This is a student blog for MDDN 241/3D Modeling and Animation at School of Design, VUW.
Dream is a space interwoven with memories, reality and fantasy. This is also how I understand the freedom of artistic creation in the realm of 3D modeling and animation.
I believe digital creations have their own interesting qualities for being different from reality. Explorations into the attributes in this none-physical medium will be the focus of my study on 3D Modeling and Animation.
Shanshan Zhou
The final:
an animation created by Shanshan Zhou
created for MDDN 241, Victoria University of Wellington
Modeled in Autodesk Maya 2012
Edited in Adobe Premier Pro CS5
Post-production in Adobe After Effects CS5
Shanshan did the sound herself this time! with her out-of-tune ukulele!
Enjoy
A summary of project 2: the story
The story is simple and honest, and the personalities of the characters are set to be ones that we may relate oursleves to. There probably lives a shy and easily hurt little guy in all of us, and at the same time in us we find a caring and sweet person.
If there’s something I am saying to the world through this movie it would be: sometimes a little bit of sweetness and gentleness brings the lonely ones together.
In terms of styling and aesthetic choices, there are some very personal reasons for me to venture this path of messiness. I grow up in a country where people are less ready for artistic explorations outside an accepted aesthetic, and experiments on forms are rarely appreciated. To create something that is beautiful but outside an accepted understanding of beauty is what I always wanted to do with my works.
I remember watching the “Making of the Lion King” , what amazed me was the development arts and storyboard sketches. I couldn’t help wonder what it would look like if the entire movie was made out of rough sketches, but my friends who were good at arts showed only contempt in such excitement of mine. Back then, I never thought would work on my own animation one day. This time with the chance of having the complete control on the art style, I decide to challenge people’s expectations.
My list of inspirations (the main ones)
there are more than listed below, see my older entries to view them all.
wood carving painting: the high contrast, the rough lining
Marie-Margaux Showreel 2011 from Moth on Vimeo.
sketechy animation
Origami, paper animals
A summary of project 2: technics
the outlining style: more than just toon shading III
The final is not just a single layer of toon shader applied to the randomised mesh, but in fact it is render out at the same time with surface shader on the original mesh. This way we see some subtle gaps between the gemetry and the outline.
Also using the low-poly original mesh makes the rendering speed much faster, otherwise it would be just slowing down the rendering unnecessarily for random polygons that are you cannot even tell or actually make any difference to the final results.
A summary of project 2: technics
the outlining style: more than just toon shading
click the image to see details on the mesh
The outlining effect was mainly achieved by using toon shader. Toon shader gives you a clear and adjustable outline around the shape, giving a simple clear cartoonic style. However to achive the effect of making the outline looking like hand-drwan, with certain degree of randomness, I had to use not only a specifically adjusted toon shader, but most importantly a “broken”/“shattered” geometry for the toon to trace around.
I could not find a function to add random polygons onto the mesh, so this shattered geometry was done by combining the “reduce”, “poke face”, “smooth” functions (under Polygons-> Mesh or Polygons->Edit Mesh) at a pretty random manner. This gives me a less mechanical and generic geometry, with which I can do a rugged toon shading.
Compare the original mesh (top left) with the randomised mesh (bottom left), and the default toon shading (top right) on the original mesh with the toon shading applied to the randomised mesh (bottom right)
The toon shader itself took me a bit tweak to get the right one, which I will explain in the following posts.
A summary of project 2: artistic question
keywords: intricating, minimal
I believe the creative power of computer graphic is beyond creating something realistic and resembles our physical world. It enables us to create forms in whole new ways that was not achivable with other artistic media. This project is dedicated to experiments on creating forms that is minimal but intricating with computer.
In terms of styling and aesthetic choices, there are some very personal reasons for me to venture this path of messiness. I grow up in a country where people are less ready for artistic explorations outside an accepted aesthetic, and experiments on forms are rarely appreciated. To create something that is beautiful but outside an accepted understanding of beauty is what I always wanted to do with my works.
I remember watching “the Making of the Lion King” , what amazed me was the development arts and storyboard sketches. I couldn’t help wonder what it would look like if the entire movie was made out of rough sketches, but my friends who were good at arts showed only contempt in such excitement of mine. Back then, I never thought would work on my own animation one day. This time with the chance of having the complete control on the art style, I decide to challenge people’s expectations.
My list of inspirations. There are more than listed below, see my older entries to view them all.
A summary of project 2: inspirations
In terms of styling and aesthetic choices, there are some very personal reasons for me to venture this path of messiness. I grow up in a country where people are less ready for artistic explorations outside an accepted aesthetic, and experiments on forms are rarely appreciated. To create something that is beautiful but outside an accepted understanding of beauty is what I always wanted to do with my works.
I remember watching the “Making of the Lion King” , what amazed me was the development arts and storyboard sketches. I couldn’t help wonder what it would look like if the entire movie was made out of rough sketches, but my friends who were good at arts showed only contempt in such excitement of mine. Back then, I never thought would work on my own animation one day. This time with the chance of having the complete control on the art style, I decide to challenge people’s expectations.
My list of inspirations (the main ones)
there are more than listed below, see my older entries to view them all.
wood carving painting: the high contrast, the rough lining
Marie-Margaux Showreel 2011 from Moth on Vimeo.
sketechy animation
Origami, paper animals
A summary of project 2: technics
the outlining style: more than just toon shading II
Click image to expand, and see caption explaining the effects of the toon shader settings
There are few interesting settings for a toon shader, among which I used most are: Line width, break angles, line extension, line end thining, line offset
Every elements in the film was toon shaded, they all had their specific toon shader to make each of the elements looking interesting but still identifiable.
A summary of project 2: artistic choice, the development of the Style
Simple gemoetry is always the core element of the style, A. for the sake of communicating the setting of the story, which is an origami world B. to play with how people can get the idea of an object by its simple abstraction rather than having to see the literal and detailed and representation of it.
Such abstraction has been around since the very early stage of human art: such as ancient painting in caves, Egyptian carvings in pyramids. They may be an result of technical limitation, but they can also be out of thoughtful and expressive artistic choice, such as modernistic paintings by Pablo Picaso. But in either case, this abstraction makes arts fascinating and interesting. This simplification abstraction of forms, even the storytelling, is an experiment on communicating with only showing the minimal.
The style changed from solid shading to pseudo-handrawn lining. This development took place as I changed my focus from creating something represent the physical quality of paper to experimenting on more dramatic contrast, with dark thick lining against light shapes and surfaces.