MoTR Production Update: Week 8

AHOY! Another active week of tests and challenges. :D

Firstly, sorry this is a day late. Woke up 6am on Wednesday with another case of horrible stomach problems that basically wiped me out for the entire day.

Most likely it's chronic gastritis. Look it up if you want. It sucks. Yes I'm seeing a doctor about it.

With that said, I'm happy to say we've made more progress! :D

Current Status:

General:

Looooots more technical progress!

That's right, I'll go into more detail later on, we've made great headway into figuring out the more technical aspects of production. Most importantly is the HOW of "How are we gonna be mixing the 2D animation in the 3D enviroment?"

Rough Animation:

I am so happy to be finally onto actually animating the characters. The thrill I get seeing and hearing my characters move and talk is honestly reminding me a lot of why I chose animation to be my medium.

I could have written a book (still might one day) but that means I couldn't show you all how the characters look and mooooove.

Short 2 - Shot 4 - Hawkins and Carbo:

Hey remember the rough animation I showed last week? Well I got it done!

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/dc34e4_f451360b25a74560a5e581abb6476561/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Carbo and Hawkins laying down groaning, clearly having been hurt be something. Carbo sits up saying "What even was that?" before spotting something in the distance and letting out an excited "Oooooo". Hawkins also looks over and says "Yoooooo". Carbo is voiced by Shannon Hobby and Hawkins by Jack Kraken.

So I'm really proud with how this came out.

That said I put WAY too much effort into this but I got excited too see them moving and emoting that I just decided to go ham for my own sake. :DDD

It was usefull however as it's done a great job teaching me my own style. By which I mean I can use this animation to note my animation style that will obviously become the animation style of the MoTR series. All of which will be essential to go over in the animation guide which is coming up.

HOWEVER! For there is always a "however."

When we imported it into blender, we dscovered some issues.

The struggles of 2D Animation in a 3D Enviroment:

Clipping:

And thus we discovered the primary issue we wrestled with most of the last week; clipping.

I knew that some amount of clipping was unavoidable but I was hopeful that using cameras perspectives and well placed props we could cover up some of the more annoying issues.

That assumption was very quickly dashed when we imported the rough animation of Carbo and Hawkins a bove into blender and noted an immediate issue that I should have really seen coming.

A still shot from within Blender. The animation of Carbo and Hawkins is slightly hovering above the ground of the ship casting a shadow on it. Making it look as if they're floating. Red arrows are crudely drawn pointing to the shadow.

As you can see in the picture above when we imported the animation into blender we realised that blender does something that Storyboard Pro does not. Cast shadows. And in doing so it made the animation look as if the characters were hovering above the floor of the deck.

Now it is possible to turn off these shadows but, considering that we are intending to use Blender to help cast shadows at the moment, it seemed unwise.

So how could we resolve this problem?

Prop Solution:

Our first attempt at fixing this issue was to take the least labour intensive path.

We realised we could drop the animation a tad so that Hawkins arms looked as if they were resting on the deck, but doing so would results in a great portion of the animation itself being unviewable as it was clipped through the 3D model. It was also REALLY obviously clipped.

But then we remembered that, in this particular shot, a fishing rod could be seen.

We wondered if we could use that fishing rod to cover up the clipping issue from the cameras perspective?

Of course that did bring up the fact that I really needed to get to designing the modelsheets for the props to be used throughout the shorts and epsiode 1 of MoTR. I'm still working on all of them but I did manage to finish the fishing pole design (with a lot of really good feedback from Natka).

Fishing Pole - Modelsheet Version1:

A modelsheet for Member of the Revelry showing a fishing rod design. Interesting the tradition hook of a fishing rod has been replaced with a cartoon glove hand.

I always had a very strong idea of how I wanted the fishing poles to look, so this honestly didn't take long. Most of Natka's advice was about simplifying the intial design, which had a lot of focus on a more "realistic" spool and handle. We simplified it and made it chunkier to better fit the style of the series.

Issues with the Prop Solution:

Drawing the newly designed fishing rod at the right angle I imported that picture into the blender scene and launched into changing the angle, position and scale to fit what we needed.

As you can see from the screenshot to the left it sort of worked. Atleast at the first position of the camera.

I mentioned in the last post to this production blog but we chose to run the first tests on this shot because the camera actually zooms out. It also however slightly lowers down during the room out, altering the perspective slightly. Something I had not fully taken into account at the start of this test.

The position of the camera after the zoomout and drop down can be seen in the second screen shot.

As you can see the fishing pole actually did a pretty decent job at covering the clipping issue but myself, Natka and Katherine weren't satisfied having so much of the animation cut due to clipping. It was also really obvious that the fishing pole had been placed specifically to cover the clipping of the animation.

So a different solution was needed. Though we noted this technique could be used in the future if it could be done so subtly.

Myself, Natka and Katherine sneaking around your animation to hide clipping issues with well placed props.

The Clipping Line:

This was ultimately the more labour intensive option but was the one that yeilded more effective results in the end and informed us about how to go about animation for MoTR in the future.

It all comes down to layers, perspective and the clipping line.

So when myself and Natka worked on Mouse: PI For Hire we were instructed, with the animation of the characters, that there was a hard line in the designs that acted as the ground. No part of the animation should go under it as it represented the ground the characters would be stood upon in the game. Characters were also all drawn from the same perspective, as the planes they were on would ALWAYS be facing the player (note that the planes the characters are on turn towards the player as you get closer to them ingame).

I came to call this line; The Clipping Line, inlue of not knowing what it is actually called.

I had been operating under the assumption that such a technique wouldn't work for us as our series wasn't a game. We picked the camera angles and thus the perspectives the characters were being viewed, a head of time. There's no player to change that angle.

However we quickly realised that the very nature of a flat 2D plane in a 3D enviroment meant that there would ALWAYS be clipping and, inparticular, a line that the 3D enviroment cut through. Thus it became essential for us to note this "clipping line" ahead of time and tailor our animations based upon it.

In much that same way FUMI tailored their animation we decided to treat the clipping line as if it was the ground. Anything below it would be cut due to clipping. As you can see below we reorientated the rough animation of Hawkins and Carbo so that the clipping line as the ground, moving Carbos body up, making sure Carbo's tail didn't go beyond the line, straightening Hawkins arms to rest upon the line and raising Hawkins head to it always rested above that line.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/dc34e4_29b84efe6ca841419d55905edca59ecd/720p/mp4/file.mp4

The same as the previous rough animation but Hawkins and Carbo are reorientated to be resting upon a red line and the animation never dips below that line.

Honestly I'm not completed satisifed with how it is currently. I will probably come back and touch up the animation to fit together neater (Hawkins hood is annoying me just looking at this), but for the purposes of our test it served well.

This however presented a new problem. By treating the clipping line as the ground it forced our perspective into a straight on position, much like Mouse: PI For Hire, and made the characters look flat (which they are but we don't want that to be obvious). This obviously wouldn't work as our series uses a wide variety of angles and shots that result in different perspectives that characters do not always perfectly exist upon for a line to accurately portray the ground.

As an example take this shot from Episode 1:

A screenshot of Hawkins, Eliot, Cassettel and Campus on the top deck of The Grand Vagabond. The camera is looking down upon them.

As we can see from this picture above, where the ground is (marked in navy blue) is not where the character's animation clips through the ground (marked by green lines). Because we want these character animation to cast a shadow upon the 3D enviroment it's importent that their clipping lines are as close to where they connect to their shadows (unless they're floating, like in the case of Cassettel).

We also know that there is a way to alter what objects are affected by what sources of light in Blender. Which we will no doubt need to learn at some point as we will probably need to edit the shadow(s) a character casts upon the enviroment. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

So how do we tackle this problem?

The solution as it turns out was rather simple.

Layering:

My assumption last week that a proper animation test for layering would be done in the coming week using the shot that features Hawkins and Carbo sitting on the edge of the ship fishing off of it.

I learned throughout the test of the zoom out shot that layering is something that we will have to use effectively through the series regardless of shot.

So what do I mean by layering? There are layers in pretty much all illustrative, graphic and animation programs after all. Indeed there is, but what I mean is breaking apart 2D animations to be imported into a 3D eniroment and placed it such a way that that animation seemlessly exists within/on that enviroment without making the seperate nature of the animation obvious.

Tricky but not impossible.

In the case of Shot 4 with Carbo and Hawkins we rendered Hawkins' torso, and legs seperately from everything else. We then imported that animation physically behind the rest of the animation in Blender and voilà! Now as the camera moves the animation doesn't egregiously clip through the ground and the characters do not look entirely flat because they shift with the perspective! :DDD

Might be more accurate to refer to this technique as 2.5D Layering.

I think it might be benefical in the future to always divide up the animation of characters based on:

• A layer behind the rest.

• A base layer where the majority of the character is.

• A layer ahead.

Obviously those layers are ahead or behind in relation to the camera. I can also imagine their will be shots where more or less layers are needed. Potentially some shots where layer divisions like that aren't needed at all (like midshots where the characters are only seen from the waist up).

The Coming Week:

1rregularCharlie:

So I need to finish the last little bits and pieces for shot 4 which shouldn't take long as they're props.

Then I need to move onto doing the rough animation for the shot of Hawkins and Carbo fishing off the edge of the ship. I'll be keeping in mind the techniques already discussed above and testing out some ideas. Hopefully I'll have made great headway by Wednesday next week.

After that I need to begin The MoTR Animation Guide to help in onboarding future animators to work on the series. Obviously I'll be going over and providing examples of what I have discussed above.

Katherine:

Needs to focus on her exams.

Natka:

Back on the grind. :P

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

If my guts don't decide to try and kill me again. Fingers crossed. ;D