Conclusion...........................

First of all I'm a little dissapointed with myself because of the fact that I once again didn't leave myself enough time for animating, which was really the reason for me choosing the brief I did. I ended up having to down my animation idea to a little less than half the original length, causing it to be a little less that the length set in the brief which was between 30-60secs.... and even for the portion i DID do, I peronally don't think I animated it well enough because I ran out of time to tweak it some more, and there were some movements and emotions I wanted to make with blendshapes, which I again ran out of time to create................

But on the up side I feel like I did a pretty good job aesthetically with the final models and environment, even though about half the finished characters didn't get to be used. Apart from the 'Sam' character which had very slight grooves underneath the ear areas when smoothed, I managed to get ALL of the charcters spot-on exactly like the actual toy or illustration versions..... something that I am incredibly pleased about. In the actual animation itself I had to get rid of Adios's cape, because I hadn't managed to learn enough about nCloth in time before the animating stages...... it was taking too much time trying to master it, and even when used it was probably gona over use my CPU power and really slowing down animating work time. It's ok though, because not every illustration of the character shows him with his trusty cape, thus I have managed to still stay true to the character's original design I think................

All that being said, even though I didn't get to really test out my animating skills like I was hoping to for this project, throughout the time spent on producing the different aspecs of it, I'v learned soooooo so much, especially on the last 3-4 weeks. I now know how to properly UV texture geometry (even though I need quite abit more practice), I have a huge increase in my knowledge and experience with lighting and render techniques, and overall I'm able to work so much quicker in Maya now with the all the new little tools and techniques I'v manage to discover or learn from others. Working on those simple models, trying to get them perfect resulted in me really getting my head round geometry as I had to really pay attention to what would affect the mesh in what way when smoothed. I still need alot more practice with weighting characters though.... with the Ci Boys characters, if I had ended up using them last minute, you would have seen how badly they were deforming around the main body areas, like around their bellys...............

The visual benchmark that I kind of set for the animation when coming up with my brief were the Lego Star Wars games and Bioncle animations and games. I feel like I have really reached my goal in this area, personally I think visually my final animation was actually better (though maybe not the animating itself) tahn the Lego Star Wars' visuald, and around about a similar kind of level to the Bionicle animations, but with a different style. The brief also said that the animation itself had to be cute and appealing, and the contents had to be well made and smooth looking like the toy counter parts. Again I feel like I have reached this goal...... everything is super smooth and glossy, pretty much all models look perfect when compared to their existing designs by each vinyl toy company, and from the responses I'v gotten from the people who have seen the finished animition (people both from class and outside of Ravensbourne) the animation itself is pretty damn cute....... and they seemed pretty appealed too :P................ I should note though that I wish I had time to add more to the environment because it seemed a little bare to me, I'm not completely happy with it.... but I guess it's ok...............

I can honestly say I have a massive massive increase in confidence in myself with what I am able to produce on Maya, and I now have this constant thirst for more knowledge to better myself even more. I look at things around me, and think to myslelf "I can actually model that now if I wanted to" or think of what I need/want to learn in order to produce something that looked like the way I invision it. So ultimately I'm very happy with my personal development this term............

So to conclude........... I DID manage to pull through in the end with a finished piece of promotional animation for the vinyl toy industry, with a nice and reasonably appealing visual look to it, but the lack of time I had due to really perfecting the characters, having to learn a wide range of new skills, AND the loss of time around the beggining of the term due to computer trouble (although it was my fault really that the time waiting to solve the problem wasn't still spent also being productive with this project), resulted in me cutting down the final animation to less than what was set for the duration in the brief. So in terms of sticking to requirements, theres both positive and negative results. I didn't get enough time to animate properly, wich was something I wanted to do for myself...... so for me, that was the biggest negative at the end of this project. BUT, like I said above I DID manage to improve myself alot this term, and I feel like I can take on much more difficult tasks than I have so far........... and that is the biggest positive thing for me at the end of this project.

I think I might go back and do the animation the way it was supposed to be done during the Easter break we have, and probably even take on a few different ideas (maybe even create more chracters, and even a new invironment)....... and this time round I know for a fact that I will be going through countless tutorials over our time off, because right now I'm in an over ambitious state with loads of ideas I now want to take on.

........And with those last words........
...............................Mehmet signing out...............................

Running Out of Time...................

Now that everything is FINALLY ready, I ONCE AGAIN only have like a day to animate (aside from the needed rendering time)............. so in order to have some kind of finished product, I'm sadly gona have to cut down the animation scene I had in mind BIG TIME............

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ORIGINAL IDEA - the idea I had in mind for this animation (which I don't even have time to storyboard - even though I should have done it aaaaages ago :P) was something like....... after an establishing shot of the enviornment, we see Adios walking upto Aciao Ciao (witch their cat Skeletrino with them) and acting out the scene I drew out earlier where he's giving her a skull shaped lolly as a present -(this is actually a shot seen in many Tokidoki illustrations, which is why I drew it out earlier (but in a setting I visualised it happening in) in the hope of staying true to the toy range)- but just as she's taking it from him, the Ci Boys (or at least a few of the 9) come in and steel it............. a chase starts off between the Ci boys and Adios, but Adios cannot keep up. Then at one point, the Ci boys litterally bump into the Sam character I modelled, where then Sam presses T0-7's power button (the Toshiba Notebook representative Ci boys character), who is holding the candy in his hand. To-7 then falls asleep (in a humorous way I had in mind), causing the rest of the Ci boys to run off in fear....... Sam then hand over the candy back to Adios.... he goes back to Ciao Ciao, etc...... HAPPY ENDING...........

I think this idea would have been a nice, short but cute animation, which stayed true to the toy ranges and showed the characters interact with each other in a reasonable and appealing way.........


NEW IDEA - now because of the lack of time, I'v decided to cut the animation into two seperate ones, with the idea of animating and rendering out one..... and then if time is left animating and rendering out the second, andhaving two short animations in hand..........
The first of the two would be the Adios and Ciao Ciao scene, and it literrally would be as I envisioned it in the picture I drew out for the concept of these characters......... the skull candy would obviously not be stollen from them :P...............
And the second would be the Ci boys pestering the Sam character to the point where he presses To-7s power button.... the other Ci boys run off again, etc. etc....................

This was would aslo result in both animations stciking to one company...... The first will be Tokidoki obviously...........and the second animation will be characters of Red Magic's characters.....................

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Some shots of the animation so far, which is pretty much completed now........ I don't think I have enough time for the second animation now though, but I'll have to see.....................

Firstly the lighting.......

Above is a shot of the scene with the default Maya lighting...... its IS gloomy in the way I invisioned the scene before hand, but I think it would be better with a slight increase in brightness, plus I want to have sum shadows inthere too, increasing the visuals a little..........

Above is a shot of the scene with the imported lights I created as a test in an earlier version of the scene, consisting of an Ambient light and a Point light (only the the ambient light which is set up close to the moon has Raytrace shadows turned on).......... As you can see its a little too bright, and there is a shadow being casted from the moon onto the sky....... So I turned off the Cast Shadow attribute of the moon, and the Recieve Shadow attribute of the sky, which I seem to have forgotten to earlier.............

And the final lighted look................

And now some shots of the animation with the final lighting setup..........

The Scene......................

Starting to run out of time and I don't even know exactly how I should have the environment for the animation........ but here I go..............

I had th choice of making th environment out of a plane..... adding loooooads of subdivisions and shaping it up with ths sculpt tool, but i thought to myself.... that's jus gona be loads of poinless polygons, and end up realllly slowing my scene down, which would really affect my animating ease....... Sooooooo I've decided to make its from scratch out of a poly cube, jus like my characters............

So this is the first signs of the structure growing, this will be the cliff sort of bit where the animation starts off.............

Other side of th cliff done....... now moving onto the rest.........

I hav no idea how, but, randomly looooads of hidden faces have emreged around the outer regions of thenvironment structure so far....... in the above shot you can see face inside the lines of geometry.... not good......

Here you can see that there are 2 virtices in one place from th e figures in the corner..... I just merged all of the double vertices, and that automatically got rid of all the hidden faces.........

Also decided I decided I'll do a bit of cleaning up at the back of the model... too many unneccesary lines, which will increase the poly when not needed when I smoothed..............

The geometry so far (test smoothed obviously).......

Increasing the area around the two cliff bits, and moving onto the outer regions of the scene........

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Ok so the scene is now finished........ I would have liked to done more to it, make it look nicer, but I'm really running out of time now.......... so moving along to texturing.................

Above is smoothed renders of the finished geometruy fo the environment...........

Quickly testing out how characters look in the environment............

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Because I'm gona be rendering with Mental Ray this time round, I have a problem with lighting..... because I will have the animation in a sphere (which will be used for the sky), it creates a huge shadow onto everything when raytrace shadows is turned on if I use certain lights, ultimately making the render shots pitch black...... so to solve this problem I have found out that I need to go into the attributes of the spere and turn off 'Cast Shadows'..............

Above you can see that the sphere also recieves shadows.... which we don't want, seeing as shadows can't exactly be cast on a sky......... so for this I also had to turn off 'Recieve Shadows' in the sphere attributes.........

Problem solved...........

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Moving onto texturing...........

Like I said in an earlier post, I need to really practice and learn more abount crating UVs, especially for things like this environment, where i should have really mapped everything out properly...... but this will have to do.............. for the UV screenshot above, I projected from above for the ground areas, and for all the other projections I did it from camera view, so that I can texture it in a way that the recooring colours are not visible in the animation, seeing as the geometry isnt completely done properly...........

The texture File

And the end result............

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I had a problem with the sky texture, where there was a line appearing in the middle of the sky, due to it being the other end of the UV map............

Above is a screenshot of the sky with the problem........

To solve the problem, in photoshop I just copied and duplicated a block of colour from the center of the previously created texture, and placed them at each ends of the UV projections....... centering them to the edges, so that when the texture is applied, you get the colour jus carry on.......... I then had to blend in the colours to the test of the texture..............

And above is a rendered shot of the fixed sky..................

And the finished texture file...........

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Ok, now time to make a moon.................

Once the UV projection was done to the flatter side facing the environment, I opened the snapshot file in photoshop as with all other UV projections, but this time I copied the moon from picture I created earlier rather than painting it from scratch again...... and then i just simply painted over the Reaper character, and touched up some of the colours.........

I then had to blend the colours into each other so that it looked right in the environment once applied to the moon geometry.......

And the finished texture.......

Even though I'm running out of time, I also needed to at least make a tree in the environment to place the Apple characters onto.............

Again the projection of the UVs was done quickly from one side (the side the tree will be seen from in the animation), I don't have time to do them properly, so I'm just gona be carefull not to make the texture file where the colours looks like they are reocurring on the other sides of the geometry in an obvious way.........

The texture for the tree..........

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Some shots of the fineshed environment and the imported characters..............

Finished Characters.......................

FINALLY........... after much labour, I have completed producing the vinyl toy characters perfectly in 3D. It took soooooo long getting each character to look spot-on exactly like its real life version, but after much labour and personal progression in all aspects of viualisation in maya, I'v managed to pull through...............

Munny!!!!.....................

Jus descovered a short promotional animation for th 'Do-it-yourself' vinyl toy Munny. This is pretty much exactly the type of thing I need to be aiming to match.......... very simple easy to follow story for even simpler character models which are animated in a nice cute way...........





I'm considering simplifying my animation abit now....... because I'm slowly running out of time, and from this example we can clearly see that a massive detailed environment and chain of events aren't essential make a short animation effective.............

Looking at this animation, I'm also thinking for next term I need to look at how to use shaders in Maya.................

Mental Ray!!!!................

Whilst doing the lighting tests I was thinking, so far I always render in 'Production Quality' with Maya Software, and there must be ways of getting better render results....... thus I found out about Mental Ray. Before when tried this method of rendering, I ended up with bad looking render (due to not knowing about all the various settings that aafect the final outcome)...... so I always thought Mental Ray was a lower level method of rendering. I'v looked at some online tutorials and played around with it using the same test scene I quickly made for the lighting tests.... below are a few renders....................

These are some of the tutorials I was looking at.......................
Create a gear and render it realisticly with Mental Ray
How to model a screwdriver and render it with mental ray
Mental Ray Approximation Editor

Render with Depth Map Shadows

Same render but with Raytrace Shadows

Once again but with coloured lighting

I need to play around with the different settings with Mental Ray before I use it for my actual animations output. I might try to find and check out some more helpfull tutorials, like tutorial DVDs for Maya....... but seeing as I'm starting to run out of time I'll leave that for later and speed up with this work!!!!.............

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Some sneak peeks of a few finished models rendered with Mental Ray..............