Practical Idea

For my practical I am going to be creating a character document as I am now exploring a textual approach to character design. The texts will be accompanied with a finished concept of my character along with developmental stages of my characters concepts.

The character I am creating will be for a game as this has always remained an area of interest through the years. In preparation for the game, I will work on some world-building aspects and create a brief storyline for it in order to give my character some grounding.

I plan to lay out my practical similar to that of a character profile found in an instruction booklet or that of a character profile in which you can access as an extra feature of the game. I have also found some detailed profiles in game art books that have a different balance of text to image so I basically have the freedom to experiment with different layouts formats, all of which I feel are fitting for display and ultimately my portfolio.

Here are some of the examples of character profiles that set the standard of what I am aiming to produce.

UFO Appearance

For this I was to demonstrate skills of comping CGI over live-action.

I decided to keep my original UFO design because I struggled to come up with a new design that works with all the other assets that were made. It wasn’t badly modelled either and I still liked the idea of the glowing rings I added to it so it would have been a shame not to use it.

The textures on my UFO are quite clearly stretched and could have come out a lot better if I had properly applied the texture but for the sake of demonstrating my composition skills I didn’t feel it necessary. The final outcome still looks good and the textures are forgivable to say the least.

After quickly fixing up my UFO, I set up the camera and back-plate of an image I took from my trimmed footage of the building in which the UFO would fly over. After setting this up I got on angling the UFO and then animating it. I grouped the entire UFO, rings and lights so they would all move together and then animated the glowing rings separately. After finishing the animating and I rendered out both the master layer and occlusion layer so that when brought into after effects there would be shadows for my UFO after following the necessary steps. The shadow did end up being a bit grainy but it made so much of a difference to the spaceship and believability as it sits much better in the shot.

I then masked out the areas on the building that look like they would give off reflection as there is quite a mix of materials on the building used. I then inverted the window layer and added an overlay and alpha matte effect to create the reflection. I then did a little colour correction on the building layers and added a purple tint to them but after rendering the scene out it actually looks very de-saturated. It sort of works though because I have quite a dark and dull sky texture in the background and the de-saturated look also give attention to the UFO but possibly makes it stand out too much?

Despite the arguments made with the colour correction I think the finished product looks very nice. I added a fast blur to the reflection because it was a little too sharp and I think it sits in the overall shot quite well.

The Zooming Out Effect

The purpose of this shot was to establish the environment and show off the UFO interior. I created the zooming out effect by scaling both the background and actor. This however, was very tedious as it was difficult to achieve a good balance of scaling between the two. I came across problems with the speed of the effect because I hid the clipping out of the actor and scaled it in a way that hides the lower half of his body. After a slow and gradual start there was a sudden rush in the zoom out that looked so unnatural and I spent quite some time attempting to fix it. It was just a case of experimenting with the scaling until I found a more fluent motion. I do believe I managed to achieve this and am quite happy with the final outcome. 

Creating the inside of the UFO

In my last two submissions I never developed the interior for my UFO therefore had no background to work with when doing the After Effects side of my project. So, decided to create a quick area in Maya. I did consider creating a digital painting as the majority of my shots are still so the matte painting would have worked well but, I'm a little out of touch with drawing and I felt like it would have turned out being very stressful and tedious.

The design, although simple, is inspired by the running temple theme seen in my UFO design and my alien. I wanted to keep this theme going as it helps put all my other assets into context and they all relate to one another in some shape or form.

The stepped platform in the center is suppose to represent a teleporting device/pad which gives Tim a central position which is ideal for the shots I want to have.

The textures I have used I just grabbed off the internet. They are all Hi-res and are stone/grungy type of textures again to fit in with the temple theme. I particularly like the grunge textures because they have a stained design to them which resembles marble. The grunge textures also fit in well with the alien angle that the brief asks for.

The lighting for my scene is again green and purple which is the same with all my assets. Again, I wanted to keep this on going theme so my alien and UFO are in relation to one another.  The green and purple lighting is nice and contrasting and again helps to project that idea of aliens.

In my initial renders I didn't actually have shadows and it was kindly pointed out to me by one of my tutors so I went back into Maya and experimented with the shadow settings and the positioning of the lights to cast shadows in the desired areas. I think the shadow of the column that is cast in the middle of the stepped platform is perhaps a little too harsh and needs toning down and softening. Overall, I am happy with the finished product.

The 'Wiggler' effect

This effect is one of the main things that I think brings my footage to life. My initial idea was to have my heavy and oversized alien draw closer to the actor as time passes. I wanted to create an earthquake type effect as the alien stepped closer and I wanted it to grow in magnitude. The wiggler effect basically allowed me to do this.

I used 3 key frames so I could get the desired impact but then achieve a slightly faded out effect rather than come to a sudden stop. This made it look more believable and more fluent.

Overall, I think this effect really adds to my work and has successfully allowed me to stay true to my initial idea. It definitely delivers the idea of my alien being very heavy and possibly large in size to the audience.

Experiments for Colour Correction

There's so many different ways in which you can do colour correcting so I experimented with a couple of different options.

The easiest option I found was the 'tint' because it's very quick and simple. You pick the darkest area and the lightest area of your scene and those colours are then applied to your actor. I experimented  with the percentage which, determines how strong the tint would be but, settled with 30%. I think the beauty of the tint option is that it is very subtle but, still manages to blend the actor into the scene, making them belong.

I also had a go at using 'curves' in which you can move and add points onto a curve which alters the light and dark on the actor. I found this useful but it was a bit too temperamental for me personally. I found it hard to get a good balance of whites and blacks. For it to have benefited I think I would have had to add a hue and saturation effect to get the desired colours to help the actor fit within the scene.

In the end I decided to stick to the 'tint' because, it allowed me to add a little purple/pink into his skin colour which, was vital as the purple was very dominant in the lighting of my scene in Maya. I also used the brightness and contrast effect to darken him a little but still allow some subtle highlights because my scene is very dark.

Problems in After Effects

It's been a while since I’ve worked in After Effects, as I don't have it on my laptop. This in itself was quite problematic as due to the lack of accessibility and practice I had to re-learn everything to jog my memory with the application. This also made my progress with keying out my green-screen footage very slow progressing but I eventually got there in the end.

After sorting out my corrupted video files (note to self, do not work off hard drive) I resized them and put them in sequence according to my initial storyboard and then got to work with keying out each shot. After going through it step by step, keying is actually very simple and quite fun. Key framing the mask around the actor was a bit tedious though because, we had cello tape on the green-screen for tracking purposes, which the keying process doesn’t get rid of so I had to try, avoid it while animating the mask. This wasn't all that successful either so, there are some clips in which the tracking marks are visible. Next time I do any filming I’ll be sure to take them off unless I require them for any of my shots.

With the entire footage ready, I returned to Maya and rendered out my shots. To help me get the right angle for my actor, I imported the footage as an image sequence which I assigned onto a plane which, I then positioned roughly where I wanted my actor to be stood. The image sequence didn't work for whatever reason but, the still image of Tim still worked just as well and enabled me to position the camera correctly from which, I then rendered out my scene.

I later noticed after animating the masks, that in the majority of the shots, Tim's feet clip out and disappear which, is obviously a fault when filming and is something I cannot change. Because of this, I decided to change from a wide shot to a mid shot making Tim visible from the knees up hiding the problems with his feet. For this I obviously had to re-render my Maya scene for a closer shot and I re-scaled Tim to fit accordingly.