Torran Rodgers, BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester

  Character Design Research After the first character design session I researched other interpretations of cartoon sharks as well as UPA characters to better understand how they look and what my character could look like. The main take away of this early research is how little the character design for the shark is in the grand scheme of achieving the look of a UPA animation. The important parts are Colour ,Layout and the economy of space in the scene. Focusing on achieving dramatic almost surrealist images with the characters being a focal point of these minimalist designs. After speaking with Justin we have decided that understanding the layout of the scene is more important then the design of the character themselves. The main reason being the designs are build to be economical and will develop more as I gain a better understanding of what I need them to be doing in my scene.

  Character Design Research: UPA Animation After initial research on the UPA animation prompt I found a series of informational videos on UPA. The second video in this 3 part series discussed what made UPA Animations so individual and recognisable to the animations that surrounded them at the time. This gave me a fairly good understanding of how I will approached designing my character. And why making choices in its design will bring it closer to the UPA Style. The idea's of UPA branch from a few key ideas being creativity, ideology and financial necessity. The people at UPA found cheap ways of showing there characters and there art form not shying away from showing the audience what there watching is animation animation, an ideology that would be the core of this style. Animation as Art is the principled idea for UPA. each frame was animation not trying to be realistic instead a picture reminiscent of great painters and comic strip artists. When it came to designing there animat...

  Character Design : Session 1 I was given my set of criteria for my character design for this unit. I got a Shark, Diva in the UPA animation style. That is set in a 50's MGM Dance Musical, having a musical night out on the town while dancing. The first part of the session was researching a object, before designing it to look like it belongs to someone and seeing that character in the object. During this first session I researched my conceit, this being UPA animation while doing some drawing of sharks. Mainly I was trying to understand the style of UPA and trying to apply it to the character I was given in the class and my character as a shark. Attempt 1. Second attempt. Second attempt.

  Tool Kit 2: Caustics This tutorial taught us how the tutorial up to this point can be used to create bigger more complicated effects such as caustics under water. Also it showed us how to create caustic animations from a generator and how that can be used to create a great effect in Maya. From using the atmosphere volume to the use of a gobo other light setting, the effect shows that when you layer effects the result gets more detailed and potential more realistic if thought and planning is given to how to create and what outcome you want to make.

  Tool Kit 2: Motion Blur In this tutorial we got taught a few ways to create motion blur when developing our projects. One in camera within Maya and the other after we rendered our footage in After Effects. The tools Maya gives you in the rendering of motion blur seem useful for creating motion blur accurate to the motion in the scene, something the post production way struggles with. This was really useful and something I could see myself using in the future.

  Tool Kit 2: Stand Ins Stand in's seem like a really powerful tool when creating large scene. The replication of interictally modelled assets at no cost to the viewport window seems extremely useful. It would make it easier to animate in or continue to contract large scene with highly detailed assets. I'm excited to leverage this in creating scene in the future and to be able to do it in a way that would lower the strain on my pc means we can push it to an extreme that is further then without this system.

  Tool Kit 2: AOV's The tutorial was really useful when thought about in terms of future projects and video projects. Understanding what these maps are and how you can use these in post production has inspired me to think more about what I'm getting out of my Maya renders. And the fact that you can set these up to come out along with your beauty render, and not needing to re render the footage is really good information to know, and something I will defiantly be using in the future. The use of After Effects to composite EXR footage is something I'm really interested to know more about after finishing this tutorial. It seems like a powerful pipeline step that could easily be under or over used if not thought out properly. Diffuse. ID. Specular. Beauty. Final composition.

  Tool Kit 2: Sub Surface Scattering This tutorial went trough the different textures that make up a material focusing on the use of Sub Surface scattering, before we added an AO pass in post using Photoshop, to add to the realism of our piece. The set up for the material is good information and as you go through the tutorial you understand how each layer adds to the realism of a material in Maya. I had small problems with the strength of my displacement map and not being sure if its effect where taking effect and not destroying the modelling work that was done for the character.  Render. Composition.

  Tool Kit 2: Fog & Atmosphere In this tutorial we went through the 2 different was of creating fog in Maya. the first being aiFog and the second being aiAtmospherevolume. These create different effects and work differently. The first i used was aiFog a seemingly simpler system then the second after finishing the tutorial. Having few controls mainly, distance,  height and colour these have limited uses however can still be used to create good effects. The second way aiAtmospherevolume seems like a more sophisticated way of controlling the visual look of fog in your scene, having control of how strong the fog is, have much it darkens the scene as well as how lights in your scene appear through the fog. These give you huge control of the scene before the need to composite in a different piece of software. Height. Distance. Colour. Colour + background colour. aiatmosphere On. Density. Attenuation. Anisotropy. Colour Light. Final Render.

  Tool Kit 2: Depth of Field This tutorial came at the perfect time for me as I was already messing around with depth of field in test scenes trying to understand it. This tutorial made it a lot clearer how to use it and how powerful it is as a system in Arnold. There is a lot of functionality in the Arnold camera and as such there is a lot of renders below to show each of the settings. First is the Filter map a system that works as a sort of vignette to the camera. A well as a load of setting to do with the shape of the blur including aperture blades as well as aperture aspect ratio. These can creating interesting effects if used in a stylistic manner. The main settings in the tutorial where Focus distance and Aperture size as there control how much of the scene is in focus and where in the z axes this area sits. Filter Map. Depth of Field 1. Aperture Blades : 3. Depth of Field 2.

  Tool Kit 2: Photometric Lights The tutorial on Photometric lights was helpful, The use of real world lighting data to light a 3d scene seemingly can really help creating natural realistic light, if that is what is wanted for the scene. Its very cool that Maya and Arnold make using this data incredibly easy, and as simple as plugging a file into the right node. It will be interesting to see how this lighting system could effect renders though, whether the render time goes up by a large amount or not. The main take away I got from this tutorial was how noisy scenes that are enclosed can get, and how regimented you need to be about de noising parts of your image.

  Tool Kit 2: Ambient Occlusion  Rendering Ambient Occlusion maps was something I was aware of from first year however this tutorial went into more detail about the shader in Arnold and as such was a really useful tutorial. Not only for the creation of good AO passes but for the knowledge I could potentially use the shader to create different effects because of the versatility of the shader. The end of the tutorial showed us how to use the AO map when composing the image in after effects of photoshop, this is a easy step however at this point a style will be shown as people will pick different intensity's depending on there eye and the effect they want to make.

  Tool Kit 2: Mesh Lights In this online tutorial we looked at turning mesh into mesh Lights, how to turn the visible in the scene and use a place 2d node to colour them to create this marbled effect. There was also the important information on how to de noise the light that is made when rendering these light. as there is an internal was to do it before editing the render settings, this of cause being the lights own sampling.

Tool Kit 2: Physical Sky In this tutorial I learnt about the physical sky in Arnold and how it can be used to easily mimic time of day when rendering exterior shots for animations. Using a variation of elevation, Turbidity, intensity and Azimuth you can create the different angles of sky light you would see in real life. Other settings that can be used to push a stylistic approach include sun tint, sky tint and sun size. These can be used to create strange effects that are stylised and aren't meant to look photo real. Day1. Mid Day. Morning/Evening. Foggy Day. Stylised Lighting.

Tool Kit 2 : In Class Tutorial. Moom Rig In class today we where introduced to the moom rig. Mainly in terms of how its controls work and how you use its controls to pose the model. As well as a few bits of inbuilt technology that aids in making the model individual and easier to use. In the form of colour assets and character scripts. We then practised posing the character. Pose 1:  Pose 2: Pose 3: Pose 4: Pose 5: