This week we rendered the last few sequences of our animation and finished the editing and compositing.
The final result of our animation will be put in the next post. Here I just make a summary for our project and review some of our works.
Project summary:
Team members and roles:
Zhengzhong Liang: Script writing; Character Modeling (old man & robot); Texturing and Shading (robot); Lighting; Rendering; Compositing.
Ziyin Wang: Script writing; Layout; Animation (all shots)
Wanxuan Liu: Script writing; Storyboard; Character Design; Texturing and Shading (old man, part of livingroom); Lighting; Rendering; Sound and Editing.
Guanze Wu: Script writing; Rigging (old man, robot, props); Texturing and Shading (scene: kitchen & livingroom); Lighting; VFX (cloth & water sim); Rendering.
Yuehui Chen: Character textures refinement.
Script and Storyboard
At first, we decided to make a cel-shading scifi background animation film, but we were not sure what to tell in the story. Therefore, we wrote the script individually and shared our scripts together. After disgussion, we finally chose one of the script and spent some time to refine it.
Here is the initial script:
In a near-future, robot is widely used in people’s daily life. A computer virus explosion lead to a chaotic, which strains the relationship between the oversensitive protagonist and his suspected robot. A misunderstanding drives the protagonist to fight with his suspected robot, and died accidentally in this fighting. The story finally shows that the robot is not affected by the virus at all.
Then Wanxuan drew the storyboard. We disgussed about the storyboard later and realized that part of the camera in the storyboard need to be adjusted. In order to understand camera movements, we shoot a video as a reference for our layout and camera settings.
Modeling
We evaluated the modeling tasks in this project and decide to model the character and robot by ourselves, and other objects in the room would be collected from website.
The character and robot were modeled by me, other models are searched by Wanxuan and Ziyin. The design and modeling of robot went smoothly. However, we met some problem when we designing the character. Wanxuan finally drew a concept art for the character, which solved this problem.
After that, I quickly modeled the character and gave these models to Guanze.
Rigging
Guanze did all the rigging after modeling. Guanze rigged the character and robot at first, all the rigging is rigged without any script or plugins. After that he also rigged a newspaper which can be folded and curved.
Texturing
After modeling and texturing, we started to texturing our characters and the scene. We invited Yuehui Chen, who studies character animation in CSM, helping us to do some texture stuff. Wanxuan finished the first version of chracter textures and I finished the robot textures. Guanze did the first version of scene textures. After that part of the furnatures inside the room were replaced by new models.
Layout
When we were making textures, Ziyin started build the layout. We were satisfied with part of the camera in the first version of the layout. However, the other part of it still had some problems. Therefore, Ziyin did some researches on camera shot and then finished the second version of layout. The second version looks much better and we decided to animate based on this one.
Lighting
We then started to lighting the scene. Guanze, Wanxuan and I finished the scene lighting. Guanze did the basic lighting, after that I and Wanxuan refined part of it. Besides me and Guanze also figured out how to make the proper AOVs for toon shading. After that we rendered the scene and test the rendered layers inside After Effect.
Animation
Ziyin did all the animations by himself, which can be considered as a huge work. He did neary 40 shots of animations. He was quite strict with himself and even remade part of the animations. Thanks for his works, our characters starts moving and the scene becomes much more interesting.
Rendering, VFX and Compositing
In the next few weeks we started to render animations, while Ziyin kept animating other unfinished animations. Guanze and Wanxuan rendered animation layers, while I dealed with the compositing. Since some of the shots requires water simulation and cloth simulation, I asked Guanze to use Houdini simulated these visual effects.
Sound and Editng
Unfortunately we didn’t have time to ask sound art students to help use make sounds and music. Therefore, we decided to finnish this part by ourselves. Wanxuan finished the editing of the whole animation and the sound. The time was so limited that we only have chance to make the first version of animation. Though part of the animations can be improved into another level, the final result was still satisfied to us.