Jules The Robot

[fktt]

hey, i must say its hard to give any C&C at this early... :sad: but for the little "comin to life" scene, id make the robot a bit slower, for some reason i think it might look abit better that way, tho im no pro..
and may i sugest you draw some story-boards for your shorts, so you can start thinking of the first short anim./episode, and what will happen in there, then try to put it into a story-board (btw. the drawing skill doesnt matter, you can make your character(s) into a stick figure(s)) this way while your making your story-board, you can discard the scenes you might find a bit hard, or those witch you think wouldnt actually look perhaps very good/interesting, and you would just generally see where youre giong with it..! :)

[CGIPadawan]

Hey, thanks for the comment.

Well, this scene was actually just a test for how the rigged model might work in some "generic" situation.

You are right about some of the IPO speeds being a bit off. But I'm not too keen on adjusting this one as it is really not something that's going into the Final Cut. In reality, if I was really trying to get this scene ready for Final Cut, I'd be watching robot toys at the local mall for many hours.... hehehe.

BTW, My favorite method of animation involves doing key-framing, and then making a Time IPO.....placing spikes on it to fix the speeds and add more "jerkiness" where needed.

Good idea about the story boards. Even if it's short. It needs a storyboard.

As for the rest of the workflow:

1) I already have my first draft for the script. It's really just very short. The story is simply the robot walking into what is an all-white room similar to the Matrix or the "Get A Mac" tv ads and finding a mysterious box. The rest of the movie is a short ep about Jules trying to open the box. That's it.

2) Music/Audio - We tested some music already and we've decided the film will be better without background music. White space + no music = mysterious effect (hopefully.)

3) Story boards. I'm doing that tomorrow. These should be quick. In my mind I already know I'll only be using 3 camera angles for 4 raw shots.

4) Animatic? Not sure if I'll need one. Everybody's warning me that I am "over-engineering" the movie. hahaha.

After those four, it should be a matter of committing to production.

I'll post more as it comes together.

[danizzil14]

The robot seems too shiny, mabe add a fresnel effect, so dead on, he's a little more matte, and at an angle, hes shiny, IMO things that are too shiny make it hard to focus and distinguish shapes in a scene, esp. a movie... other than that, i thnk youve done a great job, i wish I could model that good!

[CGIPadawan]

Yes...There are moments when the material shine creates issues.
Particularly the waist and neck become difficult to see.

I originally was tweaking it using the Mirror raytracing settings, but it started to look less like steel/aluminum.

I had never thought of using Fresnel. Thanks for the suggestion. I honestly don't know what Fresnel is for as I am pretty new to Blender, but I'll give it a shot.

The materials are also going through a final adjustment as I just completed replicating set and lighting conditions for the "Get A Mac"/Matrix white room.

I will post again with an update.

Thanks again for the suggestion.

[danizzil14]

No prob! I enjoy helping, here's an example of fresnel.

Have you ever looked directly at a wall in your home, from dead on, like 90 degrees? Well did you notice that the wall looks more or less matte, but when viewed at extreme angles, seems shiny? Well, that's fresnel, and in blender you can set how extreme the angle needs to be before the material begins to shine, even just a small fresnel will do the trick, all you need is for more of an uneven shine to your bot, and all should be good, another thing I'd look into is blender's new "tangent shading" I have a link for you here (http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-242/material-features/). It gives the material that "brushed metal" sheen, well I hope that helps, I enjoyed helping you, PM me when you update this, I'm interested on seeing how this turns out!

[CGIPadawan]

Haha...
You took the image straight out of my mind....

Uneven sheen, and brushed metal.

Thanks again for the explanation abotu Fresnel. It's a lot more essential than I thought.
Now I know.... hehe.

I will update this weekend with WIP shots out of our "Get A Mac" set in Blender.

[CGIPadawan]

Okay everybody,


Here is an update of a still from our "Get A Mac"/Matrix all-white set:

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/8049/afterfresnelae4.jpg

Kindly note the following:

1) The set was created by using a manually created Skydome (Icosphere with Inverted Normals + Dupliverted spotlights). Reflector panels and less powerful lamps were used to control the horizon to create this all-white effect with muted shadows. The floor also has a significant "Emit" value.

2) This project uses Yafray.

With those two above, the production still taken from the set already uses Fresnel of 2.0 on the Robot's materials. At this setting, there is a visible muted effect to the sheen. I do think though that the effectiveness of the Fresnel overall might have been affected because there is a lightsource at almost every angle from the Icosphere Lighting Rig.

However, Tangent shading in the Shaders panel seems to have no effect. But I think that is down to the fact that there is no Texture or Color Maps, nor any UV's of any kind in this project. It is all done with basic materials only. If my understanding is correct, I need UV information to make proper use of Tangent Shading, correct?

Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions!
Storyboarding later today!

:)

P.S.: I initially attempted the all-white effect using Yafray's GI functionality, but it seemed to be rebelling against my vision for the movie. hahaha!

[danizzil14]

Okay everybody,

Kindly note the following:

2) This project uses Yafray.


However, Tangent shading in the Shaders panel seems to have no effect. But I think that is down to the fact that there is no Texture or Color Maps, nor any UV's of any kind in this project. It is all done with basic materials only. If my understanding is correct, I need UV information to make proper use of Tangent Shading, correct?



:)

P.S.: I initially attempted the all-white effect using Yafray's GI functionality, but it seemed to be rebelling against my vision for the movie. hahaha!

The image looks great, there is one problem, you see, Yafray does not necessarily render shadows evenly, this means that the shadows would flicker and move even if the character were standing completely still, I'd suggest that you emulate Yafray, and the manual skydome is a great first step! Plus, I like what you did with the fresnel. One last thing, I find that some edges on the robot look funny, i think that this is because one or two normals are inverted, do you know how to make all verts face outward?

If you don't go to edit made and select all the verts on your model, when you've done that, press CTL+N to set all face normals outside, hopefully getting rid of the black artifacts that might pop up on his body.

Other than that, you've done a great job!! I plan to make a space battle, but my first model isn't working out so well, but I plan to finish it sometime. ^_^

P.S. I just remembered a something that might help soften your shadows, it's called ambulent occlusion, and it basically shades areas that are close to each other, I don't know much about how to use it, so you might want to do some looking around for some tuts. Oh, and yes, you do need to UV unwrap the object to get tangent shading to work ^_^

[CGIPadawan]

The "black artifacts" are from where the icosphere meets the floor on the OTHER side of the set behind the camera.

I am still wondering whether I should correct it. But that depends upon the first Raw Plate of the first part of my shooting script.

Just got a batch of sound effects from two free online sources (which I will credit of course). And currently researching Robot/Toy walking so I can figure out how Jules is supposed to look when walking.

That next update (effectively Daily #1 from the set of First day of Production) will determine whether the black lines need fixing.

Note: For now, the box is now a simple color mapped cube with Question Marks all over it.

Re: Space Battles

Space Battles are always fun....but in my experience they usually turn out more complex than a screenplay makes it sound....hahaha.

Good luck with that too and hope to see a thread on that soon.

[CGIPadawan]

While in the Action Editor trying to create a walkcycle for the robot actor, I noticed that Paste Flipped Pose had a tendency of flipping the pose in ways I didn't expect.

I also noted similar problems before flipping meshes.

It seems to happen if the bones or meshes weren't introduced in TOP VIEW.
Anyone else have this problem?

P.S.: Since this actor is very simple, I got away with making the walkcycle by doing old-fashioned stop-motion.

[fxgogo]

I think the robot needs some more work. Both in modeling and texturing. I think you can keep the basic shape and structure, but I would like to see soem more detail. The animation worked well I think, and had a nice pace and spring to it.

[CGIPadawan]

Thanks for the feedback fxgogo.

I know there's a total dearth of details on the robot. As I am a beginner, my actual objectives for the project are:

1) Model simple articulated actor
2) Complete a short animation 30 seconds or longer involving more than one camera shot.
3) Learn how to edit separate raw shots together
4) Learn how to multiplex audio

Actually, I also did a separate project where I used normal and alpha maps to create detail and transparencies, but for this project, I'm really trying to get to finished audio-visual product.

But maybe later on when the animations and everything are rigged up I will come up with more details through normal maps.

Cheers!

P.S.: Have you also encountered the issue with flipping that I experienced on this project?

[CGIPadawan]

Okay, have two updates today for production tests of the first scene in the script which is basically "Jules Finds the Box".

To help realize this first event I have produced:

A Walking Test which is the first time I am using the NLA and Action Editors (Full NLA with multiple Action Strips and Path Speed IPO):
http://rapidshare.com/files/30072861/WalkingTest.mov.html

And an Alternate Take where I eliminate Walking because I am not entirely happy with the "slippery feet" end-result (Single Action NLA with only one Action Strip for the entire shot and Armature's Time IPO):
http://rapidshare.com/files/30072479/AlternatePlate.mov.html

One thing I have noted:

NLA and Action Editors do not seem to have any true facility for controlling the passage of time within the Action Strips or in the Key Frames. The only ways I've learned so far to fine-tune animation speeds are:

a) Reduce NLA Editor to "Single Action" Mode, key frame ALL the actions in the scene as a single Action and use it as the only Action Strip. Use Time IPO of the Armature to affect its speed. Done this way, it is the same as animating with Keyframes and then tweaking with the Time IPO in Blender versions before 2.43 (I call this "Blender Stop Motion" method) :P

b) Use NLA Editor in "Full NLA" Modes and have as many Action Strips and Blend-ins as desired, but use Stride Path and use the Path's Speed IPO. This seems okay, except for the sliding, and some issues I had blending-in the standing and walking and the slippery feet. Also it seems that unless you have a path there is no IPO to control time in NLA when it is in "Full NLA" mode.

What I'd really like is a way to change the passage of time PER Action Strip within the NLA Editor. Am I missing something that does this?

Also how does one fix the slippery-feet problem?

One more thing is, I don't like it when the Robot breaks into full splits before walking and stopping. Is it enough to have full stride and full walk cycle and rely on Blend-In or should I have some intermediary positions (ex: first step over from standing position......Last step over before standing position). Or will more frames for Blend-In do the same thing?

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