently float down along the mountains, maneuvering around them as well to get a feel for the geography of the landscape. Once you've sufficiently moved around the mountains, you'll glide along some frozen ponds before settling. Then you'll zoom out to a view similar to what's pictured here, revealing that you've been inside a snow globe the whole time.

Saturday, January 18: Working Day 1

Today marks the beginning of my work on my fly thru project! I did a few sketches to work on developing my ideas, and here are the designs I decided on!

The first sketch I did! I wanted to go for a really hilly landscape perfect for icy textures, but at this point I still wasn't sure exactly where I was going with it

After a long while of messing around with different ideas, I came to this design. I'm planning on the fly thru taking you around the landscape on the inside before zooming out to show you were inside a snow globe kind of thing. I really liked the idea of the inside looking more space like and not familiar to the viewer and as I experimented in Cinema4D I played with different reflective textures to achieve that.

These were the beginnings of my experiments in Cinema4D today. I spent a lot of time trying to find the right texture for the plane, but in the end I didn't use any of these as shown. I edited the colors on the bottom red texture and applied that to the plane in my final (for today) design. 

This was my first attempt at placing the landscape inside a sphere. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that looking at the image zoomed out from different angles would show me what was going wrong. In this one, the sphere was cutting the landscape in half and the texture wasn't opaque enough for me to see through. I also took way too long to remember how to add a textured sky background, but once I did I added an edited version of the gaseous sky texture to add to that otherworldly feeling I was going for.

Once I got everything to a place I was happy with, I forgot how to navigate around the plane and spent at least 40 minutes yelling at the computer trying to get to a good angle in order to make sure everything was in order. I don't know how I ended up working that far away from my sphere? But it happened.

For a second I tried to just screenshot the little sphere and a little bit of space around it to kinda cheat...

...but then I remembered how everything works and got a good shot of it! I think as I'm typing this, I've been working up here since around 11:30 am? I wish my progress was a little greater for the amount of time I spent working, but I'm happy in general with how it looks overall.

Saturday, January 18: (Late Post) 

In class on the 15th, we did some work with 3D shapes on planes. After working through the basics for a bit we moved onto experimenting with simple textures and light sources. I was really drawn to the glass and shiny textures and spent a lot of time working with making glass-textured objects and bouncing light off them to create cool reflections.