Wk10: Flip Book
Final Project
Draft /Process
topic:
Comedy strip. 30 second to 1 minute animation of noisy upstairs neighbors.
medium:
Computer animated and generated clay animation
storyboards:
process:
1. Modeling the characters in clay like style in Maya and Zbrush as well as props
2. Creating skeleton and rigging controls for the character in Maya
3. Creating mental ray shader for the clay look, which is a mr_material_x shader with fractual and noise bump mapping and sub surface scattering
4. Setting up environment dome image based HDR lighting
5. Setting up cameras: angles, focal length etc.
6. Animating to the camera in 24 FPS and modifying animation curves to "Stepped" for a more clay animation look.
7. Assembling rendered image sequence in Quick TIme Pro in 12 FPS for the clay animation on the highest quality preset
8. Cutting together music, sounds and rendered shots in Adobe Premiere CC
what could have been better:
The challenge was to capture the look of clay animation in CG. The results turned out to be satisfying, however the down side was long rendering times per frame at high quality. As a result I had to sacrifice quality of image for rendering time, getting it down to 50 seconds per frame. If my project was better planned there would have been enough time to capture each frame at high quality, which takes about 10 minutes per frame out of approximately 900 frames if rendered on single machine. Instead I barely had enough time to capture the project at 360p even with the use of online render farm. Here is a sample of how the project would have looked like in high quality settings.
final:
December 2016